The Kiev Junta Did It + Israel Invades Gaza

Before moving to the downing of the Malaysia Airlines jet over Grabovo, Ukraine, a few words on Israel's invasion of Gaza, which began yesterday. Jodi Rudoren has the story, "1 Israeli, 20 Palestinians Killed in Gaza Ground Offensive." I mistakenly believed that Israel's talk of a ground assault was a feint while another ceasefire was worked out in Cairo with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Well, they pulled the plug on those talks:

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose meetings in Cairo on Wednesday and Thursday failed to produce a cease-fire agreement, told reporters there that the ground operation would “lead to more bloodshed and complicate efforts to end the aggression,” according to WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency. Mr. Abbas was scheduled to travel to Turkey and perhaps Qatar on Friday to continue cease-fire discussions.

Where the conflict goes now is anybody's guess. Israel's stated purpose is to close the tunnels that Hamas uses to smuggle its rockets, which I suppose has the advantage of Netanyahu being able to declare victory whenever he wants. Who is to say how many tunnels actually exist? They don't appear on Google Maps. So Israel will rack up a large body count and administer as much destruction as possible. The wild card is what happens in Israel and the West Bank. Israel's Western allies will certainly shield her from any official condemnation. But what of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Israel? Will a third intifada develop? So far Israel is coming out on top because the conflict remains what appears to be the latest iteration of Operation Cast Lead.

Now to the war in Novorossiya and who is responsible for blowing the Boeing 777 commercial jetliner, carrying 298 passengers, out of the sky. Ukraine has posted audio of an intercepted phone conversation from a militia leader named Igor Belzer where he claims to have shot down a plane. This is being covered by the Gray Lady, but it is being treated with kid gloves. No one is embracing it; that is how low the credibility of the junta is even by news organs that have supported Kiev's legitimacy from the outset.

Sabrina Tavernise and Keith Bradsher, two topnotch reporters, have the lede story this morning on the Malaysia Airlines jet, "Russia Denies Role in Downing of Airliner." They puncture the junta's claim that a ragtag militia under the command of a Belzer could launch a fancy missile system capable of bringing down a commercial passenger jet traveling at 33,000 feet

Peter Marosszeky, a longtime aircraft engineer and former senior executive at Qantas, PanAm and American Airlines who advised Boeing on the development of the 777 aircraft, said in a telephone interview that the 777-200 had an extremely long range and would have enough fuel to divert around a dangerous area during a 12-hour flight if the pilots chose to do so. But he said that airlines have typically not worried until now about surface-to-air missiles reaching planes at cruising altitude, because only a very large missile with a lot of fuel could ascend such a distance. 

Mr. Marosszeky expressed skepticism that militiamen could readily fire such a large missile without training as well as cooperation from whoever owned or manufactured the missile. “You’ve got to have special codes and so forth to operate these things,” he said.

Tavernise was on the scene in Grabovo and talked to Novorossiya fighters there. They said point blank that their side had nothing to do with it. It rings true:

As a cloudy dawn came, the full horror of the field was on display. Small white pieces of cloth dotted the grassy farmland, marking the spots of bodies. 

Four rebels in fatigues were wandering through the ruins, looking through people’s belongings and riffling through guidebooks and bags. 

When asked who was responsible for the crash, they looked incredulous and said that it had of course been the Ukrainian military. 

“This wasn’t ours,” said a rebel who identified himself only as Alexei, standing looking at an overhead bin in the grass with a rifle over his shoulder. “Why would we do this? We’re not animals.”

Tavernise's interviews from around the crash site revealed that the flash of the missile originated from Snizhne (the city that was on the news earlier this week when Ukraine accused Russian military aircraft of blasting apart a four-story apartment building and killing 11 civilians):

The crash remained the subject of intense debate in the small Ukrainian town of Grabovo, as residents tried to come to grips with what had unfolded in the fields where they work, just yards from their homes. 

Two villagers said quietly that they had seen the flash of a rocket in the sky around the time the plane went down. Victor, who said he was too afraid to give his last name, said that he had been in his garden at the time and that he had seen “the light coming from a rocket.” 

He said it had come from the direction of Snizhne, a city where the Ukrainian military has been bombing rebel positions frequently for more than a week. “It was a rocket, I’m sure of it,” he said.

The smoking gun here is not the bogus Belzer intercept but the activities in and around Snizhne. Let's go back to that story by David Herszenhorn that appeared yesterday, "Ukraine Says Russian Plane Shot Down Its Fighter Jet":

Ukraine and Russia have traded several accusations of cross-border hostilities in recent days. The Russian Foreign Ministry, for instance, warned of potentially “irreversible consequences” after a man was killed in the Russian city of Donetsk, which shares the same name as the regional capital in eastern Ukraine where rebel forces have been regrouping in recent days. The Russians said the man was killed by a mortar shell fired from the Ukrainian side of the border. 

Ukraine, in turn, has accused Russia of firing a rocket that destroyed an Antonov-26 military transport plane on Monday, and Ukraine also accused Russian military planes of carrying out an airstrike that destroyed a residential building and killed 11 people in the town of Snizhne on Tuesday morning.

The junta's southeast offensive had been routed; its military was behaving in an increasingly erratic fashion -- shelling Russia, blowing apart buildings and then blaming Russia, seeing Russian fighter jets blotting out the sun. This is a description of power coming unhinged. Downing a passenger jet is just what you would expect.

Gaza, the Center of a Global Meltdown

In the many years I have been a news consumer, principally of the New York Times, at no point has it been like it is today. The planet is convulsed by organized violence. Everywhere one turns there appears to be war.

The Middle East is being restructured. Islamic State, a Salafist construct of the Gulf Sheikhdoms, is raising a caliphate in northen Iraq and northern Syria (see Patrick Cockburn's excellent article, posted on Niqnaq's blog, for the latest there); Kurdistan is also rising out of the ashes of Iraq, while Iraqi Shiite parties are trying to figure out what to do next. Iran is spread thin, trying to negotiate with Great Satan on the future of its nuclear program while playing a central role in two hot wars.

In old Europe, conflict rages in Hitler's Lebensraum, as a U.S.-directed fascist junta in Kiev wages war on its civilian population in an attempt to draw the Russian Bear into a quagmire that isolates it from the rest of world capitalism. On the other side of Asia, Uncle Sam is attempting the same thing with the Chinese Dragon, drawing it into open hostilities with its smaller-nation neighbors over resource-rich and strategically-important island chains in the China Sea.

The spot on the map, AfPak, that led to the currently fraying U.S. Weltanschauung -- the post-9/11 reorganization of the state to facilitate a Global War On Terror (GWOT) -- is about to blow sky high. Much as Afghanistan descended into bloody warlord anarchy following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 (the year of Tiananmen and the fall of the Berlin Wall), the tribes are preparing for battle royale once again as Great Satan readies for the exit.

But potentially the biggest burst of flame is the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza. I say potentially the biggest because we appear to be at a moment when the occupation, which began not too long after I was born fifty years ago, is going to crack. Most, except for the hard right Israelis like foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, realize that the occupation cannot continue, that the every-two-year Israeli attacks have to stop, and that border crossings have to be opened. Palestinians are willing to weather, at least for now, the slaughter dished up by Israel because they are unwilling to accept the Gaza status quo. As Anne Barnard reports in "Gazans, Desiring Deep Change, Are Ambivalent on Egypt Cease-Fire Plan":

[H]is grandmother Wedad al-Jarba might have been angry that Hamas, the militant group that dominates the Gaza Strip, did not embrace the cease-fire proposed by Egypt, and kept firing rockets as Israel briefly held its fire. Instead, she shrugged. Like many Gazans interviewed, she said she longed for a deal — one that would change life in Gaza. But she doubted Egypt’s proposal would do that. 

“Every time, they have a cease-fire, but then everything comes back: the siege, the closures,” she said. “Then they bomb again.” 

That ambivalence is widespread in the strip, a narrow, 25-mile-long Palestinian enclave sandwiched between Israel, Egypt and the sea. It may help explain why a beleaguered Hamas kept firing even after Israeli officials declared that such a decision would justify further escalation. 

Israel occupied Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War and controls its borders, airspace and seas even now, nearly nine years after pulling out its settlers and troops. Since then, tough restrictions have effectively amounted to a blockade, reducing imports and exports to a trickle and preventing all but a few Gazans from leaving. Short but devastating wars deepen the misery.

In a story yesterday, "Gaza Families Near Israeli Border Struggle to Build a Life in the Heart of a Conflict," Barnard limned a helpful sketch of the occupation of Gaza as seen through the eyes of the Marouf family:

Ms. Marouf’s son-in-law, a father of four, lost part of a leg and suffered internal injuries in a strike on Saturday as he headed to his work at a chicken shop. That was only the latest blow to a family whose experience traces every stage of Gaza’s disappointments since 2005, when Israel unilaterally pulled out its settlements and troops, and residents briefly hoped for a new order of increased autonomy and opportunity.

Ms. Marouf grew up in the shadow of an Israeli settlement, subject, she said, to frequent security clampdowns. Her husband waited hours each day to get through security to work on Israeli farms. Then, Israel billed the pullout as the end of its occupation of the Gaza Strip, a narrow, 25-mile-long coastal territory that it seized in the 1967 war.

“We built good hopes,” Ms. Marouf said. “We want Gaza to be like any other nation, with a state, a seaport, a future for our children.”

But things only got worse. Israel never relinquished control of Gaza’s borders, airspace and waters; Palestinians consider it still occupied. Israel imposed even harsher restrictions on the movement of people and goods as militants periodically fired rockets and Hamas, which had killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings, won Palestinian elections in 2006. Ms. Marouf’s husband could no longer reach Israel for work, so they invested their savings in renting land to grow strawberries.

Gaza kept sinking. Facing a boycott from Israel and the West, Hamas failed to form a government; it captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2006, prompting more Israeli bombardment as Palestinian rocket attacks continued. In 2007, Hamas took over Gaza from its rival party, Fatah, by force, dividing the Palestinian Authority.

An agreement with Israel to ease its near blockade grew even more remote, making it hard for farmers like the Maroufs to export their harvests.

Then, in late 2008, came what Israel called Operation Cast Lead, involving airstrikes and an incursion into northern Gaza to destroy rocket launchers. The Maroufs fled to a United Nations school, where an Israeli airstrike killed several people; Israeli officials called it a mistake.

Ms. Marouf gave birth to her seventh child, Saja, days later. Her daughter Hadeel, then 11, and a teenage brother went home to get baby clothes, and found their house a smoking ruin, the fields burned. As they walked away, Hadeel said Monday, several neighborhood children tagged along. An Israeli tank shell killed six of them.

“One person’s insides were spilling out,” Hadeel said, reaching for her mother’s hand. Also destroyed was the house of Ms. Marouf’s married daughter, Sabeen.

“We all have childhood memories there,” Sabeen said of her mother’s house. “But the occupation killed our memories as well.”

The family lived in tents for a year, shivering at night as the wind blew under the flaps. Their only income was about $6 a month Ms. Marouf earned making cheese at a women’s factory run under a European Union aid project; even that has disappeared, the project discontinued.

They received United Nations compensation for their house, enough to build a home only half its size, Ms. Marouf said. Construction was slow because of Israeli restrictions on importing building materials. Money ran out before the house was done, but the family moved in, without furniture, which they could not afford. The children went to school in tattered uniforms.

In an Israeli assault in Gaza in 2012, the family stayed put, but last week, they cowered under the most intense bombardments they had ever heard, knowing that if wounded, they would be too frightened to go to a hospital. Ms. Marouf said that each morning, “We thank God that the day has come and we are all right.”

In the shelter, where the family sleeps on bare floors, her daughter Saja, now 5, stared gravely from her mother’s arms and played with a shekel coin. “She won’t eat,” Ms. Marouf said.

Around the corner, a building was flattened by an airstrike on Sunday, and the family is not sure whether they are safe.

Ms. Marouf blamed Israel, Hamas and Fatah for failing to achieve peace.

“We don’t hate the mujahedeen; they defend our people, ourselves, our land,” she said, using the Arabic word for holy warriors to refer to militants. “But we are the victims,” she added, “caught between the three sides.”

Let's keep an eye on the Palestinian resistance. Their continuing steadfastness in the face of terror will offer insight as to how this global conflagration that we are in will spread. The old warpigs will not give up without a great deal of savagery.