Israel's Lunacy

From 1 AM this morning until about 45 minutes ago, around 4:30 AM, a man shouted and sang on the street below my studio apartment. Whether he was insane, drunk or stoned was unclear to me. If I had to pick one, I would say the first. I am almost positive that he is the same guy, a young white man of the street, who I ran into early one perfect quiet sunny morning in June as I returned from a run. It was 9 AM. The neighborhood still slept. The morning sky was sunny blue clear. The birds sang and bees danced. Then shooting through this cinematic perfection was this angry insane ranting. I thought the guy might be frying on acid.

At 1 AM this morning it began with loud bellicose tuneless singing. Then it devolved into the pattern I was familiar with from the sunny morning in June. He calls out to some invisible interlocutor. Calls out a name. Says something like, "I'm here! I love you!" That repeats for a time and then trails off. After listening to this for 30 minutes, I drifted off to sleep, and when I started to dream I dreamed inside this young insane guy's patter. I was dreaming his insanity.

But at least I slept. When I woke at 4 AM, someone from one of the nearby apartment buildings was shouting down his own insanity -- I guess he was not so lucky as I in being able to sleep -- at the insane guy on the street below. Lots of insanity.

That is the world today. There are those of us who wake early every morning and study the news, note the contradictions in the official narrative provided by the media monopoly, attempt to draw attention to the pathological levels of violence practiced by the dominant powers, and basically make some attempt (in my case, quite meager) to point out the ruses, the lies, the divisiveness as the great game is played on the grand chessboard. We occupy what is known as the "lunatic fringe."

Real lunacy is on front-page display lately. Israel, in its slaughter of innocent women and children in Gaza, has now picked a fight with the United Nations. But before getting to that story, let us note that the Kerry-brokered ceasefire which began at 8 AM this morning has already collapsed. There was an exchange of fire between the IDF and Hamas at a tunnel in Rafah in southern Gaza. A Israeli soldier was captured by Hamas. Israel responded with saturation bombing of Rafah. According to Isabel Kershner and Fares Akram in "Gaza Cease-Fire Collapses; Israeli Soldier Is Captured":

Gaza health officials said that 35 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded as Israeli forces bombarded the area. Palestinian witnesses said by telephone that Israeli tank shells hit eastern Rafah as residents returned to inspect homes they had evacuated. 

Hamas blamed Israel for violating the truce, saying in a statement that the announcement about the capture of one of its soldiers was “to cover up the barbaric massacres, especially in Rafah.”

The Kerry ceasefire lasted 90 minutes. How could it be sustained when it allowed the IDF to continue military operations against Palestinian "terror tunnels"? So it wasn't really a ceasefire to begin with; its short duration proved.

But on the front page of the Gray Lady this morning is the story penned by two reliable court scribes, Michael Gordon and Mark Landler, "Cease-Fire in Gaza Conflict Takes Effect as Talks Are Set," praising the U.S. Secretary of State for his hard work putting the ceasefire together. The idea was to have a ceasefire that would freeze the IDF's forward operations in Gaza but let it continue to root about for the "terror tunnels" in places it had troops. Hamas could respond if fired upon. In the meantime, all the players were rushing to Cairo to begin negotiations. The U.S. was sending heavy hitters like William Burns, the guy who got the nuclear talks with Iran cooking. The hope was that enough progress would be made in three days to extend the ceasefire.

An important passage in the Gordon/Landler story is the likely failure of any bargaining between Israel and Hamas:

The substance of the negotiations will be no less tricky than the choreography. Israel and Hamas have both said they will not be satisfied with a “quiet-for-quiet” deal like those that ended violence in 2012 and 2009. 

Hamas, and the broader Palestinian leadership, is demanding a lifting of all Israeli restrictions on import, export, farming and fishing, as well as an opening of the border crossings — which depends not only on Israel but on Egypt. 

Mr. Netanyahu has increasingly emphasized the need to demilitarize Gaza — a process that some say can be accomplished only by Israel effectively reoccupying Gaza — and will be looking for an international mechanism to guarantee that Hamas’ rocket stockpile will not be replenished and that it will not be able to dig new tunnels into Israel.

Mr. Abbas may have his own set of demands, like the release of long-serving prisoners in Israeli jails who were supposed to be freed as part of the American-brokered peace talks that collapsed in April. Hamas has also asked for the release of some 50 men, who were freed in a 2011 exchange for an abducted Israel soldier and rearrested during an Israeli crackdown in June.

With the collapse of the ceasefire and Israel's resumption of saturation bombing of defenseless civilians, the story to read is Somini Sengupta's "Tensions Escalate Between Israel and a Second Party in Gaza: The United Nations." Israel has declared war on the United Nations.

Gaza, since Israel's 2007 blockade, is now more than ever a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) responsibility. UNRWA feeds 800,000 of Gaza's population of 1.7 million.

In public, the war of words intensified this week, with the United Nations blaming Israel for an attack that killed at least 19 people who were taking refuge at a United Nations school early Wednesday and Israel, in turn, accusing the world body of helping Hamas.

The United Nations has been dragged into the conflict: Eight of its staff members have been killed in the past 24 days, and more than 100 of its facilities have come under fire, including the school. United Nations officials said they had repeatedly told Israel of its exact location. 

The deputy secretary general, Jan Eliasson, a former Swedish diplomat, was visibly riled on Wednesday when he publicly reminded Israel of the Geneva Conventions, which established international law governing warfare. In Geneva, the United Nations’ top human rights official, Navi Pillay, raised the prospect of war crimes. 

Christopher Gunness, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency spokesman in Gaza, broke down at the end of an interview with Al Jazeera, which promptly went viral. And Pierre Krähenbühl, the commissioner general of Unrwa, the agency responsible for aiding Palestinians, told the Security Council on Thursday that military operations had been “waged with excessive — and at times disproportionate — force in densely populated urban settings.”

Israel has responded by mocking the UN as a tool of Hamas, a position that even the U.S. cannot parrot. This is from the Gordon and Landler story:

The White House on Thursday came closer than it had since the conflict began to criticizing Israel’s actions, saying it did not dispute the United Nations’ conclusion that Israel was responsible for the shelling. 

“What we are simply asking the Israelis to do — in fact, urging the Israelis to do — is to do more to live up to the standards that they have set for their own military operations to protect the lives of innocent civilians,” the press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters. 

Mr. Earnest called the strike on the school “totally unacceptable and totally indefensible.”

But behind closed doors, the United States is blocking any condemnation of Israel's bloody assault by the United Nations Security Council. Sengupta says:

Regardless of the verbal volleys, there is little that United Nations officials can do without instructions from the Security Council. The Council met Thursday for more than three hours behind closed doors, but failed to reach consensus on a proposed statement that would have condemned attacks on United Nations installations. Diplomats said they were stuck on language that would have also condemned the use of its facilities to store rockets. 

In the past, the United Nations has been useful in supporting political deals and keeping warring parties at bay in the Middle East: One of its first peacekeeping missions was in the Golan Heights. The tensions now may make it far more difficult for the United Nations to play that role. 

As the Security Council met behind closed doors, the Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, shoulders hunched, rued that it had not taken any legally binding steps to end the fighting. “There’s a big test for the 15 members in the chamber as they are deliberating right now — I think tests to their hearts, tests to their conscience, tests to their brains — whether they’ll condemn these crimes,” Mr. Mansour said. 

Like his Israeli counterpart, he was not too bullish on the international community. He said the people of Gaza “feel the international community is failing them.”

Israel has gone too far. The BDS Movement will flourish. The Intifada will ignite the West Bank and Israel. The U.S. has no more moral legitimacy to shield Israel from the rest of the world.

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.