Left Margin
By Carl Bloice, BlackCommentator.com
Editorial Board
Black Commentator
June 10, 2010
http://www.blackcommentator.com//379/379_cover_lm_israel_media_cement_missiles.php
In recent months, said the June 3 story on the front
page of the New York Times,
increased - although still quite limited - movement of
goods and people into and out of
official said that under Mr. Netanyahu there had been a
20 percent increase in goods, including some limited
building materials under third-party supervision so
that Hamas would not get hold of them.
"But
steel were allowed to pass in any serious amount, they
would end up in Hamas missiles and other weapons that
would be aimed at
Unable to get the image out of my mind and being
totally ignorant on such matters, I called a couple of
people who know about this stuff, inquiring as to how
one makes a missile out of cement. Not easy was the
response, and one person suggested that the kind of
structural steel needed to repair the bridges
destroyed in the terrible 2006 onslaught wouldn't be
much help either. A couple of days later the Israeli
government sought to clear up the confusion by saying
the Palestinian government in
ballast for its crude rockets. Could be. But one has
only to picture again the tremendous devastation in
to more than a "serious amount" of concrete and steel
they are never going to rebuild their cities and villages.
But then the government of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, and its far-flung propaganda
operation, can be counted on to have an answer - or
excuse -- for everything.
The purpose in this case is to underscore the
contention that the cruel blockade of
prevent the smuggling of arms and weapons-making
material into the enclave. It is not and never has
been. The aim of the blockade is to make life miserable
for the 1.4 million Palestinians there in the hope of
undermining the Hamas government, which was duly
elected four years ago.
That's collective punishment and it's against
international law.
The assertion that the only reason for the blockade is
to prevent arms or munitions building materials from
entering
consider food and medicine to be weapons because they
might be fed to military personnel.
"Preventing the importing of arms is an element in the
blockade," writes Esther Kaplan in The Nation, "but the
blockade also bars the importation of many basics of
life, such as fuel to power hospital generators and
building materials, including iron and cement,
necessary for rebuilding after the devastation of
Operation Cast Lead. It bans pesticides and spare parts
for farming equipment, which has debilitated the
agricultural sector. According to the Israeli human
rights group B'tselem, some 4,000 goods were allowed
into
now. (And the guidelines for what may join the list of
acceptable items is a tightly guarded secret.) The
blockade has severely limited access to electricity,
leaving the vast majority of Gazans facing blackouts
for eight to ten hours a day. It has cut off students
from their university educations and severed family
ties. It has left a stunning 70 percent of the
population dependent on international food aid just to survive."
Reflecting Netanyahu's original line of propaganda
attack, Gal Beckerman writing in The Forward, says that
on June 2 the Jewish Federations of
distributed talking points, which read: "When Israeli
commandos boarded the ships, they were met with
violence from a supposedly nonviolent group, including
gunfire from automatic weapons and attacks with knives
and axes. Several Israelis were wounded. As a result of
the clash triggered by the pro-Hamas group, a number of
them were killed or wounded in the confrontation."
However, on June 1 Caroline Glick, rightwing deputy
managing editor of the
advisor to Netanyahu, sharply took the Israeli
government to task for deficiencies in waging the
propaganda surrounding the flotilla. The "information
strategy" she wrote in her paper "was ill-conceived."
It should have attacked
terrorism," she wrote, it should have prepared "charge
sheets against the flotilla's organizers, crew and
passengers for their facilitation of terrorism."
Israeli leaders "stammer," she wrote, and engage in
arguments that are "worse than worthless." The
following day, the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based
think tank that - in the words of the Wall Street
Journal - "provides strategic-thinking support to the
Israeli government," and with which Glick is
associated, criticized the government for having "no
coherent conceptual response" to push back against
global critics. Then, on June 3, Netanyahu went before
the media to say there was a danger of arms smuggling
involved. By that afternoon--
President Joseph Biden was making the same claim.
As the days have worn on since the bloody events aboard
the Mavi Marmara, the arms smuggling message has
sharpened. On Saturday Netanyahu said
"not allow the establishment of an Iranian port in
got in on the act, claiming that the purpose of the
blockade of
itself with still more rockets." One of CNN's resident
foreign policy experts, Jill Dougherty, went on the air
to explain the purpose of
"Essentially to stop weapons from being taken into
Of course, there were no weapons making their way to
Gaza aboard the Mavi Marmara, hence the steel and
cement tale passed on to us by the Times' Ethan
Bronner. And the idea that if the ship reached port in
Another taking point that has gotten a lot of play over
the past two weeks is the notion that the aid ships
were not really on a humanitarian mission but rather
were aiming for a conflict or "provocation." This is a
smokescreen designed to cover what really happened.
The African American students that sat in at lunch
counters in
confrontation (little likelihood the owners were going
to do the decent thing and make them hamburgers). But
they didn't expect the Tactical Squad to suddenly
arrive en mass and start shooting them in the head with
assault rifles.
One thing that has emerged from
high seas, and the resulting tragic deaths and
injuries, is that a bright light is being shown on
something that has usually been ignored by the Western
media: the reality and effect of the blockade. Herein
lies the test for the international community, and the
Obama Administration in particular. Only the Netanyahu
government and its supporters at home and abroad would
argue that the crippling siege of
should continue. Peace loving and progressive people
should demand that it be lifted. It would mean a lot
for the suffering Palestinian community to have access
to steel and cement.
This, of course, must be a prelude to the urgent task
of ending the occupation and the birth of a new
Following the May31 Israeli military assault on an
international flotilla trying to bring humanitarian
supplies to besieged
machine went into overdrive. It wasn't always well-
coordinated but it was unrelenting and it had one big
advantage: the reluctance or refusal of the Western
media - particularly in the
and its willingness go along with the Netanyahu
government's framing of the issues. Robert Fisk wrote
in The Independent (
thing in all this is that so many Western journalists -
and I'm including the BBC's pusillanimous coverage of
the
journalists, while many Israeli journalists are writing
about the killings with the courage that Western
journalists should demonstrate."
_______________
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice
is a writer in
Coordinating Committee of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly
worked for a healthcare union
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