Defense Minister Ehud Barak described it as “false, distorted, and irresponsible“.  Information Minister Yuli Edelstein called it “anti-Semitic“.  Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren said it “insidiously… portrayed the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents“.  Foreign Minister Lieberman argued that its true purpose “was to destroy Israel’s image, in service of countries where the terms ‘human rights’ and ‘combat ethics’ do not even appear in their dictionaries“.  And the US House of Representatives banded together in bipartisan harmony to pass a resolution (344–36) that called “on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration” of it.

For nearly a year now, vicious attacks on the Goldstone report and on Judge Goldstone himself have been the thing for Israel’s numerous apologists to do.

There is just one not-so-minor problem with this knee-jerk criticism of the report and infinite stream of ad hominem libel against its main author.  A majority of the most damning—and damaging—war crimes that are alleged to have taken place have now been confirmed by the IDF’s own investigations into the matter, themselves only conducted in an effort to derail the Goldstone report’s referral to the International Criminal Court.

IDF confirms over 20 gravest findings of the Goldstone Report

Several of the most dramatic instances of war crimes, which previously stirred Israel’s defenders into fits, are now publicly admitted by the IDF in the recent update to its official response (which can be found here).

Some examples of war crimes include:

1. White phosphorous in urban areas: This one is probably the most famous admission that emerged after a series of easily disproved lies.  Israel’s initial response was one of absolute denial, indeed indignation, that people would suggest it had used banned chemical weapons in densely populated areas.  But the steady stream of photos and videos depicting phosphorous burns on children and buildings eventually forced Israel to admit it had used these prohibited weapons.
2. The murder of two unarmed Palestinians carrying white flags of surrender.
3. The Al-Fakhura Street incident: Israeli mortar fire at a site adjacent to a UN Relief Works Agency compound resulted in multiple civilian deaths.
4. The use of innocent Palestinians as human shields: The Goldstone report explains that in order “to carry out house searches as human shields the Israeli soldiers took off AD/03’s blindfold but he remained handcuffed. He was forced to walk in front of the soldiers and told that, if he saw someone in the house but failed to tell them, he would be killed. He was instructed to search each room in each house cupboard by cupboard. After one house was completed he was taken to another house with a gun pressed against his head and told to carry out the same procedure there. He was punched, slapped and insulted throughout the process.”  The new Israeli report identifies this anonymous human shield AD/03 and confirms this episode.  Other cases of human shield use, e.g. Abbas Ahmad Ibrahim Halawa and Mahmoud Abd Rabbo al-Ajrami, were also confirmed.
5. Al-Samouni family massacre: The Israelis attacked two houses of the Samouni family, killing 23 people in total.  Subsequently, they prevented the Red Cross and PRCS from providing care to the wounded and dying for three days.  Confirmed by Israel and the subject of a military investigation.
6. Firing on Al Maqadmah and other mosques during prayer time.

In total, a quick scan through the IDF’s new report provides direct confirmation of more than 20 of Goldstone’s findings.  A number of these are the subject of internal IDF investigations, which are infuriating large swaths of the military.  Of course, decent people everywhere should hope that those investigations are conducted in the most unbiased and professional manner possible, and that justice is served appropriately to all those who have committed war crimes.  I am not holding my breath, but it’s good to throw this wish out there.

Israel admits it did not minimize civilian casualties

The IDF report states: “IDF orders include the obligation to take all feasible precautions in order to minimize the incidental loss of civilian life or property” [emphasis added].  Israelis accept this statement as an article of faith and become unglued at the suggestion that “everything possible” wasn’t done to ensure the safety of innocent people.  This expression of faith is often followed by the questions: “What? Do you think Israel wants to kill civilians?”  These questions are of course answered far more accurately with data on casualties than with ideological blindness.

They are also answered, however, through inadvertent slips in the public relations machine that shapes international media coverage of Israel/Palestine.  Today, we are treated to a spate of articles across the English and Hebrew-language press (e.g. here and here) about how Israel “promises” to do a better job of not killing innocent human beings next time around.

“The IDF has … implemented operational changes in its orders and combat doctrine designed to further minimise civilian casualties and damage to civilian property in the future,” it said.

“In particular, the IDF has adopted important new procedures designed to enhance the protection of civilians in urban warfare, for instance by further emphasising that the protection of civilians is an integral part of an IDF commander’s mission.”

Perhaps in a future “update” the IDF can enlighten the world as to how it was previously taking “all feasible precautions” and yet finds only now new tactics to protect civilians.  Perhaps the IDF spokesperson can further explain how emphasizing to its soldiers that “protection of civilians is an integral part” of the mission is considered an “operational change” from earlier practice.  One must presume that protection of civilians has not been given sufficient attention until now, and only Goldstone’s courageous and now confirmed report has forced Israel to reconsider the meaning of “all feasible precautions” and “minimize civilian casualties”. As Magnes Zionist has pointed out, Israel seems to think it can get away with a “I didn’t do it but will try harder next time” approach.

Or perhaps the IDF’s commanders and soldiers got a bit confused by all this talk of “protecting civilians” and that talk of the “Dahiya Doctrine.”

But all of this gives the IDF a bit too much credit, too much benefit of the doubt.  This new report is nothing more than a desperate tactic to try and avoid criminal prosecution for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in the ICC.  Most of the IDF’s “investigations” have already been dismissed as part of this whitewash, notwithstanding all the irate IDF officers unaccustomed to the pretense of accountability.

All it teaches us is four concrete things: (1) the Goldstone report did a stunningly good job in identifying possible war crimes despite Israel’s concerted non-cooperation with the commission, (2) Israel has by its own admission failed to adequately protect civilians in war, (3) many people owe Judge Goldstone a sincere, begging apology for the disgraceful manner in which he has been treated, and (4) justice for the Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism is still far away.

It is difficult to recall such a striking example of personal and institutional racism, which allows justice to be meted out so differentially, so disproportionately to individuals from different ethnic groups.

Of course, the issue has nothing to do with black men impersonating white men, as the title suggests. Rather, the actual story centers on an Arab man who was just convicted of rape in Israel and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Did he force himself on his “victim”? No.

Was she incapacitated through substance abuse and he took advantage of her? No.

Was she underage, a minor who was taken advantage of by someone of greater size/age/authority? No.

Did the girl want to have sex with him? Yes.

Did she get so horrified when she learned that she just had consensual sex with an Arab that she decided to charge him with rape? Yes.

Was an Arab convicted for the crime of pretending he was a Jew? Yes.

Unbelievable! I cannot even believe I have to write this.

According to Yediot Ahronot (Note: Google translation of original Hebrew), the judge recognized this was not a case of rape, but explained that the Arab’s impersonation of a Jew to try and win over the girl amounted to a violent scheme to overcome her “opposition”. Because, of course, she would naturally be “opposed” to his advances if she knew he was “only” an Arab rather than a full-fledged human—a Jew.

Poor guy, all he did was express in a “significant romantic relationship”, as was explained in court.

The apartheid judge went on to explain the functions of the court in protecting the overlords from their lustful minions:

“The court must protect the public interest against sophisticated criminals who use sweet, slippery tongues to deceive innocent victims, with the price paid by sanctity of body and spirit.”

Indeed, consensual sex between two adults supposedly interested in long-term romance violates apartheid’s dictums for “sanctity of body and spirit”. . . . but only when the two parties come from different sides of the psychological segregation barrier.

Max Blumenthal published today a nice catch from the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot about how 550 Israeli officers and soldiers have been investigated for possible war crimes in Gaza.

On July 15th, I published a little post on the two IDF soldiers prosecuted for shooting an unarmed, bound, and blindfolded man. I noted the revealing attitudes of the military officials, who expressed to Yediot the damage they felt was being done to their militarism by lengthy investigations into international law-breaking.

Similarly, we find in Blumenthal’s article the same whiny and disrespectful attitude toward international laws of warfare:

“Senior officers expressed their worry that this will create a situation in future wars where commanders in the field will think twice before carrying out problematic operations, due to fear of legal steps taken against them later.”

The horror! The indignation!

How dare these leftist, terrorist-sympathizers like B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Judge Goldstone, and now the Israeli political establishment suggest that commanders “think twice” before carrying out “problematic operations” that risk murdering innocent civilians?

This is not a current event, but then again the Israeli effort to erase Palestinians from history and contemporary life make the article forever relevant.

According to a doctoral dissertation prepared at Ben-Gurion University using Israeli government archives, Israel “plundered and destroyed” 27,000 Palestinian books as part of its effort to “Judaize the country,” which is a rather obvious euphemism for ethnic cleansing, of course.

Israel destroyed the Palestinian books in the framework of its plan to “Judaize the country” and cut off its Arab residents from their nation and culture.

According to the doctoral dissertation, Israeli authorities collected tens of thousands of Arab books in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Safed, and other towns that were home to Arabs. Israeli officials proceeded to hand out about half the books, while destroying the second half, characterizing them as a “security threat,” the researcher said.

In his al-Jazeera interview, the researcher claimed that, based on Israeli archives, IDF troops plundered the books from the homes of Palestinians expelled during the “Nakba” and handed them over to authorities. The State proceeded to establish a library in Jaffa and other towns for the books, he said.

The researcher told al-Jazeera that according to documents he possesses, Israel destroyed 27,000 books in 1958, claiming that they were useless and threatened the State. Authorities sold the books, most of them textbooks, to a paper plant, he said.

“This was a cultural massacre undertaken in a manner that was worse than European colonialism, which safeguarded the items it stole in libraries and museums,” the researcher charged.

There is much to be said about Israel’s hyper-paranoid definition of security, but the main point I would like to highlight is the effort to Judaize the country, to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants (as documented by Benny Morris and early Zionist leaders themselves, such as Ben-Gurion (1937), who explained “we must expel the Arabs and take their places”), to destroy or resettle their villages, to erase them from memory, and then propagate the revolting nationalist myth that “Palestine is a country without a people for a people without a country.”

A mind-numbing, gut-wrenching, logic-shattering piece of chauvinistic chutzpah.

Of course, most Israelis don’t know much about this history of ethnic cleansing. And even if they have heard of some of the more famous massacres of Arab innocents, like at Deir Yassin, they do not know much about the coordinated attacks on Palestinian history. Ben-Gurion led massive efforts to erase Arabs and Arabic from the geographical and social landscapes, which were presumably to be followed by Palestine’s erasure from the political one as well, or so the thinking went. So most Israelis don’t know about the Jewish National Fund’s Names Committee or the Negev Name Committee, both founded by Ben-Gurion, which together assigned over 200 new names to formerly Palestinian towns because “Israel was obliged for reasons for state to remove Arabic names.”

This effort found great “success”, as Moshe Dayan, Israel’s famous former Defense Minister, explained:

“You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either…. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

And this is the essential story of how a land populated with over 450 Palestinian towns has become a map filled with Hebrew. With the publication of this dissertation on the destruction of Palestinian intellectual life, we now know a bit more about the social disaster that was the founding of Israel.

An utterly disgraceful chapter not only in Jewish history but in world history at large.

Update:

As I first published this, some racist nimrod named Moshe Dann took to the pages of Ynet to write about the non-existence of the Palestinian identity that his idols did so much to try and erase. It boggles the mind that this genocidal soul butter (definition: moralizing drivel with the purpose of erasing a people) can still be published anywhere on earth, much less taken at all seriously by, say, aspiring political leaders in the US (e.g. Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin).

He writes:

Efforts to impose a Palestinian state (the “two-state” proposal) are doomed to fail for one simple reason: Palestinian Arabs do not want such a state; they don’t constitute a nation, or a people. Their nationalism is not based on a unique linguistic, historical, cultural, or religious identity; its primary goal is to wipe out the State of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.

Palestinianism’ is not a national identity, but a political construct developed as part of a terrorist agenda when the PLO was formed in 1964. It was a way of distinguishing between Arabs and Jews, and between Arabs who lived in Israel before 1948 and other Arabs.

What a violent, orientalist, colonial mentality allows this man to write about what Palestinians want. But what a shocking chutzpah allows him to overlook the history of ethnic cleansing highlighted by his own newspaper. Disgusting.

The only thing that distinguished this event from an endless stream of similar incidents was the fact it was recorded on video. Thankfully, a Palestinian held in hand one of B’Tselem’s video cameras and thereby managed to generate a massive quantity of evidence, which yielded an infinitesimal amount of accountability.

To make a long story short, a nonviolent Palestinian demonstrator against the segregation wall in Ni’ilin was detained, bound, blindfolded, allegedly beaten, and then shot in the leg at point-blank range with a rubber-coated steel bullet.

[Warning: Graphic video]

An IDF officer and a soldier in his unit were initially charged with the extraordinarily light offense of “unfit behavior”. But B’Tselem and other Israeli human rights organizations petitioned Israel’s High Court, which then instructed the Military Prosecution that the indictment did not fit the crime as recorded on the video. “The battalion commander’s actions, despite his desire to protect security interests, against a person who presents no danger, cannot be considered a legal action,” they wrote. As a result of this High Court decision, the Military Prosecution added a “threat-making” charge to the officer and an “illegal use of a weapon” charge against the soldier who fired. These charges are a mere “drop in the bucket”, remarked Joseph Dana, but at least they’re something.

Even then, some military officials complained: “No doubt there was a bad incident here, but, on the other hand, you can’t discuss and keep talking about it for so long. You need to know when to stop and not send a message to commanders and soldiers that when they make a mistake it will take years for the matter to be decided.” Indeed, it would have been far better from the IDF’s perspective if this incident was swept under the rug like the vast majority of such cases.

Subtext: Violent repression of civil demonstrations

More important than the legal treatment of these officers, in my view, is the context of occupation, ideology, and brutality, which is on full display in the court proceedings.

As the commander and soldier traded accusations, revealing attitudes surfaced. The two IDF militants threatened their prisoner, Abu Rahme, by saying: “Now you will stop demonstrating against the IDF.” It is not a specific charge they are concerned with, and it is certainly not any violence on the part of Abu Rahme, as the High Court understood in its statement. Rather, the threat posed by Abu Rahme was one of “disrupting the [IDF's] peace” by daring to stage civil protests, apparently repeatedly for the IDF officer recognized him, against the illegal land theft and ethnic cleansing of he and his co-villagers from their own agricultural land.

The ultimately basic example is a powerful example and counterargument to Zionists and their unconditional defenders who are all-too-quick to explain away every Israeli transgression in the name of security. In the end, an extraordinarily large majority of what the IDF does is police and patrol and make life miserable for an indigenous population yearning for freedom from under a brutal military occupation.

Be clear: it is not violence and militancy that the IDF attempts to contain. Rather, it is primarily the essential craving for independence, free air, and one’s continually worked land passed on through dozens of generations, human impulses that are met constantly with this sort of banal, almost ritualized violence of an occupation army.

This is the reason why so many pro-justice, pro-human rights, anti-apartheid activists refer to the Israeli army not as the IDF (the Israel Defense Forces) but instead as the IOF (Israel Occupation Forces). It is simple matter of relative proportions spent enforcing occupation in the name of apartheid versus protecting civilians from violence.

A slap on the wrist for two scapegoats, violent thugs surely but scapegoated nonetheless, does not change this fundamental context.

Update:

For more information about Israel’s violent suppression of Palestinian civil demonstrations, see a recent B’Tselem report on the matter.

Israel’s leaders are tripping over themselves to pay respects to the recently deceased Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu and thereby earn themselves some street cred with Israel’s religious ultra-nationalists.

A Biography of Support for Terrorism and War Crimes

Eliyahu was the “spiritual leader of the national religious movement in Israel” who served previously as the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel from for over ten years (1983—1993) and who sat on the Supreme Rabbinical Council in Jerusalem.  He was an enormously important figure to the settler movement as well as the religious and ultra-nationalist parties Shas, National Union, which now sit in the coalition government.  In 1950, In April 1950, he helped to found an extremist group called Brit Hakanaim, the goal of which was to impose Jewish religious law on the state of Israel and whose activities caused Eliyahu to be sentenced to 10 months in prison.

For years Eliyahu maintained close ties with the far-right in Israel.  As a good friend of Jewish terrorist Meir Kahane, he officiated at Kahane’s son’s wedding and delivered the eulogy at Meir Kahane’s funeral.

More recently, Eliyahu took to the podium to explain to the world that the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was (pre-emptive) divine punishment for the support of Asian governments for Ariel Sharon’s planned decolonization of Gaza.  In May 2007, he wrote to then PM Olmert explaining to him “there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza” because “all citizens are collectively guilty,” based on readings of Genesis 34 and Kings 9,14.  Contrary to the biblical world, this act is properly understood in its international legal context as a war crime and possible crime against humanity.

Even if he didn’t feel this way about carpet bombing, his racism, spread to generations of religious fundamentalists in Israel, would have justified just about anything:”Even if we seek revenge,” he once argued,”it is important to make one thing clear—the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs.”  While uniquely potent toward Arabs, his prejudice extended to Jews as well when they didn’t follow his ultra-Orthodox prescriptions.  About Reform and Conservative movements in Judaism, for example, he once said that they “reek of hell”.

Perhaps most famously, Eliyahu was one of Israel’s most vocal opponents of relinquishing any land whatsoever to Arabs, and actively encouraged his followers to resist military orders to evacuate settlements.

(Side note: His son, Shmuel Eliyahu, also a famous and influential Rabbi, has called for children of Palestinian militants to be “hung from trees” and for the blanket carpet bombing of Gaza.  During the Gaza assault, he cited his father’s teachings and said: “If they don’t stop [firing rockets] after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand.  And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000.  If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million.  Whatever it takes to make them stop.”)

A thoroughly charming family.

Loved By All… Jewish Extremists

He passed away this week from persistent cardiac problems, providing an excellent opportunity for Israel’s leaders to curry favor with those extremist groups for whom Eliyahu is greatly revered.  Fellow extremist Rabbi Wolpe said: “One of the greatest leaders of Israel has been lost, one who fought courageously for the completeness of the Land of Israel, and the love of Israel surged within him.”  Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger cried as he summarized Eliyahu’s virtues:

“This is a huge loss to the Torah world and the rabbinate. . . .  I owe him a personal debt; I received so much from him. . . He was unrivaled as far as his human relations, loved by all, and Jews of all types—hassidim, Lithuanians, settlers, Ashkenazim and Sephardim—would convene in his house to hear Torah from him.. . . This is a difficult day for all of Israel, and so many rabbis who were privy to his advice and wisdom.”

A Shas spokesman (Shas currently has 11 seats in the Knesset) said that “Shas’s Council of Torah Sages, the Shas movement, its rabbis and public from all over the country mourn and feel pain over the death of the great genius. . . . who taught so many and promoted Torah.”  The extremist settler organization the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria (i.e. the occupied West Bank) released a statement that said: “His guidance, courage and love for the people of Israel and the Land of Israel led generations in their struggle over establishing and fortifying the settlements. . . . We’ve lost our guide, who unified the camp and led us in the face of the challenges of the times.”  The Jewish fundamentalists of Hebron expressed gratitude for the way Eliyahu was “always available to help and show support in every way possible.”  The chairman of the National Union party (4 seats in Knesset) said Eliyahu was “one of the special souls that God sends down to the world in each generation.”

And on and on.

That Eliyahu’s co-extremists eulogize him in this way is not particularly newsworthy, although your friends say a lot about who you are.

A Prime Minister’s Eulogy

More shocking (to people who don’t know the extent to which far-right, extremist ultra-nationalists have taken hold of Israeli institutions, including the Knesset and military), is the way his death was received by the political elite of the country.  PM Netanyahu, for example, gushed at Eliyahu’s funeral, saying he “was a first-rate, paramount spiritual leader of religious Zionism, a loyal righteous member of our people who combined words of Torah, clear analysis and sage advice.”  Defense Minister Ehud Barak called him a public leader and spiritual shepherd, adding “he will be especially remembered as one who undertook many efforts and worked for rapprochement and the unity of Israel.  May his memory be blessed.”

This is outrageous sycophancy toward one of the most morally revolting religious leaders of our time.  He was an extremist monster, whose teachings have done incalculable harm to human rights and justice in the Middle East.  The fact that he is treated in this way while the Abe Foxmans of the world excoriate Helen Thomas for something far more benign and ambiguous than the wretched arithmetic of tribal value that Eliyahu advocated, that Israeli hasbarists are more concerned with the comments from some IHH members before the flotilla massacre, is testament to the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the Israeli mind.

The last few blog posts have focused on the contradictions—that is, fabrications—coming out of the “IDF” Press Office and Israeli Foreign Ministry about the flotilla massacre.

Here, I focus again on the IDF effort to paint the humanitarian activists as terrorists. The point is not new; it has been making the rounds on the blogosphere, but I include it here anyway for the sake of completeness.

Days before the illegal attack on the Freedom Flotilla in international waters, the Israeli daily Maariv published a detailed account of the IDF’s plans for dealing with this nonviolent political action. The plan included the use of force if the boats would not voluntarily comply.

A senior IDF officer explained:

“We have very good reason to suspect an act of terrorism from the boats. It is impossible to know at this stage whether terrorists boarded the ship or whether there is intent to use live ammunition against our forces. Therefore, we will act with full seriousness and caution.”

This is sensationalism, pure and simple. The ships were inspected by Turkish customs prior to departure and every passenger was searched with x-ray machines to ensure they did not bring weapons with them, a fact confirmed by the Israeli army after they seized and searched the cargo, despite their hysterical insistence after the fact that kitchen knives, screwdrivers, and bullet proof vests constitute weapons.

But what is important about this statement is its incompatibility with Israel’s attempt to paint their efforts as one of peaceable intentions with non-lethal weapons. Much has been made about the commandos’ use of paintball guns, an assertion repeated in every Israeli and American newspaper. Israel also claimed—directly in verbal statements by government officials and indirectly in its dramatic footage of commandos landing into a crowd of activists wielding sticks and decks chairs—that only after it was met with such violent resistance did its commandos start firing.

The New York Times reports on Israeli officials speaking on the latter point:

Israel’s inner cabinet of seven ministers approved the plan and the Israeli Navy Seal units began training for what they expected to be passive resistance. “We had in mind a sit-down, a linking of arms,” a military spokesman said.

Perhaps Ethan Bronner should have asked the Israelis why, if they expected the activists to have a sit-in with passive resistance, did they arrived shooting stun grenades and rubber bullets from the helicopters, thereby initiating hostilities and dramatically escalating the violence, as he himself reported earlier in the same piece. Perhaps he overlooked this obvious question because he so accustomed to glossing over and concealing Israeli violence against nonviolent activists for the New York Times and its Serious Readers.

Thus, Israel would choose for us to believe that the humanitarian activists were “hard-core” Islamic radicals trained and prepared for battle, with possible links to Al Qaeda (an assertion so preposterous the Israeli government was forced to retract it under pressure of evidence) , on the one hand, but that simultaneously they were not prepared for a “brutal ambush”, a “lynching” in the words of Israel Ambassador Michael Oren, of sweet, pacifist commandos carrying a glorified toy (a paintball gun) as their primary weapon.

That these two versions of “reality” can co-exist in the Israeli mind is all one needs to see how brainwashed, tormented, and ultimately self-defeating Israeli psychology has become.

Of course, as the evidence has come to light, its increasingly clear that both of these mutually inconsistent arguments are false. Not only does the Israeli effort to paint these humanitarian activists as terrorists have no basis in fact, but also that the so-called “brutal ambush” turns out to be a classic case of self-defense… of the activists haphazardly armed with makeshift tools and pieces of furniture against commandos raining from the sky after a barrage of stun grenades and rubber bullets.

The NY Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, whose objectivity was cast into doubt because his son actively serves in the IDF, has just published a detailed article on the flotilla massacre.

The second paragraph jumps off the page:

The crack of an Israeli sound grenade and a hail of rubber bullets from above were supposed to disperse activists, but instead set them into motion. And when three Israeli commandos slid down ropes out of helicopters to take over the ship, a crowd set upon them.

The “newspaper of record” (of all places!) finally cuts through all hasbara coming out of the IDF Press Office and Israeli Foreign Ministry.

The activists did NOT attack first (something that anyone listening to any eyewitnesses other than the IDF already knew). The commandos shot stun grenades and rubber bullets from above. Only THEN did the activists attack them after they descended.

Israel’s entire claim to “self-defense”, as preposterous as it ever was, is now sunk at sea.

Let the war crimes investigation and prosecution begin. Israel MUST be held accountable.

Our collective humanity depends critically upon it.

In addition to the proven IDF lies highlighted in the preceding posts on this blog, the latest blunder comes from the IDF’s clearly doctored “Radio Transmission from Mavi Marmara to Israel Navy”. Thanks to Ali Abunimah for the original post pointing this out.

It sounds in the strange, clearly edited recording that the IDF published as though some Slavic fellow tells the IDF officer on the line to “Go back to Auschwitz.” Then some other guy in a deep Southern-sounding drawl mumbles something related to 911 and helping the Arabs. Yeah, right. These weird, garbled voices chiming in at different volumes and speeds is suspicious enough at it is.

A third voice, however, is the clincher. A woman’s voice says: “We have permission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter.” The only problem with this is that Adam Shapiro, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and husband of Huwaida Arraf, chair of the Free Gaza Movement, has identified clearly the voice as that of his wife.

Except she was never on the Mavi Marmara. She was on a different ship in the flotilla—the Challenger 1.

The video, like the rest of the IDF’s version of events, is distorted, a feeble fabrication designed to justify what increasingly looks like a grave war crime.

The Freedom Flotilla has inspired some rabid and quite insane responses from my countrypeople and co-religionists.  The following videos/articles don’t need a lot of extra commentary.  I just wanted to put together some examples of the type of reactions one sees coming out of Israel and the Jewish community.  This is, in my view, the strongest evidence possible not only of Israel’s guilt in this matter (why else such violent defensiveness?) but also of our exact historical place in the inevitable decline of the ultra-Zionist worldview that has gripped my people for the last 70 years, with seemingly increasing intensity each passing moment of our lives.

1. Israelis demonstrate in favor of the IDF’s actions, chanting “Death to Arabs! Death to leftists!”
2. Knesset members nearly attack Palestinian-Israeli MK Zuabi, calling for her citizenship to be stripped.
3. Facebook group calling for MK Zuabi to be killed.
4. The Jewish Week (an American Jewish magazine) publishes an op-ed calling for a war crime to be committed against next flotilla.
5. Israel navy officer saying flotilla “result is near perfect.”
6. The Zionist Organization of America calls for an investigation into Turkey’s role (yes, you read that right) in the flotilla fiasco.
7. Israelis burn Turkish flag, i.e. the flag of their closest ally in the Middle East, in front of Turkish embassy.
8. Rightists berate Tel Avivians (for being “indifferent”, call them “traitors”) and attack former left-wing Knesset member Uri Avnery
9. Attempts to shut down media outlets deemed insufficiently favorable to the government
10. Pro-IDF, Anti-Turkey Rally in Tel Aviv—A Glimpse Into Collective Israeli Derangement
11. Palestinian-Israeli Knesset members, often touted in support of the strength of Israel’s democracy, face numerous death threats
12. Pro-Israel hecklers in San Francisco threaten silent protest by Women in Black, a group committed to nonviolence: “We will find out where you live; we will disrupt your families.”
13. The ‘price tag policy’, whereby Jews attack Palestinian people and property as a form of political protest, comes inside the Green Line to Haifa

More will be added as I find them.  Please feel free to send in any materials that you think make the list.