'We Can't Remake Afghanistan'

By Russ Hoyle (from The Nation)
April 1, 2009

Russ Hoyle: Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, weighs in on how President Obama failed to consider the containment option in Afghanistan.

"Ours is the far stronger hand," Bacevich has written. "The jihadist project is entirely negative. Time is our ally. With time, our adversary will wither and die." In the following e-mail exchange, Bacevich criticizes the new Obama policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, in part, for its failure to consider the alternatives:

Obama's new Afghanistan-Pakistan policy, with its emphasis on military counterinsurgency operations and nation-building, suggests that the president is none the wiser about the containment policy outlined in your book. Do you see any evidence to the contrary?

Candidly, I know of no evidence suggesting that the president is familiar with anything I have written. No one from the administration has been in touch with me about any subject whatsoever. The Obama approach differs from the Bush approach in that Obama defines US objectives somewhat more modestly than Bush did--he'll settle for stability, whereas Bush insisted that we sought to democratize. And Obama understands that relying entirely on hard power won't work--hence, his greater emphasis on economic development. But in Afghanistan, at least, Obama still seems to think that the United States can and must remake the place.

Do you support a strong US-led, regionally based diplomatic initiative and nonmilitary operations designed to strengthen Afghan governance and economic development?

I'm not optimistic about our ability to "strengthen Afghan governance and economic development." Given the current economic crisis, I don't believe we have the money for such an enterprise. When it comes to Afghanistan, I'm sympathetic to economic support and security assistance only in the sense that the Bush approach was even worse. Let me speak plainly: we can't remake Afghanistan and don't need to.

You have been an outspoken critic of the Bush war on terrorism as a "fashionable" idea that has created a "constellation of celebrities" around General Petraeus. I take it you have little confidence in the Pentagon's investment in counterinsurgency doctrine?

The "surge" produced improved security but has not delivered the promised political reconciliation. To the extent that the surge produced positive results, the credit is due in large measure to the Sunnis, who decided for their own reasons to suspend insurgent activity. If you think we need to stay in Afghanistan for the next several years, then separating the bad Taliban from the not-so-bad Taliban is certainly legitimate and also probably imperative. I don't happen to subscribe to the premise, however.

Do you agree with Les Gelb's proposal for a US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan after three years that emphasizes containing Al Qaeda and Taliban militants with counterinsurgency tactics, economic aid and training Afghan security forces?

I think Gelb has it about right on Afghanistan. I part company with him on Pakistan. If we can't "fix" Afghanistan, then it's absurd to think that we can "fix" Pakistan. He's right. The hawks in Washington tend to overstate the promised benefits of military victory and to overstate the consequences of policy failure.

Pakistan seems a black box as far as US anti-terrorist operations are concerned. Should such raids, either by Predator missiles or commandoes, simply be stopped cold?

If the Predator strikes are killing civilians, they are probably doing more harm than good. If they are killing Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives exclusively, they might be worth it. Press reports say that we have been deeply involved in trying to ensure that Pakistani nuclear weapons are secure and under firm civilian control. That's about as much as we can hope to do.

Pakistan would seem the ground zero of any containment policy, since its porous borders areas offer sanctuary for Al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban militants operating in Afghanistan. How do you contain that?

The most important way to implement a containment policy is to deny jihadists the wherewithal needed to promote their activities. We need to stop shipping billions of dollars to the Arabs. That means implementing a serious energy policy.

You describe containment as an alternative to open-ended global war that can't succeed, since it will exhaust US resources and set off mass uprisings in the Islamic world. Is that the fate that awaits President Obama's recast war in Afghanistan?

I fear that may be the case. Obviously Obama has ratcheted down US objectives in Afghanistan--there's no more talk of converting it into a liberal democracy. Still, the project he has in mind is an enormous one. It will last many years and cost many tens of billions of dollars, not to mention a considerable number of lives. That project is simply unnecessary. There are less expensive and more effective ways to secure our limited interests in Afghanistan.

Does Obama's policy represent the new face of American exceptionalism?

Not a new face; simply the latest version. Certainly it suggests that Obama is no more likely than his predecessor to understand that a belief that we are special or different actually endangers our well-being.


About Russ Hoyle
Russ Hoyle is the author of Going to War (2008, Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press), writes on foreign affairs for The Daily Beast, and is a visiting lecturer on the Iraq war at Trinity College.

UK Jewish MP: Israel Acting like Nazis in Gaza

Obama on Al Arabiyya

Israeli Army Rabbi: Palestinians are [our] mortal enemies and...cruelty is sometimes a "good attribute"

The Independent: The Israeli army’s chief rabbinate gave soldiers preparing to enter the Gaza Strip a booklet implying that all Palestinians are their mortal enemies and advising them that cruelty is sometimes a “good attribute”.

The booklet, entitled Go Fight My Fight: A Daily Study Table for the Soldier and Commander in a Time of War, was published especially for Operation Cast Lead, the devastating three-week campaign launched with the stated aim of ending rocket fire against southern Israel. The publication draws on the teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the Jewish fundamentalist Ateret Cohanim seminary in Jerusalem.

In one section, Rabbi Aviner compares Palestinians to the Philistines, a people depicted in the Bible as a war-like menace and existential threat to Israel.

In another, the army rabbinate appears to be encouraging soldiers to disregard the international laws of war aimed at protecting civilians, according to Breaking the Silence, the group of Israeli ex-soldiers who disclosed its existence. The booklet cites the renowned medieval Jewish sage Maimonides as saying that “one must not be enticed by the folly of the Gentiles who have mercy for the cruel”.

60 Minutes: Time Running Out for Two-State Solution

CBS: Getting a peace deal in the Middle East is such a priority to President Obama that his first foreign calls on his first day in office were to Arab and Israeli leaders. And on day two, the president made former Senator George Mitchell his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mr. Obama wants to shore up the ceasefire in Gaza, but a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank where Palestinians had hoped to create their state. The problem is, even before Israel invaded Gaza, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians had concluded that peace between them was no longer possible, that history had passed it by. For peace to have a chance, Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank, which would then become the Palestinian state.

It’s known as the "two-state" solution. But, while negotiations have been going on for 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved in to occupy the West Bank. Palestinians say they can't have a state with Israeli settlers all over it, which the settlers say is precisely the idea.

Gaza invasion: Powered by the U.S.

Salon: Israel's current air and ground assault on the Gaza Strip has left about 1,000 Palestinians dead, including 400 women and children. Several thousand people have been wounded and dozens of buildings have been destroyed. An estimated 90,000 Gazans have abandoned their homes. Israel's campaign in Gaza, which began more than two weeks ago, has been denounced by the Red Cross, multiple Arab and European countries, and agencies from the United Nations. Demonstrations in Pakistan and elsewhere have been held to denounce America's support for Israel.

It's well known that the U.S. supplies the Israelis with much of their military hardware. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has provided about $53 billion in military aid to Israel. What's not well known is that since 2004, U.S. taxpayers have paid to supply over 500 million gallons of refined oil products -- worth about $1.1 billion –- to the Israeli military. While a handful of countries get motor fuel from the U.S., they receive only a fraction of the fuel that Israel does -- fuel now being used by Israeli fighter jets, helicopters and tanks to battle Hamas.

According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, between 2004 and 2007 the U.S. Defense Department gave $818 million worth of fuel to the Israeli military. The total amount was 479 million gallons, the equivalent of about 66 gallons per Israeli citizen. In 2008, an additional $280 million in fuel was given to the Israeli military, again at U.S. taxpayers' expense. The U.S. has even paid the cost of shipping the fuel from U.S. refineries to ports in Israel.

In 2008, the fuel shipped to Israel from U.S. refineries accounted for 2 percent of Israel's $13.3 billion defense budget. Publicly available data shows that about 2 percent of the U.S. Defense Department's budget is also spent on oil. A senior analyst at the Pentagon, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, says the Israel Defense Force's fuel use is most likely similar to that of the U.S. Defense Department. In other words, the Israeli military is spending about the same percentage of its defense budget on oil as the U.S. is. Therefore it's possible that the U.S. is providing most, or perhaps even all, of the Israeli military's fuel needs.

What's more, Israel does not need the U.S. handout. Its own recently privatized refineries, located at Haifa and Ashdod, could supply all of the fuel needed by the Israeli military. Those same refineries are now producing and selling jet fuel and other refined products on the open market. But rather than purchase lower-cost jet fuel from its own refineries, the Israeli military is using U.S. taxpayer money to buy and ship large quantities of fuel from U.S. refineries.

The Israeli government obtains the fuel through the Defense Department's Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, and pays for the fuel and the shipping with funds granted to it through Foreign Military Financing (FMF), another Defense Department program. (In 2008, Congress earmarked $2.4 billion in FMF money for Israel, and $2.5 billion for 2009.) The dimensions of the FMS fuel program are virtually unknown among America's top experts on Middle East policy. For his part, the Pentagon analyst was surprised to learn that FMS money was even being used to supply fuel to Israel. "That's not the purpose of the program," he says. "FMS was designed to allow U.S. weapons makers to sell their goods to foreign countries. The idea that fuel is being bought under FMS is very, very odd."

The fuel program, in fact, raises a number of pressing questions. The shipments have occurred during times of record-high oil prices, when American consumers have been angered by motor fuel prices that in 2008 exceeded $4 per gallon. Given those high prices, it appears to make little sense for the U.S. government to be promoting policies that reduce the volume of -- and potentially raise the price of -- motor fuel available for sale to U.S. motorists.

The U.S. fuel shipments are part of a sustained policy that has widened the energy gap between Israel and its neighbors. Over the past few years, the Israel Defense Force has cut off fuel supplies and destroyed electricity infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Those embargoes and attacks on power plants have exacerbated a huge gap in per-capita energy consumption between Israelis and Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. And that sharp disparity helps explain why the Palestinians have never been able to build a viable economy.

Edward S. Walker, former president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, says the fuel supply program is emblematic of U.S. military support for Israel. Walker, who has served as U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel, explains that the FMF money allows the Israelis to "do with it what they want. They can buy equipment or fuel. It's their choice, not the government's choice. It's the only program where we give someone a blank check and they can use it any way that they choose."

Given the recent spike in oil prices, which helped send the U.S. and the world economy into a tailspin, and Americans still smarting from paying $4 at the pump, says Walker, "Why are we supplying fuel to Israel when we are paying such high prices?"

Since 1948, oil has been a critically important commodity for both the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli economy. And Israeli leaders have long worried about their energy security. In 1957, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote in his diary, "The only sanctions which could defeat or break us are oil sanctions."

In 1967, Egypt's blockade of the Straits of Tiran precipitated the Six Day War. The Straits, writes Israeli historian Michael Oren in his book on the conflict, "Six Days of War," were "a lifeline for the Jewish state, the conduit to its quiet import of Iranian oil." In 1973, the Yom Kippur War (Arabs call it the Ramadan War) led to the Arab Oil Embargo, an event that still reverberates in the U.S., particularly in the fanciful political rhetoric about the desire for "energy independence."

The U.S.-Israel oil relationship goes back to 1975. In September of that year, Henry Kissinger, who was then secretary of state, struck a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that led the Israelis to partially withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. The agreement required Israel to pull out of the Giddi and Mitla passes and relinquish the Sinai oilfields the Israelis had captured during the 1967 war.

In return, Kissinger agreed that America would provide multibillion-dollar economic and military subsidies to Israel. He also agreed that the U.S. would supply Israel with oil in case of any emergency. That agreement was formalized in 1979 about the time of the Camp David peace talks. It says that the U.S. will "make every effort to help Israel secure the necessary means of transport" for the oil that it purchases. The agreement concludes by saying that the U.S. and Israel will "meet annually, or more frequently at the request of either party, to review Israel's continuing oil requirement."

Since 1979, the agreement has been quietly renewed every five years. (The most recent approval of the document was done by the U.S. State Department in November of 2005.) The U.S. does not provide any other country the same insurance.

Nor does any other country get anything close to the volume of fuel that Israel does under FMS. In 2004, more than 140 countries received FMS aid from the U.S. Of that group, only about 13 countries received fuel of any kind through the FMS program and the biggest recipient, after Israel, was Singapore, which got $7.3 million in fuel. That year, Israel received 17 times more FMS fuel than all of the other countries combined.

Why did the U.S. Defense Department begin providing oil to Israel in 1986? And why does the program persist, particularly given that Israel no longer sees its refineries as strategic assets? The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which manages the FMS and FMF programs, referred questions about the program to the Israeli government. The press office of the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to numerous requests about the program.

While the rationale for the oil transfers remains elusive, the facts behind Israel's refinery privatization are freely available. In 2006, the government sold the Ashdod refinery to Israeli tycoon Zadik Bino for about $500 million. And in early 2007, it sold the larger refinery in Haifa to a group led by Israel Corp., the shipping and chemicals conglomerate, for $1.5 billion.

The sale of the refineries marked a major turning point in Israel's attitude toward oil. In its earliest years as an independent nation, Israel's survival was made possible by using crude from the Soviet Union and Venezuela. From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Iranian crude was the lifeblood of the Zionist state. Later still, the Israelis relied on the Kuwaitis. Today, the Russians are providing much of Israel's crude needs. And the sale of the refineries is indicative of the Israeli government's confidence in its ongoing ability to purchase the oil it needs on the international market.

Nevertheless, the FMS fuel shipments to Israel have continued. The most recent shipments for which records are readily available occurred in July and October 2008.

On July 7, 2008, the spot price for U.S. crude oil hit a near-record of $141. That same day, the San Antonio Business Journal reported that San Antonio-based refiner Valero Energy Corp. had been awarded a contract by the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) worth $46 million to provide fuel to Israel. Valero has won a number of lucrative contracts from the DESC, the Defense Department agency that handles all of the Pentagon's bulk fuel purchases. On Oct. 9, the Journal reported that Valero had been awarded a $235 million contract under FMS. Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero, says that the company "doesn't talk publicly about its contracts."

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that U.S. taxpayers are paying the shipping costs to move the fuel from refineries -- many of them on the Texas Gulf Coast -- to Israeli ports at Haifa or Ashkelon. Shipping costs vary but one specific bid called for shipping costs of $.30 per gallon. Officials with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that manages programs that "strengthen America's alliances and partnerships," has confirmed that the costs to ship the fuel from U.S. refineries to Israel have been paid for with FMF money designated for Israel by Congress.

The huge FMS fuel shipments are puzzling to the Israelis. Amit Mor, CEO of Eco Energy, an Israeli consulting and investment firm, has worked on energy issues in his home country for about two decades. In a recent e-mail, Mor says that "there is a paradox" in the fuel shipments that Israel gets from the U.S. He said that the privately owned Israeli refineries export jet fuel in "FOB prices," while the defense ministry imports jet fuel in "high CIF prices," with the funds of U.S. military assistance.

FOB, short for "free on board," means that customers must take possession of the fuel at the refinery and then pay for all shipping and related costs to get the fuel to its final destination. On the other hand, as Mor explains, the Israeli military is importing fuel from U.S. refineries located 7,000 miles away, while incurring the CIF, short for "cost, insurance and freight," of moving the fuel that distance.

Mor says Israeli refiners have "complained about this issue" but have had no luck with the Israeli government. He goes on to say that "it is the U.S. government that insisted for some reason to continue with this historical, costly and inefficient arrangement."

Energy analysts squabble about a myriad of issues. But if there is one truism that draws near-universal agreement, it's this: As energy consumption increases, so does wealth. And while that truism holds for oil use, it is particularly apt for electricity. As Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their 2005 book, "The Bottomless Well," "Economic growth marches hand in hand with increased consumption of electricity -- always, everywhere, without significant exception in the annals of modern industrial history."

That statement underscores the significance of the FMS fuel shipments to Israel, many of which have occurred at or near the time that the Israeli military has attacked the electric power plants of its neighbors.

In late June 2006, Israeli aircraft fired nine missiles at the transformers at the Gaza City Power Plant, the only electric power plant in the Occupied Territories. (One of the original partners in the project was Enron, but that's another story.) The missiles caused damage estimated at $15 million to $20 million and, for a time, made Gaza wholly reliant on electricity flows from Israel. The 140-megawatt power plant, owned by the Palestine Electric Co., was insured by the Overseas Private Investment Corp., an arm of the U.S. government. Thus the U.S. was providing fuel and materiel to the Israeli military, which destroyed the plant, but it was also paying to fix the damage. Call it cradle-to-grave service.

The Israeli attack on the Gaza City Power Plant offers a stark example of how the FMS fuel helps assure that Israel stays energy rich while many of the citizens in neighboring regions live in energy poverty.

Two weeks after the attack on the Gaza City plant in 2006, during Israel's monthlong war against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, Israeli aircraft attacked the 346-megawatt Jiyyeh power plant, the oldest electric power plant in Lebanon. Those attacks resulted in the largest-ever oil spill in the eastern Mediterranean. About 100,000 barrels of fuel oil that was stored in tanks at the Jiyyeh site flowed into the sea, creating an oil slick that stretched for more than 150 kilometers.

The attacks on the Jiyyeh plant occurred on July 13 and July 15. Those dates are important because they underscore the timing of the U.S. fuel transfers to Israel.

On July 14, 2006, the U.S. military issued two press releases. In one of them, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced that it would be providing up to $210 million in JP-8 jet fuel to the Israeli government. The other release, put out at 5 p.m. Eastern time, came from the Defense Logistics Agency, which said that it had awarded a $36.7 million contract to Valero as part of another JP-8 supply deal for Israel.

The July 14 release contains this rather bland description of the fuel deal: "The proposed sale of the JP-8 aviation fuel will enable Israel to maintain the operational capability of its aircraft inventory. The jet fuel will be consumed while the aircraft is in use to keep peace and security in the region. Israel will have no difficulty absorbing this additional fuel into its armed forces." The release goes on to claim that the "proposed sale of this JP-8 aviation fuel will not affect the basic military balance in the region."

While the attacks on the Jiyyeh plant were important, Lebanese citizens could get electricity from other power plants in the country. That was not true in Gaza, a province in which electricity has always been in short supply. According to the CIA Fact Book, the Gaza Strip ranks dead last -- 214th out of 214 countries and territories listed -- in the amount of electricity consumed. According to the Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Agency, in 2004, the average Gazan used about 654 kilowatt-hours of electricity. By contrast, the 7.1 million residents of Israel consume about 6,295 kilowatt-hours of electric power per person per year, nearly 10 times as much as the average Gazan.

Although more recent energy consumption data for Gaza is not available, there's no question that the endemic poverty in the West Bank and particularly in Gaza, is due, largely, to a continuing lack of energy resources. And the Israelis have frequently cut off the flow of fuel and electricity, which has exacerbated the Palestinians' energy poverty.

Over the past few years, the Israelis have cut off the flow of energy to Gaza as retribution for various transgressions. And those cutoffs have forced the Gaza City Power Plant to shut down for lack of the fuel oil it needs to operate. When the power plant is idled, most of the residents of Gaza City are left without power and overall power supplies in the Gaza Strip decline by about 25 percent.

In May 2006, Israel cut off the flow of oil into the Occupied Territories after the Islamic group Hamas won local elections. In January 2008, the Israelis closed the border crossings into Gaza, which resulted in a fuel shortage that closed the Gaza power plant. In April 2008, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency stopped distributing aid in Gaza after it ran out of fuel. The Israelis stopped the fuel flow as retribution for attacks that killed two Israeli civilians and three Israeli soldiers. In November 2008, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency was again forced to suspend work due to lack of fuel. The fuel shortage occurred after Israel closed the border into Gaza in response to rockets and mortar shells that had been fired into Israel from Gaza.

The disparity in energy consumption between the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and their counterparts in Israel is just one element in the centuries-old story of tragedy and conflict in the region. But with the U.S. squarely on the side of the Israelis in the Gaza campaign, the potential for an angry backlash against the U.S. appears to be growing.

And that anger will likely only increase when Arabs begin to understand that much of the fuel that the U.S. is giving to Israel is being refined from Arab oil. The Valero refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, which has won several of the FMS contracts for Israel, is a big buyer of Mideast crude. During the second quarter of 2006, according to data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the refinery got about 40 percent of its crude oil from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

In short, U.S. taxpayers are paying for U.S. energy companies to buy Arab crude, ship it across the Atlantic to refineries in the U.S., refine it, and then ship it back across the Atlantic so that the Israel Defense Force can use it in its wars.

While the origination point of the crude may only matter to part of the Arab world, it is becoming apparent that bloodshed in Gaza is further complicating America's efforts to gain credibility as an honest broker in the region. Anti-U.S. sentiment is not in America's long-term interest, says former diplomat Chas Freeman, a man whose résumé in international affairs extends back nearly four decades.

Freeman is a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as well as a former assistance secretary of defense. He served as Richard Nixon's chief interpreter during Nixon's visit to China in 1972. Now the president of the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank, Freeman says the FMS fuel program for Israel runs counter to long-term goals of resolving the Palestinian conflict and America's stated goal of protecting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. The Defense Department has assumed "unilateral responsibility for the protection of the oil trade in the Persian Gulf, and yet it's assuming responsibility for the delivery of aviation fuel for the Israeli military," he says. "That's confused and contradictory." The program, he adds, is "one of many elements of our relationship with Israel that is very hard to explain."

Freeman may be correct, but the House of Representatives has scant doubt about continued U.S. support for Israel. Nor has Congress shown much interest in the fuel shortages among Palestinians. On Jan. 9, the 14th day of the fighting in Gaza, the House passed a resolution sponsored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "recognizing Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza." The vote was 390 to 5.

Two days before the vote, UNICEF estimated that 800,000 Gazans did not have running water and 1 million were living without electricity.

-- By Robert Bryce

Analysis: Joseph Massad: Israel's right to defend itself

EI: Common Western political wisdom has it that when Western countries support Israeli military action against Arab countries or the Palestinian people, they do so because they support Israel's right to defend itself against its enemies.

This has always been established wisdom in Israel itself, even before the colonial settlement was established, wherein its predatory army is ironically named the Israel Defense Forces, not unlike the South African apartheid army, which was also known as the South African Defense Forces. This defensive nomenclature is hardly exclusive to Israel and South Africa, as many countries rushed after World War II to rename their Ministries of "War" as Ministries of "Defense." Still, Israel's allegedly defensive actions define every single war the colonial settlement has ever engaged in, even and especially when it starts these wars, which it has done in all cases except in 1973.

Thus the war of 1948 which Zionist militias started against the Palestinian people on 30 November 1947, a day after a Western-controlled United Nations General Assembly issued the Partition Plan, is presented as "defensive," as was its expulsion of about 400,000 Palestinians before 15 May 1948, i.e. before the day on which three Arab armies (the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi armies) invaded the area that became Israel (Lebanon hardly had an army to invade with and hardly managed to retrieve two Lebanese villages that Israel had occupied, and Jordanian forces only entered the areas designated by the UN plan for the Palestinian state, and East Jerusalem which was projected to fall under UN jurisdiction).

Yet until this very day, Israel, its Western and Arab and Palestinian allies, seem to agree with the major Israeli lie that the refugee "problem" resulted from the 1948 war which Israel fought as a "defensive" war and that the responsibility of the refugees lies with the Arab governments who "started" the war. While the remaining 370,000 Palestinians Israel expelled were driven out after 15 May 1948 and before the end of January 1949 (when armistice talks began), they could ostensibly be included in the argument that their expulsion was a result of the war, but it remains unclear why the first 400,000 would be included in that category. The thousands of Palestinians who would be expelled after the armistice agreements were signed, especially those of the city of Majdal, now Ashkelon, whose population was loaded onto trucks and expelled to Gaza, does not even enter these calculations.

The argument in fact must be extended to the post-15 May refugees. After all, it was Zionist expulsions of the Palestinians for over five months prior to the Arab armies' intervention in May 1948 that was used as a casus belli for the Arab armies whose intervention was carried out under the banner of defending Palestine and the Palestinians against Zionist aggression. None of this however seems to matter and Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people and their UN-designated state continues to be presented as part of "Israel's right to defend itself."

Ironically, Israel's unprovoked invasion of Egypt in 1956 and occupation of Sinai also seems to fall under the category of Israel's right to defend itself as far as the Israelis were concerned, although United States President Dwight Eisenhower and the Soviet Union thought otherwise at the time, which forced Israel to withdraw. Israel's massive invasions of three Arab countries in 1967 was/is also presented as another defensive war, wherein if it is ever admitted that Israel is the party that started the war, the admission is quickly followed by the "explanation" (hasbara in Hebrew, which is also the word for "propaganda") that it was a "preemptive" war in which Israel was "defending" itself. This also applies to Israel's 1978 and 1982 and 2006 invasions of Lebanon, its continued occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, its siege of Gaza, and its massacres against the Palestinians there in the last three weeks.

The logic goes as follows: Israel has the right to occupy Palestinian land, lay siege to Palestinian populations in Bantustans surrounded by an apartheid wall, starve the population, cut them off from fuel and electricity, uproot their trees and crops, and launch periodic raids and targeted assassinations against them and their elected leadership, and if this population resists these massive Israeli attacks against their lives and the fabric of their society and Israel responds by slaughtering them en masse, Israel would simply be "defending" itself as it must and should.

Indeed, as The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the best friend of Israel and the Saudi ruling family, has argued recently, in doing so, Israel is engaged in a pedagogical exercise of "educating" the Palestinians. Perhaps many of the Arab businessmen's associations who regularly invite Friedman to speak to their organizations in a number of Arab countries and pay him an astronomical speaking fee can invite him back to educate them on Israel's pedagogical methods and on The New York Times' war propaganda on behalf of Israel.

The major argument here is two-fold, namely that while Israel has the right to defend itself, its victims have no similar right to defend themselves. In fact, the logic is even more sinister than this and can be elucidated as follows: Israel has the right to oppress the Palestinians and does so to defend itself, but were the Palestinians to defend themselves against Israel's oppression, which they do not have a right to do, Israel will then have the right to defend itself against their illegitimate defense of themselves against its legitimate oppression of them, which it carries out anyway in order to defend itself legitimately.

This is why, not only does Israel have the right to arm itself and to be a nuclear power and to have a military edge over the combined militaries of the entire region in which it lives, but it also must ensure that the military power of its neighbors is used to quell the Palestinians and not Israel, indeed to help Israel lay siege to the resisting Palestinians. When and if Palestinians try to arm themselves to defend their lives against Israeli invasions and slaughter, Israel makes every effort to prevent them from doing so and considers this "illegal smuggling."

The recent signing of an agreement between Israel and its US sponsor and the volunteering of European countries (France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Spain) to police the waters and borders of Gaza with Egypt to prevent the Palestinians from "smuggling" arms to defend themselves is the most recent application of this understanding. Israel's US sponsor and European allies are horrified by the Palestinians' attempts to arm themselves (to which they have no right) in order to defend their very lives against Israel's right to slaughter them in order to defend itself.

Indeed, Israel has included the erstwhile Palestinian leadership for the last 15 years in its efforts to repress all Palestinians who resist its right to defend itself by oppressing them. This is precisely why the Palestinian Authority (PA) was created in the first place. The PA that the Oslo Agreement established on paper in autumn 1993 and came to life in the form of institutions and a collaborating Palestinian elite in 1994 has finally, however, come to an end in the winter of 2009. While the PA tried its best to be a repressive force on behalf of Israel and has killed scores of Palestinians who resisted the occupation and PA collaboration since 1994, its ability to control the surge of Palestinian resistance was checked by its failure to win the last elections and its failure to defeat Hamas militarily. Fifteen years after its establishment, the PA has run its course. In Gaza, Israel destroyed all the bureaucratic and administrative offices of the PA run by Hamas and thus has returned Hamas by default to its erstwhile status as the major Palestinian guerrilla group resisting Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel's criminal siege of Gaza, and Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

In the West Bank, the process of finishing off the PA has been more gradual. While an ambivalent war against the PA started with Israel's reinvasion of West Bank cities and towns (around which it had redeployed earlier) in 2002, a reassessment occurred after Yasser Arafat's death and after his successors promised to collaborate with Israel as much as Arafat used to before the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000. Israel's kidnapping of Hamas officials elected in January 2006 to the Palestinian Legislative Council and its government ministers, followed by the war launched against Hamas officials and rank and file members by the Fatah leadership who lost the elections, and by the illegal coup d'etat staged in collaboration with the US and Israel against Hamas with success in the West Bank and with utter failure in Gaza by Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies, have sealed the fate of the PA. The final coup de grâce came in the last few days when the term of Abbas in office ended on 9 January 2009, his ongoing illegal attempts to extend his term for one more year notwithstanding.

Abbas was the only member of the collaborating group in the West Bank that still had any legitimate and legal status given to him by the elections. Today, as a result, there is no longer a Palestinian Authority as a legal entity or as one that has any popular or juridical legitimacy. The PA was born by Israeli fiat and a collaborating Palestinian elite and has died by Israeli fiat and the actions of the collaborating Palestinian elite. Mahmoud Abbas's absence from the Arab summit in Qatar a few days ago, which convened to support the resisting Palestinians in Gaza, and his characterization of the summit as an "ambush" to divide the Palestinians have exposed him further in the eyes of the Palestinian people as an unrepentant collaborator with the Israeli occupation and with the Arab dictators allied with Israel and the United States. His subsequent attendance of the Sharm al-Sheikh summit with European powers that seek to help Israel decimate the Palestinian people is therefore hardly surprising.

As the PA continues to usurp political power in the West Bank, it remains clear that nothing short of a third Palestinian uprising there will end the illegitimate rule of the PA whose collaborators continue to refuse to pack up and leave. Indeed, the new move by the US and European allies of Israel is to shower money on the PA in the form of reconstruction funds slated for Gaza in the hope of seducing the Israeli-impoverished, -butchered, and -devastated Palestinians in Gaza to stop supporting Hamas and switch allegiance to the illegitimate and collaborationist PA whose European funds will be dangled before them as bait.

If a generation of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals came to believe since the 1970s that armed struggle would not be able to end the Israeli occupation and that negotiations would be the only way to do so, a whole new generation of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals (some of whom are liberal) now understand that negotiations with Israel have only served to intensify the occupation and will only serve to do so in the future. The benefits of 18 years of negotiations with Israel, as is evident for all to see, has been not only more Jewish colonial settlement and more massacres and more confiscation of land, but also the destruction of the Palestinian national movement through imploding it from within. It is true that negotiations have enriched the Palestinian business class in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the comprador intellectuals and the bureaucratic and military class that were inducted in the PA game of non-governmental funding via the so-called peace-process, but these benefits have been delivered to the few by taking away the livelihoods of the many.

What has ended then with Israel's ongoing butchery in Gaza is not only the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority but also negotiations as a viable or a credible path to ending the occupation. This is the situation that the incoming rabidly pro-Israeli American President Obama will be facing soon. The half-white and fully Christian Obama, who, when denying the accusation of being a Muslim assured Americans that not only was he raised by his white Christian mother and her family but also of his belief that the blood of Jesus Christ will "redeem" him, and that he prays to Jesus every night, will continue, along with his pro-Israel operatives, to support Israel's war crimes and to buttress the illegal authority of the Palestinian collaborators in the West Bank.

Israel destroyed the PA in Gaza because it could no longer ensure its collaboration there after Hamas was elected and assumed political power there. After Hamas won the free elections, Israel arrested the majority of Hamas elected officials to ensure that the Fatah leadership continues to collaborate unhindered. The PA survives as an illegal entity in the West Bank today, because Israel still banks on its collaboration, most evident in PA police repression of demonstrations across the West Bank which sought to show solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Injecting the illegitimate and illegal PA with more funds with which to torture the Palestinian people and stuff the pockets of its collaborators will hardly make it a more attractive choice to the majority of poor Palestinians who have been the ultimate losers of PA rule and the Oslo Accords.

In the meantime, the West and Israel will continue to defend Israel's right to defend itself and to deny the Palestinians the right to defend themselves. While some call this international relations, in reality it is nothing short of inter-racial relations wherein Jews, who since World War II have been inducted into the realm of whiteness, have rights that the Palestinians, like their counterparts elsewhere in the non-European world who are forever cast outside the realm of whiteness, do not. Thomas Friedman is right; Israel has been trying to educate the Palestinians that it will punish all their attempts to check its white colonial power to oppress them and that they must understand that they deserve to be punished and defeated for not being white.

The problem is that the Palestinians, students of a universal humanism in which they consider themselves equal to everyone else, keep failing Israel's racial lessons and tests. What the Palestinians ultimately insist on is that Israel must be taught that it does not have the right to defend its racial supremacy and that the Palestinians have the right to defend their universal humanity against Israel's racist oppression. Will Israel and its allies ever learn that lesson? Israeli history tells us that as students of racial supremacy, Zionists have always failed the test of universal humanism.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006).

Matthews: Democracy is NOT the path of Moderation in the Middle East

In criticizing Bush's Farewell Speech, Political Commentator Chris Matthews engages in his own broad over generalizations about the "Arab street" and the value of democracy in the Middle East. In essence, they (Arabs, Persians, etc.) have their values and we have ours and oh, yes, they want to kill us all. Therefore, dictatorships in the Middle East, not democracy (no, not even homegrown democracy), are the answers to our security and foreign policy concerns in the Middle East.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Memo to Mr. Matthews

Where were the 9/11 hijackers from? Saudi Arabia.
Form of government in Saudi Arabia? Repressive Monarchy.

Exactly how did the U.S. arrive at it's current impasse with Iran?
By installing the Shah's dictatorship which in turn led to the Anti-U.S. Iranian Revolution.

U.S. heavy-handed policies in the Middle East are the problem. The idea that dictatorship or democracy, at gunpoint, is the solution is, in reality, a sure-fire formula for further blowback from the region.

Let's hope Mr. Matthews does not have any aspirations to be a foreign policy adviser, much less a U.S. envoy to the Middle East. The U.S. is already in a deep enough hole. Let's stop digging.

Analysis: Israel's Aggression: A Pattern

Here's an excellent assessment of Israel's aggressive patterns against Palestinians.

HP: As Israel and Palestine suffer a hideous new spasm of terror, misery, and mayhem, it is important to ask how this situation came about. Perhaps an understanding of recent events will afford lessons for the future.

How did the recent ceasefire unravel? The mainstream media in the US and Israel places the blame squarely on Hamas. Indeed, a massive barrage of Palestinian rockets were fired into Israel in November and December, and ending this rocket fire is the stated goal of the current Israeli invasion of Gaza. However, this account leaves out crucial facts.

First, and most importantly, the ceasefire was remarkably effective: after it began in June 2008, the rate of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza dropped to almost zero, and stayed there for four straight months (see Figure 1, from a factsheet produced by the Israeli consulate in NYC). So much for the widespread view, exemplified in yesterday's New York Times editorial that: "There is little chance of restraining Hamas without dealing with its patrons in Syria and Iran." Instead, the data shows clearly that Hamas can indeed control the violence if it so chooses, and sometimes it does, for long periods of time.

Second, and just as important, what happened to end this striking period of peace? On November 4th, Israel killed a Palestinian, an event that was followed by a volley of mortars fired from Gaza. Immediately after that, an Israeli air strike killed six more Palestinians. Then a massive barrage of rockets was unleashed, leading to the end of the ceasefire.

Figure 1. Number of Palestinian rockets fired in each month of 2008 (adapted from The Israeli consulate in NYC [pdf])

Figure 1

Thus the latest ceasefire ended when Israel first killed Palestinians, and Palestinians then fired rockets into Israel. However, before attempting to glean lessons from this event, we need to know if this case is atypical, or if it reflects a systematic pattern.

We decided to tally the data to find out. We analyzed the entire timeline of killings of Palestinians by Israelis, and killings of Israelis by Palestinians, in the Second Intifada, based on the data from the widely-respected Israeli Human Rights group B'Tselem (including all the data from September 2000 to October 2008).

We defined "conflict pauses" as periods of one or more days when no one is killed on either side, and we asked which side kills first after conflict pauses of different durations. As shown in Figure 2, this analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.

Figure 2. For conflict pauses of different durations (i.e., periods of time when no one is killed on either side), we show here the percentage of times from the Second Intifada in which Israelis ended the period of nonviolence by killing one or more Palestinians (black), the percentage of times that Palestinians ended the period of nonviolence by killing Israelis (grey), and the percentage of times that both sides killed on the same day (white). Virtually all periods of nonviolence lasting more than a week were ended when the Israelis killed Palestinians first. We include here the data from all pause durations that actually occurred.

Figure 2

Thus, a systematic pattern does exist: it is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that kills first following a lull. Indeed, it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week.

The lessons from these data are clear:

First, Hamas can indeed control the rockets, when it is in their interest. The data shows that ceasefires can work, reducing the violence to nearly zero for months at a time.

Second, if Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.

Note: For a detailed account of the breakdown of the ceasefire and the precise numbers of rockets fired in November from the point of view of the Israeli military, see http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/hamas_e011.htm

Human Rights Watch Report: Israel's Indiscriminate Killing

Here's a report concerning Israel's indiscriminate killings in Gaza. As expected, you won't find this on the popular media. For the full report, click here.


I. Summary of Report

In the northern Gaza Strip and adjoining areas of Israel, attacks by Palestinian armed groups launching locally made rockets known as Qassams and attacks by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) firing 155mm artillery shells have together killed dozens of civilians, wounded hundreds, and greatly disrupted civilian life. After Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005, Palestinian rocket attacks continued sporadically, spiking in late September, late October and again in December, with Israeli artillery fire following suit beginning in late October. Initially civilian casualties on both sides were light, but the casualties rose dramatically starting in April 2006, when Israel sharply increased its artillery attacks on alleged Palestinian rocket launch sites and also fired closer to residential areas.

Both sides have shown disregard for civilian loss of life in violation of international humanitarian law (IHL): Palestinian armed groups have directed their rockets at Israeli towns; Israeli artillery shelling near populated areas has caused considerable civilian casualties for uncertain military gain as well as at least one serious incident of indiscriminate shelling.

There is an opportunity today to put an end to this needless loss of civilian life: in November 2006, after an artillery attack that killed 23 civilians, the IDF placed a moratorium on use of artillery to respond to rocket attacks in Gaza, and a five-month ceasefire on the part of Hamas the same month led to a decrease in Palestinian rocket attacks in 2007, meaning that for a time rocket attacks were largely limited to the Islamic Jihad organization. Hamas ended its ceasefire on April 24, 2007, firing rockets once again into Israeli territory.[1]Israel has not resumed its use of artillery, responding instead with more precise air-fired missiles to hit targets, but it is unclear how firm this change of practice is. The conduct of Palestinian armed groups and the IDF that led to the spike in civilian casualties in mid-2006 is likely to resume unless the parties learn the lessons of 2006 and definitively change military policies and practices in accordance with their independent obligations under international humanitarian law.

This report is based on on-the-ground assessments of Palestinian armed group rocket attacks and IDF artillery attacks, focusing on the period from the beginning of September 2005 through May 2007. It sets forth recommendations aimed at ending practices that have led to unnecessary civilian death and injury. This report does not address other important issues affecting civilians in Gaza, including deteriorating humanitarian conditions, internecine fighting between Palestinian factions, Israel's destruction of Gaza's sole electrical power plant, and IDF and armed group clashes that have claimed civilian casualties separate from the rocket/artillery attacks.

Israeli Artillery Shelling

From September 2005 through May 2007, the same period covered by the rocket attack statistics cited above, the IDF fired 14,617 artillery shells into Gaza. This fire killed at least 59 people, wounded another 270 people, and did significant damage to many civilian structures.[6] Of the 38 Palestinians killed through September 2006, 17 were children under the age of 16, 12 were women, and one was a 60-year-old man; Human Rights Watch, in its field investigations, identified 5 of the remaining 8 men as civilians.[7] A subsequent artillery attack on November 8 killed or mortally wounded 23 and injured at least 40 Palestinians, all civilians. As discussed below, this last incident led to an Israeli moratorium on further use of artillery in Gaza, which continued as this report went to press in mid-June 2007.

Most of the artillery shells that the IDF fired into Gaza in this period landed in open areas, and the great majority did not result in civilian casualties. Many, however, were fired close to civilian areas, and some landed directly on homes and other civilian structures, causing serious harm and loss of life. Human Rights Watch has been unable to find any report or claim that those killed or injured by artillery fire included persons believed to be combatants, and the IDF has not responded to a Human Rights Watch request about whether any Palestinians killed or injured by artillery fire into the Gaza Strip were combatants or believed to be combatants.[8] Israeli artillery strikes in 2006 also left many unexploded shells strewn on the ground that constitute a continuing hazard to lives and livelihoods.

Israeli artillery strikes hitting Beit Hanoun and nearby Beit Lahiya caused considerable civilian casualties and damage to civilian structures. On April 10, 2006, for example, Sofia Gabin told her children to hide in a cement cupboard when she heard explosions nearby. "I was afraid for them. It was the safest place," she said.[9] A shell landed directly on the house, killing her 8-year-old daughter, Hadi, and injuring 10 others. A series of strikes earlier that week leveled several homes belonging to the Abu Shamas family and injured or killed at least three civilians. The frequent shelling has also had a devastating impact on the civilian life of the northern Gaza towns.

Most of the civilian deaths and injuries occurred at a time when Israel claimed that it was targeting nearby rocket-launching activity. While Palestinians often claimed that Israel's shelling had other objectives, we were not in a position to gather sufficient information to assess such claims, and for purposes of this report we accept Israel's stated purpose. Nevertheless, as will be discussed below, all of the Palestinian civilian deaths and the great majority of injuries caused by Israeli artillery fire occurred following Israel's exponential increase of artillery fire and reported authorizing of shelling within a proximity to civilian areas that is smaller than the casualty radius of the artillery. Moreover, Israel did not routinely investigate cases in which civilians died or were injured to learn from past cases of civilian casualties and to ensure that in the future all feasible precautions were taken to avoid them. The combination of increased shelling considerably closer to populated areas and failure to investigate suggest, at the very least, an indifference to the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties and a failure to rigorously balance concrete military advantage against expected civilian harm, as required by the rule of proportionality.

In assessing the legality of the IDF's artillery fire under international law, it is necessary to determine for each attack whether it was targeted at a specific military objective; whether the weapon used could be sufficiently targeted to differentiate between the military objective and civilians; and whether the anticipated civilian casualties were not disproportionate to the expected military gain from the attack. In addition, while Palestinian fighters firing rockets from sites close to Palestinian civilians can itself be a law-of-war violation and does not prohibit the IDF from returning fire, the IDF still must take all feasible steps to minimize civilian loss and refrain from attack if expected civilian casualties will be disproportionate to the concrete military gain.

When investigating incidents, Human Rights Watch found that IDF shelling with 155mm howitzers often caused unnecessary loss of civilian life and property in violation of international humanitarian law. In one serious case, artillery was used indiscriminately, in a manner that could not properly discriminate between civilians and combatants. Other times, the evidence suggested that the attacks were disproportionate, causing expected civilian loss that was excessive compared to any anticipated military gain. The repeated use of such methods of attack, combined with the evident failure of the IDF adequately to investigate harm caused to civilians, demonstrated a failure to take all steps feasible to minimize civilian loss, in violation of IHL.

Two changes in IDF artillery practices in April 2006, roughly corresponding with Hamas's taking over the Palestinian Authority (PA) following its January victory in parliamentary elections, led to a significant jump in civilian casualties. This was evident in that all 59 Palestinian deaths and all but eight of the 270 injuries due to Israeli artillery fire into Gaza occurred after the change in IDF practices. First, the IDF greatly increased the number of artillery shells fired: a total of 446 rounds were fired in March 2006 while 4,522 rounds were fired in April 2006.[10] Between May and November, when the IDF instituted a moratorium, the number of shells fired fluctuated between 113 (October) and 3,709 (July) per month, averaging more than 1,350 shells per month. The second change was an increase in artillery attacks in the immediate vicinity of civilian residences. There is evidence that this was a deliberate policy: an Israeli newspaper reported in April that the IDF had narrowed the "safety zone"-that is, the minimum distance it required between a potential target for its artillery and the nearest homes or populated areas-from 300 meters to 100 meters, a report that the IDF refused to affirm or deny.[11] This new policy undoubtedly added to the number of civilian casualties and damage to civilian property. There was no parallel increase in rocket fire in April 2006.

Israeli authorities responded to Human Rights Watch's concerns about specific incidents involving loss of civilian life and property from artillery shelling by stating: "The IDF retaliated with artillery firetowards open spaces, and no deviation [in the intended trajectory of the shelling] was observed at the time," or "[The IDF] is unfamiliar with any injury or any allegation of injury to Palestinian civilians."[12] These responses suggested that the IDF had not investigated civilian loss of life associated with its attacks in or near heavily populated areas of Gaza. For Israel to ensure that its artillery attacks do not violate the IHL prohibitions against indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, particularly in the face of continuing civilian casualties, it was essential for the IDF to assess accurately civilian harm arising from its use of artillery in order to adopt corrective measures. Human Rights Watch has no evidence that the IDF ever attempted such an assessment, at least not prior to the November 8 incident. During that period, this showed an indifference to the fate of Palestinian civilians, in violation of the IHL requirement that parties take all steps feasible to minimize harm to civilians.

There is little evidence that the IDF artillery attacks reduced the overall incidence of rocket attacks against Israel or significantly damaged the ability of Palestinian groups to launch further attacks, though some IDF sources claimed that rocket fire grew less accurate immediately following artillery strikes on launch areas. Other IDF officials publicly criticized the policy for its lack of effectiveness. The division commander for the Gaza front, Brig. Gen. Moshe Tamir, told Ha'aretz that he did not believe artillery helped to reduce rocket attacks.[13]

The deadly November 8 incident led the IDF to call a halt to artillery fire until "further technical, professional, and operational inquiries are completed." [14] Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly acknowledged and expressed distress at the civilian casualties in that attack, saying that the artillery strike had missed its intended target due to a technical failure. [15] Neither he nor the IDF said, however, whether routinely required precautionary steps had been taken to avoid such misfiring, as explained below (see chapter on Israeli artillery shelling). A report in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz suggested that they had not: the newspaper reported that the shells were fired with range settings from the night before that did not take into account changes in weather, violating a basic precautionary procedure. [16]

In response to continued rocket fire from Gaza, Israel's security cabinet reportedly approved on November 22, 2006, a series of other measures to counter rocket attacks. Ha'aretz reported those measures were to include "attacks on Hamas institutions, and [the security cabinet] called for the IDF to aim for a 'significant halt' to the Qassam rocket fire, to increase 'pinpoint preventions'-a euphemism for targeted killings-and to prepare for a ground operation in Gaza, evacuated by Israel last year." [17] After a December 26 rocket attack injured two Israeli boys, the IDF reportedly issued a directive calling for "pinpoint action" against launches. According to an account in the New York Times, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert directed the IDF "to strike before, while or after rockets are launched"but not "to fire shells into open areas near the border to deter rocket-launching teams from entering them." [18]

Following the IDF moratorium on the use of artillery in Gaza and the reported directive from Prime Minister Olmert, there have been no further reports of civilian casualties as a result of artillery fire. As of this writing (June 2007), this moratorium remained in effect. In late May 2007, an IDF spokesperson said that the IDF had fired artillery shells without explosives into Gaza "for calibration purposes," adding that the army did not intend to use live artillery "at this time."[19] In June, in response to a Human Rights Watch inquiry, the IDF said that "since November 2006 there was no use of artillery, and there has been no change of policy."[20] When clashes resumed in May 2007, Israel relied almost entirely on more precise air-fired missiles to hit targets, including persons allegedly responsible for launching or attempting to launch rockets into Israel. Such more precise weapons are capable of causing avoidable civilian harm, depending on how they are deployed, but Israel's halt in the use of artillery represents a positive step. Any future IDF deployment of artillery must refrain from firing at or near populated areas.