AxisMundi Jerusalem
Inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories
from FaithWorld:
Jerusalem: heart of the Mideast conflict
Jerusalem, December 8, 2009/Ammar Awad
Next week is the time of year when millions of people around the world look to Jerusalem as the source of inspiration for the Christian festival of Easter and Jewish Passover celebrations. But this week the city is also the recurrent focus of bitter dispute. The United States has directed rare strong criticism at Israel over its plans to expand Jewish settlements there, saying the building undermines U.S. efforts to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Want to know more? Following are links to a sampling of recent Reuters stories about Jerusalem and a Reuters graphic on new Israeli construction in East Jerusalems:
LATEST NEWS
Wanted: an ethical code of war
International law governing the conduct of war is based on the traditional model of two armies on a battlefield. It fails to apply effectively to ‘terrorist conflicts’ and provides insufficient response to the ethical dilemmas that arise.
Until effective international law is developed to regulate the ‘war on terror’, no decisive ethical code will exist. This is not only a challenge for the Israeli military. It is shared by all Western armies fighting to preserve core democratic values.
The above is the thesis of an Israeli foreign ministry briefing published March 25 in response to allegations that Israel flouted the rules of war in its Gaza offensive Dec 27-Jan 18 against Islamist militants led by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Here are a few excerpts. It may be noted that the docmuent does not define “terrorist” or allude in any way to the political, religious, national or other causes underlying “terrorist” activities. You can read the full document (one and a half pages only) here.
“Terrorists have developed a number of strategies … to offset their military inferiority … at the same time they place the value of propaganda above the value of human life.”
“Terrorists attempty to deligitimize the actions of their state targets: by protraying themselves as victims, by accusing the state of unfair play, and by waging war in densely populated areas and causing panic among the populace with the ultimate goal of obtaining media coverage.”
“To confront ethical dilemmas arising during counter-terrorist operations, the IDF (Israel Defence Force) developed a moral code, The Spirit of the IDF .
The code is composed of Israeli values, democratic Western values and commitment to international laws. It is deeply integrated throughout each IDF soldier’s education.
Spirit places a high standard of personal judgement when targetting terrorists who seek shelter among civilians.
Until an effective international deterrent exists, terrorists will continue to use civilians as human shields. The advantages to amoral forces of operating from densely-populated urban areas are clear, as are the media advtanges arising from international condemnation of counter-terrorist operations in these areas. As a result, international legal attention to this issue is vital.”
The entire idea is a conflict of terms.
There already is a code of war ethics.
But war is war. It isn’t pretty. There will always be collateral damage, blue on blue incidents, and civilian casualties. It’s not entirely avoidable. It can only be minimized. And there will always be a very small percent of soldiers who don’t care and will commit war crimes. But you can’t blame the army or country they belong to for their actions. And you can’t judge the entire country, army, batallion, or other smaller unit based on the actions of those few.
Michael, USAF
from FaithWorld:
Soldier says rabbis pushed “religious war” in Gaza
Our Jerusalem bureau has sent a very interesting report about criticism within the Israeli army of the Gaza offensive in January. What caught my eye was that it brings up the issue of a religious war, a term usually used in relation to Muslims.
The story starts off as follows:
Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January's Gaza offensive that they were fighting a "religious war" against gentiles, according to one army commander's account published on Friday.
"Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land," he said.
The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier's identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper on the second day of revelations about the Gaza offensive that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com "Shooting and Crying, 2009")...
The officer felt there was a "huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out".
The corps distributed pamphlets about the history of Israel's fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present, he said. But the rabbinate's message imparted to many soldiers the sense that "this operation was a religious war".
It's hard to know when to use terms like "religious war" for violence such as what we've seen in the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Afghanistan. The opposing sides in these conflicts have different religious labels, so there is -- at least superficially -- a religious angle there. But there is also an underlying political struggle which often plays a far bigger role than those labels. Northern Ireland, for example, is not about religion but has often been presented mostly as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants. By contrast, the unrest in Sri Lanka pits secessionist Tamils (Hindus) against majority Sinhalese (Buddhists), but nobody calls that a religious war. Some seem to evolve -- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on more religious overtones over time while the Taliban are now seen more as insurgents than the Koran students their name signals.
What do you think? When is a conflict a religious war and when is it more a political struggle going on behind those labels? Or is it impossible to disentangle the two?
Here is our video report on the story and the script (including translations).
can any one agree that some one would not make a statement like this in these circumstances,if i was involved and my son was a soldier in this conflict,how else could you explain it.the jews have their backs against the wall,every battle could be their last,it is fortunate that their state was formed in 1947 can you imagine the same happening today?with middle east oil in the frame.gods timing is perfect, there was a corridor in time and it was used.sadly some of us think that the holocaust was the price that had to be payed,would there have been the same compliance from america and england to assist if this had not happened?even so they still has to sacrifice to get established.whether you agree or not, but if by chance you consider israel,s existence only temporary and ultimately they will be destroyed then so does the christian faith,even though now it considered permissible to select only certain sections of text,with out israel no bible.
Here’s the scoop on bulldozers
In the Middle East, a region bristling with weapons of the most sophisticated kind, the bulldozer has become a symbol of simple, crude violence, causing fear and anxiety among people on both sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Yesterday’s attack in Jerusalem by a Palestinian construction worker who used a bulldozer to try and ram a police car into an empty bus was the third time in less than a year that Palestinians have employed bulldozers as weapons.
The video below is from a traffic control camera above the intersection where yesterday’s attack took place.
This video, from Israel’s Channel 10 News, shows a bulldozer attack last July where the Palestinian driver killed three Israelis before he was shot dead. Some of the pictures are of a graphic nature.
After the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings on buses that rocked Jerusalem a few years back during the height of the second Intifada, Jerusalemites began to eye buses with suspicion. The same is now happening with bulldozers.
Thanks for your comments EastWest. The presence of the Koran in the cab of the bulldozer was mentioned by police in their initial conclusions on the motivation of the driver and thus was considered by our reporters and editors as worthy of mention.
In relation to your second point – we reported extensively on the controversy surrounding a booklet distributed by Israel’s chief military rabbi to Israeli soldiers fighting in Gaza that called on them to show ‘no mercy’ toward a ‘cruel enemy’.
Here’s one of the stories:
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews /idUSTRE50P2SZ20090126
from Global News Journal:
Gaza damage more than even the ‘fixer’ can fix
I first met Raed al-Athamna when he was driving a journalist friend of mine around Gaza in his yellow, stretch-Mercedes taxi during the tense and violent days after Gaza militants captured Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, in the summer of 2006.
Raed seemed to be a good 'fixer' - attentive, sensible and with far-from-perfect but perfectly understandable English.
A few months later, I interviewed him in the rubble of Beit Hanoun - after Israeli tank shells slammed in to a relative's home killing 18 members of his extended family early one morning as most were still sleeping.
Israel said a technical mishap caused the shells to stray from their intended targets and in to the residential neighbourhood where the Athamnas lived.
Perhaps because his immediate family had escaped the tragedy in their nearby home, and perhaps because loss is so intimately entwined in the lives of Gazans, Raed seemed sanguine and calm in the interview and still confident that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was possible.
Raed's business hit a lean patch soon after that interview - when many of the foreign journalists he worked with stopped making the trip in to Gaza as the menace of kidnapping and the unpredictability of the factional fighting between Fatah and Hamas effectively put the Strip off limits.
Why so pro=palestinian? Israel was not targeting the Palestinians! They were going after the Hamas.
Hamas is being supported by Iran. Israel doesnt teach its 3 years old children hatred of Arabs. The Palestinian people have cartoons and children programs with anti-Israel propoganda. So how are we to get the Palestinians to halt violence. Cooler heads will prevail, settlements on the west bank should be debated a bit,are they necessary? But rockets should not be flying into Israel from Gaza.
from Global News Journal:
Politics and pop culture mesh in Gaza conflict
Israel's offensive against Hamas in Gaza has made headlines around the world.
But beyond the raw realities of war -- more than 1,100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead -- the three-week conflict has also created a peculiar intersection with music, literature and cinema, in the surreal way that wars sometimes do.
The latest away-from-the-headlines development is that Israel's entry for the Eurovision song contest, the annual pan-European song-fest that pits some 40 nations against one another, is suddenly under pressure because of the war.
Israel, which has won the competition before and takes it very seriously, is hoping to enter a singing duo -- Mira Awad, a Christian Arab Israeli, and Achinoam Nini, better known as Noa, a Jewish Israeli of Yemenite descent -- for the event to be held in Moscow in May.
But some Arab and Jewish artists and intellectuals are calling on Awad to pull out of the competition, saying her participation would play into the "Israeli propaganda machine" that seeks to convey an image of national coexistence -- Jews and Arabs living happily under one banner.
"What allows the international community to provide support is Israel's image as a 'democratic', 'enlightened', 'peace-seeking' country," a string of signatories wrote in an open letter to Awad, posted on the website of ynetnews.com.
"Your participation in Eurovision is taking part in the activity of the Israel propaganda machine," they said, with one describing Awad's role as that of a "fig leaf" for Israel.
from Global News Journal:
Twittering from the front-lines
Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?
It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.
As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.
For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.
The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.
Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.
Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.
Joe the plumber is right. Journalists are incapable of being unbiased always having some political bias. Apart from that, what soldier wants to rescue journalists who get themselves captured risking their own lives?
