GAZA: Ongoing & Reflective Coverage

here "A Palestinian Voice of Mass Instruction" also see the Sunday updated post just below with items & video from the BBC - since now Israel has blocked foreign journalists, we may not be getting the updated information from inside Gaza as quickly but we will look for the same if at all possible...

Also look for Bitter Lemons coverage in time...as well as that from International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent...Human Rights First, Amnesty International/AIUSA...Ha'aretz newspaper and anything by Chris Hedges who has been reporting on the plight of the Palestinians, the refugee camps and the Occupied Territories for a long long time...including the article he wrote before America's 911 which was published soon after that fateful date in Harper's magazine with a cover alert where he said, he'd been all over the world but NEVER had he seen soldiers treat children the way the Israeli soldiers treated the Palestinian children in refugee camps with such brutality...

The above is my paraphrase...so for more on items from Hedges go below for
Gaza diary: Scenes from the Palestinian uprising, By Chris Hedges ...
October 2001 A Gaza diary: Scenes from the Palestinian uprising ... © The Harper's Magazine Foundation.

See here

Go here to see Hedges RECENT "Israel's Crime Against Humanity" here

From "Gaza Revisited" earlier in reference to his 2001 reporting...this was printed in January 2002 evidently...some of the former online versions of this earlier Hedges work seem to be hard to access...

Here are some of the letters from the reaction to Hedges Harper Magazine article which may be relevant today in this recent incident...

Who could argue with Chris Hedges's description of Israeli brutality against the Arabs in Gaza ["A Gaza Diary," October 2001]? After all, Hedges personally witnessed those atrocities, whereas most of his readers remain thousands of miles away....

What Hedges's purpose writing this essay? He is a journalist, but he doesn't appear to have been particularly concerned with balanced reporting: his biases emanate from every corner of the page. It is perfectly legitimate for Hedges to describe the squalor and desperation that pervade the Gaza refugee camps, and I don't think you will find too many Israelis who will dispute the wretchedness of these conditions. But his piece is dominated by a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bent and laden with historical inaccuracies, which seriously undercut the credibility of his reporting.

As a student of the conflict for the past eighteen years, I would like to clarify some of the history:

1. Hedges writes that Khan Younis "was established in late 1949 to provide aid to the some 200,000 Palestinian refugees who had fled the advancing Israeli army in 1948, an army that pushed displaced villagers toward Gaza." According to a report by the Arab-sponsored Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, a majority of the Arab refugees who settled in Gaza and the West Bank after Israel declared its independence in 1948 were not expelled; 68 percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier. Most of the Arabs who departed Israel in 1948 were encouraged to do so by the invading Arab armies, which sought to purge Palestine of the Jews.

2. The Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank remain in refugee camps more than fifty years after their arrival because the Arab countries of the Middle East have consistently refused to take the refugees in, preferring that they remain impoverished symbols of the evils of Israeli and American policies. The number of Jews living in Arab countries who fled or were expelled from their birthplace in 1948 is equivalent to the number of Arabs who left Israel during that period. In contrast to Arab treatment of the Palestinians, Israel gladly absorbed most of those Jewish refugees.

3. Imad al-Fajuli, the Palestinian minister of communications, has admitted that "Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque"--as Hedges suggests--"is wrong.... This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations...."

These facts and a plethora of others about the Arab-Israeli conflict can be found in the scrupulously researched book From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters, a journalist who has written and lectured widely on the Middle East; has contributed to Harper's, Commentary, and The New Republic; and has served as a White House consultant on the Middle East. Peters began writing the book in response to the injustices perpetrated on the Palestinian Arabs but, after much research, concluded that the historical truths regarding the conflict were far different from what most people have been hearing over the past fifty years. I wish that Hedges had read Peters's book before further distorting the historical record regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mark Sonnenklar Los Angeles

Your publication of "A Gaza Diary" is a shocking perversion of responsible journalism. Chris Hedges gives no context to what he describes, and so the reader has no idea that the Arabs' avowed political and military purpose --from 1948, when a U.N. resolution created the state of Israel, to the present moment--is to "drive Israel into the sea." It is the Arabs who have instigated four wars against Israel. It is the Palestinians who have instigated this intifada, taught their children to kill Israelis, and told them that they will go to heaven as martyrs if they die while killing Israelis. Without this context, the article is, at best, propaganda.

Joan O. Rothberg Summit, N.J.

When Chris Hedges refers to two particular outbreaks of violence, he refers to them as having happened at mosques: "The latest intifada erupted in September 2000, when Ariel Sharon ... visited the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam"; and Hamas "began to attack individual Israeli civilians after a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron." Hedges cannot bring himself to acknowledge the holiness of the two sites to the Jewish people: al-Aqsa is located on the Temple Mount, where two Jewish temples stood. The Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron is also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site of great religious significance to Jews. This speaks volumes about Hedges's convictions and the biased undercurrent of his writing.

David William Tyler, Esq. Teaneck, N.J.

Chris Hedges's chronicle of his visit to the Gaza Strip was authoritative, eloquent, harrowing, and, like all of Harper's Mideast reportage, devoid of even the pretense of balance or context. Among mainstream journals, Harper's alone displays neither the remotest sympathy for nor interest in the Israeli side of the struggle: repeatedly, the magazine has run articles depicting the Arabs as noble stoics beaten down and slaughtered by bloodthirsty, laughing, faceless soldiers and genocidal settlers (apparently the sum of Israel's Jewish inhabitants). Although the magazine offers viewpoints on any number of subjects--one reason I've subscribed since 1988--its relentless single-mindedness with regard to the Mideast conflict is a frequent annoyance.

Matthew Budman Haverford, Pa.

Chris Hedges's report shows a small but true picture of the Middle East and goes a long way toward countering the extensive P.R. campaign of Israel and the American-Jewish community.

Even after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I am amazed at how the campaign has been able to sidestep analysis and criticism of Israel and to hoodwink, if not to force, American government leaders into concentrating all their attentions upon Arab nationalists in a tit-for-tat brinkmanship. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were resolved on a basis fair to the Palestinians we could be assured that much of the West-Arab tension would cease.

David Shortbaun Coronado, Calif.

It is tragically ironic to hear so many Israelis speak of and act toward Palestinians as animals to be exterminated, The United States, in its long-term vocal and financial support of Israel, no matter its action and attitudes, has allowed us to be seen as perpetrators of the oppression. This, in turn, has created a generation of terrorists even less human in their thinking than their oppressors. Each act of retaliation creates new terrorism. And so it goes. In destroying one generation of terrorists, we create another even more determined.

Duane Carr Elkins, Ariz.

Let's pray and hope that US President Elect, Obama will take all this to heart in his choices to support or not completely support Israel right or wrong and in the final choice of his "assistants"...maybe the US Congress will have another look at choosing someone who has any kind of family background which may include alliance with Israeli terrorist groups?