Vannacht heeft het Israelische leger weer een paar luchtaanvallen uitgevoerd op Gaza. En na veel druk van onder andere de VN is er weer voldoende diesel binnengelaten om voor de komende drie dagen electriciteit op te kunnen wekken voor in ieder geval een deel van Gaza. Zie Haaretz, hier.
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Te gast: Gideon Levy
A great darkness has fallen
Haaretz 08/03/2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961666.html
Operation Warm Winter ended without a single Israeli journalist setting foot on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing with Israel. Even the military correspondents, who usually recount the brave acts of our forces from inside their jeeps and armored vehicles, were not taken this time to report on the raids in Jabalya and Sajiyeh. A handful of other correspondents, those who are still interested in what the Israel Defense Forces leaves behind after its campaigns of killing and destruction, stayed home. They have been holed up in their houses for over a year and a half already.
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The lights have been turned off
04 februari 2008
Te gast: Gideon Levy
One after another, the final lights are being turned off, and a moral gloom is falling upon us as we stand at the edge of an abyss. Just last week, three more lights were turned off. The Winograd Report did not come out clearly against the fact that Israel embarked on a pointless war; the Supreme Court authorized collective punishment and the attorney general concluded that the killing of 12 Israeli citizens and someone from the territories by the police does not warrant a trial. The final keepers of order, the lighthouses of justice and law, are reconciling themselves with the most serious injustices of the institutions of authority and no one so much as utters a word about it. The upsetting and depressing crop of a single week has drawn the moral portrait of the country.
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Te gast: Gideon Levy
Here we have the yardstick for security success: the number of Palestinians killed. As in the most primeval wars, the heads of the defense establishment are boasting about the number of people Israel has killed. Their job is to ensure protection for the residents of the state. And, as we know, the residents of the “Gaza perimeter” are not receiving this protection. So the death toll has become the measure of their success.
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Te gast: Gideon Levy, Haaretz
28 September 2007. Haaretz
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Meanwhile, in the West Bank
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz
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Er wordt vaker een vergelijking gemaakt tussen het Zuid-Afrika onder het apartheidsregime, en het huidige Israel. Nee, die vergelijking gaat niet naadloos op, daarvoor zijn de respectievelijke geschiedenissen, de motieven waarom de apartheidsstaat enerzijds, en de joodse staat anderzijds zijn ontstaan te verschillend. Ook is onze verantwoordelijkheid voor de repressie, bij en ene door de blanke-Afrikaanse minderheid, bij de andere door de joods-Israelische meerderheid, zoals we die vanuit Europa voelen – of niet voelen – verschillend. We weten het ondertussen: het is de holocaust en onze Europese schuld die staat tussen massaprotest zoals dat met Zuid Afrika wel gebeurde, en het nog veel te magere protest tegen de daden van het huidige Israel.
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Te gast: Gideon Levy
Blood on the hands: Two crimson handprints stain the white wall. The tile floor shines in shades of brown, the walls are painted in white and soft pastels, their new house, after the two previous ones were destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces. The bloody handprints stand as silent testimony on the wall of the staircase that goes up to the second floor. This is where Ruqiya stood, the blood of her dead daughter all over her hands, as she pounded them on the wall in a panic, desperately calling to the neighbors for help. She pounded and pounded, her palms staining the wall, when outside stood a line of terrifying jeeps, on the roof of the building down the street stood the snipers and in the other room Bushra lay dead in a spreading pool of blood, a bullet hole in the center of her forehead.
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