Robert Fisk on Gaza

Robert Fisk’s latest articles concern Gaza:

Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored (29.12)

Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony (30.12)

The self delusion that plagues both sides in this bloody conflict (31.12)

The rotten state of Egypt is too powerless and corrupt to act (1.1)

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, where the military is concerned (3.1)

Keeping out the cameras and reporters simply doesn’t work (5.1)

Bring in the peacekeepers? It’s not as easy as it sounds (6.1)

Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask (7.1)

Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons (10.1)

When it comes to Gaza, leave the Second World War out of it (17.1)

So, I asked the UN secretary general, isn’t it time for a war crimes tribunal? (19.1)

Posturing and laughter as victims rot (20.1)

The current war in Gaza is justified by Israel as a nation’s right to defend itself. Fisk does not deny this right to Israel, but object, as usual, to the way Israel reacts. He makes a small comparison to the conflict in Northern Ireland and makes a pretty good point:

But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn’t want to lower ourselves to the IRA’s level.

Another small comparison concerning the bombing of the UN schools:

Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas.

Another point Fisk is making, and has been making for several years, is “the simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths.”

Fisk’s analysis and views are well known to anyone who has read any of his articles or books. He is not afraid to say what he really means and is a refreshing voice in troubled sea of Mid East news. In the first two articles he is simply saying that the bombing of Gaza will not solve anything and that after this current crisis “we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.”

Krig i Gaza

Etter førti år med okkupasjon av Vestbreidda og Gaza held Israel framleis tradisjonen om å svare på eld med meir eld i hevd. At det snarare har vorte verre på Gazastripa enn betre ser ikkje ut til å ha endra stort på taktikken. Det at amerikanske styresmakter støttar Israel til det fulle og legg all skulda på Hamas er so innlysande at eg eigentleg ikkje treng skrive den ein gong. Det same gjeld for at alt det Israel drep frå no av kjem til å vere vonde terroristar og at alle sivile dødsfall, same kor mange det er, kjem til å omtalt med eit skuldertrekk og eit “synd, men slikt skjer i krig” (i alle fall so lenge det ikkje er snakk om israelske dødsfall).

Aftenposten sin Midtaustenkorrespondent, Per A. Christiansen, har skrive ei lita analyse so langt: “Forsøk på nødløsing“. Harald Stanghelle i Aftenposten har seinare skrive ein artikkel om konflikta sitt vidare omfang, “Ekstremismens triumf” (6.1), og om media si rolle i “Kampen om virkeligheten” (8.1).

Det er ikkje mykje ein eigentleg kan seie, men eg tykkjer det passar å sitere den tidlegare amerikanske presidenten Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

“If people in the Middle East were more like Scandinavians”

An interesting perspective from the fantastic Wulffmorgenthaler.

Thanks to Kvitlauk for bringing this strip to my attention.

Gamle jarnbanedraumar får nytt liv II

I går kunne ein lese i Aftenposten at heile Hijazbana no skal opnast for turistar og andre:

Til Mekka på første klasse?

Togstasjonen i Damaskus

Dette er langt på veg på tide. Jarnbana vart aldri skikkeleg gjenbygd etter at Lawrence of Arabia og venene hans sprengde store delar den under første verdskrig. Sidan då har det i tillegg vore svært lite trafikk på denne berømte jarnbanestrekka. Til no har det berre vore to delar av bana som har vore i bruk. Strekka mellom Amman og Damaskus og strekka mellom Ma’an og kystbyen Aqaba. Amman-Damascus har vore open for passasjertrafikk, men dette tilbodet skal vere svært treigt alternativ til taxi (tog: ni timar, taxi: tre timar) i tillegg til at ein må byte tog på grensa til Syria. Ma’an-Aqaba har for det meste godstogtrafikk.

I følgje Wikipedia skal det ha vore gjort forsøk på å opne opp bana att sør for den jordansk-saudiske grensa på midten av  60-talet, men på grunn av seksdagarskrigen i 1967 vart ikkje dette noko av. Grunnen til at ein ikkje prøvde å opne opp bana før 60-talet var at grensa mellom Jordan og Saudi-Arabia i området der Hijazbana gjekk,  ikkje var avtalt og at denne var forbode å krysse. Saudi-Arabia hadde til og med lagt krav på store delar av sør-Jordan (Aqaba og Maan). Dette ordna seg i 1965 då båe partar fekk i stand ein grensebyteavtala som forma grensene slik vi kjenner dei i dag. Det var sikkert som ei følgje av denne at dei prøvde å opne den opp att.

Jordan Times hadde ein artikkel om jarnbana for nokre veker sidan: Initiative to place Hijaz Railway on tourism map. I august i år var det forresten 100-årsjubileum for jarnbana, eller nærmare sagt 100 år sidan bana og det første toget med pilegrimar nådde Medina. Dette skjedde åtte år etter byggestart.

Eg vil takke Per A. Christiansen, Midtausten-korrespondenten til Aftenposten stasjonert i Amman, for ein interessant artikkel som alltid. Men eg vil likevel ønskje han velkomen etter sidan eg skreiv om akkurat dette på bloggen min allereie i april i år på bakgrunn av ein artikkel i Jordan Times. Eg håpar verkeleg at Hijazbana blir gjenopna, og om den blir det, kjem det til å vere ei togreise eg gjerne vil ta. Sidan eg ikkje er muslim kjem eg ikkje inn i korkje Mekka eller Medina, men på vegen dit ligg Mada’in Saleh.

Clayton’s Slave

In a continuation of my post from yesterday, Travelling with loaded rifles, here is a new entry from Clayton’s diary. It is five days later, 15th of October 1925, and he is well settled in Ibn Saud’s camp that is situated right outside Mecca. Every evening he, his aide (George Antonius) and their personal bodyguard provided by Ibn Saud, takes a walk outside the camp to see the sunset. Here is Clayton’s description of the daily walk and their escort:

We usually start shortly before sunset, so as to get to some hill before the sun goes down. We then get a very delightful view, as the bare hills begin to take on a soft-purple light, and every night there is to the east over Mecca a great bank of cloud which reflects the setting sunlight and becomes a great welter of rosy flame. At the actual moment when the sun sets we always have to stop in order to allow our escort to say his prayers, which he does with great devotion and a lack of self-consciousness which Christians might well copy. He is a Sudanese slave, by the name Idris, who has been made specially responsible for our safety and who never leave us. He is always armed, sometimes with an Enfield rifle, sometimes with a curved sword in a heavily silver-mounted scabbard, sometimes with a heavy mace studded with nails, and occasionally with all three. He is a capital fellow. When I call “Ya Idris,” he always replies “Ay wallah” (Yes, by God). Then I tell him to do something or ask for something, to which he always replies by one of three ejaculations: “Inshallah” (God willing) or “Marhabba” (Everything is open to you) or “Ma yekhalif” (There is no objection).

- From An Arabian Diary by Gilbert Clayton

Travelling with loaded rifles

On the 10th of October 1925 Gilbert Clayton was travelling to Ibn Saud’s camp outside of the besieged city of Jeddah in present-day Saudi Arabia. The road to the camp at Bahra was not an easy ride and in his diary Clayton describes the road itself like this:

Hereafter, the road became very bad – indeed it was practically non-existent – and we ploughed laboriously through deep sand, over boulders and stones, and through low but tenacious bush.

Clayton travelled by car through what then was a war front between Ibn Saud and the Hashemite King Ali, the son of the more famous Sharif Hussein (This was the Nejd-Hejaz war of 1924-1925). Clayton’s mission was to negotiate two agreements with Ibn Saud concerning the southern frontiers of the British mandates of Transjordan and Iraq. This was, however, not his main worry during the bumpy car ride through the desert, that belonged to the loaded rifles in the front seat:

I was not sorry to get out of the car, as our escort had insisted on placing their loaded rifles beside the chauffeur, and I therefore found myself most of the time gazing into the muzzles of no less than five loaded rifles which might have been exploded by any of the numerous and hearty bumps which our car indulged in.

- From An Arabian Diary by Gilbert Clayton (edited and introduced by Robert O. Collins) [1969]

Waltz with Bashir – articles

A BBC article from today on the Israeli animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir”:

Journalist relives nightmares of war

The main focus of the article is the Israeli war journalist Ron Ben-Yishai, the first journalist to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps after the massacres in September 1982. He has a small, but important role. He did not want to take part in the documentary at first, but was later convinced by director Ari Folman.

From the article:

“Inhibition – the ability to inhibit, is a very powerful defence mechanism,” says Ben-Yishai.

“You see horrible things, you inhibit, you store it somewhere. I believe if it doesn’t come back and if you don’t work it out early – it is there and it might explode.”

The Independent also had an article on the movie a couple of weeks ago:

War, death and animation: Cartoon film stirs Israel’s conscience

This article by Ben Lynfield is much more informative than the one from BBC. Lynfield reports from Jerusalem and he focus mpore on the different Israeli reactions and reviews. A good article worth reading if you are interested in both the Lebanon war and movie itself.