See what innocence, naiveté, there was then, floating white balloons, peace balloons, from Nahal Oz, over the Gaza wall, to the other side... 

All the women in white in the name of Women Wage Peace, from the Gaza kibbutzim, Nir'Am near Sderot, Be'eri, Kfar Aza, from all over the land, gathered before the wall, to make a connection with the people on the other side.

December 16, 2023: The nightmare deepens by the days.

 

Yotam Haim, the blond redhead, from Kfar Aza; Samer Fuad al-Talalka, from Nir Am; and Alon Lulu Shamriz, from Kfar Aza too, were abducted on October 7. After seventy days in captivity they were shot down in Shejaiya yesterday by soldiers who had mistaken them for terrorists. They say 20 Israeli soldiers were likewise killed by "friendly fire".

When it's "unfriendly fire" you need to add three zeros. To the tune of 20,000.

"No military operation can be totally under control. Bush and Powell and Cheney |were] doing a super job [in the Persian Gulf] but I tell you Jesus Christ himself can't keep one of these things under control."   Robert McNamara

The bodies of three more hostages were recovered in Gaza, a French Israeli Elia Toledano, kidnapped at the Re'im rave party on October 7; Cpl Nik Beizer, 19, and Sgt Ron Sherman, also 19, who were in charge of the Erez terminal crossing. Beizer and Sherman, their job was to monitor and facilitate the passage of Gazans into Israel and back.

December 17, 2023. The fog of war deepens. The war drags on.

They have just uncovered the largest attack tunnel ever, from Gaza, intended to reach into Israel.

Four kilometers long, as deep as 50 meters in parts, just 400 meters from the Erez border crossing !

Wide enough for vehicles, complete with electricity, plumbing, communication lines.

This is the reason why this war is unfolding, week after week.

October 7, with its toll of 1,200 killed in a few hours, and 240 kidnapped, was a "test trial". The Gaza leaders obviously had further plans,

for future operations. This is the most damning evidence that can be produced.

For a fact, all the years I worked in Gaza, with Peace Lines, despite my many connections with people in position of authority, I was never allowed to go down into a tunnel. All I could was take a couple of pictures at the entrance of tunnels to Egypt. Going down was taboo.

Likewise, I was not supposed to wander on my own through the streets of Shejaiya, East of Gaza City. Every time I was driven there, to work in schools, introducing Martin Luther King's codes and thoughts to Gaza teenagers, I never was given the address, or the ways to return there without my escort from the Ministry. I now understand why, learning that the army is fighting terror operatives sheltered in schools.

And I can't help but think of the kids whom I was facing then. Years later, where are they now ? Under which uniform, Hamas, Islamic Jihad? How many of them have been sacrificed, maimed, scarred for life ?

I loved the job. I loved the kids. Our little red book, The spirit of Luther King, printed in Bethlehem,  handy as it was, bilingual, English on the left page, Arabic on the right page, was the perfect tool. Arafat himself had found it "charrming", years before. In June 2006, due to the insistence of then Minister of Education and Higher Education Dr Nasereddin Alshaer, in Ramallah, it had received approval of the Palestinian government in Gaza, then headed by PM Haniyeh.

 

 

 

Still, on the ground in Gaza, despite the official authorization to proceed, consecutive years of attempts and efforts proved to no avail. The "black preacher" shot down in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 was perceived as a "Christian" - were we missionaries in disguise ? The philosophy of non-violence, of non-violent resistance was definitely unwelcome. Arafat passed away in 2004. We received the permit and encouragement to proceed with our Bilingual Experimental Programme (which should have been extended to ten cities, from Jenin to Khan Yunis and Shejaiya) on June 19, 2006, by fax. But six days later only, on June 26, 2006, Corporal Gilad Shalit, stationed near the Gaza wall, was captured in a cross-border underground raid, and kept in a tunnel (until 2011). From there, all hell broke loose.

Israeli forces launched raids into the West Bank. In a matter of weeks they arrested close to a quarter of the members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Dr Alshaer, who had been nominated Deputy Prime Minister on top of his position at the Ministry of Education, was taken prisoner on August 19, 2006, along with the PLC speaker, Dr Dweik. As a consequence, the unity government (with a Hamas majority) formed at the end of March 2006, crumbled, and the Legislative Council was so impaired it could not function anymore. The rift between the West Bank and Gaza deepened, and one year after the abduction of Corporal Shalit, mid-June 2007, in what is known as the Battle of Gaza, Hamas fighters took complete control of the Gaza Strip, expelling or executing their Ramallah-backed Fatah rivals, leaving 160 killed and some 700 wounded.

Making the case of Israel's grief : we forcibly evacuated 8,000 Israeli residents from Gaza in August 2005, leaving the Strip under full Palestinian autonomy. The immediate consequence was that they started raining rockets at us, and started digging attack tunnels, with the aim of attacking and kidnapping soldiers. The tunnels only got more sophisticated and wider in the course of time, the range and destroying power of rockets, with the help of Iranian technology, only grew more threatening. The combination of the two leading to the October 7, 2023 onslaught and rampage.

December 18, 2023. Yotam Haim, the young drummer from Kfar Aza, was buried in music today. His beautiful soul radiant all over us.

On the other side of the wall, countless faces are torn beyond recognition, nameless.

When too many are killed, you can't name them all anymore.

The survivors' ache is endless.

 

 

 

December 19, 2023. Shameless manipulation of people and facts.

Haim Peri, 80; Yoram Metzger, 80; Amiram Cooper, 84. All kidnapped on October 7, in Nir Oz.

Nir Oz is no "settlement". Nir Oz is a kibbutz indeed, largely devoted to combating desertification with plants.

It is located between Magen and Gaza, in a zone which is historically undisputed, and cannot be considered as "occupied".

 

Take a look at the map. These names will stay with us forever. Erez Crossing (between Yad Mordechai and Gaza). Kfar Aza. Nahal Oz. Be'eri. Re'im. Nir Oz. Kisufim. This is not a one-side thing. You don't have to be a partisan, pro-Israel, to realize that what happened here, on October 7, 2023, by its scope and specificity, propels us all into another dimension, worldwide. You look for similarities, precedents, previous landmarks, and all you can find over half a century is the internecine savagery in Rwanda in the nineties, the fate of the Yazidi under the Islamic State rule closer to us (mid-2010s), and then you have to jump over eight decades to the last pogrom, after World War II, Kielce, in Poland. July 1946. Kielce reveals the killing of 42 Jews in a few hours for what they were : Jews.

On October 7, 2023, we witness the slaughtering, raping and abducting, of 1,440 Jews, Yehudi, in a few hours, for what they were : Yehudi, Jews. In their own space and land, on a quiet, peaceful, religious Shabbat morning, when everyone was either in bed or simply at home, almost all of them defenceless, helpless, without weapons, unprotected by an absent army.

We hear talk of "resistance", and a "war of liberation". We've hard it for years. I've heard it in Gaza repeatedly from the mouth of the leaders I had to meet. Had this "war of liberation"  been targeted at and limited to army posts, as happened in June 2006, it would have made sense. But whoever made the decision to give full licence to kill, maim, rape, and kidnap children, women, old people, to some three thousand men, has taken us all back to the infamous days of the extermination of Jews as Jews, from the late thirties to July 1946.

All this talk of "occupation settlement" is rooted in lies, gross lies, and binary, black and white ignorance of facts.

The people of the Gaza kibbutzim are known for their left-wing, pro-peace politics. Take Chaim Peri, kidnapped from Nir Oz. He has been a film lecturer and peace activist all his years, founder of Friends of Yemin Orde for orphans, also volunteering time and energy to drive sick Gazans of all ages from Erez Crossing to Israeli hospitals for thirty years.

His name means Fruitful Life. Haim, Life. Peri, fruitful. His heartfelt dedication has been  "for thousands of youth around the world who were uprooted or from dysfunctional homes, giving them a long-term home base at Friends of Yemin Orde, the Orde Wingate Youth Village in Israel.But there is so much more to Chaim’s dream of “The Village Way” that the model has now been replicated in 20 educational institutions around Israel, shared by all sectors of Israeli society – Jews and Arabs alike and in other countries including Rwanda after the horrible genocide there.

Chaim maintains that only transformed educators have the ability to transform children. According to Chaim, the key to this transformation is in restructuring educational environments for at-risk youth by deinstitutionalizing their institutional characteristics. It is about carefully addressing the built-in failures of residential education for at-risk youth and providing solutions to overcome these setbacks.".

December 20, 2023. From the fog of war to the fatigue of war. 

Feeling Haim's anger at his condition. Being a hostage in some forsaken pit, for seventy-five days and nights, at the mercy of young illiterate men in black shirts and fatigues, brandishing their kalashnikov like a life and death scepter. Can he speak Arabic ? What kind of a dialogue can they have, if any at all ? This is so reminiscent of the fate of  Jean-Paul Kauffmann and Michel Seurat at the hands of Hezbollah, and of French diplomats Carton and Fontaine, abducted by the Islamic Jihad in Beyruth, in 1985.

For three years they were starved, moved from cellars to sordid dungeons, humiliated, harshly treated. Seurat died in captivity after nine months, from mistreatment and lack of the medicine he needed. Never saw the light of day again.

Then, in 2004, two French journalists, Chesnot and Malbrunot, were kidnapped in Baghdad, by the Islamic Army - demanding that France forfeit its law against wearing veils in State facilities, schools and universities. Two weeks after their release, another French journalist, Florence Aubenas, was abducted and remained detained for five months.

In 2020, three other French citizens, members of the NGO S.O.S. Chrétiens d'Orient, were abducted in Baghdad and kept incommunicado for two months. Deprived of food, deprived of sleep, sometimes of water, without their shoes, tortured psychologically. They speak of a deep mental fracture within, hard to reduce.

Beyruth, Baghdad, Gaza... Raqqa, in Syria, for that matter... or Mosul in Iraq, under the Islamic State...

December 21, 2023.

Wading through the depressing toxic swamp of war news. Seldom a break - except this unexpected letter from a Lebanese, self-described atheist, Arab pacifist, Fred Maroun.

I'm a pacifist, atheist Arab and I'm praying for IDF soldiers

His first words : "I hate war. I have hated war since 1975 when the Lebanese civil war started and I was a  fourteen-year old Lebanese teenager. I always support peace as an alternative to war when the two sides can negotiate peace instead of killing each other."

I think you should really read him, hear his heartfelt, paradoxical cry.  

Down to his unexpected conclusion : "This is my prayer as an atheist. Since the powers on this earth do not have the right priorities and do not recognize those who are risking their lives for peace, I am left to hope against any real expectation that there is a power above us who cares."

 

News surfacing from Sderot today : I first thought that only the police station had been targeted by the attackers of October 7. Until I found a piece from the New York Times, October 10, titled 

‘Everyone Died’: How Gunmen Killed Dozens In Sderot Videos filmed by residents in Sderot captured a grisly and indiscriminate shooting rampage by Palestinian gunmen in the town on Saturday.

 The Saturday I could, should have been there. I also learn that 90% of the population were evacuated. Speaking of 32,000 people.

In the same groove, I have found the energy to send messages to my two best friends in Gaza, AhMeD, who escorted me in all our endeavours from the Ministry of Education to schools in Shejaiya, and Dr B. I also realize that Shejaiya begins on the Eastern side of Salah al Deen Road (the North East / South West axis roughly parallel to the Al Rashid coastal road), whereas I used to reside on its Western side.

That is to say, 4 kilometers only from the closest kibbutz, Nahal Oz.

4 kilometers from where the pictures were taken floating peace balloons, with Vivian Silver and the women in white.

If you care to know what life in Sderot has been like until October 7, you should read Seth Freedman's testimony in The Guardian, "Sderot : besieged and abandoned", written in 2008, the year I first visited Sderot.

Sderot : besieged and abandoned

December 22, 2023. Living with war.

Yesterday, or was it Thursday, Palestine Square, in the heart of Gaza City, went up in smoke.

They say there was a vast tunnel network underneath, like a headquarter.

I think of my friend the optician, and his family, living right there. The warm, happy times we had together.

And that time, sitting in the veranda after dinner, when I asked him what was fundamentally wrong with the Israeli neighbour in his eyes. He is no Hamas, does not don a beard, and cares for his business in town, like any other optician in the world, and for his family. He looked puzzled for a moment, as if there was no immediate answer. Then, suddenly, in the not too far distance, there was a flash and a loud bang. He burst laughing : "That !" he exclaimed. "That's what's wrong with Israel". The time was 2011, a rather quiet summer, twelve years ago.

Don't take it back to Abraham/Ibrahim, Joseph/Yusef, and all those mythical ancestors.

Take it back to August 2005. August 22, 2005, when the last Israeli soldier left the Gaza Strip, after special units of the army and police had finished evacuating 8,000 settlers. It only took three days for the first rocket to be fired from Gaza at nearby Sderot. From then on, the rocket rain never stopped. Their range and explosive heads only got larger and larger.

You may check "Daily life in Sderot"  Israel - Palestine (2000-2014) - Peace Lines

The damage done cannot be compared. The tension kept rising, until October 7, 2023. The day our pacifist friend, Vivian Silver, in her 74th year, was burnt alive in her home in Be'eri. By young men from Gaza. Her body was reduced to such a distorted magma of sticky blackness that it could not be identified for weeks on end, and we all thought she'd been taken hostage.

Am I being partial by reminding that all was quiet until dawn, on October 7, both sides of the border ?

They launched three thousand rockets that morning into Israel, followed by two thousand more.

What would you do if you were in a position to take decisions ?

Have you read the Hamas Charter (2017), with its specific vision of what coexistence means to them ?

20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

23. Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honour for all the sons and daughters of our people and our Ummah. 

 Speaking of standards and contexts, the question remains : how do you deal with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ? How do you deal with Islamic Jihad + Hamas in Gaza ?

How many double standards are there, regarding the Middle East ?

From September 2015 to March 2019, the Russians in Syria, ordered over 70,000 strikes, with a toll of 18,000 killed, half of them civilians, half of the fighters killed being ISIS members, the other half from opposition groups. There were descriptions of "indiscriminate bombings" in Homs, Hama, Raqqa, "carpet bombing" (in Aleppo), a "scorched earth strategy", razing whole civilians areas, the aim of which was "war against terrorism", to destroy "the infrastructures of terrorists". Last year, 2022, there were 4,000 strikes. We don't have the number of casualties for 2022.

As for the eradication of the Islamic State in Iraq, did the Americans fare any better ?

In Mosul alone, the second city of Iraq, which had been conquered by the Islamic State, their bombings left 40,000 killed. These figures are easy to verify through the net.

Minutes before the terrorists (what else do you call them, fighters ?) broke into her home, Vivian Silver sent a last message to friends through WhatsApp. She said she could not believe what was happening, that if she survived she promised she would keep a knife in her shelter. This is the testament of one of the best pacifists that ever preached in the "land of milk and honey".

I would not go for a knife, if I lived next to Gaza. I would keep the peace work and the connections with the neighbours beyond the fence, as Chaim Peri did. I hate knives, weapons of any kind. I would have to depend on reliable armed forces to protect me though, wishing that they be more reactive than on October 7.

My personal testimony, after years of peace work in Gaza, is that the leaders there don't want anything but war.

It says so explicitly in their Charter. They're men of their word, if anything. October 7 is their message.

The culture of peace and constructive coexistence still has a long way to go, after this war is over.

You don't go around waving little peace books in the midst of such a fire.

December 23, 2023. Living in war, the war mind, is slow time. Like prison time.

You feel you're not going anywhere. There's nowhere to go anyway.

Nobody to really talk to. What could the others understand ?

Living in a vault : we all live in those tunnels, down those pits.

What the released hostages feared most : the bombings in the night, like all the other Gazans.

They say they feared the bombings more than their guards after some time.

How long will it take for the survivors to forget the unending thunder of bombings ?

I think I will meet Chaim Peri someday, and Amiram. I think, feel, hope.

Will I ever see AhMeD in Gaza again, and my friends, Dr B. the Islamic University teacher, the optician ?

I think of Pierre, who spent five and a half years of his life in German camps of prisoners of war.

Is there no escape from such camps - except getting shot down by your own troops ?

December 24, 2023. Wartime Christmas eve.

Christmas was supposed to be a Christian festival, celebrating peace and a new life.

There used to be Christmas truces in the twentieth century (among Christians killing Christians).

There may not be many Christians left in what was once the "Holy Land", let alone in Gaza.

Not a single Christian voice has been heard there for ages.

A Call for compassion, for the children, was launched in October by the 2014 Nobel peace laureate Satyarthi "Palestinian children are our children. Israeli children are our children... Tonight in the middle of this darkness, we will light three candles - one for all the children killed and kidnapped in Israel, one for all the children killed and maimed in the bombing and fighting in Gaza, and one for humanity and hope."

It also states, "To make progress on a just and lasting peace, we need compassion for all the children who are suffering."

A vast undergound complex (one square kilometer) where the bodies of five hostages were discovered earlier this month has been revealed in Jabaliya, complete with two levels and an elevator heading down dozens of meters to a large hall and command center 

The longer this war lasts, the more we discover another Gaza underneath Gaza...

To be compared with what the first tunnels (towards Egypt) were, in 2008-2009 :

 

December 25, 2023. "Do they know it's Christmas?" 

 "There's a world outside your window, And it's a world of dread and fear"

picture taken in Gaza in 2021 :

 

This is precisely what we refuse, what we oppose.

This forced determinism of murder and guns imposed on infants.

Treating infants like pawns in the insane game of death and night and blood.

Treating human beings like metal cogs, like deadly bargaining chips.

December 26, 2023. The insanity of the  mutual war compulsion.

We launched a Call on December 22, as a reminder that "human beings are not bargaining chips", the bottom line of our Open the Doors! Call (2015-2019), against the alibis of "armed resistance" and a "war of liberation", demanding an unconditional release of all hostages, a permanent end to all attack tunnels, i.e. the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, for a "durable cessation of hostilities" (as coined at the UN in their Security Council resolution of December 21).

How do Palestinians react to the Gaza war, in the West Bank, in Jordan ?

With an "uptick in support for the option of armed struggle".Hamas popularity tripled in West Bank since Oct. 7, US support at 0%

 In Jordan, both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are making gains, from what we hear.

Pope Francis, in his Urbi and Orbi Christmas message sheds his light on this "aimless voyage" :

the very mindset of war, an aimless voyage, a defeat without victors, an inexcusable folly. This is what war is: an aimless voyage, a defeat without victors, an inexcusable folly. To say “no” to war means saying “no” to weaponry. 

December 27, 2023. "A war of no choice" we keep hearing.

When we know there is always choice, for each one of us, wherever we are.

The choice, on October 7, was to submit, to capitulate to the enemy - or fight back, with full might.

How do you define "the enemy" ?

Was it a national army, like the Syrian army, the Egyptian army, in 1973, fifty years ago ?

They say they have twelve battalions in Gaza, each composed of some two thousand men.

But what happened in Israel on October 7 was not by a national army, or a battalion from a national army.

It fits in the mould of terror groups, the way they operated in Irak and Syria, with the Islamic State, from 2014 on (against all civilians at large, Yazidis in partiuclar), and the way they operated in Algeria during the Black Decade, with the Islamic Armed Group, and the Islamic Front of Salvation.

In Irak, Syria, Algeria, they never cared about the fate of the people around them, speaking of the civilians, children included.

You had to join them, pay them whatever amount of money they extracted from you, or else get dispossessed - of your stock, your vehicle, your home, eventually of your life, if you did not submit.

 

 

December 29, 2023. Pictures from the past in Gaza...

 

 

 

These kids were in the El Yarmouk school, financed by the European Union, as can be seen on the wall, inaugurated by Yasser Arafat, in the heart of Gaza City, between Rimal (NW) and Tuffah (SE), Jabalia (NE) and Zeitoun (SW).

As militias are known to take cover in schools, mosques, and hospitals, does it still stand ?

How many of these kids have had to join a militia ?

Do they remember our work with the little red book, The spirit of Luther King ?

Were they brainwashed into becoming gunmen, forgetting that "Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear" ?

What they call a "senior Palestinian official" recently gave his view in an UAE news outlet :

 December 30, 2023. Losing hope.

They say the Bibas family has been killed.

They say Chaim Peri, Amiram Cooper, Yoram Metzger, have also been killed. By Israeli bombings.

The New York Times has published the most devastating inquiry I've read...

'Screams without words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct.7

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html

Also : Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israem in Past 40 Years

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/world/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-palestinians.html

 

January 1, 2024. Happy New Year ?

What a way to start a year, in this increasingly polarized, chaotic society.

The remaining hundred and twenty hostages lost somewhere in the tunnels, among the ruins of Gaza, are not heard of anymore.

And people forget or ignore that there are over two million hostages in the Gaza Strip. Not pointing to Israel as a single guard of the Strip, but to Egypt as well. Since nobody wants anything to do really  with the Muslim Brotherhood - and the Strip has been ruled by an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas) since they violently seized power from the secular Palestinian authorities in 2007.

Remember the Rabaa massacre, August 14, 2013, when the Egyptian state police shot down over one thousand Islamist protesters in one day, thus terminating their ascent to power.

Thinking now of the first marathon in Gaza, organized by the UNRWA teams, on May 5, 2011. From Beit Hanoun in the North to Rafah, the legendary 42 kilometers.

1,200 runners participated in it, partially, nine only for the full length. The winner was Nader al-Masri, in 2 h 42 mn 47".

The second marathon was run on March 2, 2012, under drizzling rain and heavy winds, with 120 Gazans, men and women, and 80 foreigners. Nader al-Masri won again, but in 3 h 10 mn due to the winds and conditions.

These two marathons had made my days, and I was thinking of running a half-one in 2013.

There never was a third marathon. Some politico-religious authorities decided it was haram, sinful, having women in trousers, running with men.

The same sort of censorship decided our Experimental Bilingual Programme would not be permitted, in 2013.

 

There was always a woman in full black, or brown, beige, with just the slice for the eyes open, checking upon the morality of everything - what was allowed for a young girl, young woman, and what was sinful, a perverted import from the West.

2013 was the end somehow.

While women in burqa were controlling the minds in all places, men in black fatigues were digging deeper, longer, concrete tunnels - not to smuggle goods from Egypt, as was the practice from 2006 to 2008 and 2009, but to dig into Israel, in the prospect of kidnapping people and use them as bargaining chips.

January 2, 2024.  From Gaza to Beirut

   Today in Beirut, a drone took the lives of Hamas commanders, including their top man abroad, apart from Haniyeh. The "second front" with Hezbollah has been over-active in the North, and this strike is likely to fan the flames. It is strange that this second war remains on the backburner, despite the losses both sides. 100,000 Israelis living close to Lebanon have had to leave their homes and go live somewhere else, including Gilad Shalit's family, who live a mere 5 km from the border.

I often think of Gilad, who was only nineteen when he was wounded and kidnapped, as a tank operator, in June 2006. Kept in the tunnels incommunicado for five years, now that he's had to evacuate their home, what can his thoughts be ?

 Sargeant Shalit was finally set free in October 2011, in exchange for one thousand Palestinian male prisoners (among them Yahia Sinwar) and twenty-seven women.  It was only two years when residents from Northern Galilee started complaining about hearing sounds of digging at all times of night and day. 2013, Diary of a Bad Year.

It took the Israeli army four years to uncover a first Hezbollah tunnel from Lebanon (2017). It had reached forty meters into Israel.

 

You look at it from the outside : what is this "Hezbollah", digging state-of-the-art tunnels into its neighbour's territory, with the obvious intent to attack him unpredictably, and kidnap its citizens, be they civilians or in uniform ?

Hizbullah = Party of Allah, Party of God. Created in 1985. In the nineties they had trained volunteers to go and fight in Bosnia, along with other jihadis belonging to Al Qaeda. As a reminder, there were around fifteen hundred jihadis in Bosnia from 1993 till 1996. They then moved to Algeria, to spread havoc there.

What is this God about, commanding his adepts to dig tunnels all the way from Lebanon and Gaza into this one land called Israel ?

 

January 3, 2024. How long till it all flares up between Lebanon and Galilee ?

Looking at it more closely, you wonder what the United Nations are about, in the end. As far back as 1978, a peacekeeping mission was installed in Lebanon, called UNIFIL, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

It is now composed of ten thousand men, from some forty countries - the main contributors being Indonesia (1230), Italy (1041), India (895), Ghana (877), Nepal (872), Malaysia (834), France (662), China (417), and Ireland (317). With all due respect to their hierarchies and commanders, what are they doing in Lebanon ?

In December 2018, the UNIFIL finally acknowledged the existence of four Hezbollah attack tunnels by the border, two of which crossed "the Blue Line" into Israel, "in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701".

And then what ?

January 4, 2024. Feels like it's the same endless day, and we're not out of the tunnels.
How could we be, with some 130 hostages still kept there ?

I've read the account of a young woman who was shot at the arm and kidnapped from the Re'im rave party.
She's adamant that there are "no innocent civilians in Gaza, not one" - whereas her experience of Gazans relates to a dozen of them only, two dozens at most; forcibly among the worst types, for taking part in the October 7 rampage and the detention of hostages treated as bargaining chips, conceived as bargaining chips from the start and planning of the onslaught.

What's more damaging is when State ministers go around claiming the same, and that the people of Gaza should emigrate.

When, again, a State minister dare declare that in Gaza two million people wake up every morning with aspiration for the destruction of the State of Israel and with a desire to slaughter and rape and murder Jews wherever they are it is obvious he's never been there, in plain clothes, as a simple human being. He does not know anyone in Gaza.

On the other side of that, my main joy today was to be able to answer a call for help from Gaza, a university teacher, father of two, a specialist of English literature in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Is it soo difficult to look for plain human beings on both sides of the fence, instead of pre-ordained stereotypes ?

 

January 5, 2024. Pondering Robert S. McNamara's late wisdom.

"We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why." in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, about the Vietnam war

How wrong were those who blindly opened the gates to this hell...

 

Hearing Sahar Calderon's cry, after 52 days in the Gaza underground :

 

“I heard all the Israeli strikes, very intense bombing. Many times I told myself that in the end, I will die from Israel’s missiles and not from Hamas. Please, stop this war; get all the hostages out.” 

 January 6, 2024.  Stranded...

How many persons are now stranded, "displaced", because of the October 7 horror ?

Three hundred thousand Israelis from the "Gaza envelope"... more than a million Gaza Palestinians... a hundred thousand Israelis from the North of Galilee close to Lebanon... thirty thousand Lebanese from South Lebanon - and it is "just starting" ?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/100-for-25-kg-of-flour-gaza-families-scramble-to-find-food-water-and-medicine/

 

January 7, 2024. The heart of the matter.

An Ofir Hauzman piece, in yesterday's YNet News goes to the core of it all. 

"Sinwar isn't a psychopath, but a cunning narcissist"        https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/hyw00ksu00a

Probably the best insight into the whole bloody conundrum.

 “We’re not talking about animals.(...) More than two months have passed since October 7th, and accounts of the horrors still surprise the very people who thought they’d seen all the human evil that exists.

  "the definition of evil and the classification of a person as evil is open to interpretation and dependent on the values on which they were raised and the culture in which they grew up. The question as to who is an evil person is a philosophical one."

Dr Guy Becker, psychotherapist treating psychopathic victims and dangerous personality disorders

“The most horrific part is that Gazans, who are not regular terrorist operatives, took part in the massacre acting out of hatred and murderous ideology that had warped and corrupted their souls, allowing them to carry out such cruel acts."

Gazans, who are not regular terrorist operatives, took part in the massacre...

 

January 8, 2024. A fifteen-year span.

The evolution from 2007-2008 till 2023-2024, from a diameter of 10 cm for a length of 1 m and a range of a few miles (check Ulrike Put's inquiry in Der Spiegel, January 29, 2008) to what we have today :

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/graveyard-shift-for-islamic-jihad-a-visit-to-a-gaza-rocket-factory-a-531578.html

https://www.timesofisrael.com/on-gaza-civilian-evacuation-road-idf-uncovers-largest-hamas-rocket-factory-to-date/

 

January 9, 2024. 8 generations of rockets in 15 years.

Take it back to January 2008, six months of Hamas rule in Gaza (check Ulrike Putz's inquiry in Der Spiegel again) :

it was young men working at night, producing ten to a hundred rudimentary "qasams" per night, like a game, a mind game.

All the way from makeshift tubes of a diameter of around 10 cm and warheads of  5 kg, with a limited range of 5 km to the recent Iranian Fajr-3 of 24 cm diameter, warheads of 90 kg, with a range of 43 km and the more advanced S-55 with a range of 55 km.

What's the sense of this arms race ? Its cost for the people ? In wealth, in lives, in pain ?

January 10, 2024.

Kibbutz Be'eri, where Vivian, Vivian Silver, lived, and was burnt alive.

Shijaiya, East of Gaza City, 3 km from Nahal Oz, 6 km North-North-West from Be'eri, in January 2024.