Nakba

Of Robert Fish
How much longer will we continue to pretend that the Palestinians are not a people?
Source: Comedonchisciotte
Monstrous. Frightening. Wicked. It's strange like today, in Middle East, the words are simply missing. Sixty Palestinians dead. In one day. Two thousand four hundred injured, more than half from live ammunition. In one day. These numbers are an outrage, an escape from morality, a source of infamy for every army.
And we should believe that the Israeli army is that of the “purity of weapons”? And we have another question to ask. If I'm there this week 60 Palestinian deaths per day, what will happen if there are any next week 600? O 6.000 next month? Israel's squalid justifications (and the crude American response) they raise exactly this question. If we can now accept a massacre of this magnitude, how long our immune system can handle in the days, in the weeks and months to come? Read More

Of Tossi Gurvitz
These are the questions any journalist should ask the Israeli army
Source: Comedonchisciotte
As these lines are written IDF snipers have killed more than 40 Palestinians near the Gaza barrier and injured others 2,200, a dozen are believed to have been mortally wounded. At the same time you read these words, the numbers have probably already gone up. IDF spokesman used to claim his snipers were 'in danger'. When you hear these words, think aboutoperazione Speedy Express.
Speedy Express was flown by the US Army's 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta in 1969. The US military claimed to have killed 10,899 opposing fighters. He just suffered 244 losses. Being in Saigon, a young genius called Alexander Demitri Shimkin, a veteran of civil rights marches, he perplexed his fellow journalists with a strange pastime: he took the trouble to actually read the official press releases and tabulated what was written.
After a few months, Shimkin put together a strange statistic: the 9th Division claimed to have killed 10,899 fighters but had only captured 748 weapons. Shimkin's conclusion was simple: the disparity between deaths and captured weapons means that the majority of those killed in Speedy Express were not combatants but civilians. It was problematic for Shimkin to find a publisher willing to publish this first example of data journalism and Newsweek published it only in 1972. Nonetheless, the publication caused a political firestorm, with the US military forced to take refuge in the desperate claim that “many guerrilla units were not armed with weapons”. Read More