It would be cynical to introduce Lawrence of Cyberia’s article on Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza by asking why the US does not follow Israel and invade Canada, but it would not do justice to the depth of understanding she brings to the Gazan mentality today. In fact, there is rather an irony at play in Israel’s invasion of Gaza that is a much better approach to this understanding.
Two thirds of the Palestinians living in Gaza are refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing that emptied Palestine of two thirds of its Arab population. That the UN organization, UNWRA, responsible for these refugees since that year, reported that it ran out of food weeks before the ceasefire terminated provides at least one clue as why Hamas’ refused to continue it.
But if you want to know what the Palestinians are all about, what their mentality is, and why they fight back today in Gaza today, read on. (For links, see the original article.)
Je Me Souviens (or I Remember)
The stupidest defense of what Israel is doing to Gaza has to be, “But what would Americans do if Canadians were firing Qassams from Quebec over the border into the U.S.?”. Well, I dunno. Flesh out your scenario for me. While these imaginary rockets are falling on the U.S. from Quebec, is the U.S. blockading Quebec and conducting a violent, repressive military occupation of Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and all points north, that has been going on for 41 years, and involves the forcible dispossession of the Canadians in those provinces so that Americans can steal their choicest land and the U.S. can annex it (without the inconvenience of having to give citizenship rights to the Canadian people who live there)? Because that’s what it would take for your comparison to have meaning. And if you tell me “Yes, actually we are doing all that to the people who are launching home-made, sugar-fueled rockets at us”, then I think the answer to the question “What would Americans do?” might well be that if I were doing that to Canada and only getting a bunch of Qassam rockets in return, I might just shrug my shoulders and think maybe I’d gotten off lightly.
Beyond the occupation as the immediate context for the inherently violent and unstable relationship between the Gaza Strip and Israel, there’s a broader context that is unmentionable in U.S. news media, but got an airing yesterday in the Hebrew-language version of Ha’aretz (via skyredoubt, via the incomparable Mondo Weiss). Returning to our Canada analogy, there’s something else I need to ask if I really want to know why those nasty Canadians are lobbing rockets at me. I need to know not only whether the U.S. is occupying and blockading the people who fire the rockets, but whether in your analogy the very existence of the United States depends on the continuous expulsion, dispossession and disenfranchisement of Canadians, as Israel’s does in regard to the Palestinians. If you leave that bit out of the comparison, then you’re really only telling me half a story about why these people might want to fire rockets at me.
In the U.S., all our TV pundits and major newspapers ever tell us about the Gaza Strip is that 1. it’s a Hamas stronghold, and 2. it’s the most densely-populated piece of real estate on earth. But they don’t tell us that it wasn’t always like that. They don’t mention that Gaza wasn’t a stronghold of Islamic nationalism till Israel’s occupation administration in Gaza funded Hamas as a counterweight to the secular nationalism of the PLO, then engaged in a phony 15-year “peace process” that hopelessly compromised the secular nationalist parties that had supported a compromise peace with Israel, leaving Hamas as the only credible resistance to the continuing occupation.
They don’t tell you either about the time before the Gaza Strip became the most densely-populated place on earth; when Gaza was a small coastal city, rather than a moon scape, and its environs were wheat fields and orchards – cultivating citrus products, dates, grapes, figs and mulberries – rather than refugee camps.
And they DEFINITELY don’t mention how the transformation in Gaza’s fortunes came about. They don’t tell you where those 1.5 million people now squashed into the Gaza Strip came from. Because they come from what is now Israel, and they didn’t leave their homes there voluntarily in order to spend their days in an overcrowded, bombarded slum. Eighty per cent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees. These are the people who have been expelled from Israel since 1948, and always had to be expelled according to the logic of Zionism, if a Jewish state was to be created in Palestine, where most people happen not to be Jewish. The vast majority of the people in the Gaza Strip are the original inhabitants of the towns and villages of southern and coastal Israel, who took refuge from Zionist armies in Gaza City because it was the last southern city left in Palestinian hands in 1948.
In short, the people in the Gaza Strip who are today firing rockets at the towns of southern Israel are, overwhelmingly, the children and grandchildren of the Palestinian people who were expelled by Israel from those very same towns in order to gerrymander a Jewish majority where one did not naturally exist.
Yesterday, rockets from Gaza fell on the Israeli city of Ashkelon. Benny Tziper in the Hebrew-language version of Ha’aretz online was the only person I saw publicly mention that the Israeli city of Ashkelon was, until quite recently, the Palestinian city of Majdal al-Asqalan whose Arab population was expelled within the lifetime of many present-day Israelis to the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip:
[…]A nice man was there at the entrance to the museum, an invalid of IDF from the Yom Kippur War, who was born and lived all his life in Ashkelon. From his knowledge and enthusiasm one could tell that he loves the city very much. He had no problem telling me how in 1953 the Arabs were expelled, and the long process of looking for a new name for the place started (the Arab name was Majdl), till it was decided to call the place Ashkelon. The entire communications between the authorities regarding the cleansing of the city of Arabs and Hebrewisation of the name is exhibited in the museum. I think that nobody makes the connection today between the fact that the Qassams land on Ashkelon and the fact that poor Arabs who did nothing wrong to anybody were put on trucks and expelled from their city to Gaza fifty five years ago, and since then they are there and Ashkelon is here. And this did not happen in wartime or as a result of hostilities, but from a cold calculation that the area must be cleansed of Arabs. There is a picture in the museum that shows the Arabs sitting and waiting in front of the of Israeli military government building. It sends shivers down my spine because it happens in the year I was born. And it is really, really hard for me to realize that at the time that my parents were happy with my birth, other people were put on trucks and expelled from their homes.[…]
(via skyredoubt, via Mondo Weiss; emphasis mine).
Those “poor Arabs who did nothing wrong to anybody” yet “were put on trucks and expelled from their city” because of a “cold calculation that the area must be cleansed of Arabs” are people like Salim al-Damagh and Sayyed al-Sharief (above), who are now aged 70 and 76 respectively and who, 55 years after being expelled, are still unable to return to Ashkelon because Zionism says they have the “wrong” ethnic-religious background to be allowed to live in their own homes.
Also yesterday, Qassam rockets again fell on the oft-bombarded Israeli town of Sderot. Sderot was built as an Israeli town in the early 1950’s to house Jewish immigrants from the Maghreb, who were told they were coming to a land without a people for a people without a land. But they weren’t; they were coming to the ruins of the Palestinian town of Najd (Photo by Uri Zackhem for Palestine Remembered).
A little town by the name of Sderot became home to poor immigrants in the early ’50s, only years after it had been cleared of Palestinians living in what was the village of Najd. [A] resident of Sderot told me that when he got there in 1989 he thought he was in “the safest place in the world, in the middle of nowhere.” And yet, it was not the middle of nowhere, he had moved onto what was once someone else’s land and adjacent to where that displaced person and their displaced descendants were held imprisoned. There, his displaced neighbors daily face the consequences of the past. This past is what is allowing for the hell of that very town, Sderot.
Sderot Created The Gaza Strip by Philip Rizk; 22 May 2007.
Najd was completely destroyed, and its 719 inhabitants expelled to Gaza, by troops of the Israeli Negev Brigade, on 13 May 1948. Among those inhabitants expelled to the Gaza Strip were Muhammad Jasser, a former mayor of Najd, and his son, Ahmed (below):
They lived the rest of their lives in the Jabalya Refugee Camp, unable to return to Najd because Zionism said they had the “wrong” ethnic-religious background to be allowed to live in their own homes.
By 1998 there were an estimated 4,417 people living in Gaza Strip refugee camps who were either expelled from Najd, or the children/grandchildren of people expelled from Najd. Conceivably, some of them are among the people firing Qassams at Sderot right now.
That sort of background information makes the Canada analogy sound really dumb, doesn’t it? And you can learn it from a newspaper in Israel, but not here. At least not yet. But you will. And the reason you will hear more and more even in the U.S. about the unacknowledged history of 1948 is because of the demise of the two state solution. Israel has spent 40 years doing everything it can to erase the Green Line of 1967, in order to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. But what it has actually ended up doing by refusing to settle for the borders of 1967, is to return its conflict with the Palestinians to 1948, by unraveling the demographically Jewish state that it went to such trouble to establish through the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba. Forty years of trying to absorb the Occupied Palestinian Territories of 1967 into an expanded Jewish state of Israel, have resulted instead in the restoration of the bi-national state of Israel/Palestine that existed before 1948. A bi-national state under sectarian rule, which presently reserves the benefits of citizenship to only one of the state’s nations, but a de facto bi-national state nonetheless. And as Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper has pointed out, the real irony is that Israel has no-one to blame but itself for throwing away the Jewish super-majority it created for itself on part of Palestine in 1948. Israel’s own inability to untangle itself from the mirage of a Jewish state in all Palestine, has brought it to where it is today – on the verge of losing a Jewish state even on part of it:
[I]f it was we who eliminated a viable two-state solution – the creation of a truncated Palestinian prison-state on 15% of historic Palestine a la South Africa’s Bantustans will not solve the conflict – then how shall we end our century-old conflict? How shall we deal with the bi-national entity that is Israel/Palestine, largely our own creation?
In order to avoid these questions, we have developed a number of mechanisms, delaying forever a political solution being only one of them. It is enough for us to merely assert our support for a two-state solution in order that we be considered peace-minded and reasonable. Two-state supporters require only the notion of a Palestinian state, a never-ending process towards it, to escape confronting the reality we created. As long as a Palestinian state can be held out as a possibility, the pressure’s off. Thus many Israelis, Diaspora Jews and others – including such searching and otherwise radical figures as Noam Chomsky and Uri Avnery, together with Peace Now, Brit Tzedek, Rabbis Michael Lerner and Arthur Waskow and members of Rabbis for Human Rights – cling tenaciously to the two-state solution, all refusing to admit it is no longer viable.
The 40th anniversary of 1967 had to do with occupation. Had we dealt with that issue wisely and justly, Israel today could have been a Jewish state living at peace with its neighbors on 78% of the Land of Israel, a true cause for celebration. This year’s focus on 60 Years, on 1948, is a different matter entirely. If we want to salvage a national Jewish presence in Palestine/Israel, nothing remains but to courageously confront what we did in 1948 and the bi-national reality we have fostered since 1967. No longer can we blame the Palestinians for our dilemmas; they accepted the two-state solution way back in 1988. No, it is we, the triumphant, those who believed (and still believe) that military power combined with Jewish victimhood can defeat a people’s will to freedom, who carry the burden of responsibility for this most anti-Zionist, yet wholly predictable, situation… (emphasis mine)
Jeff Halper, Rethinking Israel After Sixty Years
Photo credit – Photos in this post are from PalestineRemembered.com, the online home of all ethnically-cleansed Palestinians; specifically from that site’s sections on al-Majdal and Najd.
Thanks Diane for this look underneath the reality in Gaza. Clearly no one here condones the killings that are occurring on either side. It must stop.
The Quebec, Canada analogy: forgotten is the fact that Quebec supplies the north east; Vermont to Mass with hydro-powered electricity, a huge resource
and
off the shores of Gaza lies a large natural gas field – 0ne trillion cubic feet, equivalent of one hundred and fifty million barrels of oil. Israel would like to have it. So expect no peace. No self-determination for Palestinians.
Into the sixth day of bombardment, blood on their hands, all to win the February election. Criminals.
The CONSEQUENCES to Israel’s long occupation and war crimes will be soon; before 2012 when Pakistan packs its punch.
Excellent, Shergald. Thanks.
This is really Diane’s diary (Lawrence of Cyberia) that I only republished, with her permission, of course. I have urged her to crosspost her own work, because it is really excellent. From time to time, she does post comments here, but I can’t get her to do more.
I think of myself as her occasional publisher, really.
And thanks for your excellent comments below; and those of the other posters. They are also fine and contributory.
The details elaborated here are illuminating and important. It is equally important to recognize and acknowledge explicitly that the mentality of Gazans is quite simply the mentality of human beings, and that why they fight is that when human beings are subjected to threats to their survival, they fight for survival.
This is from a recent Tariq Ali article
“Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for 45 years against occupation force,” said General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993
Tariq Ali said it well.
Nice werk Shergald. December 30 (?) Robert Fisk pointed out in the Independent what he called the ‘irony’ of rockets falling on ‘Ashkelon’ where so many people, or their descendants, in Gaza came from. I’ve started reading the stomach-churning ‘Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Ilan Pappe. He tells everything in clear, understandable language. Another cutesy myth about Israel is how the Israelis turned Palestine into a garden, instead of how they appropriated the Palestinian gardens, farms, etc., that already existed when they arrived.
immigrants from the Maghreb
Who are second class citizens to be used for propaganda purposes.
Let the racist Ashkenazi take their place and watch peace break out.
Not only for propaganda purposes. The Arab Jews were brought to Israel, in many if not most cases by various forms of deceit and fear tactics, less to “rescue” them than to beef up the population and provide what was called “human material” needed to beef up the population, and do menial jobs that were beneath European Jews – “dirty work”, also known as “Arab work”. Thus, hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews, many of whom had been part of the intellectual, professional, artistic, and economic elite in their native countries, were induced to leave their affluent lives and homes and elite status to live in Israel where they were humiliated by being deloused on entry, given more “suitable” names, since most of them had Arabic names, forced for years to live in camps of tents or tin shacks at a subsistence level, viewed as “dirty Arabs”, and relegated to jobs as street sweepers, garbage collectors, servants, and human cannon fodder.
The status of Arab Jews has improved over the decades, but they are still not viewed as equal to their “more equal” fellow European citizens. On the other hand, they have always had a higher status than their “less equal” Palestinian fellow citizens, who are officially denied many of the basic rights and privileges of citizens of a democratic state.
I read Ben Gurion Scandals. Are there other sources of information about this deception?
Na’im Giladi’s book is interesting, but kind of disjointed, and you have to take his word for a lot of it, so it doesn’t make the best good reference for substantiating the facts to doubters.
Probably the best study available in English on the exodus of Iraqi Jews is by Abbas Shiblak. It was originally titled The Lure of Zion, and it has a new edition titled Iraqi Jews, A History of a Mass Exodus. It is a small book – about 200 pages – and is available from Powell’s Books, Alibris, or Amazon.com. What the Zionists did to induce the Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq, and how they treated them once they got to Israel is probably the most scandalous of any of them. There were Jews in Iraq among the creme de la creme of elite society – they were doctors, lawyers, professors, intellectuals, business owners, writers, poets, musicians, scientists. There were also, of course, Jews who were less well off, just as there were poor members of every ethno-linguistic-religious group.
There is another book by Nissim Rejwan called the Jews of Iraq that covers more of the pre-exodus period starting with the Babylonian exile, in the 8th century B.C., which the origin of the Iraqi Jewish community. It’s probably the most well-rounded and realistic book I know of on the subject. It discusses the exodus in 1950-51 at the end of the book, but does not go into great detail.
There is a lot of self-congratulatory literature written by Israelis about the “rescue” of Arab Jews, including of Iraqi Jews, but it hardly tells the whole story, and those books never talk about how those Jews were treated once they arrived in Israel.
Tom Segev has written in 1949: The First Israelis about the treatment of Arab Jewish immigrants, and I believe he has some material about how they were induced to go.
There are a number of anti-Zionist or at least non-Zionist Iraqi Jews who left Iraq, went to Israel, and as quickly as they could left there, usually for Europe or the U.S. One of the best known is Ella Habiba Shohat (her name was Habiba, which means beloved in Arabic, and the Israelis who processed her family on their arrival did not like the Arabic names, and changed hers to Ella). The last I knew she was a professor in New York. Another is Ammiel Alcalay, also a professor in New York. I recall seeing a searing documentary film on Israel and the Palestinians a number of years ago by a strongly anti-Zionist Jew who immigrated to Israel from the Maghreb – Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria, I believe – was horrified, and quickly left to France. I wish I could remember her name or the name of the film. It contained footage from the 1940’s and ’50’s that would give even the most staunch Israel lover take pause.
Oh, I just remembered another book, Prophets in Babylon, Jews in the Arab World“.
{thought I’d left my last remark here @ BooMartin’s Exceptionalist Fantasy Cesspool a long time ago, but came across yr Ammiel Alcalay cite while running a google search}
He (Alcalay) isn’t of Iraqi heritage – his parents fled Tito’s Yugoslavia in the 50’s – & was born in the U.S. P’haps you’re thinking of Shalom Ballas (an Israeli writer born in Baghdad), whose novel, outcast (City Lights, 2007), Ammiel has translated.
The work’s apropos to yr subject tho. You might be interested in the anthology of writing from Israel’s Middle Eastern Jews which he edited, Keys to the Garden, (City Lights Books, 1996) – I left a bit more about it here.
& here’s a quote in his book, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (U Minn, 1999) from a passage in G.N. Giladi’s Discord in Zion: Conflict Between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Israel (London: Scorpion, 1990) an account of a Sephardic immigrant to the new State: “We were wearing our Sabbath clothing. We thought as the plane landed that Israel would welcome us warmly. But goodness, how wrong we were! . . . ‘Are we immigrants or prisoners of war?’ ” (full quote here)
I forgot to add that Dr. Pappe lives safely in the UK. He foretold the current events.
Speaking of Ilan Pappe’s most recent book, when Benny Morris “broke the story” of the 1948 Palestinian exodus in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 he was extolled as a courageous pioneer (it turns out that the only real objection he had to Israel’s creation of 750,000 refugees was that Israel did not complete the job, but that’s another subject). For the first time the fact – well known to anyone who examined the facts thoroughly – that the Palestinians did not leave voluntarily or at the behest of their leaders had been well and carefully documented with Israeli primary source materials. It was so clearly a story of deliberate and systematic ethnic cleansing that it was easy to make little of his denial of the reality even as he meticulously detailed and documented the facts.
Many, many heated and frustrating debates took place in the ensuing years between those of us who understood exactly what Morris was describing, despite his attempts to pretend otherwise, and die-hard Zionists (including many, many “leftists” and “peace activists”) who had focused mainly on his absurd claims (sans any kind of factual or logical evidence) that Plan Dalet was NOT a plan for systematic ethnic cleansing, that the use of violence, well-planned propaganda and whispering campaigns intended to terrorize the Palestinians into fleeing, along with the outright expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (including well-prepared operations in which tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced onto trucks and transported out of Zionist-controlled territory), were not part of any deliberate plan to remove the Palestinians.
What Pappe does is to lay bare this lie of Benny Morris’s and show that the inevitable conclusion is that the ethnic cleansing was not a coincidental result of the war, but rather one of its primary purposes, territorial expansion being the other.
It also brings to light in a less direct way that the war of 1948 was not a result of hordes of Arabs rushing in to annihilate the “new born state of Israel” (pardon me while I gag), but something else altogether.
Tell me about Morris. I was under the impression that he backed down under pressure after he corrected the historical record.
Didn’t he lose his job at the Jerusalem Post?
Benny Morris never worked for the Jerusalem Post. He is not a journalist, but a historian. Ironically, a few years after the publication of his book, which scandalized the Ben Gurion family because it busted wide open some of the fondest myths about David Ben Gurion, he received an appointment at Ben Gurion University in the Negev. I believe he is still there. At least he was a few years ago.
I corresponded with him briefly in the ’90’s, and an Israeli friend of mine met him once when he was doing some research for a high school history project. Said he was kind of an asshole.
There is a very ironic integrity to his work because he is a fervent Zionist with a strong, pretty ugly racist bent, and yet he meticulously documented and wrote the seminal work on the earliest crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians. For that he is admirable in a strange kind of way.
No contrast seems as extreme as between the two historians of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, Pappas and Morris. Really strange how individual differences or personality lead to diametrically opposed moral conclusions.
That would be Pappe. :o}
I have often wondered, and have discussed with some people what difference in personal qualities will allow, for example, one Jew to immigrate from the U.S. or Europe to Israel, buy into it 100%, and live the rest of their lives as a “proud Israeli” and fervent Zionist while another Jew with a very similar background makes the same trip, take a look around, recoils with horrified disappointment, and either leaves the country as quickly as possible or becomes an anti-Zionist activist, or both.
What is it that allows one to close his eyes or to accept what he sees, and what is it that forces the other to see clearly and find it unacceptable? I have never figured it out, but I wish someone would do a study.
People like Ilan Pappe and Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, and others are deeply moral, ethical people who cannot live on the blood and bones of others, and who have the courage to speak out about it.
Still, I cannot fault the honesty and professional ethics of Benny Morris. He did not try to hide what he found.
Excellent questions, deep questions. Morris also did not hide his bias, and frequently has used the plight of the American Indian to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Should we conclude with Sartre, that (the study of) man is “a useless passion,” that there are no answers to your question? Hitler was also honest during his last days, when he told his secretary, after destroying Germany and one of the most advanced cultures in Europe, at least I solved the Jewish problem. I’m reminded that some serial killers eventually fess up to their killings.
I wish some psychologist or sociologist would do a study.
By the way, he did not back down on his findings. He really couldn’t have because what he presented was irrefutable documentation mostly from the Israeli military and government of what they planned to do, how they planned to do it, what they did, and how they did it.
The thing about Benny Morris that was obvious from his first book on the creation of the refugees was his refusal to admit what his research clearly shows. His determination to believe that what took place was not a well-planned, systematic ethnic cleansing is glaring. On the other hand, in the last several years he has made it clear that the massacres, the rapes, the terrorism, and the – well, the ethnic cleansing – that he so meticulously and irrefutably documented and reported on were only objectionable to him because they did not go far enough. They did not get rid of ALL the “Arabs”, and that was a mistake in his opinion.
I have read where Morris has taken to using the rational that the ethnic cleansing of 1958 was no different than what Americans did to the native Indian population.
Yes, and that means, of course, that he finds genocide a perfectly acceptable tactic in the interest of nationalism.
Wait a minute – isn’t that what the Nazis believed?!
Or Jehovah??
I’ve started reading the stomach-churning ‘Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Ilan Pappe.
That book made me aware of the “Nakba”. Here in the states we need to see what has happened through unbiased eyes. The Palestinian people have legitimate grievance here. Israel is acting outside of international law. The illegal settlements cruelty. The blockade of Gaza was sadism. This bombardment and the coming invasion are murder.
Israel may be underestimating Palestinian resolve. The have made the whole population Hamas united and resisting Israel’s violent aggression. An invasion will not be pretty.
“Here in the states we need to see what has happened through unbiased eyes.“
A small while ago I started to write a comment inspired by two of the “small fat lies” I have been hearing on the media today. Unfortunately, while editing it, I managed to completely wipe out most of what I had already written, which wasvmore or less the heart of my point.
These “small fat lies” are important, because they are one of the means used to implant certain assumptions in the unconscious of the public (including, or perhaps especially media people, commentators, analysts, and politicians) that result in their internalizing a pro-Israeli, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim filter without realizing it. This is not a “conspiracy theory”, it is Marketing 101.
These are the two Small Fat Lies that for whatever reason have stuck in my mind today:
Small Fat Lie No. 1:
Hamas violently overthrew Fatah, which was the legitimate, democratically elected government, and took over Gaza.
Not true. In brief, Hamas, not Fatah, was the big winner in the 2006 Palestinian elections. This displeased Israel, the U.S., and the EU so much that they immediately instituted a regime of collective punishment of the Palestinians, imposing a blockade on Gaza in particular. Israel, apparently panicking, suddenly saw the need to arrest tens of duly elected Hamas government officials.
The split-up of the Hamas-Fatah unity government was hardly a simple matter of Hamas overthrowing Fatah, and was duly helped along by Israel and the U.S. (specifically the always incompetent Condi Rice). Too complicated to do justice to it now. Maybe later.
In any case, this lie has the purpose and the effect of delegitimizing Hamas while giving the impression that Fatah is and has always been the legitimate government. Whether you like Hamas or not, the Palestinians, including Christian, secular, and Muslim, elected them, and did so as an alternative to the corrupt, collaborationist thugs of Fatah.
Small Fat Lie No. 2:
Israel and Hamas have rejected a proposal for a ceasefire. (See how quickly and subtly the lie – “and Hamas” – gets by?)
Not at all true. Israel has unilaterally refused a ceasefire proposed by France. Israel has also refused a ceasefire called for by democratically elected Palestinians P.M. Ismail Haniya. It has been fairly widely reported – at least outside the U.S. MSM – that Haniya proposed this ceasefire.