Steve Kamlish, Human Rights lawyer has just returned from Gaza and has written a report about conditions there.
You can read it here. But it doesn't make pleasant reading.
He describes what happen to the Al Samouni family
29 members of the Al Samouni family were slaughtered, including over 10 children and seven women
Inside their command post the Israelis have scrawled graffiti on some walls which says things like ‘1 Arab down, 999,999 to go’, alongside Stars of David, slogans such as ‘make war not peace’ and a chilling drawing of a tombstone on which it is written Arabs 1948-2008. When they exited the house they started fires in the remaining rooms and left human shit in many of the rooms.
This man is a highly respected lawyer. A QC (Queens Counsel, though chosen by legal peers not Elizabeth) and the website it's posted on Jews for Justice for Palestinians is not anti-semitic.
Amira Hass's report in Haaretz makes very similar reading. There is the same reference to the kind of graffiti left by Israeli soldiers.
On Monday, on one of the walls of the house that became the IDF position from which soldiers shot the two brothers who died at their father's side, we found two inscriptions in Hebrew: "The Jewish people lives" and "Kahane was right," referring to right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane.
And the statistics in the Haaretz report are chilling
The data, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, as of January 22,:
17,000 homes that were partially destroyed
4,000 homes destroyed completely.
1,285 dead, of whom 1,062 were non-combatants (895 civilians and 167 civilian police). Of these, 281 were children (21.8 percent) and 111 were women. There are 4,336 wounded, among them 1,133 children
Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper.
The Guardian describes the food crisis in Gaza.
We are hearing that 60% of the land in the north - where the farming was most intensive - may not be exploitable again. It looks to me like a disaster. It is not just farmland, but poultry as well.
And A secret database reveals the level of illegal settlement
Again the source is haaretz.
One final item. A piece of research from Tel Aviv
The conclusion it reaches:
Israeli Jews' consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering
Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Most of the nation retains a simplistic collective memory of the conflict, a black-and-white memory that portrays us in a very positive light and the Arabs in a very negative one," says the professor from Tel Aviv University.
I belive in the state of Israel. A secular Middle Eastern State prepared to share its wealth with its neighbours. Not a fundamentalist fanatical religious state dependent on superstition and prophecy from thousands of years ago, fighting its own jihad against those it disagrees with. Israeli neocons have the same respect for law and human rights and reason that the US ones did. Zilch. Zero.
I know that debate and discusssion is necessary and that will involve the readinesss to abandon entrenched positions. It's in that spirit I've posted this.