Finkelstein triumphs at Cambridge debate on “Israel"

Norman Finkelstein triumphs in debate at Cambridge University on “Israel" as a rogue state

March, 2015 — In front of a large, cheering student audience, Dr. Finkelstein nails the long record of Israeli massacres of Arabs:

“If Jews are allowed to talk about six million, six million, six million, we can talk about the number of Palestinians killed.” -Norman Finkelstein

In the last 72 hours of the Israeli war in Lebanon in 2006, Israelis “dropped four million cluster munitions on south Lebanon…saturating entire villages, population centers…” -Norman Finkelstein

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Why the Israelis Didn’t Win in Gaza

Why Israel Didn’t Win

By Adam Shatz

London Review of Books 

http://www.lrb.co.uk/ 

December 6, 2012, pp. 3-5 

The ceasefire agreed by Israel and Hamas in Cairo after eight days of fighting is merely a pause in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It promises to ease movement at all border crossings with the Gaza Strip, but will not lift the blockade. It requires Israel to end its assault on the Strip, and Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets at southern Israel, but it leaves Gaza as miserable as ever: according to a recent UN report, the Strip will be ‘uninhabitable’ by 2020. And this is to speak only of Gaza. How easily one is made to forget that Gaza is only a part – a very brutalized part – of the ‘future Palestinian state’ that once seemed inevitable, and which now seems to exist mainly in the lullabies of Western peace processors. None of the core issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict – the Occupation, borders, water rights, repatriation and compensation of refugees – is addressed by this agreement. 

The fighting will erupt again, because Hamas will come under continued pressure from its members and from other militant factions, and because Israel has never needed much pretext to go to war. In 1982, it broke its ceasefire with Arafat’s PLO and invaded Lebanon, citing the attempted assassination of its ambassador to London, even though the attack was the work of Arafat’s sworn enemy, the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal. In 1996, during a period of relative calm, it assassinated Hamas’s bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, the ‘Engineer’, leading Hamas to strike back with a wave of suicide attacks in Israeli cities. When, a year later, Hamas proposed a thirty-year hudna, or truce, Binyamin Netanyahu dispatched a team of Mossad agents to poison the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman; under pressure from Jordan and the US, Israel was forced to provide the antidote, and Meshaal is now the head of Hamas’s political bureau – and an ally of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi.

War in Gaza as a means for the Israelis to test their new rocket defense shield, Iron Dome

Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel’s latest war, began just as Hamas was cobbling together an agreement for a long-term ceasefire. Its military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, was assassinated only hours after he reviewed the draft proposal. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, could have had a ceasefire – probably on more favorable terms – without the deaths of more than 160 Palestinians and five Israelis, but then they would have missed a chance to test their new missile defense shield, Iron Dome, whose performance was Israel’s main success in the war. They would also have missed a chance to remind the people of Gaza of their weakness in the face of Israeli military might. The destruction in Gaza was less extensive than it had been in Operation Cast Lead, but on this occasion too the aim, as Gilad Sharon, Ariel’s son, put it in the Jerusalem Post, was to send out ‘a Tarzan-like cry that lets the entire jungle know in no uncertain terms just who won, and just who was defeated’.

Victory in war is not measured solely in terms of body counts, however. And the ‘jungle’ – the Israeli word not just for the Palestinians but for the Arabs as a whole – may have the last laugh. Not only did Hamas put up a better fight than it had in the last war, it averted an Israeli ground offensive, won implicit recognition as a legitimate actor from the United States (which helped to broker the talks in Cairo), and achieved concrete gains, above all an end to targeted assassinations and the easing of restrictions on the movement of people and the transfer of goods at the crossings. There was no talk in Cairo, either, of the Quartet Principles requiring Hamas to renounce violence, recognize Israel and adhere to past agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: a symbolic victory for Hamas, but not a small one. And the Palestinians were not the only Arabs who could claim victory in Cairo. 

In diplomatic terms, the end of fighting under Egyptian mediation marked the dawn of a new Egypt, keen to reclaim the role that it lost when Sadat signed a separate peace with Israel. ‘Egypt is different from yesterday,’ Morsi warned Israel on the first day of the war. ‘We assure them that the price will be high for continued aggression.’ He underscored this point by sending his prime minister, Hesham Kandil, to Gaza the following day. While refraining from incendiary rhetoric, Morsi made it plain that Israel could not depend on Egyptian support for its attack on Gaza, as it had when Mubarak was in power, and would only have itself to blame if the peace treaty were jeopardized. After all, he has to answer to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organization, and to the Egyptian people, who are overwhelmingly hostile to Israel. The Obama administration, keen to preserve relations with Egypt, got the message, and so apparently did Israel. Morsi proved that he could negotiate with Israel without ‘selling out the resistance’, in Meshaal’s words. Internationally, it was his finest hour, though Egyptians may remember it as the prelude to his move a day after the ceasefire to award himself far-reaching executive powers that place him above any law.

Israelis fear Arab democracy

That Netanyahu stopped short of a ground war, and gave in to key demands at the Cairo talks, is an indication not only of Egypt’s growing stature, but of Israel’s weakened position. Its relations with Turkey, once its closest ally in the region and the pillar of its ‘doctrine of the periphery’ (a strategy based on alliances with non-Arab states) have deteriorated with the rise of Erdogan and the AKP. The Jordanian monarchy, the second Arab government to sign a peace treaty with Israel, is facing increasingly radical protests. And though Israel may welcome the fall of Assad, an ally of Hizbullah and Iran, it is worried that a post-Assad government, dominated by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brothers, may be no less hostile to the occupying power in the Golan: the occasional rocket fire from inside Syria in recent days has been a reminder for Israel of how quiet that border was under the Assad family. Israeli leaders lamented for years that theirs was the only democracy in the region. What this season of revolts has revealed is that Israel had a very deep investment in Arab authoritarianism. The unravelling of the old Arab order, when Israel could count on the quiet complicity of Arab big men who satisfied their subjects with flamboyant denunciations of Israeli misdeeds but did little to block them, has been painful for Israel, leaving it feeling lonelier than ever. It is this acute sense of vulnerability, even more than Netanyahu’s desire to bolster his martial credentials before the January elections, that led Israel into war.

Hamas, meanwhile, has been buoyed by the same regional shifts, particularly the triumph of Islamist movements in Tunisia and Egypt: Hamas, not Israel, has been ‘normalized’ by the Arab uprisings. Since the flotilla affair, it has developed a close relationship with Turkey, which is keen to use the Palestinian question to project its influence in the Arab world. It also took the risk of breaking with its patrons in Syria: earlier this year, Khaled Meshaal left Damascus for Doha, while his number two, Mousa Abu Marzook, set himself up in Cairo. Since then, Hamas has thrown in its lot with the Syrian uprising, distanced itself from Iran, and found new sources of financial and political support in Qatar, Egypt and Tunisia. It has circumvented the difficulties of the blockade by turning the tunnels into a lucrative source of revenue and worked, with erratic success, to impose discipline on Islamic Jihad and other militant factions in the Strip. The result has been growing regional prestige, and a procession of high-profile visitors, including the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who came to Gaza three weeks before the war and promised $400 million dollars to build housing and repair roads. The emir did not make a similar trip to Ramallah.

Hamas’s growing clout has not gone unnoticed in Tel Aviv: cutting Hamas down to size was surely one of its war aims. If Israel were truly interested in achieving a peaceful settlement on the basis of the 1967 borders – parameters which Hamas has accepted – it might have tried to strengthen Abbas by ending settlement activity, and by supporting, or at least not opposing, his bid for non-member observer status for Palestine at the UN. Instead it has done its utmost to sabotage his UN initiative (with the robust collaboration of the Obama administration), threatening to build more settlements if he persists: such, Hamas has been only too happy to point out, are the rewards for non-violent Palestinian resistance. Operation Pillar of Defense will further undermine Abbas’s already fragile standing in the West Bank, where support for Hamas has never been higher.

Does Palestine have a right to defend itself?

Hardly had the ceasefire come into effect than Israel raided the West Bank to round up more than fifty Hamas supporters, while Netanyahu warned that Israel ‘might be compelled to embark’ on ‘a much harsher military operation’. (Avigdor Lieberman, his foreign minister, is said to have pushed for a ground war.) After all, Israel has a right to defend itself. This is what the Israelis say and what the Israel lobby says, along with much of the Western press, including the New York Times. In an editorial headed ‘Hamas’s Illegitimacy’ – a curious phrase, since Hamas only seized power in Gaza after winning a majority in the 2006 parliamentary elections – the Times accused Hamas of attacking Israel because it is ‘consumed with hatred for Israel’. The Times didn’t mention that Hamas’s hatred might have been stoked by a punishing economic blockade. It didn’t mention that between the start of the year and the outbreak of this war, 78 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by Israeli fire, as against a single Israeli in all of Hamas’s notorious rocket fire. Or – until the war started – that this had been a relatively peaceful year for the miserable Strip, where nearly three thousand Palestinians have been killed by Israel since 2006, as against 47 Israelis by Palestinian fire.

Collective guilt of Gaza: the Israeli warrant for genocide

Those who invoke Israel’s right to defend itself are not troubled by this disparity in casualties, because the unspoken corollary is that Palestinians do not have the same right. If they dare to exercise this non-right, they must be taught a lesson. ‘We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza,’ Gilad Sharon wrote in the Jerusalem Post. ‘Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki too.’ Israel shouldn’t worry about innocent civilians in Gaza, he said, because there are no innocent civilians in Gaza: ‘They elected Hamas … they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.’ Such language would be shocking were it not so familiar: in Israel the rhetoric of righteous victimhood has merged with the belligerent rhetoric – and the racism – of the conqueror. Sharon’s Tarzan allusion is merely a variation on Barak’s description of Israel as a villa in the jungle; his invocation of nuclear war reminds us that in 2008, the deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai proposed ‘a bigger holocaust’ if Gaza continued to resist.

But the price of war is higher for Israel than it was during Cast Lead, and its room for maneuver more limited, because the Jewish state’s only real ally, the American government, has to maintain good relations with Egypt and other democratically elected Islamist governments. During the eight days of Pillar of Defense, Israel put on an impressive and deadly fireworks show, as it always does, lighting up the skies of Gaza and putting out menacing tweets straight from The Sopranos. 

 The Israelis, not Hamas, are the region’s pariahs

But the killing of entire families and the destruction of government buildings and police stations, far from encouraging Palestinians to submit, will only fortify their resistance, something Israel might have learned by consulting the pages of recent Jewish history. The Palestinians understand that they are no longer facing Israel on their own: Israel, not Hamas, is the region’s pariah. The Arab world is changing, but Israel is not. Instead, it has retreated further behind Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’, deepening its hold on the Occupied Territories, thumbing its nose at a region that is at last acquiring a taste of its own power, exploding in spasms of high-tech violence that fail to conceal its lack of a political strategy to end the conflict. Iron Dome may shield Israel from Qassam rockets, but it won’t shield it from the future.

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Finkelstein: Israeli army “most cowardly on earth"

There are many reasons Israel can't invade. The most obvious is, this time there are lots of foreign journalists in Gaza.  The IDF (Israeli army) is the most cowardly army on earth. They don't attack without first destroying everything in front and to the sides of them, which of course means massive civilian casualties.

 This time they can't do this because the operation was largely spontaneous, unlike Operation Cast Lead (in Gaza 2008-2009), so they weren't able to seal the borders.

There's even a NY Times reporter in Gaza, and she's plainly not happy with what she's seeing.  The Times even made an “error" yesterday and referred in the headline to the Israeli attack on "civilian buildings."  A few hours later they referred to "government buildings.”  But today the Times led with the deaths of 11 people, five women, four children (killed by the Israelis Sunday, Nov. 18; the victims are now said to be 12).

Of course, Israel can't be thrilled with this, and they know that in the event of a ground invasion, it'll be scores of civilians killed, not just because they like to kill civilians (which they do) but also because that's the only way the know (how) to fight: destroy everything in your path for miles around.  They can't do that now, but also Netanyahu can't risk significant IDF casualties.  (It would be a) Disaster with an (Israeli) election looming.  So, I still say, no invasion. --Norman Finkelstein

New York Times online, Monday Nov. 19, 2012

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Mitt Romney: Clueless in “Israel”

By Michael Hoffman

Copyright ©2012 www.revisionisthistory.org

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney did his ritual obeisance in counterfeit “Israel,” propitiating the gods of war and holocaust denial with his former business partner at Boston Consulting Group, Benjamin “the Butcher” Netanyahu. Mr. Romney also placed a note to the Talmudic deity in the supposed “western wall of the Temple,” while wearing the obligatory yarmulke Talmudic head gear.

Of course the American media were complicit in the farce, failing to ask Romney how much a gallon of gas will cost American drivers if “Israel” bombs Iran (around five bucks a gallon). They also ”forgot” to ask him what the bill to American taxpayers will be to fulfill Romney’s scheme to base a U.S. aircraft carrier task force permanently off the coast of Iran, at a time when Republicans say we must drastically cut the Federal budget.

Romney flirted with anti-Arab bigotry from the Ayn Rand school of disembodied  economics, by opining that it was unspecified “cultural differences” which accounted for the huge disparity in Palestinian and Israeli incomes: "As you come here and you see the [Gross Domestic Product] per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality," Romney said, according to a media pool report.

In fact, the Washington Post reports that the difference is far more stark than that. “According to the World Bank, Israel's GDP per capita is actually $31,282. The same figure for the Palestinian areas is around $1,600.”

"Culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference," Romney said, repeating the conclusion he drew from a book by David S. Landes, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.”


How soon we forget when the holocaust is against people who are not considered holy: during “Operation Cast Lead,” the Israelis used white phosphorus on schools and hospitals in Gaza from December, 2008 to January, 2009. They killed 1400 people, mostly civilians. They destroyed some 4,000 Palestinian homes and flattened 80 Palestinian government buildings.


 Palestinian access to their own farmland and water supplies are routinely restricted, denied or “appropriated” by the Israelis. Palestinian trade and commerce are heavily impeded. In addition to ignoring the Israeli mass murder of Palestinians, Romney did not mention that “Israel” controls all crossings to Palestinian lands. Israelis have imposed a blockade of Gaza since Hamas won an election there in 2007. In the West Bank, the Israelis continue to severely blockade Palestinian trade and movement. Romney has no clue concerning any of these destructive policies which have strangled the Palestinian economy.

Romney has to be a political illiterate or a clown to equate Palestinian workers and managers with Israelis, as if they were both competing on equal terms in the business world. This is what denial of the slow motion holocaust of Palestinians by the Israelis engenders: a make-believe foreign policy that leads America from one foreign war money-pit disaster to another, based not on pragmatic geo-politics, but  a reality twisted and warped by the demands of Israeli supremacy over the Middle East.

The Republican candidate for President of the United States ignores the slaughter of Palestinians and the mass destruction of their housing less than four years after it happened. Romney just can’t factor a little thing like the Israeli subjugation and slaughter of an occupied people when doing his libertarian economic analysis. This is beyond callous. It is merciless. While none of us is allowed to forget the smallest chapter in the Zionist tale of eternal woe from the Middle Ages to the Munich Olympics, the Israeli demolition of Gaza and the human and financial consequences that accrued from that human rights horror are already a will-o’-the-wisp.

It is said by some on the Right that Romney is the conservative alternative to Obama. If Romney was trying to conserve anything resembling western civilization he would have condemned MK (Member of the Knesset) Michael Ben-Ari who, on July 17 in Jerusalem destroyed a copy of the New Testament by ripping out its pages and terming it “garbage,” after it was mailed to him by a missionary. Romney, the tough talking “Republican conservative” had nothing to say in defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ which was traduced three weeks ago by a barbarian who happens to be a member of the Israeli parliament.

If someone in Palestine had ripped out pages of the Babylonian Talmud and called it garbage while tossing it in the trash, Mitt would have thundered denunciations of “this biased hate crime against a holy book.”

Biased hate crimes against Jesus Christ’s holy book don’t register, however.

So which God does Mr. Romney serve, the god self-made from the swamp of Judaic racial pride, or Jesus Christ who, when it comes to Zionist depredations against His Name and Word, seems to have few defenders, though many come preaching “Lord, Lord.”

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism’s Strange Gods and Judaism Discovered, and executive editor of Revisionist History newsletter.

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Remembering Israeli holocaust against Palestinians

Human rights activists gather at the Deir Yassin Massacre Memorial on the shore of Seneca Lake in upstate New York

Led by Prof. Dan McGowan, eighteen people gather in New York to bear witness to the Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians, as symbolized by the Deir Yassin massacre.

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Israeli Woman Seriously Injured as "Holocaust Siren" Sounds (Thursday, April 19th, 2012)

At 10:00am Thursday morning, a two-minute siren was heard nationwide marking the beginning of "Holocaust" Remembrance Day events. As the siren sounded, a 64-year-old woman on King Shaul Street in Beersheva was struck by a vehicle as she stood at attention during the siren. She was struck by a passing vehicle and seriously injured as she was thrown and pinned between two cars, apparently sustaining a serious head injury. She was transported to the trauma unit of Soroka Hospital in the city. Elsewhere, another woman sustained moderate injuries as she too was struck during the siren on Route 44. She was transported to Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv.

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Clinton's hypocritical rant against Syria, Russia and China

Mrs. Clinton’s hypocritical rant against Syria, Russia and China:

she had no similar outrage when Israelis massacred Palestinians 2008-2009

Manufactured Disgust and Imperial Cynicism

by Ben Schreiner / February 27th, 2012

Since failing to win United Nations Security Council backing for “regime change” in Syria, Washington and its lackeys in the corporate media have been unrelenting in voicing their great moral outrage at both the violence of the Assad regime and the seeming indifference to it all by the likes of Russia and China. Washington is no doubt long in forgetting those that thwart the will of the “international community.” After all, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, the “travesty” of the Russian and Chinese veto left the entire Security Council “neutered.”

Given this, it was of little surprise to see Ms. Clinton mount her soapbox once more last week in Tunis at the meeting of the so-called “friends of Syria.” As Ms. Clinton moralized Friday:

It’s quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto when people are being murdered, women, children, brave young men. Houses are being destroyed. It is just despicable. And I ask, whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people.

Clinton’s remarks won swift and high praise from the American punditry. On the PBS Newshour, Mark Shields swooned over Clinton’s performance. As he commented, “It was impassioned. It was eloquent. It was really, I thought, quite moving.” David Brooks likewise fawned, “The reaction was something I think we should be proud of, clearly a lot of passion, a lot of directness.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, also weighted in on the Syrian crisis with a Friday editorial (titled “Syria’s Horrors“). As the paper argued, “The United States and Europe need to use all their powers of persuasion and shaming to get Moscow and Beijing to cut all ties [with Syria].” In an editorial published just a week prior (titled “The Enablers“), the Times called on Russia and China to finally “meet the test of leadership” by “standing against Mr. Assad’s siege on his people.” Little doubt, then, that the Times also took heart in Clinton’s Tunis show.

But least one think the violence gripping Syria really moves such pillars of the U.S. liberal establishment like the New York Times and Ms. Clinton, let us briefly recall how the both responded to Operation Cast Lead. That is, Israel’s 23-day assault on the Gaza strip in late 2008, early 2009. The Israeli assault—or more properly, war crime—left a total of 1,385 Palestinians dead, 318 of which were under the age of 18. (5,300 more Palestinians were also wounded.)

So, as Israel slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, did Ms. Clinton deride the distressing murder of women and children? Did she bemoan a “neutered” Security Council unable to respond? No. Instead, just the same as then President-elect Obama, Ms. Clinton hid behind the notion that “there is only one secretary of state.” Not that she would have acted any differently had she been actively serving as secretary of state.

But how about the Times? Did the paper of record lament the horrors unfolding in Gaza? Did it call on the U.S. to meet the test of leadership and stand against the Israel siege of Gaza? No. In fact, in the midst of the slaughter, the Times boldly editorialized, “Israel must defend itself.” Then to perhaps demonstrate their “humanity,” the editorial board cautiously affirmed that, “Israel must make every effort to limit civilian casualties.” The Israeli motive behind its attack on Gaza, of course, was beyond rebuke for the Times.

The great anxiety presently on prominent display by the U.S. liberal establishment over the violence in Syria is then nothing but a public show of manufactured disgust. Such displays of outrage by the likes of Ms. Clinton and the New York Times are really little more than cynical ploys veiling imperial aims.

In fact, a recent Times op-ed by former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, arguing that the ouster of Assad would lead to a strategic defeat of Iran, encapsulates the real motives behind all such contrived outrage. As Mr. Halevy wrote:

Getting Iran booted out of Syria is essential for Israel’s security. And if Mr. Assad goes, Iranian hegemony over Syria must go with him. Anything less would rob Mr. Assad’s departure of any significance.

He noted further, “The current standoff in Syria presents a rare chance to rid the world of the Iranian menace to international security and well-being.”

Now, without a doubt, the Syrian people have every right to resist despotic rule. But they would be wise to give pause to their purported “friends” residing amongst the U.S. liberal elite who employ such imperial cynicism. 

Ben Schreiner is a freelance writer living in Salem, Oregon. He may be reached at: bnschreiner@gmail.com

The appearance of Mr. Schreiner's essay here does not constitute or imply his endorsement of the views expressed in On the Contrary.

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Read, distribute, review and publicize Judaism's Strange Gods by Michael Hoffman. This is the best book on Judaism for educating people about the hidden side of a much glorified, but soul-destroying religion of warfare and deception. Don't let this high-power ammunition go to waste! Most Christians have never heard of this outstanding book. Win the war of ideas with Judaism's Strange Gods! Our children's future depends upon it. Quality paperback. Illustrated. 381 pages. $17.95 plus shipping. 

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Partial List of Contents: Principle Sources of the Divine Law of the Religion of Orthodox Judaism; The Rabbinic Eras; Rabbinic Law vs. Biblical Law; Judaism's Attack On The Biblical Prophets And Patriarchs; The Talmud: Only a Record of Debates?; "The Babylonian Talmud Represents God in the Flesh"; Judaism's Hermeneutic of Concealment in Theory and Practice; The Tarnish on Hillel's Golden Rule; A Gigantic Heap of Self-Perpetuating Legal and Textual Arcana; Falsifying Scripture with Gezera Shava; "A Hedge Around the Law"; Loopholes And Escape Clauses; "The Pious of the Nations" Loophole; Four Exegetical Categories: PaRDeS;  Outright Lies and Deception; Permissible Categories of Lying; The Deceiver's Gloss on Exodus 23:7; Why Women Have Not Been Allowed to Study the Talmud; Bribery; Defrauding Workers; The Authority of the Talmud; The Inferiority of Gentiles; Gentile is not a Brother or a Neighbor; Jews May Kill Non-Jews; Torat Hamelech: Warrant For The Murder Of Gentiles; The Status of the Gentile in Jewish Law; Non-Jews are "Supernal Refuse"; The Halachos of Manslaughter: "Lifting and Lowering";  Judaism Teaches: Abraham & Isaac were Tainted with Lust; Rabbinic Texts are a Virulent Source of Anti-Black Racism; Every Gentile's Mother, Daughter and Sister: NShGZ; New World Order: U.S. Government Lays The Groundwork For Talmudic Courts; Christians in the Talmud; Escape Clauses and Loopholes Concerning the Rabbinic Ban on Churches; Talmud Citations Concerning Christianity; Balaam: The Talmud's Code Name for Jesus; Christianity Alleged to be a Form of Prostitution; Mary the Mother of Jesus as "Sedata" (a promiscuous woman); Establishing a Legal Principle for Courtroom Entrapment of Christ and Christians; Pandera and Balaam: Jesus as a Bastard in the Talmud; Origen Contra the Antichrist Rabbinic Calumnies of Celsus; Anti-Goyimitic and Anti-Christian Hatred; Divine Mandate to Kill Jesus Christ and Christians; Judaism's Reincarnation Dogma;  Star of Bohemia, Not David; Kaparot: The Sin Chicken; The X-Rated Talmud; Judaism and Menstruation; Judaism and Abortion; Converts and Conversions to Judaism; Yom Kippur and the Kol Nidrei Nullification of Vows; Judaism's Holy Days; Birkat HaMinim: The Curse on Christians; Child Molestation and Homosexuality; Glossary; Index.

The enemies of Truth are extremely energetic and dedicated to their cause. What about us, we who say we are for the Truth? Have we matched their energy and dedication? Or do we wallow in apathy and inaction? The hour is late. Racist Talmudism rules America through Churchianity, the media,  the Federal government, and powerful institutions such as the highly influential Cardozo School of Law, an affiliate of a Talmudic yeshiva --where future elite lawyers and judges are trained in rabbinic halacha. Let us go forward with Judaism's Strange Gods,  and with God's help, engage in the war of ideas in accordance with His will. If Judaism's Strange Gods is not the best tool in this fight, please tell us what is. If, however, it is indeed the most effective book for educating the public concerning the toxic Talmudic Trojan horse in our midst which daily grows more powerful, to what degree have you utilized it? 

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The Gaza Massacre by “Israel” (video)

The Gaza Massacre from Sana Kassem on Vimeo.

The agents of Israeli messianism are preaching the overthrow of the Syrian and Iranian governments due to their tyrannies and in Iran’s case, alleged weapons of mass destruction (where have we heard that before?).

The Israeli agents in the media can run this scam because the mass media always “forget” Israeli atrocities, war crimes and massacres.

We don’t forget.

The Israelis used white phosphorus on schools and hospitals in Gaza from December, 2008 to January, 2009. They killed 1400 people, mostly civilians.

Why would one holocaust be worth more than another?

There has been a holocaust against the Palestinians.

It is our duty to remember and not let it happen again.

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VIDEO: Talmudic Mentality in the History of World War II

Hoffman analyzes the propaganda system’s presentation of the religion of Holcaustianity as objective history, in terms of its function as the expression of the Talmudic mentality, and the dual standards which this mentality imposes on the genocide debate, with certain prerogatives and immunities reserved solely for a privileged few, denominated by Hoffman as the "Master Race of Holy People." Hoffman's point of departure is a Zionist protest over the appearance of Dr. Norman Finkelstein at Rutgers University in November, 2010.

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Israeli war criminal: General Yoav Gallant

Editor's Note: Mass murderer Yoav Gallant is not being sought as a war crime suspect anywhere in the West and he is hardly even known outside of Palestine.

Man responsible for Israel's cruelest wars only attracts praise

By Gideon Levy | Haaretz | July 16, 2009

A huge weight has been lifted off our chests: Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant will stay in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Although Gallant was not named deputy chief of staff, Defense Minister Ehud Barak publicly declared that he views him as a candidate to succeed Gabi Ashkenazi as chief of staff. The military correspondents, those who only spoke glowingly of Gallant during the entire appointments commotion, put their minds at ease. And the brainwashed public, which shows no interest in learning what our soldiers did in Gaza, were also put at ease.

The fact that this feted general is directly responsible for two brutal military operations in Gaza which have no equal - Summer Rains and Cast Lead - did not even warrant a mention in the public forum. While more and more suspicions and well-founded allegations over the IDF's behavior in Gaza, especially during Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 - January, 2009), surface all over the world, here a general of this "war" - really a brutal assault on a helpless population - only attracts praise.

Suspected war crimes? Violations of High Court rulings? No mention of those at all. Gallant has always been in favor of large operations in Gaza. He kept pushing for more strikes and more destruction, as much as possible. In the summer of 2006, his wish was granted and he took command of Operation Summer Rains. The result was 394 Palestinian deaths and a thousand wounded. The lone power station in Gaza was bombed along with the university and a number of bridges. A grand success.

At the time, nobody wondered why all this killing was necessary and who benefited from all this destruction. What was the reason for bombing a power station, except for meting out collective punishment, which has long proven to not only be a criminal act, but also a foolish one? Gallant emerged from "Summer Rains" unblemished.

He had the same success following Cast Lead. A war with almost no Israeli deaths is always a success, without commissions of inquiry and with no questions asked. To hell with the horrible price exacted from the other side, including the hundreds of women and children killed and the thousands of homes destroyed. Gallant commanded the most cruel war in Israel's history. In order to understand what happened in Gaza, it is worthwhile to read the report issued Wednesday (July 15) by the (army) reservist group "Breaking the Silence." The group recorded 54 testimonials of 30 combat troops that should come to represent the dark period in history that was this war, a war over which a blacker-than-black flag flies.

From the "neighbor procedure" of using people as human shields, which is a gross violation of a High Court ruling, a public scandal in itself; to the spirit of words uttered by a commander who is quoted by a number of the soldiers as saying that was preferable to harm bystanders than to hesitate in hurting the enemy. "If you are not sure, shoot," one of the soldiers quoted him as saying. The soldier added, "The firepower was insane ... In urban warfare, everyone is an enemy. There is no difference between innocent civilians and enemies."

It is for this that Gallant is responsible. He orchestrated a war in which there were almost no instances of combat, all the while inculcating an awful attitude within the IDF, one that says it is permissible for us to do anything: to drop thousands of bombs, shells, and missiles in addition to phosphorus shells and flechettes; to kill whole families and to sow destruction on a horrific scale while considering it all a success.

"They didn't set a goal for us," one of the combat soldiers said in the report, which recounts the destruction the soldiers wreaked just for its own sake. "I don't know what the objective of the war was."

Our Southern Command chief is a hero against the weak. While he rose through the ranks at sea, where his resumé is full of top-secret missions, his stint on land is nothing to write home about. He always makes sure to be photographed wearing dark sunglasses, his personal weapon while "on duty." In the meantime, the deep baritone voices of the military correspondents on television shower praise upon him in light of his grand achievements. But the truth is that this is a joke, a sad military joke that is drenched in blood. It was one of the most advanced arsenals of weapons in the world against those who launch empty pipes; hundreds of tons of smart and stupid bombs against factories and schools; precision-guided unmanned aerial vehicles that killed children; the tiny few of our dead, many from friendly fire incidents. In summation: military heroism on the cheap.

All these factors will not hold up Gallant's promotion. They will be credited to him as sparkling successes on his way to the top. And it is only the soldier who gave the 54th testimonial in the "Breaking the Silence" report who understood what the general who is a candidate for chief of staff did not: "I didn't leave there with a feeling of heroism or great sacrifice. Just plain disgusted, bored and stupid. I did not feel I did anything significant. I convinced myself, 'Okay, I was in Gaza, I can tell my buddies.'" Like him, Galant also told his buddies, and the buddies bought it with giddiness and blind admiration.

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The effect of Israeli war crimes in Gaza six months later

Editor's note: Here is more testimony of the ongoing Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians, war crimes by the so-called "Jewish state," which most of the rulers, intelligentsia, media, and human rights mavens of the West deny. Consequently, they are all holocaust deniers. The Zionists claim that Pope Pius XII was "silent" about the Nazi "Holocaust" and this is a major issue in the western media confronting the Catholic Church. But how much of an issue is the silence regarding the Israeli holocaust -- a holocaust which continues to this day? Are you silent about --and therefore complicit in-- Israeli mass murder of the Palestinian people?

online slideshow of Israeli war crimes in Gaza

A life in Ruins

In the immediate aftermath of Israel's bloody three-week war with Hamas in January, Peter Beaumont travelled to Gaza and met the Palestinians devasted by the death of their families and the destruction of their neighborhoods. Six months later he returns to find they are still waiting - to rebuild both their homes and their lives

by Peter Beaumont • The Observer, July 5, 2009

Shifa Salman, in the ruins of her family home, which was destroyed by the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in January 2009. Photographs: Antonio Olmos

The force of the explosion that destroyed Shifa Salman's house in the northern Gaza district of Jabal al-Rayas folded floor into floor as easily as pastry. It pushed pillars through concrete, reconfiguring her home into a bristling dome. The tail-fin of one of the Israeli bombs responsible still sits on top of the rubble, innocuous as a child's discarded toy. These days, pigeons and sparrows nest in the cave-like space carved out by the detonation inside the ruins where mattresses and bags of flour are stored, the latter stencilled with the initials of the World Food Programme. Sleek, aggressive cockerels patrol the floor, flying at intruders.
Six months after Israel's war against Gaza, Shifa, a 20-year-old student, sleeps with her family behind the fallen house. A trodden path leads through the rubble to a row of cramped, ramshackle shelters open to the elements and roofed with hessian sacks. They are identical to the cattle pens that stand beside them.

On closer examination I can see that the frames have been constructed out of cast-off sections of wood and metal lashed together. What walls that exist are fashioned out of old pallets and branches woven into crude wicker. Or more sacking, staked into the soil to make rudimentary windbreaks.

Shifa's family are Bedouin. Until recently they farmed this land close to the barrier, in an area once used for missile launches against the Jewish communities on the far side. This was one of Gaza's limited areas of agricultural production in a densely crowded urban area, home to 1.4 million people. Because of the missiles, this neighbourhood of farms and little factories was treated to a scorched earth policy.

Inside Shifa's own tiny, dirt-floored "compound" a fire pit has been scooped out of the earth and filled with twigs. On it sits the blackened pan in which Shifa and her mother make stews of molokhiya - spinach-like greens - with chicken, garlic and onions. "This is my kitchen," says Shifa shyly, in English. A piece of broken board is propped on two drums to function as table. Here a jam jar sits, holding a pestle and a solitary sharp knife.

I first came to this house in January, in the immediate aftermath of Israel's war against Gaza, visiting the Salman family almost every day. The family were sleeping in the ruins to shelter from the rain, surrounded by the stinking bodies of their sheep, killed during the assault. Then, Shifa complained that the frightened younger children were kept awake at night by the sound of packs of dogs scavenging among the carrion outside.

A slight and pretty woman with dark brows, Shifa is walking along a road where the ruined houses of her neighbourhood stand on each side like stone-piled graves in a desert. It is 7am and she is on her way to meet the bus that will take her to university. She is wearing a black abaya, the head-to-ankle veil that is the uniform of the university, and carrying a pile of her books. Both books and the veil were donated by the college after Shifa's family lost most of what it owned. "There used to be a factory here," says Shifa, pointing at a collapsed, blue-painted metal structure. I am reminded of the last time I saw this building. A herd of cows lay slaughtered in the field outside.

"My life used to be so good when we had a home. Now it is awful." She wipes a tear away, trying to hide what she is doing. "This street used to be full of cars," Shifa explains. "It was easy to get to university. Now I have to walk for half an hour before I can get a ride. There used to be houses here, but everyone fled after the F-16s attacked. After the tanks attacked. Only a few of us have stayed."

So few, in fact, I quickly learn their names. There is the Khader family, who have built a complex cloth-walled shelter on top of the ruins of one of their houses, a structure that has expanded over the months as new rooms have been added. One day I find the men of the family crawling into a dark hole beneath the house to chip out tiles from what was once their ground floor to sell for food, disturbing a nest of pinkly squirming newborn mice.

There is the owner of the dairy parlor, Mohammed al-Fayoun, whose cattle were killed. He has set up business again beneath the bent and twisted rafters of his metal roof, where he sits daily in a plastic chair. He complains his customers are still too scared to visit him this close to the border with Israel.

While her fathers and uncles work the land, Shifa is representative of a new generation - the first from her family to go to university. She says she wants to be a geography teacher and has an exam today. "I used to have a television in my room," she says, passing the house of Nabil Nasser Hassan, once one of her neighbours, whose demolished home is now surrounded by a stockade of corrugated metal sheeting to keep out looters hunting for pipes and wire to recycle. "At the beginning, people came to give us coupons and blankets. But no one has come to see us for a long time. No one has spoken to us about rebuilding our home. I'm scared living where we live. All of the family is, especially my sister Safa when she hears the [Israeli] jets."

It is not only Shifa's daily walk at 7am through the ruins to reach the Islamic University that is a mark of her changed life. Before the destruction visited by the bombs, tanks and bulldozers, Shifa says, she would sit up after dark, reading her books in her own room, which was decorated with posters of animals. Now when the light fades, she must cease her studying. "I used to spend all night working. I'm good," she says with confidence. "But now I'm struggling. And I know if I can succeed, I can make life better for my family."

Israel's Operation Cast Lead began on 27 December 2008. By the time of its conclusion on 18 January, with the declaration by both Israel and Hamas - which governs Gaza - of their own unilateral ceasefires, more than 1,300 Palestinians had been killed, many of them civilians. They had perished under an Israeli rain of bombs, bullets, missiles and artillery fire, including white phosphorous munitions.

While Israel insisted the war was designed to bring a halt to the launching of home-made missiles out of the Gaza Strip, its targets suggested wider aims, not least the dismantling of Palestinian institutions. Police stations, ministries, schools and hospitals were hit. Orange groves and tunnel tents for growing strawberries and vegetables were uprooted. And thousands of houses were damaged.

On my return, I scour Gaza for evidence that anything has changed for the better in the months since the war ended. But houses and other buildings destroyed during the conflict remain as hollowed-out and dusty monuments to violence. In places, some owners have experimented with repairing buildings with an adobe made of mud and straw baked in the sun. But it is a very temporary solution.

In the office of Dr Ibrahim Radwan, the man appointed by the Hamas government to record the damage done in Israel's three-week war, I jot down the numbers that describe what happened. Some 3,800 homes and businesses badly damaged in one way or another - although he admits this includes some damaged in previous Israeli attacks. In addition, 80 government buildings were hit. Radwan has his own categories to describe the degrees of destruction, but after a week driving around Gaza, the damage conforms to its own types. The big metal walls of the workshops on Salahadeen Road, where the heaviest fighting took place, now leak light through hundreds of bullet perforations; other walls are splashed with the shrapnel of missiles fired from drones; blocks of flats hit by artillery fire show scorched holes. And across the north of the Gaza Strip stand the weird igloos of the bomb-flattened houses.

There are changes that I do register in the six months since the war ended. The bodies of dead animals have been removed and cleared away; the ruins have been sifted for human remains. It has expunged the odour of decay that was once tangy with the chemical flavour of explosives and spent phosphorous. The tangled remnants of an orange grove I drove past every day, tipped over and torn by military bull-dozers, has disappeared, razed for firewood.

And without concrete and steel, aluminium and glass, without tiles for roofs and cladding for stairs and bathrooms - all prevented from entering Gaza by Israel's continuing economic blockade - no rebuilding has begun. For those who suffered most, the war continues.

I run into Shifa's father by chance one day at Gaza City's flea market, in the Yarmouk district. He tells me he comes once every fortnight to look through stalls selling broken and unwanted things in the hope of finding something that might alleviate their circumstances. He shows me the contents of his white plastic shopping bag: two plastic joints for connecting water pipes. Bought in the hope that he might one day have a use for them.

It is not only the physical symptoms that persist as a reminder of what happened in Gaza. Sana al-Ar's family live in a light but sparsely furnished fifth-floor flat in a tower block in Shujaiya. There are photographs on the wall of 16-year-old Sana's younger brothers, Rakan and Ibrahim, and her father Mohammed - all killed during Israel's attack. Missing are pictures of her 18-year-old sister, Fida, and her brother's wife, Iman, who also perished. In a room decorated with gold curtains and floor cushions, Malak, the youngest surviving child, plays on the carpet, in a T-shirt printed with the slogan "Daddy's Little Tiger". But Daddy is gone.

Holocaust survivor Sana al-Ar

On 3 January, Israeli tanks attacked the area where Sana and her family lived. Their house - like Shifa's - was located close to the border, not far from a pretty, gold-domed mosque and a graveyard. Shifa Salman's family managed to flee. But Sana's family - her mother says - were blown to "pieces of meat". It is left to Sana's grandmother to recount the story, while the girl and her mother listen. She tells how a rocket hit the house, injuring Fida with shrapnel. She quickly bled to death. The father told the family to flee in their donkey cart, but a second missile exploded, fatally injuring him, too. I listen as Sana's grandmother describes how in the smoke from the explosion the weeping mother found her son Ibrahim "missing half his face". The family gathered what they could of their dead in a blanket and took them to a neighbour's house, where they were trapped, sitting with the bodies, for five days.

I had heard about Sana in January, from Dr Fadel Abu Hein at Gaza City's Community Training Center and Crisis Management. Fadel was sending teams of social workers and therapists to run workshops for the most badly affected children, even working with them as they sat on blankets in the rubble. As we talked about the types of trauma suffered by children during the conflict, he mentioned a girl who had seen most of her family die and had spent days trapped with their bodies. I had met her the following day, at the house of an uncle she was staying with. And I had tried to talk to Sana then. But sitting on a bed in a cold, bare basement room, she had been withdrawn behind a wall of grief, managing to speak barely a handful of words. Instead, it was the other relatives who had crowded the room who supplied answers to my questions. The only thing I learned was that she liked to paint, and so I had bought her pens and paper, since all of hers were lost.

Sitting in her new flat, Sana fetches the only drawing she says she has done since the killing of her brothers - in charcoal grey, against a shaded blue background, are the names of the boys. A day later, I learn from Nahid Hanrarah, the social worker who has worked most closely with Sana, that she has done other paintings, paintings of her family drenched in blood.

"Painting their names is an improvement," Nahid says. He adds that Sana is much improved, but when I ask her questions, she answers in fragmented sentences: "Things aren't too much better. Everything is still... I feel things are separate. The anger and the sadness. The one who could make us happy [Sana's father] is the one we've lost."

There are long pauses when Sana looks away. "People have tried to help me. There have been people at school ... " Sana mentions her irritation at those among her friends who insist on trying to talk to her about what happened on 3 January and in the days that followed. "I feel I can't concentrate at school like I used to," Sana explains. "I hate it because people at school keep asking how my family died. They think if I talk then it will help me. That is why I went to see Nahid. Because it makes me so upset.

I don't want to talk about it." Sana is also scared to go to the bathroom alone and, she tells me, she suffers with nightmares. I learn from talking to Nahid that Sana was suicidal when she was first referred to him. "She didn't want to live. She had no hope," he explains quietly.

It has not only been at school where Sana has been confronted by what happened. At home, too, she has had to deal with constant reminders of her loss from her mother, Laila, whose grief is even more debilitating.

"I think," Nahid suggests, "that Sana is the only one in the immediate family who really understands what happened to them, and who can help the family. Her mother can't do anything, really. So the responsibility has fallen on Sana. Sana is growing [as a person] from the knowledge of all the things that she passed through, which is helping her to overcome. But it is a process that is far from complete. They were a family of nine, now only four are left."

There are moments when you see an echo of how this family must once have been. Before the Israeli soldiers came. Before the war. Malak crawls on to her mother's knee with her doll and squeals loudly: "Bite her! Bite her!" Suddenly I realise that Sana is smiling at her mother. It is the first time in five visits to this family that I have seen her smile. And when she does, another girl is briefly visible.

And Sana is smiling again when I next see her. We are talking about ordinary things other than the horror that befell her; about the films she likes to watch - Bollywood and action films, X-Men - about her new computer, and the internet connection she is waiting for with excitement: "Before, we didn't have a computer. I've had it two weeks." Then the pain is in the room again. "The first thing I'm going to do is put pictures on it of my father and my sister and my brothers."

She seems sad, but not unreachable. I ask Sana if she will be going to the beach in the holidays, but it is her mother who answers: "We used to go to the sea, all of us together. We don't go any more ... " There are ghosts in the room that Laila cannot ignore. And because Laila cannot ignore them, Sana is also bound to observe them, and to mirror her mother's grief.

Laila says she has nothing left, and I remind her of Sana and Malak. She looks up at the pictures above her. "Rakan was the most beautiful," she sobs, as Sana begins to cry, quietly. "He was only four and a half. He was a very naughty boy. People kept saying to his father: 'This boy will be someone.'" When his sister went to carry him, I did not recognise him. He had come to pieces."

In Dr Fadel's office, decorated with pictures of dead Palestinian fighters, he tries to assess what has changed and what has not. Some people have begun to rebuild their lives, while others living in tents, or displaced, or living - like Shifa's family - among the ruins remain largely in the circumstances they were in when the war ended. "The biggest obstacle that we are facing is among those people whose problems have not ended - who live in a continuing war atmosphere. Nothing is happening about the destroyed homes, because we live in a continuing state of economic siege. So there are people still living in tents, or in the rubble."

Visiting his office one day I am confronted with evidence of how those dealing with damage from the conflict can progress. Hanging on one wall are pictures drawn by trauma-affected children, before-and-after images whose real subject is the effects of exposure to violence, and how it can be mediated. The "before" pictures show soldiers with guns, tanks and jets, images of destruction and death. The "after" pictures show the ordinary stuff of childhood: flying kites and images of family and friends and flowers, produced after lengthy work with the centre's social workers.

I mistakenly believe that they come from the recent conflict. I am informed that they pre-date the war - describing the experience of Israeli military incursions and air strikes. When I ask to see drawings produced after the January war I am led to another series of sketches that depict - so far - only fighting. And examining them, I am reminded of another picture I had seen a few days before in Khan Younis, in Gaza's south, in a child's bedroom.

I had first encountered Rewa'a Omer, aged 30, in the Nasser Hospital, standing between the beds of her two children, her daughter Ola and her son Yahya. It was a few days after the ceasefire and Rewa'a was clutching a bloody piece of clothing. An hour or so before, 10-year-old Ola, and Yahya, nine, had been standing close to their school gates with a group of other primary school children, waiting for a lift to take them home. As they stood chatting, an Israeli drone had fired a missile at a passing Hamas fighter on a motorbike three metres from the children. The blast had driven shrapnel into the legs of the children and a sliver into Yahya's eye.

Until I see the poster in Ola's bedroom, I think she has recovered better than her brother. It depicts a baby's smiling face. But someone has drawn trickles of blood coming from the nose and mouth, and added small scarlet cuts. Rewa'a tells me it was Ola who had disfigured it. I notice, too, that she has shaded around the baby's eyes so that the skin appears yellow. I think of how her brother's face was in his hospital bed, bruised under the bandages and stained with something like iodine.

Rewa'a's family are what passes for middle class in Gaza. Her husband was a police captain in the Palestinian National Authority before Hamas's assumption of full executive power in 2007, at the end of the most violent period of the so-called "internal fighting" between Fatah and Hamas. He does not work now but still receives his salary. Well-educated, Rewa'a speaks excellent English.

The family asks me for a copy of the photograph I took on the day the children were injured, and Rewa'a shows me an image saved on her phone, given to her by a neighbour, that shows her son being carried from the scene in someone's arms, his head limp and bloody. "It was on the television. And I was not there to protect them."

There are still some marks on her daughter's legs, like dark bruises. "My son was injured worse," she says. "He is still shy about wearing shorts because of the scarring. There was shrapnel in his eye that we did not know about. He had to go to Egypt to be operated on. They have recovered physically," Rewa'a adds, "but emotionally my daughter is more damaged than my son. That first time that she saw her brother bleeding has stuck with her. I think it will always be inside. She talks about what happened and her grades at school have suffered. It was a month and a half before she was ready to go back to school."

Rewa'a says that Ola is still frightened to go to the bus stop, and "the children are always fighting now. I worry all the time about them, waiting for them to come home from school."

Ola wants to tell the story of what happened to her. "The car was late. There was a sound and I woke up and everything was black. Things were broken and bleeding. Then people came to rescue my brother. Someone took my hand. I said: 'My brother! My brother!'" I ask Ola what she would like most. She does not have to think about it: "I would like to live somewhere safe."

Yahya wants to talk about Egypt, where he went to have the shrapnel taken from his eye.

"I went to the zoo and saw the pyramids!"

"I feel that there is nowhere safe in Gaza any more," adds Rewa'a. "I used to think before that ... you know, we are ordinary people. This [the violence] had nothing to do with me."

When I visit Rewa'a again we climb up on to the flat roof of their building. Fading home-made kites are propped in tangles of string against the balustrade. Rewa'a seems oppressed by the thought of what has happened. "I wish that they could have a normal childhood. I didn't grow up in Gaza, I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I came back to Gaza when I was 16. I had a beautiful childhood. I want the same for them. Not this.

"Every time the summer holidays come round I wish there was something that they could do. Hobbies that could help them grow. But there is nothing here like that." I remind her of something that Yahya told me when I asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He replied that he wanted to be a fighter. "Yahya says that. But it is just an idea in his head."

As we are leaving I ask Rewa'a if she has any hope that things might change in Gaza. She seems sad. "Nothing ever changes. There is no rebuilding. Everything becomes worse.

Nothing here ever changes for the better."

Child survivors of the Israeli Holocaust in Gaza

The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict by Peter Beaumont will be published in the U.S. on Sept. 1, 2009.

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