<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Wikileaks Cables on Israel&#8217;s Gaza&nbsp;Onslaught]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p><img class="aligncenter" src="https://occupiedpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/cpheader6.gif?w=403&#038;h=109" alt="" width="403" height="109" /></p>
<p class="style23"><span style="color:#990000;">January 19, 2011</span></p>
<p class="style23"><em><span style="color:#990000;">A CounterPunch Special Investigation</span></em></p>
<h1><em><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:xx-small;">US was Cheerleader for Massacre</span></em></h1>
<h1><span style="color:#990000;font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:x-small;">Wikileaks Cables on Israel&#8217;s Gaza Onslaught</span></h1>
<p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:xx-small;">By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON</span></p>
<p><span class="style23"><span class="style50">C</span></span><span class="style2"><em>ounterPunch</em> has accessed Wikileaks’ <strong><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/wikigazacables.html">file of cables</a></strong> on Israel’s Gaza assault two years ago (Operation Cast Lead, December  27, 2008 through January 18, 2009). Though the cables often  simply  rehash Israeli press reporting, providing  little new insight into  Israel’s attack or the planning behind it, they show with pitiless  clarity  the U.S. government to be little more than a handmaiden and  amanuensis of the Israeli military machine.</span></p>
<p class="style2">The cables make clear, were any further disclosure  needed, exactly where the United States stands with respect to Israel’s  unprovoked attacks on Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors.   Although Operation Cast Lead took place in the last days of the Bush  administration, ending two days before Barack Obama was inaugurated,  every Obama policy in the succeeding  two years – including the  administration’s repudiation of the Goldstone Report detailing Israeli  atrocities and war crimes during Cast Lead – has demonstrated a striking  continuity of support for Israeli actions.</p>
<p class="style2">The cables give a notably one-sided account of the  assault.  Because they take their daily reporting primarily from the  Israeli media, the cables keep a tally of rockets fired into Israel from  Gaza and dramatically describe “burned dolls and destroyed children’s  toys” at an unoccupied kindergarten in Beer Sheba hit by a rocket, but  make virtually no mention of Israel’s intensive air and artillery  bombardment of Gaza, including its civilian population.  There are no  reports of burned Palestinian babies or very few of destroyed property  in Gaza.  Even the western media provided more accurate coverage of  Palestinian casualties than this.</p>
<p class="style2">The U.S. embassy cables did provide some information  on Palestinian casualties, but the reporting was minimal.  In one cable  buried in the collection, approximately ten days into the assault,  western press reports are cited giving a single report of 530  Palestinians killed.  This was at a point when the cables counted five  Israelis having been killed.  Israeli casualties were totted up  repeatedly.  This roughly 100-1 ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed  persisted throughout the operation, but this is not noted in the U.S.  cables.  In a few instances, U.S. consular officials report the views of  a few Gazans, frankly conveying Palestinian distress, but even here,  when one Gazan reports that his town is increasingly being assaulted by  Israeli fire, the cable qualifies his report by referring to “what he  termed ‘indiscriminate’ Israeli fire.”</p>
<p class="style2">Whenever the cables mention a specific location in  Gaza having been attacked or destroyed, including hospitals and mosques,  the cables repeat Israeli claims without questioning them; on January  2, for instance, it is reported that the Israeli Air Force destroyed a  mosque “reportedly serving as a weapons depot and communications hub.”   The embassy reports, without a hint of skepticism, the Israeli claim  midway through the operation that Hamas operatives were reconstituting  “certain command and control capabilities” at Shifa Hospital in Gaza by  disguising themselves as doctors and nurses.</p>
<p class="style2">The earliest of this collection of cables reveals U.S.  bias by reporting several days before Cast Lead began that pressure had  been building in Israel for a “response” to rocket attacks from Gaza,  “since Hamas announced the end of the ‘tahdiya’ truce agreement December  19.”  This effort to place responsibility for the hostilities on Hamas  ignores the fact, which was no secret to those following the situation  at the time, that it was Israel that had violated the truce, in effect  since the previous June, on November 4 when it launched an unprovoked  incursion into Gaza and killed several Palestinians.  Hamas’s action in  ending the truce weeks later was a response to Israel’s violation.</p>
<p class="style2">The most blatant evidence of U.S. bias – and the only  instance of analysis or policy advice in this collection of cables –  also comes before the operation began.  “Our recommendation,” Ambassador  James Cunningham writes on December 22, “is that USG start with putting  the blame on Hamas for the illegitimacy of its rule in Gaza, its policy  of firing or allowing other factions to fire rockets and mortars at  Israeli civilian targets, and its decision to end the ‘tahdiya’ calming  period.”  Cunningham seems to confuse cause and effect: even were Hamas  rule illegitimate, which it was not – Hamas having been democratically  elected three years earlier – it is not a common presumption that  political illegitimacy justifies a massive military assault.  And  particularly not when, as the U.S. had to know, Hamas did not provoke  the hostilities.  Cunningham goes on to recommend support for “Israel’s  right to defend itself.”  Hamas apparently has no such right to defend  Gazans from Israeli attack.</p>
<p class="style2">The embassy burnishes its conscience by “emphasizing  our concern for the welfare of innocent Palestinian civilians and the  U.S. readiness to provide emergency humanitarian relief.”  This is the  only mention of innocent Palestinian civilians in the entire collection  of cables.</p>
<p class="style2">The hypocrisy is glaring.  The U.S. bias shown here is  obviously not at all a new phenomenon.  But here it is in black and  white—or, more accurately, in pin-stripe: diplomacy as cheerleader for  massacre and genocide (a term used by not a few Jewish and other  commentators during the Gaza assault).  Such atrocities are all right in  U.S. eyes if Israel commits them, but Hamas is not allowed.</p>
<p class="style2"><strong>Kathleen Christison</strong> is a former CIA political analyst and the author of several books on the Palestinian situation, including <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745329292/counterpunchmaga">Palestine in Pieces</a></em>, co-authored with her late husband Bill Christison.  She can be reached at kb.christison[at]earthlink.net</p>
<p class="style2">&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/christison01192011.html">Kathleen Christison: Wikileaks Cables on Israel&#8217;s Gaza Onslaught</a>.</p>
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