On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched.  The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press.  The planning had two components: military and propaganda.  It was based on the lessons of Israel‘s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised.  We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

 

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City.   It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.

 

In his retrospective "Parsing  Gains of Gaza War," New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner cited this achievement as one of the most significant of the gains.  Israel calculated that it would be advantageous to appear to "go crazy," causing vastly disproportionate terror, a doctrine that traces back to the 1950s. "The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day," Bronner wrote, "when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza." The tactic of "going crazy" appears to have been successful, Bronner concluded: there are "limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this war that they will seek to rein in Hamas," the elected government.  That is another long-standing doctrine of state terror.  I don’t, incidentally, recall the Times retrospective "Parsing Gains of Chechnya War," though the gains were great.

 

The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes.

 

Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath.  To honor the holy day, Palestinians

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