Israel’s latest military assault on the Gaza Strip officially ended with a tentative cease-fire two months ago, although sporadic rocket attacks by Hamas and retaliatory bombing by the Israeli military continue.
The assault is believed to have claimed more than 1,300 Palestinian and 13 Israeli lives, of which at least 700 (more than 50 percent) and three (respectively) belonged to civilians.
According to a March 16 press release, Amnesty International has delivered a letter to the United Nations signed by 16 of the world’s most experienced war crimes investigators calling for an investigation into the targeting of civilians by both Hamas and the Israeli military.
While the international community calls for an investigation of war crimes, citizens in the United States should be demanding some accountability from the government that supplied Israel with the illegal white phosphorus artillery, missiles, helicopters, and other weaponry employed against Palestinians. As taxpayers, we have subsidized the destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of more than 700 unarmed men, women and children.
Rhetoric justifying military support for Israel invokes its "right to exist" or claims that Hamas is a rogue terrorist organization hellbent on the destruction of Israel. If the incredible disparity in the number of casualties inflicted is insufficient to belie this claim, perhaps it is at least sufficient to lend some credibility to the alternative that Hamas is a democratically elected party and has been calling for a two-state settlement for 30 years.
Admittedly, Hamas has engaged in terrorism, and factions have called for the reclaiming of Israel. On the other hand, a military campaign that kills more than 700 civilians, a virtual siege of the Gaza Strip that blocks even humanitarian aid, and illegal expansion of settlements that displaces and isolates Palestinian communities could arguably be construed as an act of state terror and an attempt to eliminate the Palestinian populations while expanding Israel’s borders.
Most of the violence between Israelis and Palestinians could be resolved if the United States would stop propagating it. This is unlikely, however, as support for Israeli military aggression has been lucrative for domestic contractors such as Raytheon, Hellfire Systems, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, all of which were named in a Feb. 23 report by Amnesty International requesting that the U.S. stop arming Israel with weapons being used on civilians.
Even after the death toll had passed 1,000 for the Palestinians, the U.S. abstained from Security Council Resolution 1860 and the House and Senate passed their own resolutions (supported by Rep. Steve Buyer and Sen. Richard Lugar) restating the government’s "vigorous support" for Israel’s military campaign and blaming Hamas for Israel’s need to act in "self-defense" by killing 1,300 Palestinians.
That no mention is made of Palestinian rights to self-defense is consistent with 30 years of official policy. Contrary to official claims, it is not Hamas but the U.S. government and its "unwavering commitment" to the Israeli military that has been the greatest barrier to peace and a two-state settlement in the region.
Napoletano is a doctoral candidate at Purdue University and a West Lafayette resident. He has volunteered with Amnesty International.
Brian Napoletano holds a PhD from the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, a MS from the Department of Zoology at Michigan State University, and a BA from the Department of Telecommunication (now the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media) at the same. While studying at Purdue, he worked with Bryan Pijanowski in the HEMA Laboratory on a number of projects pertaining to land-use change, spatial modeling, and biogeography. His Doctoral dissertation focused on correlations between land-use trends and avian species-richness within the contiguous United States. He also gained experience in political ecology, environmental monitoring, remote sensing, various GIS and statistical analysis, theoretical ecology, and data visualization.
Prior to studying at Purdue University, Brian worked with Stuart Gage at Michigan State University as both an undergraduate and graduate research assistant on the development of conceptual and methodological frameworks for the interpretation of acoustic signals in the environment. Using his knowledge of telecommunication technologies, Brian helped to develop prototype sound sensors, and integrated his technical expertise into his ecological studies. His Master's thesis focused on both the technological and theoretical aspects of soundscape analysis.
Brian's primary research interests are in the biophysical and societal dimensions of environmental change. As the proportion of humans living in cities recently passed fifty percent, he is particularly interested in the challenges associated with maintaining ecosystem services in urban landscapes. Other research interests include the geographical and biophysical determinants of avian species richness and the role of auditory communication in community interactions.
Because he frequently works with comparatively large and complex datasets, Brian has invested significant time and effort into understanding the basic aspects of data visualization and multivariate statistical analysis. He works extensively with free software for scientific computing, including GRASS GIS, the R statistical computing language, Bash, the Python programming language, and MySQL databases. For practical reasons, he has also retained a degree of proficiency with ArcGIS and other proprietary systems.
In addition to his research, Brian has had several opportunities to teach at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He served as an instructor and coordinator for an introductory (honors) earth-systems science course at Michigan State University, and assisted with a number of graduate and undergraduate courses on remote sensing, GIS, and environmental change at Purdue. He is presently an adjunct faculty member at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he is teaching a course on environmental science. Brian has also been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to research urban ecology in Morelia, Michoacán at the Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, which he is looking forward to beginning in January.
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