Love of the Land: Israel's Haiti relief elicits both praise and condemnation

Israel's Haiti relief elicits both praise and condemnation

Adam Holland
26 January '10

(Adam gives an excellent survey what has been put out there. The good guys on one side and the problematic personalities, as is expected. Y.)

Israel's efforts to assist Haitians at their time of need have, for the most part, been praised. At a time when virtually all Haitians were deprived of health care, Israel was the first to set up a fully operational field hospital, before the U.S., France, the U.N., Red Cross, etc.. They also sent rescue teams to find and extract people trapped in collapsed buildings -- an effort which saved many lives. Predictably, those who are predisposed to do so have found grounds for condemnation in what most observers would call noble efforts and achievements. Here's a sampling:

Richard Silverstein, a Seattle resident who blogs at Tikkun Olam (rough translation: "repair the world"), has found Israel's Haitian relief to be the sort of world-repairing the world could do without. In a strongly worded column he calls "The Zionization of Disaster Relief" (read here), Silverstein writes that sending portable toilets, rather than doctors, medical equipment and rescue teams, would have been more useful to the Haitians. Silverstein condemns Israel's decision to send doctors instead of toilets as being based on public relations considerations.

He also claims without providing a source that a Haitian woman who gave birth in the Israeli field hospital was pressured by the Israelis to name her child "Israel". He captions a photo of the mother and child posted on his blog "A baby named Israel...who, if he reaches adulthood, would never be welcome in Israel". (On the contrary, that child would be very welcome there, but if he does visit, Silverstein will condemn it as Zionist PR.)

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Love of the Land: Israel's Haiti relief elicits both praise and condemnation

Love of the Land: Too Much to Bear

Too Much to Bear

Aussie Dave
Israellycool
25 January '10

While I waded in the filth that is Richard Silverstein’s blog, I noticed a post of his on an article about Israel’s rebuttal to the Goldstone Report (http://tinyurl.com/yec7g5a). In particular, this reaction:

On a final note, I was also astonished that B’Tselem allowed itself to become part of Bronner’s case that Israelis universally condemn Goldstone’s claim of a deliberate Israeli plan to destroy civilian infrastructure:

“I do not accept the Goldstone conclusion of a systematic attack on civilian infrastructure,” said Yael Stein, research director of B’Tselem. “It is not convincing.

This is too much to bear. Anyone who has visited Gaza or lives there can see with their own eyes that this is simply wrong. The schools, mosques, parliament, civilian ministries, factories, UNWRA food warehouse, everything it takes to make a society–virtually all of it was systematically destroyed. And Israeli generals during the war essentially conceded this point by claiming that every Gazan was presumed either a combatant or supporter of Hamas, and therefore a likely combatant. Israel soldiers themselves reported Gaza was a virtual free fire zone in which anything that moved whether civilian or not was considered a target. 1,100 of the 1,400 Gazans killed by the IDF were civilians, which further underscores either a willful campaign to target civilians or a strategy that accepted the decimation of the civilian population as a corollary of the approach.

I generally admire B’Tselem’s human rights work. But in this they have fallen down hard and deserve criticism.

This reaction speaks volumes about Silverstein and others like him. Notice how he is completely unwilling to accept a scenario in which Israel did not deliberately kill innocent people, even to the point of making the emotional statement “This is too much to bear.”

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Love of the Land: Too Much to Bear