Three weeks ago my father became ill, on return from a holiday in the USA. What then happened? Did he survive the death panel described by Palin?

My father was complaining of steadily more intense back-ache and sharp, stabbing pains in his legs. (He had fallen in the US, but seemed to show no ill effects till after his return to the UK. Although he was heavily insured for medical problems while in the US, he adamantly refused to be taken to an ER for a check-up after the fall).

A home visit by his National Health Service doctor indicated no apparent damage such as broken bones. Pain killers and bed rest were prescribed. When the pain persisted through the night my mother phoned for medical assistance. A middle-of-the-night doctor’s visit again found no apparent cause, so arrangements were made for an ambulance to take him into one of the city’s two large NHS hospitals for tests.

I flew over from my home in the US.

For US readers, it should be understood that at no stage during this process are doctors or nurses asking questions about health insurance providers, insurance plans, co-pays or whatever. There are no costs or bills or financial concerns for my parents. This is simply a no-cost service for them… the reality of free health care at the point of delivery from cradle to grave as the NHS’s founding fathers put it.

Two days and a night in hospital for x-rays, other tests and observation, confirmed the most likely cause of the pain was soft tissue damage, bruising, caused in the fall. The appropriate care was bed rest and physiotherapy. He was discharged and taken home by ambulance, with a report for his family doctor at the nearby clinic.

The next home visit was from the Community Matron working out of my mother and father’s local health clinic. She adjusted the medication and arranged for the necessary (free) presciption to be issued. She called for a further visit by nurses from the Intermediate Care Team later that day and continuing for as long as needed… as well as assessments by the team’s occupational and physio therapists.

The occupational therapist arrives in the afternoon to do an initial assessment on what is needed to ease life. The physiotherapist puts my father through his paces and advises on exercises that he can do in bed. Two nurses arrive that evening to do a pre-night time examination and some exercises. They were back first thing the next morning and again in the evening. The physio returns with a walking frame, a stool to help with washing, a frame for the toilet and a commode.

That day a social worker from the local authority also arrived for a two-hour interview about the long-term care needs for both my parents to help keep them safely in their own home living an independent life.

The basic care plan is going to be a visit in the morning by a care worker to check my parents are both up and moving, breakfast is sorted, medicines taken, laundry put in the washer. A second visit in the evening will check on the day, evening meal, medications and preparations for the night. Once a week a care worker will collect a shopping list to supplement the weekly delivery of frozen meals. There’s a discussion about what can be done to help maintain and even improve my parent’s social life.

The house will be fitted with fire alarms plus an emergency call button with my parents having pendants and fall monitors, all linked to the local authority 24/7 call centre. A key safe on the outside of the house will give the care workers and emergency services access to the house. The social worker apologises, my parents will need to pay for the call centre monitoring, the UK equivalent of about $1-a-day.

The care plan will be free if my parents have less than £25,000 — about $37,000 — in savings, but will be capped regardless at £200 a week — about $300. As my parents already receive £120 a week to subsidise cleaning, gardening and the likes, their costs are likely to be minimal.

All health care costs were, are and will remain zero.

Three weeks in we have once again phoned in the early hours for advice from a night doctor regarding pains near my father’s right lung, fearing possible infection. The Community Matron confirmed his lungs and heart were sounding OK early the following morning, diagnosing possible constipation.

On a Sunday we phoned for advice when my father complained his legs were feeling cold, fearing a problem with circulation in his legs. Two nurses arrived within 20 minutes and stayed for 30 minutes. Again all clear.

The physio and occupational therapist have schooled my father to safely negotiate the stairs.

The house has been measured ready for installing more grab rails inside and outside to help when my parents move around. A spare walking frame as arrived. The key safe as been installed. The fire alarms and monitoring system will be fitted early next week. The bath is fitted with a chair to help lower my father into the bath. The local pharmacist will be delivering the medical presciptions, pre-sorted into dated and timed doses from now on.

A community nurse will visit later today to discuss my mother’s medical needs.

Long-term care starts on Monday.

And we’ve had numerous chats with nurses, carers and friends about the differences between the US — where I live — and the UK. People are baffled and flabbergasted by the attitudes in the US on health care. The public option was not as strong as the UK system, and similar public-based philosophies in some 50+ other countries, but it was a “no-brainer” comments one friend.

The nurses are angry at the misrepresentations of their work in the US. One, who worked with US-based health insurance plans earlier in her career, recounts tales of medical incompetence, inefficiency and cynicism with open contempt.

So, my elderly father is still in pain, though less, he still needs medication and he still needs nursing care. But he has survived the UK’s socialized death panels to live another day.

Many elderly people in the US — indeed, even many with insurance in their 30s, 40s and 50s — might wish they had access to such “death panel” care from a socialized care system, rather than the pay-or-die dictats they get from the US for-profit, private anti-social health insurance industry. The opposite of “socialized” might simply be described as “uncivilized”.

They might also inquire why Sarah Palin tells lies about the UK health service while availing herself of the similar “socialized” Canadian health care system.

Well, as a UK citizen now living in the US with my US-born wife I can give some real-life, like-for-like examples.

Some years ago at my home in London, UK, I had chest pains. I also collapsed unconscious in the bathroom. My wife dialled 999.

A year ago in my new home in Portland, Oregon, USA, I had chest pains again. I did not collapse, but in my later 50s I decided it would be prudent to seek some help. This time I did my own dialling, I called 911.

How did the two experiences compare? Well, I’m still alive to write this.

In the UK my recollection is hazy: I woke up facing a guy dressed in a bright green biker suit. In many emergencies UK first-responder help arrives on a motorcycle (with its own flashing lights, sirens… and de-fibrilator). The white ambulance arrived some minutes later. And the police car.

Suitably wired up, I was carried down the stairs and put to bed in the back of the ambulance. Our local casualty department — the UK equivalent of the ER — was about three miles away.

For the next three or four hours I lay in bed trailing wires, curtained off, listening to the steady and reassuring beep of the monitor. Nurses and doctors came and went, questions asked and some tests done.

All clear. A panic attack, the outcome of stress.

In Portland I could hear the fire tender’s siren as I lay on my back on the floor (ready for CPR!), so I knew help was on the way. The white ambulance arrived soon after. So did the police car. Wired up I was driven the three or so miles to the hospital. Again I listened to the monitor. Hours later I was home again. Too much stress.

So, what was the difference? Well, as far as I can recall, medically probably not a lot.

But there was one notable difference. In the US the fire fighters asked for the name of my insurance company. In the ambulance I was asked for the name of my insurance company and told we were going to a nearer hospital than the one run by my insurance company, but not to worry.

At the hospital I was again asked for the name of my insurance company. A nurse phoned to check. Why had I not gone to the other hospital? The guy in the ambulance said the shorter journey would be better.

In the UK I never heard anything more.

In the US the bills started to arrive. One from the fire service. Another from the ambulance company. One from the hospital I’d been taken to. And another from the hospital of my own insurance company, even though I’d never received any care from that hospital. Total: $2,500.

I’m a teacher, so I have decent benefits. I only had to pay $250.

If I were in the UK and I had chest pains? I’d dial 999. In the US? I’d lie down and think about it, picture my orphaned kids, feel my stress level rise… swallow hard and dial 911. Many don’t.

In the UK they call it the NHS — the National Health Service. It’s driving principle is to provide universal health care to all, free at the point of delivery, from the cradle to the grave. Surveys show that it is more popular and dear to the UK citizen than the royal family. Politicians meddle with it at their peril, as they say.

Do the Brits complain about it? Incessantly.

In the US it’s called the health industry. But in a land where the word “service” drips from the lips of every pompous politician I cannot recall it being used in association with health care, indeed you don’t hear the word “care” much either. It’s the health industry. The bottom line is return for the shareholder. It’s not about health, care or service.

There are other examples of the two systems I have experienced.

My dear son was born in the early evening in a London hospital after my wife had been in labour since the early hours. For next six months she and our new baby would be together while she received her full salary (by law). I got two weeks off too (by law). For the following six months my wife received half her salary to care for our son. Her job would have been protected (by law) for a further year had she wanted to take unpaid leave.

When we wanted a second child the natural process didn’t work, despite much effort and numerous (free) tests on the NHS. Even the porn mags (catering to most respectable tastes) to help me do my bit were free. We adopted a dear daughter.

The adoption screening was exhaustive and exhausting over many months, but we weren’t expected to buy our baby and certainly the notion that we should buy a baby from another country was simply viewed by all concerned as beyond the pale.

We have not had a baby in the US. However, several of my colleagues have.

They don’t seem to get paid maternity leave, apart from sick leave they have saved up. They also seem to have to pay bills for the process.

Many also appear to give birth by ceasarean section as a matter of course. Many expectant mothers seem to want a natural birth, but expect a surgical delivery… babies are expected to adhere to a nine-to-five, five-day working week. In the UK a section birth is considered to be an emergency procedure, the preference being for natural birth, even if it is the early hours of a Sunday morning.

Young children also become ill, a great worry for their parents. Fever in the middle of the night. We used to call the doctor and then leave the lights on to identify the house when the night doctor would visit to see our child. I always found it interesting to look out of the window waiting for the night doctor to see neighbouring houses, with their elderly and young, their stressed and eccentric awake.

The night doctor was free. Did we complain? Yes, the night doctor was always too slow in coming. Why weren’t more on duty, isn’t it obvious that children and the elderly get ill in the night and need care?

Of course, my Republican friends (well, I have one) point out that it’s not free. It’s paid for by taxes. And that means people who don’t need these services subsidize those that do.

Well, that’s true. Except UK tax payers who do get an NHS pay less tax than US taxpayers who don’t get health care.

More to follow…

God may have heard the prayer. But few others did.

HBO pulled the plug on the Bishop.

Here is the prayer HBO decided only God needed to hear:

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears — tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger — anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort — at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience — and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility — open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

And bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for all people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain.

Give him stirring words — we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

Amen.

In the next days the full, appalling horror of what the Israelis have done in Gaza will start to be revealed. But just as the US media was diverted by the Obama celebrations on the night of Tuesday 4 November when Israeli tanks and bombers breached the ceasefire to provoke the latest conflict, the Israelis hope that attention will again be diverted from Gaza by the inauguration.

And, as Robert Fisk reports, the world forgets quickly when it comes to the Palestinians: “Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead — almost all civilians, most of them children and women — in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?”

With utmost cynicism the Israelis have used the interegnum between the US elections and the arrival of a new US President plus media manipulation to put back the cause of peace in the Middle East. In the US, if not Europe and the rest of the world, the media manipulation has worked. Here in the US it’s hard to know that a major act of ethnic cleansing has been taking place, indeed some media portray events solely as an attack on Israel by Gaza.

Yet again. Any talk of a secure, viable Palestinian state, and fixed Israeli borders is as far away as ever. Peace is not on the agenda. A new US President has been trumped. And Israel will be weaker.

But the vision of Eretz Yisrael — a 21^st century Israeli state stretching from inside Egypt in the south and into Lebanon and Syria and to Jordan, and even beyond to the Euphrates and Iraq in the east, as defined in 2000-year-old texts from the Hebrew Bible (sic) — is safe for another day. “The one and only Hebrew nation — in all of its Holy Land inheritance.”

(The map to the left is just one of many based on a multitude of mythical biblical interpretations. The extent of Eretz Yisrael depends on who you consult, and when, and often what’s in their interests. Osama Bin Laden, for instance, draws a map of Eretz Israel that extends across almost all the Middle East from Cairo, the Sudan, across Saudi Arabia, half of Iraq and even into Turkey.)

Certainly, the Gaza war has sown the seeds of the next generation of “terrorists” to guarantee the Israelis their excuses for another Gaza, another Lebanon, another walk away from talks, another breach of agreements, another dismissal with contempt of UN resolutions.

In the last days of the Bush presidency the worst-US-president-ever has continued to aid his friends and tie the hands of his successor. Israel has got yet another military agreement (on top of the near $7 million a day of US aid) that the US will blockade Gaza to prevent arms being smuggled into Gaza (the right of all peoples to defend themselves does not extend to Palestinians).

Whether or not Israeli troops fully withdraw from Gaza, whether or not Israel fully lifts the blockade and opens the border crossings, and keeps them open, will be seen.

If the troops do withdraw and the border crossings are opened, then after three weeks of bloodshed and systematic demolition of much of Gaza’s pathetic infrastructure, Israel will merely have returned to what it had agreed at the time of the June ceasefire, but never implemented. Then the crossings stayed shut. The blockade of Gaza was never lifted. Gaza was turned into a concentration camp.

Mark Steel, writing in the UK’s Independent, noted: “Dov Weisglas, Ariel Sharon’s chief of staff, referred to the siege of Gaza that preceded this bombing, a siege in which the Israelis prevented the population from receiving essential supplies of food, medicine, electricity and water, by saying, ‘We put them on a diet’.”

But the impression will be that Israel is weaker:

❏ Hamas survived. In the Arab world that will be seen as a victory. Just as it was a victory when Hizbollah survived everything the Israelis could throw at it in Lebanon.

❏ The people of Gaza are almost certainly more united behind Hamas than they were before.

❏ A whole new generation of militants has been recruited against Israel.

❏ Mahmoud Abbas, the putative Palestinian leader has been exposed as powerless and lacking any influence whatsoever over the Israelis, despite becoming their willing pawn and anti-Hamas mouthpiece. He has lost all credibility. Israel’s clampdown on the West Bank has not weakened, the settlements are still being constructed, the wall carving up Palestinian land goes ahead, Palestinian homes are still being bull-dozed.

❏ Israeli politicians have been exposed as cynical, callous opportunists willing to slaughter a trapped population to serve their own short-term electoral needs.

❏ Apart form the US, the world has expressed outrage and is appalled at another Israeli atrocity. For many the Israeli state is increasingly seen as a pariah state.

❏ Younger Jews around the world are reported to be moving away from blind loyalty to the Israeli stated, recoiling in embarrassment at the inhumane spectacle.

As Israeli tanks and troops entered Gaza at the beginning of January The Independent’s John McCarthy spelled out the reality of Israeli strategy: exploit the shame of the western world over the Holocaust, keep taking Palestinian land and never talk about borders.

“The simple fact is that Israel has the most powerful psychological influence to count on — the world’s collective guilt over the Holocaust. This means that although the world may sporadically slap Israel’s wrists, no one dare go too far, perhaps out of fear of being accused of anti-Semitism or in any way attacking a people who have historically suffered so much. The tragedy is, though, that it is now another people, the Palestinians, who are suffering because of the world’s hesitation to offend Israel.”

McCarthy asks: “But is there really a viable peace process to restart?” A two-state solution requires Israel to graciously give up occupied territory in the West Bank to create a Palestinian state there and in Gaza.

“But,” says McCarthy, “there are few signs that the Israeli establishment, fully committed to the Zionist goals of creating Eretz Israel (a Greater Israel that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan), plans to relinquish very much land at all: 250,000 Israelis already live on the West Bank. On the contrary, Israel’s road and settlement building programmes continue apace.

“Israel’s policy has always been to build ‘facts on the ground’ while delaying accepting any final borders. Her founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, summed this up with the phrase ‘where we plough our last furrow is where we put our border’.

“Ben-Gurion’s political heirs are still ploughing. While conceding that a Palestinian state of some sort is necessary to ensure Israel is kept as purely Jewish as possible, they will put off delineating that state until Israel ends up with as much land and as few Palestinians as possible on that land.”

❏ Israel bans Arab parties from forthcoming elections.

Eretz Israel

IN 1896 a young Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl claimed the “Palestine of David and Solomon” would be the future Jewish state. It would extend from the Turkish mountains of Cappadocia in the north to the Suez Canal in the south.

The Kingdom of David and Solomon did not stretch from Turkey to Suez. The Israelite kingdom last just 73 years. And it ended almost 2,900 years before Herzl’s vision.

As Herzl and his fellow early zionists agitated among the rich and powerful in the capitals of western Europe for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East — “at Basle I fonded the Jewish state” — some 650,000 palestinians continued a life rooted in almost 4,000 years of history, and uninterrupted for 1,300 years.

So when Israel Zangwill coined the propaganda phrase “The land with people — for the people without land” at the turn of the 20^th century it was a lie. In 1901 fewer than one-in-ten of the population of Palestine was Jewish.

But that community of Jews, Christians and a vast majority of Muslims did, for the most part, live in peace and harmony.

By 1947 the peace had long ended. Herzl’s vision was becoming a reality.

The Jewish National Land Fund had bought up 6 per cent of Palestine on behalf of ¹/₂ million European Jewish immigrants. Land fund director Joseph Weitz made clear, “there is no room for both peoples in this country”.

Within a year the Israelis’ first war of aggression was over. The new Israelis had seized 78 per cent of the land and in under six months 750,000 Palestinians fled to become the first Palestinian refugees, filling refugee camps (see map left, click the map for a larger version) in Jordan, Lebanon and particularly Gaza.

The zionists had proclaimed their new state “by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people”. It was a lunatic claim.

HG Wells commented at the time: “If it is proper to reconstitute a Jewish state which has not existed for 2,000 years, why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.”

He could have mentioned the Egyptians, the Abyssinians, the Babylonians, the greeks, the Turks or even the Romans.

But on the basis of interpreting a few verses from The Bible the new Israeli state was consumed with territorial ambition. The Jewish National Fund Charitable Trust — the offical organisation of the Israeli government for land acquisition and settlement — defined Eretz Yisrael.

Eretz Yisrael, it said, takes in the whole of the Sinai, the whole of Jordan, the whole of Lebanon and the whole of Syria.

Israeli founding father, Irgun terrorist leader and later Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin wrote: “Eretz Yisrael will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”

Describing themselves, as “profound and passionate supporters” of Israel – and supporting its right to defend itself against the “war crime” of Hamas rocket attacks – they added that the current tactics threatened to undermine international support for Israel.

The intervention, in a letter published in today’s Observer, came as fears grew that Israel was to launch a “new phase” of its military offensive inside the Gaza strip. Yesterday warplanes dropped leaflets warning Gazans “not to be close to terrorists, weapons warehouses and the places where the terrorists operate”. The two-week-old campaign has already killed more than 800 Palestinians, while 13 Israelis have died, three of them civilians killed by Hamas rockets.

Although individual Jewish writers and religious figures have expressed their opposition to the conduct of Operation Cast Lead, the letter represents the most significant break with Israel’s tactics from a group of UK Jews.

Prominent rabbis, academics and political figures are among the signatories, including Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield, head of the Movement for Reform Judaism; Sir Jeremy Beecham, former chair of the Labour party; Professor Shalom Lappin of the University of London; Baroness Julia Neuberger; Rabbi Danny Rich, chief executive of Liberal Judaism; Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein, principal of Leo Baeck rabbinical training college; and lawyer Michael Mitzman, who set up Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for the Home Office.

Their demand comes amid increasing pressure on Israel from the diplomatic community to halt its operations, and rising criticism of the humanitarian impact on Palestinian civilians, including allegations of potentially serious breaches of international humanitarian law. Demonstrations around the world yesterday called for a ceasefire.

A call from within is signed by more than 500 — and growing — Israelis living in Israel, including well-known artists and academics.

“Israel’s destructive criminal policy will not cease without a massive intervention by the international community,” says the letter.

“However, except for some rather weak official condemnation, the international community is reluctant to intervene,. The United States openly supports the Israeli violence and Europe, although voicing some condemnation, is unwilling to seriously consider withdrawing the “gift” it handed Israel by upgrading its relations with the European Union.

“In the past the world knew how to fight criminal policies. The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves: its trade relations are flourishing, academic and cultural cooperation continue and intensify with diplomatic support.

“This international backing must stop. That is the only way to stop the insatiable Israeli violence.

“We are calling on the world to stop Israeli violence and not allow the continuation of the brutal occupation. We call on the world to Condemn and not become an accomplice in Israel’s crimes.”

Klein backs call for boycott of Israeli goods

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo argues for a boycott of all Israeli goods in The Nation.

“It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa,” she writes.

For more detail on the world response to calls for a boycott of all Israeli goods see Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for Palestine.

Australian academics John Docker and Ned Curthoys have set up a new Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism.

They say: “We are part of an increasing number of people around the world of Jewish descent who are sickened by the coldly calculated massacre of the Palestinians of Gaza and who utterly repudiate Israel’s claim that it acts in the name of Jews the world over.”

They accuse Israel of committing genocide agaqinst the palestinians and describe Israel as being a “genocidal settler colonial society”.

“The December 2008 Gaza massacre by Zionist Israel poses an intense dilemma for Israel’s organized Jewish supporters and much of the Jewish diaspora, who have for decades cooperated with and been complicit in the ongoing, incremental Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.”

They add: “Israel is guilty under article II, part C of the UN Genocide Convention, in that it intends to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic group by ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.”

Jewish diaspora thinkers, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin have also argued that the lesson of any diasporic experience should be “that peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected”.

This land is empty they said. It’s the land we were promised by God they said. It’s ours. They said.

It was a lie.

But a world shocked, shamed — as it should have been — by the Holocaust, a declared attempt at the genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazi state, a known atrocity that had not only been denied but ignored… the world chose to ignore the lie.

Palestine was not empty. It was full of a people who had lived there for generations in hundreds of villages and towns… the Palestinians lived in this land.

As well as lies, Israel also born out of terrorism. Jewish terrorism. The Irgun Zvei Leumi, Haganah, Lehi, the Stern gang. There were repeated massacres in the decade following 1946… at the village Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, Friday 9 April 1948, the Irgun, Haganah and Stern gangs’ systematic massacre of at least 100+ Palestinians, mostly women and children, was a defining atrocity on which the Israeli state was founded. Following the killings the village was looted and the dead desecrated.

Homes were dynamited. The cemetery was bulldozed and Deir Yassin was wiped off the map. More than 50 orphans were found huddled by the walls of old Jerusalem.

Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, said: “Without Deir Yassin there would be no Israel”.

The massacre caused panic among the Palestinian population, with many fleeing in fear of further atrocities in the villages around Jerusalem.

The ultra-militant Irgun attack on Deir Yassin was headed by Menachem Begin. He was a refugee from Russian labour camps and later the sixth prime minister of Israel and Nobel peace prize winner.

On the night of the massacre the Irgun held the equivalent of a press conference at a nearby Jewish settlement. The website Deir Yassin Remembered reports the Irgun claimed Deir Yassin had become “a concentration point for Arabs, including Syrians and Iraqis, planning to attack the western suburbs of Jerusalem.” They said that 25 members of the Haganah militia had reinforced the attack and claimed that an Arabic-speaking Jew had warned the villagers over a loudspeaker from an armored car. This was duly reported in The New York Times on April 10.

The Irgun committed hundreds of acts of terrorism, including the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, killing 91, and the hanging of British soldiers.

You won’t find Deir Yassin on maps of Israel today. If you visit Isreal you won’t find the village of Deir Yassin. There are no memorials. No plaques. Deir Yassin has long gone, except in the memories of the Palestinians.

Within months of the massacre Deir Yassin had been settled by Jewish immigrants from Poland, Romania and Slovakia. It was renamed in Hebrew Givat Shaul Bet. Today the site of Deir Yassin is in the grounds of a mental hospital, hidden in the trees within sight of the Yad Vashem memorial to the victims of the holocaust. Yad Vashem rightly honors the Jews who were victims of the Holocaust by attempting to record all the names of .

There is no memorial to those killed at Deir Yassin — though the organization Deir Yassin Remembered is raising funds for a memorial.

Deir Yassin was but one village of at least 400 that were obliterated in the early years of the Israeli state. More than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from the new land of Israel — many of their descendants became trapped behind the barbed wire fences and closed checkpoints of the giant refugee camp that is now Gaza.

The Israelis went to great pains to cover up, deny and obliterate any record that the land they forcibly occupied was a land of people, the Palestinians. Not only were the people forcibly removed — ethnically cleansed — to create the diaspora, evidence of their existence and culture has been systematically destroyed.

History has been re-written.

Except… as the history of other oppressive assaults on peoples has revealed, it is not possible to obliterate a people, their history and their culture. It survives, albeit under great pain, sacrifice and suffering. But it survives. One day to be honored.

In 1982 I, along with a colleague, visited this crowded, troubled land. We visited refugee camps in Jordan, villages and towns in the occupied West Bank and lived with dear Emile in Ramallah and visited the house that had been his in Jerusalem. We went to cities in Israel. We saw the Israeli concrete forts (from where Palestinian children and peace activists have since been shot to death) looking down on the refugee camps of Gaza, Khan Younis, Jabaliyah.

In Israel we talked with Palestinians and Israelis. We visited the Palestinians in Hebron whose homes had been attacked by settlers demolishing the joint-walls with axes and picks. We visited the old woman whose small dwelling was all but surrounded by the barbed wire of the settlement of Kiryat Arba and who had survived the repeated grenade attacks on her home.

We met with the elected mayor of Bethlehem, who had lost both his legs in an Israeli assassination attempt. We walked with Israelis calling for Peace Now in demonstrations in Tel Aviv.

We became tourists to Canada Park and watched Israeli families and children relax and cook BBQs on what was once a vibrant Palestinian town, of which there was no surviving sign whatsoever.

We took photographs of the child survivors of the Israeli-backed Falangist massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut.

Weeks after we returned home we watched on TV as Israeli troops and planes invaded and obliterated apartment blocks in Beirut and villages in southern Lebanon… and shelled the refugee camp of Rashidieh south of the ancient city of Tyre where weeks before we had walked along the roads of sand.

But wherever we went we were implored to publish the map: the map that showed that Palestinians had lived throughout what was to be called Israel before 1948. That what had become Israel had been before home to a plethora of tiny Palestinian villlages, that there had been a land with people. Proof that the Israelis had deliberately set out to cleanse the land of Palestinians.

As we returned to London the map of Palestine before 1948 became our most treasured possession.

Print the map. And again and again. They said.

On our return we published the map as the centre-page spread of our humble report. We said there should be two states, Israel and Palestine.

When we sent copies of our report back to occupied Palestine with its pictures of Palestinian children in hospital beds recovering from gun-shot wounds, of barbed wire, of bulldozed Palestinian homes… in all the copies it was the map which had been removed by the Israeli authorities. It was the map that offended the idea of Israel.

Download the map. You’ll find Deir Yassin as a un-named small circle in grid J-5 between Ein Kerem and Jerusalem.

The map will print at 300 dpi on UK A3 (11.6 in x 16.54 in) paper.

“It is a war on two fronts,” writes Chris McGreal from Jerusalem for the London-based The Observer.

“Israel also understood that a parallel operation would be required to persuade the rest of the world of the justice of its cause, even as the bodies of Palestinian women and children filled the mortuaries, and to ensure that its war was seen not in terms of occupation but of the west’s struggle against terror and confrontation with Iran.

“After the debacle of its 2006 invasion of Lebanon — not only a military disaster for Israel, but also a political and diplomatic one — the government in Jerusalem spent months (Hippasus emphasis) laying the groundwork at home and abroad for the assault on Gaza with quiet but energetic lobbying of foreign administrations and diplomats, particularly in Europe and parts of the Arab world.

“A new information directorate was established to influence the media, with some success. And when the attack began just over a week ago, a tide of diplomats, lobby groups, bloggers and other supporters of Israel were unleashed to hammer home a handful of carefully crafted core messages intended to ensure that Israel was seen as the victim.

“Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the UN until a few months ago, was brought in by the Foreign Ministry to help lead the diplomatic and PR campaign. He said that the diplomatic and political groundwork has been under way for months.

“‘This was something that was planned long ahead,’ he said. ‘I was recruited by the foreign minister to coordinate Israel’s efforts and I have never seen all parts of a very complex machinery — whether it is the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, the prime minister’s office, the police or the army — work in such co-ordination, being effective in sending out the message.’

“In briefings in Jerusalem and London, Brussels and New York, the same core messages were repeated: that Israel had no choice but to attack in response to the barrage of Hamas rockets; (see Hippasus blog on how Israel broke the ceasefire to set up an invasion — Hippasus) that the coming attack would be on “the infrastructure of terror” in Gaza and the targets principally Hamas fighters; that civilians would die, but it was because Hamas hides its fighters and weapons factories among ordinary people.”

And those have been the consistently repeated messages we have been hearing again and again over the past days.

“Hand in hand went a strategy to remove the issue of occupation from discussion,” adds McGreal. “Gaza was freed in 2005 when the Jewish settlers and army were pulled out, the Israelis said. It could have flourished as the basis of a Palestinian state, but its inhabitants chose conflict.”

The Independent, again in the UK, adds: “There will now be a war over the story of this war,” in a report from Johann Hari headlined The true story behind this war is not the one Israel is telling:

“The Israeli government says, ‘We withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and in return we got Hamas and Qassam rockets being rained on our cities. Sixteen civilians have been murdered. How many more are we supposed to sacrifice?’ It is a plausible narrative, and there are shards of truth in it, but it is also filled with holes.

“The Israeli government did indeed withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005 — in order to be able to intensify control of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser, Dov Weisglass, was unequivocal about this, explaining: ‘The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians… this whole package that is called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.’

“Ordinary Palestinians were horrified by this, and by the fetid corruption of their own Fatah leaders, so they voted for Hamas. It certainly wouldn’t have been my choice — an Islamist party is antithetical to all my convictions — but we have to be honest. It was a free and democratic election, and it was not a rejection of a two-state solution. The most detailed polling of Palestinians, by the University of Maryland, found that 72 per cent want a two-state solution on the 1967 borders, while fewer than 20 per cent want to reclaim the whole of historic Palestine. So, partly in response to this pressure, Hamas offered Israel a long, long ceasefire and a de facto acceptance of two states, if only Israel would return to its legal borders.

“Rather than seize this opportunity and test Hamas’s sincerity, the Israeli government reacted by punishing the entire civilian population. It announced that it was blockading the Gaza Strip in order to “pressure” its people to reverse the democratic process. The Israelis surrounded the Strip and refused to let anyone or anything out. They let in a small trickle of food, fuel and medicine — but not enough for survival. Weisglass quipped that the Gazans were being ‘put on a diet’.

“According to Oxfam, only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza last month to feed 1.5 million people. The United Nations says poverty has reached an ‘unprecedented level.’ When I was last in besieged Gaza, I saw hospitals turning away the sick because their machinery and medicine was running out. I met hungry children stumbling around the streets, scavenging for food.

“It was in this context — under a collective punishment designed to topple a democracy — that some forces within Gaza did something immoral: they fired Qassam rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities. These rockets have killed 16 Israeli citizens. This is abhorrent: targeting civilians is always murder. But it is hypocritical for the Israeli government to claim now to speak out for the safety of civilians when it has been terrorising civilians as a matter of state policy.”

Hari (writing on Monday 29 December) adds: “Before it falls down the memory hole, we should remember that last week, Hamas offered a ceasefire in return for basic and achievable compromises. Don’t take my word for it. According to the Israeli press, Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, ‘told the Israeli cabinet [on 23 December] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms.’ Diskin explained that Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. The cabinet — high with election fever and eager to appear tough — rejected these terms.”

Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald also reported Israeli intelligence officials in a piece by Paul McGeough. Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad operative turned commentator says: “The economic siege of Gaza has not produced any of the desired political results,” he said. “It has not manipulated the Palestinians into hating Hamas, but has probably been counter-productive. It is just useless collective punishment.”

McGeough continues: “If Israel was to act against Hamas, it needed to move in these last days of the Bush presidency because, despite his words in Sderot (In July Obama spoke in Sderot, a target for rocket attacks — Hippasus) Israel worries that the incoming American president might be less supportive than his predecessor. But does Jerusalem have the nerve to keep it up through Obama’s inauguration and the first critical days of an American campaign to reposition itself in the world? On this, the signals are mixed.

“Israeli diplomats speculate that their international window for action in Gaza will begin to close as early as Monday (5 January — Hippasus) when Western officialdom starts to return from the holiday break. A push by Paris for a 48-hour ceasefire offered the hope of some respite for Gaza’s 1.5 million people and its chances of implementation are better with the passing of the Bush-Blair trans-Atlantic axis.

“Working against the proposal, however, are Israel’s need for military gains and the competing ambitions of three politicians vying for the prime ministership in Israel’s February 10 election: the Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, the Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, and the Opposition Leader and front-runner in the leadership race, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Noting all of that, Palestinians are themselves hopelessly divided between the Islamist Hamas movement in Gaza, and the corrupted remnants of Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah movement which, under the hapless Mahmoud Abbas, is propped up by Israel and the US as a government in the West Bank. Abbas is using the crisis to mount his own rhetorical attacks on Hamas. But the more overt and covert support that Abbas gets, the more his movement is diminished in the eyes of Palestinians.

“Ghassan Khatib, one of Abbas’s former ministerial colleagues in the Palestinian Authority, this week cast doubt on Abbas’s efforts to advance himself on the back of Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians. Despite the material and human cost they are made to pay, Khatib told The Christian Science Monitor: “Politically speaking, [collective punishment] strengthens Hamas.”

The above are edits from the original articles. Readers are advised to click on the links and read all three articles to get more information than quoted here, and to understand the contest of each piece.

Chris McGreal in The Observer

Johann Hari in The Independent

Paul McGeough in the Sydney Morning Herald

Now imagine one of the world’s most high-tech armies bombing and shelling a poverty-stricken population of more than 1.4 million trapped inside a narrow strip, mostly less than five miles wide — at most less than eight miles wide — and stretching under 25 miles from Epsom in the south-west across the heart of central London to Loughton in the north-east. It fits inside the yellow boxes in the pictures to the left and below (click the pictures for larger views in new windows)

Imagine, instead of the central-london chic villages of smart Kensington, Notting Hill, Maida Vale to the west, the Mediterranean’s most miserable beaches.

To the south-west, instead of the respectable suburbs of Epsom, a seven-mile border with Egypt’s Sinai desert. To the east and north, instead of the suburbs of south London, there’s barbed wire, concrete, corrugated iron and a 32-mile long border with southern Israel.

The lucky people of Richmond, Muswell Hill, Dulwich, Blackheath would be living outside the barbed wire. But those in Fulham, Clapham, Brixton, the MPs and Lords in The Houses of Parliament, the Queen in her Buckingham Palace, the tourists riding the London Eye or viewing the execution axes in the Tower of London, Finsbury, Dalston… all trapped inside a ring of barbed wire, concrete and corrugated-iron fencing.

There’s one gate to the north, five to the east and one to the south.

Imagine one road into the yellow box from Loughton in the north.

Another five gates allow entry into the yellow box from the east possibly at Balham, Herne Hill, Deptford, West Ham, one road from Weybridge goes to the check-point in the south.

The M4 from the airport is blocked off. No gates at Richmond, Acton, Notting Hill, Tufnell Park from the north and west. Everything is blocked off with concrete and razor wire.

And it is the people of Loughton, Richmond, Notting Hill and Weybridge who decide whether or not the gates are open or not. Often they’re not.

All other roads are blocked by concrete and barbed wire. And it’s been like this for 40+ years.

For a fuller description of life inside the Gaza Strip — plus how Gaza fits on top of New York City — see the post below.