Pensez-vous que la solution des deux Etats ne soit plus envisageable dans le contexte actuel, avec un nouvel échec des négociations de paix ?
 
J'ai peur de dire que c'est fichu et que par la force des choses, on va en arriver à un Etat binational. Comment faire pour que ce ne soit ni un Etat d'apartheid ni une guerre civile permanente ? Pour cela, je m'accroche toujours à la solution des deux Etats. La véritable forme de coexistence, ce sont deux Etats voisins, avec une union douanière, économique et une collaboration sur les dossiers importants. La question est de savoir si nous, Israéliens et Palestiniens, acceptons l'état de fait créé en 1948-1949, et les frontières de 1949. Et est-ce que les Palestiniens sont prêts à abandonner tout espoir d'un retour en Israël car cette revendication signifie la destruction de l'Etat d'Israël ? Après, il ne resterait que des problèmes solvables, non existentiels.

PHOTOS. Avec ces Juifs qui quittent la France pour Israël

À l'image de cette famille d’"olims" (immigrants juifs vers Israël) arrivant dans leur nouveau logement à Kyriat Haïm, près de Haïfa, de plus en plus de Français choisissent de vivre au pays hébreu. Focus. Ci-dessus, Marc et Sylvie, ainsi que leurs trois fils, originaires de Bretagne, sont partis "pour tenter l’aventure" le 16 juillet 2014 de Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle avec le groupe des 430 Français faisant leur alya (littéralement "la montée" vers Israël).

Reporters who covered Operation Protective Edge in Gaza dismiss Israeli accusations of giving Hamas an easy ride.
 
On Wednesday night Benjamin Netanyahu briefed the foreign press, summing up four weeks of warfare in Gaza. “Now that the members of the press are leaving Gaza and are no longer subjected to Hamas restrictions and intimidation,” he said,” I expect we will see even more documentation of Hamas terrorists hiding behind the civilian population, exploiting civilian targets. I think it’s very important for the truth to come out.”
 
The prime minister’s voice betrayed no rancor but his words masked a deep frustration in his office over what one adviser called “a conspiracy of silence” by the foreign correspondents reporting from Gaza for the past month. “They have remained silent over how no one digs too deep into the Hamas side or into how they use civilians as human shields,” the adviser said. “That’s how they get an opportunity to cover Gaza, and it creates an imbalanced picture, which is bad for Israel. We should be trying to expose that.”
 
Netanyahu’s expectations have yet to be fulfilled. Of the 710 foreign journalists who crossed into Gaza during Operation Protective Edge, only a handful have claimed they were intimidated by Hamas or produced hitherto unpublished footage of rockets being fired from civilian areas, such as the pictures filmed by Indian channel NDTV, which were shown at the Netanyahu briefing. Maybe such footage will still emerge — all the foreign correspondents interviewed for this piece insisted that it doesn’t exist, and not because they wouldn’t have liked to obtain such pictures.
 
“It’s a phony controversy,” said one reporter who spent three weeks in Gaza and, like most who were interviewed, asked to remain anonymous. “This is a post-facto attempt to claim the media’s biased and Netanyahu [is] therefore infallibly right."

“I didn’t see a rocket at point of launch,” says one European photographer who left Gaza a few days ago, “but I did see a lot in the air, and those pictures were published. If I had a chance I would have photographed launchers, but they were well hidden. Israel, with all its sensors and drones, didn’t find them all.”
 
“You couldn’t tell exactly where a rocket was being launched from,” says an American reporter. ”Often they were hundreds of yards away, although you could hear the launch and see the contrails. We didn’t hesitate to mention the general area in our reports, but that didn’t necessarily add much.”
 
“There are always some gung-ho photojournalists who would go to any front line, no matter how dangerous,” says Anne Barnard, the New York Times Beirut bureau chief, who spent two weeks reporting from Gaza. “But that requires essentially an informal embed with the militants, to even be able to locate them without getting caught in crossfire on the way. Our team in Gaza noted frequently in stories that Hamas operates in urban areas and from farm fields. We mentioned witnessing specific rocket launches in numerous stories, witnessing the rocket going up from some distance away, that is. But in two weeks I never saw a rocket crew; for obvious reasons, to avoid getting a hit by Israeli strikes, they try not to be seen.”

The New York Times came in for specific criticism from pro-Israel advocates who focused on the seeming failure of its star photographer, Tyler Hicks, to capture any militants in his camera lens.
 
“Tyler saw some guys come out of a hole in the side of a building in Shujaiyeh during the brief cease-fire on July 20,” recalls Barnard. “They were without guns but making gestures to say no photos. I put that in the story. Tyler also took pictures of at least one Hamas member being buried, but again funerals were harder to access than usual because they were held quickly and without much fanfare and [with] few mourners because of the danger. You could understand why they stayed out of sight: Israel appeared to be defining Hamas targets very broadly, to include any member of the Hamas administered police, government, etc. They may have felt that they would be targets, and so would the reporters they were talking to. We certainly were concerned about that ourselves.”
 
“There’s been a lot of talk about Hamas preventing us from seeing them,” says another correspondent with extensive experience in covering Middle East wars. “But the fact is that the areas they were fighting in were just too dangerous. If I had tried to report from Shujaiyeh during the fighting, I would probably have got killed. Hamas isn’t a regular army: When they leave the fighting areas, they don’t wear uniforms or carry guns.”

“I wasn’t intimidated at any point,” says one seasoned war reporter. “I didn’t feel Hamas were a threat to my welfare any more than Israeli bombings. I’m aware some people had problems, but nothing beyond what you would expect covering a conflict. Hamas’s levels of intimidation weren’t any worse than what you occasionally experience at the hands of the IDF, which didn’t allow access to fighting for most of the conflict either. As a rule no armed forces permit you to broadcast militarily sensitive information.”
 
If anything, most reporters are complaining that Hamas seemed to make little effort to engage with the media. “How could there be Hamas censorship if there was no Hamas to be seen?” says one exasperated reporter.

In another case, a number of reporters have said off the record that Hamas officials summoned one photographer and warned him that they would confiscate his camera if he didn’t delete a certain picture. There are also reports of fighters brandishing rifles to prevent photographers from taking their picture, but all the reporters insist these were isolated cases.
 
“Look, no one is claiming for one moment that Hamas is an enlightened organization that believes in freedom of the press,” says one reporter who has been visiting Gaza for years. “I don’t think I have to mention that fact in every report I make. But at least over the last month, they were simply too busy fighting to bother themselves very much with the media.”

“Israel wants reporters to write about the conflict as it conceived it, as a security problem framed by the IDF,” says one reporter with 30 years experience in hot spots worldwide. “Most journalists chose to report it from the point of view of [the] humanitarian impact of conflict, which is what war reporters actually usually do. They’re not writing like defense correspondents. I personally chose not to speak to Hamas mouthpieces because I hold Hamas propaganda in as much contempt as that of Netanyahu.”

Not all the Israeli officials share the criticism. Nitzan Chen, director-general of the Government Press Office, says that “you can’t judge the correspondents without having been in their place. At the end of the day they also have families and want to get home in one piece. Their job isn’t to do [PR] for Israel; they don’t work for us. All in all, I think the coverage was relatively balanced.”

Khouza’a (Gaza) : Le Scoop bidon de Paris Match !!!
 
Un article du reporter free-lance Fréderic Helbert publié dans Paris-Match le 7 août 2014, intitulé « A GAZA, LA MAISON DE L’HORREUR » prétend expliquer l’assassinat de 7 palestiniens dans une maison de Khouza’a dans la bande de Gaza durant l’opération Bordure protectrice. Cet article comporte des lacunes considérables.
 
Premièrement, Paris-Match s’est fait rouler dans la farine par son reporter Fréderic Helbert. Car naïvement, Paris Match annonce le 7 août en introduction de l’article « Notre envoyé spécial à Gaza raconte comment il a découvert la scène d’un massacre dans une maison du petit village de Khouza’a. » Le premier gros problème c’est que ce monsieur n’a rien découvert du tout et qu’il est même arrivé après la guerre car Al Jazeera avait publié l’information 1 semaine plus tôt.
 
...
 
http://coolisrael.fr/19951/khouzaa [...] aris-match

Marrant, la dernière fois qu'on a dit qu'on regrettait ça, un ancien palestinien-syrien s'est dévoilé, demandant des photos du quartier de son père. Un israélien lui à répondu qu'il allait lui en faire, et qu'il pouvait venir s'il voulait. Puis ils ont disparu du topic, sans doute pour finir en mp, loin de cette haine entre internautes.

J'aime.

As debate and international concern grow over Gaza, RT's Mona Zughbi sits down for an exclusive interview with American political scientist, activist, professor, and author Norman Finkelstein. We take a deeper look into the the war on Gaza that has left almost two thousand Palestinians, mostly civilians dead.
Finkelstein, who has extensively studied and written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 3 decades explains the reason behind this offensive and what the end game will be for Gaza. In addition to this analysis, he answers questions about Hamas' rockets and tunnels as well as Israel's Iron Dome. We take a look at how these components came together resulting in the deadliest attack in Gaza.

   AMY GOODMAN: So can you explain further how this works, how the Iron Dome—how Raytheon built this?

   THEODORE POSTOL: Well, the Iron Dome is mostly an Israeli development, although Raytheon is involved. The Iron Dome interceptor has to approach an incoming artillery rocket head-on. So if you saw an Iron Dome interceptor flying a near-vertical trajectory, that would indicate the Iron Dome interceptor is in a near-head-on engagement geometry coming at the artillery rocket. In that geometry, the interceptor has some chance of destroying the artillery rocket warhead. If you see the Iron Dome interceptor engaging the artillery rocket from the side or from the back by chasing it, then it has essentially a zero chance of destroying the artillery rocket warhead. So, if you look up in the sky and you look at the hundreds of videos we now have of the contrails of the—the smoke trails of the Iron Dome interceptors, you can see that almost all the time—there are exceptions, but almost all the time—the Iron Dome interceptors are traveling parallel to the ground, which means that the falling artillery rocket is engaged from the side, or the Iron Domes are—the Iron Dome interceptors are diving to the ground, which means that they are trying to chase artillery rockets from behind. All those engagements are zero probability of intercept. And we’re guessing—we’re guessing, based on what we have, that maybe 10 percent or 15 or 20 percent of the engagements are head-on. Actually, it’s not 20 percent; it’s closer to 10 percent. And when you see so few engagements head on, your conclusion is that the system is not working the vast majority of the time.

   AMY GOODMAN: This goes to the issue of the proportionality of the attack on Gaza. You know, more than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed. And so often when this issue is raised—and I think it’s three Israeli civilians, and of course every death is horrific on either side. But when this issue is raised, Israel just says, "Well, we have an extremely effective Iron Dome system." If it’s not Iron Dome, is it simply saying that these rockets that Hamas and other groups are firing off, they’re not working? I mean, if their intention is to kill, that they are not lethal weapons, if so few people have died and Iron Dome isn’t working?

   THEODORE POSTOL: Well, one has to realize—you know, one has to know some simple technical facts. First of all, most artillery rockets are carrying warheads in the 10-to-20-pound range. So if you’re sitting in a room and the rocket comes through the roof and explodes in the room, it will kill you, and it will kill everybody else in the room. If you have 10 seconds or 20 seconds of warning and you go into the shelter that’s, by law, built in your home, and the rocket happens to hit your home, you won’t be killed. It can even hit the shelter, and you won’t be killed. So, sheltering and early warning are extremely critical to keeping the death toll down. Now, the odds of an artillery rocket going through the roof and into your room are very low. They’re high enough that if I were in Israel, I would advise you, and I would do so myself: I would take shelter, because there’s—you know, the inconvenience is small relative to being killed or injured. But most of these rockets are landing in open areas, landing between buildings, landing outside buildings. And the real danger is that this relatively low-lethality warhead lands within 10 or 20 feet of you.

   Now, if you just lie on the ground—let’s say you’re caught in the open, and you can’t go to a shelter—the Israeli government itself will tell you that your chances of being a casualty from a falling artillery rocket are reduced by 80 percent—80 percent—if you simply lie on the ground. And the reason for that is the lethal range of these low-weight warheads is not very large, and they are blowing fragments out sort of like a shotgun, and if you get close to the ground, unless you’re very unlucky and the thing lands on you or lands very close to you, you’re not going to be injured by the explosion. So, although these artillery rockets are fantastically disruptive, with regard to the functioning of Israeli society—and I think that that is true, and because of that, there’s a psychological and political leverage associated with these artillery rocket attacks—they are not killing people, as long as people are taking shelter and sheltering is available.

[...]

   AMY GOODMAN: Professor Postol, I’m looking at a Boston Globe piece on the Iron Dome and Raytheon being a key in the Israeli defense plan. And it says, "For Raytheon, the Israeli contracts—part of a 'coproduction' deal with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems—present a potential financial windfall. Much of the work would be done at Raytheon’s Tucson, Ariz., missile systems plant, as well by subcontractors across the country." Can you talk more about exactly what Raytheon does and if this Iron Dome system is now being sold to other countries?

   THEODORE POSTOL: Well, I’m not aware of sales to other countries at this point. I haven’t been following that part of the issue. On the question of foreign aid, in this case to Israel, it’s very common—it’s almost always the United States government requires that foreign aid largely be spent with—using American companies. And in the case of Raytheon, they are the premier company for basically building missiles and interceptors of all kinds. So, it’s a natural business arrangement for Raytheon to be a big beneficiary of an agreement like that, because the money goes to Israel in a virtual way, but it basically is spent in the United States.

   Now, this brings—this raises the question of the cost of these interceptors. The Israelis are saying—some Israelis are saying that the interceptors cost $20,000 each. Now, the reason for lowballing this number—I’ll give you a sense of what it could cost—is because the interceptors, the Iron Dome interceptors, are intercepting rockets that might cost $500 or $1,000 each. So there’s an issue of how much you should pay, assuming the system is working, for stopping an artillery rocket, especially if the passive defense, if the taking shelter, saves lives. And, you know, for example, how many artillery shells cause $20,000 or $100,000 worth of damage. And the actual cost of an Iron Dome interceptor is almost certainly well over $100,000, not the $20,000 that some Israeli sources seem to be saying. Now, just to give you a sense of how off the cost could be—again, we don’t know at this point—another interesting fact, there’s so much we don’t know, yet people are throwing money at this. There’s a comparable missile in its cost called the Sidewinder. It’s an air-to-air missile that Raytheon manufactures and sells. The Iron Dome interceptor is very close to an air-to-air missile. It’s a very small missile, weights about 200 pounds, and so does this air-to-air missile—different design, though. That costs $400,000 each. So how is it possible to build an interceptor that has the same advanced technology—it’s not exactly the same, but similar—and roughly the same size, and it only costs $20,000 each? There’s a significant question there about whether the Congress and the American people have accurate information about what this system is really costing.

During my military service in the Israeli army I served in the artillery corps, and thus learned a thing or two about using shells. From the testimonies I have read and heard from the school and the marketplace bombardment, I am not sure if these were mortar or artillery shells that struck, but what’s clear from the photos and reports published by the IDF is that there was massive use of artillery fire. Artillery fire is statistical fire. It is the absolute opposite of precise sniper fire. The power of the sniper lies in the accuracy that his weapon provides him, while the power of the artillery shells being used in Gaza is based on both the extent and possibility of causing damage (impact).
 
As someone who served as a combat soldier in the IDF I feel obligated to explain what is behind the numbers we hear about regarding the military operation in Gaza. A standard high-explosive shell weighs about 40 kg and is nothing but a large fragmentation grenade, which, at the time of explosion, is meant to kill everyone within a 50-meter radius and injure people located in an additional radius of 100 meters. It is impossible to aim the shells in an accurate manner and they are not meant to hit specific targets. Different factors such as the humidity of the air, the amount of heat in the barrel and the direction of the wind may determine whether the shell falls 30 or even 100 meters from the spot at which it was aimed. For that reason, a multi-barrel artillery battery fires a barrage of shells in a certain direction knowing that statistics will work their course, and that due to the scatter and the amount of damage caused by many shells, the target will indeed be hit.
 
There’s no way of knowing who is hit.
 
As a result of the inaccuracy of this weapon, the safety ranges used during war require us to aim at least 250 meters away from our troops while they are behind cover. In 2006 when the IDF first fired artillery shells into Gaza, I was surprised by the choice to use such an inaccurate weapon in such a densely populated region.
 
At the time, firing guidelines were changed so that the safety distance from Palestinian houses was reduced from 300 meters to 100 meters. Shortly thereafter, a shell hit the house of the Ghaben family in Beit Lahiya, killing 9-year-old Hadil and injuring 12 of her family members. Following the incident and several others related to artillery fire, human rights organizations appealed to the Israeli High Court to stop this lethal practice. In response, Israel stated that artillery fire would no longer be used in the Gaza Strip.
 
Only three years later, in Operation Cast Lead, artillery fire was used once again, even more extensively than before. Nowadays, since the launch of Operation Protective Edge, the IDF has already shot thousands of artillery shells at different parts of the Gaza Strip. The shells have caused unbearable damage to human life and tremendous destruction to infrastructure, the full scale of which will only be revealed when the fighting is over.

Idan Barir served in the artillery corps during the Second Intifada. Today he is a Ph.D candidate in history, and an activist with Breaking the Silence.

Media reports have largely focused on the growing capabilities of Hamas’ rockets, noting that the Fajr-5 has a range between 45 km and 75 km. This factoid makes for good press because it shows Iran is continuing to help Hamas. But the reality of this is unlikely, because Hamas had a falling-out with Iran’s ally Syria, which resulted in Hamas leaders being expelled from Damascus.
 
Another indication of the improbability of Hamas using Iranian rockets comes from a BBC News analysis which pointed out that there are huge logistical problems to using the Fajr-5. At 6 meters (some 20 feet) tall, it is heavy and fairly large, requiring mechanical handling. The Fajr-5 needs to be pre-positioned in hidden launch sites and camouflaged from the prying eyes of Israeli drones.
 
Similar arguments can be made against Hamas using the Syrian-made M-302, a large rocket with a reported range of 160 km, or long enough to reach Haifa.
 
Meanwhile, the Gaza-made, homegrown, short-range, unguided rockets keep coming.
 
In theory, Iron Dome could possibly intercept these shorter-range rockets, due to the Gaza rockets’ low speeds. Much like the Patriot interceptor, Iron Dome is essentially an upgraded air defense system, designed to shoot down both aircraft and missiles. The maximum speed of an F-16 fighter, for example, is 1,500 mph, at which it is easily overtaken by a 3,500 mph Patriot missile, as was the case in two friendly fire incidents during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Meanwhile, the flight time of a Gaza rocket with a range of about 15 miles is about 1,350 mph. So, if Iron Dome is even close to a Patriot missile interceptor in speed, its ability to at least catch up with low-speed Gaza rockets may have some credibility. (Iron Dome’s ability to counter longer-range rockets that have a higher speed is yet to be tested. The Scud missiles launched by Iraq under Saddam Hussein traveled at 4,000 miles per hour; the Patriot system did not perform well against them.)
 
Regardless, the aura of Iron Dome invincibility was unmistakably undermined on July 22, when a Hamas rocket landed near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, causing chaos. US and European airlines temporarily stopped flying to Israel due to safety concerns.

Most of the media attention in the United States has focused on Hamas rockets—only 3 percent of which have actually reached populated areas, causing little damage—with not as much paid to Palestinian casualties, or to the reasons Gaza’s residents support the Hamas rocket campaign.

The world’s largest open-air prison. The Gaza Strip consists of just 139 square miles of land, but it has 1.8 million people. The population density in Gaza City—and in refugee camps like Khan Younis, where most Gazans live—could reach 435,000 people per square mile. In comparison, the population density of Manhattan is just 67,000 people per square mile, according to the United Nations Relief Agency in Gaza. Compounding the density problem, Gaza is effectively a prison with no exits.
 
The Palestinians in Gaza live under lockdown and have endured terrible economic deprivations, psychological pressures, dehumanization, and a sense of hopelessness from which they have found no escape. For many, life is not worth living. Under these circumstances, can anyone blame a Palestinian if he or she chooses to join the “resistance,” as they call it? In this completely asymmetric conflict, crude rockets seem to be the only way for Palestinians to redeem a minuscule amount of self-esteem.
 
So, Americans are focusing on the wrong problem. Whether or not Iron Dome works, it does not give Israel more security. To gain real security, Israel needs to end the lockdown on Gaza and get serious about achieving a just and fair deal with the Palestinians. The status quo is not sustainable.

As airstrikes and rocket-fire return to the region, FSRN’s Nell Abram talks with independent journalist and film-maker David Sheen,  who has written extensively on Israel’s anti-Arab and anti-African policies. His work has appeared in the Nation, the Israeli daily Haaretz, on Mondoweiss and the Electronic Intifada. He joins us from his home in Dimona, Israel.

Les Français détachés par rapport au conflit à Gaza
 
Quelques heures après la fin de la trêve décrétée mardi, le Hamas et Israël s'affrontent à nouveau à Gaza.
Les trois quarts des Français (74 %) n'expriment de sympathie pour aucun des deux camps en présence sur la bande Gaza, 17 % se déclarant en faveur des Palestiniens et 9 % pour Israël, selon un sondage IFOP pour Sud Ouest dimanche.