A Question of Perspective: Arab response to Gaza

I've found a few articles treating the topic of Arab political response to Gaza, and wanted to explore the regional politics that factor into how Arab leaders are reacting to the conflict. This article from Reuters reported that demonstrators across the Middle East protested the lackluster answer offered by Arab leaders. In addition to civilian protests, some Muslim nations (particularly Libya) have criticized Arab leaders and how they have handled the situation.

The third article I found from Haaretz gave more insight into regional politics and their influence in the conflict. The second half of the article discusses Syria, which historically has ties to Hamas. Syria and Israel have been meeting in the hopes of negotiating a peace deal between the two, and while the talks have been suspended as a result of the incursion, the article implies that Bashar Al-Assad still wishes to keep that diplomatic avenue open. These kinds of conflicting interests may be driving how Arab nations respond to violent conflicts between Israel and Palestine.

This Al-Jazeera article took a different viewpoint by characterizing Syria as highly critical of Israel at a recent Arab summit. Given these different accounts, I had a difficult time coming to a conclusion about the Arab reaction to the conflict. While some depict Syria as a hard-line critic of Israel's incursion, the Haaretz article sees a more nuanced political situation that has prevented a stronger response to Israel. What do you think? Are there any other sources that can give clues to Arab geopolitics and how they influence Arab responses to Gaza? What about the history of Arab involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Hamas using children as human shield

This post is in response to Alyson's post, but I couldn't add a video in my comment so I just am writing this as a separate post. I thought Alyson's post was an great perspective on the different uses of human shields in conflict. I found the BBC article the most interesting perhaps, since it acknowledged that both Israel and Gaza overtake civilian homes, thus reducing them to human targets. I had never considered that the use of a home transformed into a military target would fall into the same category as the type of human shields I have heard of/seen. I began searching for clips of human shields in the Middle East and I came across these two YouTube videos, which both show Hamas’ use of children as human shields. The first, is a 17 second clip, the second contains the exact same clip beginning around 2:15, but includes other human shield images and a larger message of Hamas’ abuse on children.




I think the second video falls in line with a sort of sensationalist media, it uses the abuse of children as another negative perspective on Hamas. It induces pity for these children, but the video is without background--for example the final image is of a young child crying with a fake rifle around his neck.

Pro-Israel Response and "Human Shields" in International Media

Laura's post on Arab representations of the Gaza conflict spurred me to research representations in political cartoons produced by pro-Israel sources. These are a few comics I found on Mideasttruth, a pro-Israel media site that has articles and editorials as well as comics. I don't know how blogger will scale the images, but if the text is too small to read you can just click on the image to link to a full-sized version.

The first image, by an Austrian cartoonist, as well the second, by an American, reiterate claims that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as "human shields" during military operations. While the first cartoon suggests that the human shields are used just to physically protect Palestinian militants, I felt that the second cartoon links the use of human shields ("Body Armor") to a larger agenda that uses civilian casualties to strengthen the humanitarian case against Israel ("Public Relations").

I also found an article on BBC that discusses the use of human shields from a very different perspective. BBC reports that Amnesty International is accusing both Israeli and Palestinian forces of using Gazans as shields during the conflict. The article discusses in more depth the tactics both sides allegedly employ with regard to human shields.

Finally, the last comic in the post brings in yet another perspective on civilian casualties in armed conflict, and in a sense it responds to the "Public Relations" agenda implied in the second cartoon. I feel it criticizes the way that popular media can over-exaggerate or sensationalize civilian casualties, and as a result perhaps what some see as a "Palestinian PR agenda" can be attributed to the willingness of sensationalist media to feature civilian casualties in its coverage of the conflict.

So my initial research on pro-Israel cartoons led me to a larger discourse on human shields and how media represents this kind of violence. I think it's interesting that each of the sources I found came to very different conclusions about who is at fault and what the motivations are for using human shields.