My Name is Rachel Corrie

MyFDL Editor Note: Original picture removed due to copyright

Ten years ago today, mere days before we began our $2 trillion criminal war of aggression against the Iraqi people, American college senior, Rachel Corrie, was murdered near Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.

I’ve never before written that the courageous young woman was murdered.   However, having considered the testimony given during the civil trial against the Israel Defense Forces regarding her death, which concluded last August, her demise was indeed murder, to wit: an unlawful killing of a human being, with malice.

My thoughts in 2003, in reaction to what I then thought was a terrible accident, with elements of negligence both by the Israeli Defense Forces and the International Solidarity Movement, led to the creation of my antiwar, anti-Zionist cantata, The Skies Are Weeping.  I’ve posted the youtube I created of The Skies Are Weeping here before, but today is a truly fitting day to take the liberty to do this again.  Late last year, a couple of organizations inquired about performing it live today.  I declined the offers, as I would want to be there, and my work and performing schedule this month ruled it out.

Today, in Olympia, Washington, Rachel Corrie’s home town, there will be many 10th anniversary commemorations.  Among the musical elements will be a performance by my friend, David Rovics.  Here are the lyrics to his song, The Death of Rachel Corrie:

When she sat down in the dirt
In front of your machine
A lovely woman dressed in red
You in military green
If you had met her in Jerusalem
You might have asked her on a date
But here you were in Gaza
Rolling towards the gate

As your foot went to the floor
Did you recall her eyes
Did her gaze remind you
That you’ve become what you despise
As you rolled on towards this woman
And ignored all the shouts to stop
Did you feel a shred of doubt
As you watched her body drop

And as your Caterpillar tracks
Upon her body pressed
With twenty tons of deadly force
Crushed the bones within her chest
Could you feel the contours of her face
As you took her life away
Did you serve your country well
On that cool spring day

And when you went back across the Green Line
Back to the open shore
Did you think that this was just another day
In a dirty war
And when you looked out on the water
Did you feel an empty void
Or was it just one more life you’ve taken
One more home destroyed

Here is David, performing it three years ago:

And here is the original performance of The Skies Are Weeping.  An apology on the sound quality is appropriate.  In order to be able to donate another 1,200 pounds or so to Palestinian charities, we opted out of a professional recording of the event.  So I recorded it with an MP-3 player under my seat in the front row of the hall.

Read the rest of this entry →

Next Saturday, March 16th, will mark the tenth anniversary of the death in Gaza, of Rachel Corrie.  Rachel, then a senior at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, had gone to Gaza at the beginning of 2003, to fulfill aspects of her senior thesis.  While there, she became active in efforts by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), to protect Palestinians from outrages of the Israeli occupation forces.

She was killed by an Israeli Army D-9 armored bulldozer, with two people aboard in the cockpit, one there to drive, the other, to observe.  During the same time period, Israeli forces in Gaza shot and mortally wounded Tom Hurndall, a British photographer, also working with the ISM (April 11th), and mutilated Brian Avery (April 5th), another American ISM activist, in Jenin in the West Bank.  This time period coincided with the American invasion of Iraq – March 19th to May 1st.

A notable aspect of Rachel Corrie’s legacy is the sheer volume of art her life and sacrifice evoked.  Between March 19th 2003 and April 24th 2004, I collected over 160 poems written in the young woman’s honor, and posted on the web, in the English language.  I used two of them in my 2003-2004 cantata, The Skies Are Weeping.  California composer, Paul Crabtree composed another cantata about Corrie, American Persephone.

Corrie’s journals and emails from Gaza became the basis of the most widely viewed and highly regarded work of art about Corrie, My Name is Rachel Corrie.  Written by Katharine Viner and Alan Rickman, the play premiered in London on April 5, 2005, in a highly evocative solo performance by actress Megan Dodds.  Premiered in a very small theatre, it was revived in the 2005 fall London theatre season in a larger venue, and proceeded to win many awards.

The first attempt to produce My Name is Rachel Corrie in the USA, at the New York Theatre Workshop resulted in a cancellation, when the NYTW caved to threats from militant Zionist expansionists. (Incidentally – the article about the cancellation in The Nation, by writer Philip Weiss, and the pushback that writer got in the publishing world for having written so sympathetically about Corrie, and critically about the NYTW, was one of the epiphanies Weiss underwent that led him into new directions, now expressed most fully at his web site, Mondoweiss).

The play has gone on to be performed on every continent save Antarctica, in many languages.

The play was derived from Corrie’s written material with cooperation of the slain activist’s family.  Some of Corrie’s writings had been posted on the web soon after her death.  Some soon became the basis of poems or lyrics.  For instance, the concluding lyric in The Skies are Weeping is my editing (with the Corrie family’s approval) of one of her last emails home: Read the rest of this entry →

March 16th, less than two months away, will mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Evergreen College senior, Rachel Corrie, in Rafah, near the Egyptian border of the Gaza Strip, as she sought to and succeeded in keeping an Israeli military armored Caterpiller bulldozer from destroying the house of a large Palestinian family.

Her action cost her her life.  But her legacy lives on through the work of her parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie, and through the inspiration she has provided to hundreds of thousands of young people, worldwide.

RT TV commentator and reporter, Abby Martin, in an interview with Rachel’s parents, notes:

Rachel served as a symbol for me to really wake up about this issue.

Here’s Martin’s interview:

There will be hundreds of commemorative events worldwide as March 16th approaches.  I hope to  cover some of the more significant ones here.

If you, like Abby Martin, have been inspired or influenced by Rachel Corrie’s determination on March 16th, 2003, please comment on that here.

Meanwhile, ponder this interview with Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar about his disgust over the gratuitously cruel carnage wrought by Israeli forces during 2008-2009′s Operation Cast Lead.

RT TV‘s meteoric young on-air commentator, Alyona Minkovsky, left the network in late July, to take a position at Huffington Post’s new real-time web niche, HuffPost Live. While at RT TV, Minkovsky’s interviews were edgy and provocative. Her interviewing skills combined with what appeared to be a thirst for knowledge about news that seldom or never gets covered by the likes of Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz, for instance. Compared to Alyona, Rachel was more like FOX than like progressive.

Since her move to HuffPost Live, it has been almost painful to watch how the new show seems to have sucked the life and soul out of a brilliant young news person. I guess HuffPost could do that to almost anyone, though. I stopped watching.

On her last show before exiting into Arianna’s fief in the Borg, Alyona interviewed Firedoglake‘s Jane Hamsher and the Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald. I praised her fine work up to that point in her career, as did Kevin Gosztola.

So what did RT TV do to make up for the loss of Minkovsky? On September 4th, a new show debuted, featuring Abby Martin. According to RT‘s bio page on her:

Abby was involved in the creation of multiple new media projects. She is a self taught editor, videographer, writer, journalist and artist. In 2009, she founded her own citizen journalism media organization called Media Roots based in Oakland, CA. There, she editorially managed and produced hundreds of multimedia stories, including front line coverage of the Occupy Oakland crackdowns.

Abby is also the youngest member on the board of Project Censored, the largest research organization in the country, that works to publish the top 25 censored news stories every year. While based in the Bay Area, she hosted a weekly radio show with Project Censored on KPFA, a Pacifica affiliate FM radio station.”

I’ve caught a few YouTube clips from her show, Breaking the Set, and from her short feature, Brainwash Update. She’s sort of like Minkovsky on steroids. Unfortunately, I’ve been way too busy with teaching, conducting and composing this fall to watch much, but her reports on Gaza may have been the best on American television. She was visibly moved, even physically disturbed by the possibly intentional Israeli attacks on newsmen, including RT, during the recent Gaza massacre. But this one threw me for a loop:

I would not want to piss off this courageous reporter.

Welcome to the battle, Abby the Hasbara Slayer.

After Martin’s in-your-face response to threats, she was again criticized by Zionist media.  Here’s how she responded (28 minutes):

She’s not taking prisoners.

I’d like to see Martin interview the Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands, Haim Divon, next.  As the Gaza massacre was winding down, he went to a speech at which “full-time fascist” Leon de Winter raged:

On the night a ceasefire came into effect ending eight days of Israeli slaughter that left 162 people, the vast majority unarmed civilians, dead in Gaza, Dutch columnist and author Leon de Winter proposed adding chemicals to Gaza’s water supply to sterilize the population.

The website PowNed reported that de Winter “made his proposal for forced eugenics yesterday evening in Amsterdam at a solidarity meeting of Dutch Jews,” and that the speech by de Winter was broadcast this morning by Dutch mainstream and publicly-funded Radio 1.

PowNed said:

De Winter responded in his speech to the accusations of genocide leveled against Israel, saying that the population of Gaza had only increased over the last few years. “Maybe we should secretly add some means of birth control to Gaza’s drinking water,” De Winter proceeded to propose.

The suggestion was met with roaring laughter by the public. Among the participants that evening were the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, Hiam Devon [sic], and the cheerful leader of the [religious ultra-conservative] SGP party, Kees van der Staaij.

De Winter blogged until 2008 on the mainstream liberal news site Elsevier. He is also an “an adjunct fellow” at the Hudson Institute, a right-wing American think-tank.

While de Winter, known for his “humor,” might have intended his suggestion as some sort of sick joke, the reported reaction suggests that the audience were only too ready to mock an already dehumanized population.

Maybe Martin can interview Divon on his seeming support for such a strange and public fascist, whose ideas strike me as boilerplate Anders Breivik.

Maybe Martin can interview the commanding officer of the Israel Defense Forces’ social media unit, Lieutenant Sacha Dratwa.  Here’s the lieutenant, posing on his facebook page, as President Obama:

I suppose in his racist mind, he thought he was being funny.  The American blog, YourBlackWorld did not think Lt. Dratwa was funny.  At all.  Nor did Democratic Underground.

Maybe Lt. Dratwa feels their anti-Semitism keeps them from seeing the true humor in his, uh, parody.

Yeah – that’s the ticket.

Good luck, Abby Martin.

The music of Tariq Shadid, a Palestinian surgeon, who goes by the nom de web of Doc Jazz, is quite varied.  A self-taught musician, his unique take on aspects of the Palestinian diaspora is gaining traction on the web, and in the Low Countries.  Although recently primarily based in the Netherlands, Doc Jazz has worked in the Gulf States, and was in the USA this fall, performing benefits.  Here is what Doc Jazz wrote about a benefit in Anaheim on October 18, 2012, for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund:

I ended this sweet little concert with the song I had written especially for PCRF’s amazing efforts: ‘Healing Hands.’ By then, it was time to move on with the other parts of the program, most importantly the reason for holding this annual gala: to raise funds for providing medical treatment for the children of Palestine.

While the impressive efforts of PCRF’s medical projects were being shown on slideshows on two large screens, the generous crowd started making its donations. I was extremely impressed to hear that when it was all over, more than a hundred thousand dollars had been raised, with expectations being expressed of reaching almost double that amount at the closing of the fundraiser.

Knowing that PCRF translates all these finances into direct medical assistance to Palestinian children, was absolutely humbling. I know that words are of enormous importance, in creating awareness for the injustice that befalls these children, but you can’t help but feel forced into a modest attitude when you see the direct relief resulting from real-life medical and surgical treatment of Palestinian children in need.

In an interview by activist author, organizer and blogger, Heather Wokusch, Doc Jazz described his musical beginnings and impetus:

Next to my full-time job as a surgeon, I devoted the larger part of my spare time to supporting the Palestinian cause in any legal way I could think of. I started writing articles for the Palestine Chronicle in 2001, the same year in which I started a website called the ‘Musical Intifadah’. Being a self-taught hobbyist musician, I wrote and recorded, in my home-studio, songs about the Palestinian situation, and published them online, and made an online collection of songs, also by other artists, about Palestine. At that time, I did not believe that speaking up for the Palestinian cause was a feasible or useful thing to do in the Netherlands, so I saw the internet as a useful means to reach out on a more global level. However, then Gretta Duisenberg, wife of the then president of the European Central Bank, did a very courageous thing here. She hung a Palestinian flag from her balcony for several weeks, which caused a small international row, so I started believing there was yet hope for the Dutch situation. I wrote a song about her brave deed in Dutch (my first song in Dutch ever), which brought me into contact with her. When I joined her on her delegation to Palestine, a visit that was followed by the Dutch media on a day-to-day basis, it threw me right in the middle of the Dutch discourse on matters of the Middle East.

Dr. Shadid goes on to describe the role of artists, particularly protest artists, in this discourse:

The interesting thing we see in our modern societies, is that the corporations that finance (control) the media and entertainment business are very aware of the importance of artistic expression. They are always sure to propel their own symbolisms and stereotypes into the minds of people, whenever they get a chance to. Hollywood is one of the best examples of this, and who can deny its world-wide influence?  On the opposition side however, the disagreeing side, you find that many people lose themselves in angry discourse, and make themselves victims in the discussion, by falling into the defensive position. I believe art is one of the ways to reverse this dynamic, since art makes a statement that can not easily be responded to by verbal discourse. If those who are unhappy about the statement in your art try to attack it with their rhetoric, they often unwillingly aid in enlarging the message it is sending out. This way, I believe, art can be more powerful for a cause than any intellectual form of expression, be it a speech or an article. Nevertheless, I have noticed that people who propagate human rights causes often underestimate this effect, and don’t utilize it enough. They should support the efforts of artists who engage in ‘Creative Resistance’, more than they already do. [emphasis added]

From my own experience, I couldn’t agree more.  Doc Jazz’s concern expressed above about “speaking up for the Palestinian cause [being] a feasible or useful thing to do in the Netherlands,” came to my mind this morning, reading this (retweeted by Doc Jazz):

On the night a ceasefire came into effect ending eight days of Israeli slaughter that left 162 people, the vast majority unarmed civilians, dead in Gaza, Dutch columnist and author Leon de Winter proposed adding chemicals to Gaza’s water supply to sterilize the population.

The website PowNed reported that de Winter “made his proposal for forced eugenics yesterday evening in Amsterdam at a solidarity meeting of Dutch Jews,” and that the speech by de Winter was broadcast this morning by Dutch mainstream and publicly-funded Radio 1.

Troubling, but even more troubling:

de Winter responded in his speech to the accusations of genocide leveled against Israel, saying that the population of Gaza had only increased over the last few years. “Maybe we should secretly add some means of birth control to Gaza’s drinking water,” De Winter proceeded to propose.

The suggestion was met with roaring laughter by the public. Among the participants that evening were the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, Hiam Devon, and the cheerful leader of the [religious ultra-conservative] SGP party, Kees van der Staaij. [emphasis added]

So, as the Israeli war crimes in Gaza were winding down, the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands was attending a RWNJ (right-wing nut job) event in the Netherlands, recommending another war crime – genocide!  Why am I not surprised.  Hopefully, somebody will write a song about this.

Here are two performances by Doc Jazz.
Read the rest of this entry →

The wake of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire is getting turbulent:

Egypt’s president on Thursday issued constitutional amendments that placed him above judicial oversight and ordered the retrial of Hosni Mubarak for the killing of protesters in last year’s uprising.

Mohammed Morsi also decreed immunity for the Islamist-dominated panel drafting a new constitution from any possible court decisions to dissolve it, a threat that had been hanging over the controversial assembly.

Morsi took this and other actions within hours after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Here’s a link to the text of PM Morsi’s declaration.

Nobody is yet making a connection between his meetings with HRC and this move, but one might ponder this from 2009:

We look forward to President Mubarak coming as soon as his schedule would permit. I had a wonderful time with him this morning. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.

Clinton’s main job in the Middle East, after satisfying Netanyahu and his ilk, is finding the best dictators our money or threats can purchase.  She may have found one this week.

Protests are gathering in Cairo as I write:

Demonstrators for and against sweeping new powers assumed by Egypt’s Islamist president are gathering in different parts of Cairo, a clear show of the deep polarization plaguing the country.

Protests following Friday midday prayers are set to be led by prominent pro-democracy figures, like Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the U.N.’s nuclear agency.

Muslim Brotherhood backers were gathering in front of the presidential palace northern Cairo to support Morsi.

Earlier tonight ElBaradei tweeted:

Mohamed ElBaradei ‏@ElBaradei

Morsi today usurped all state powers & appointed himself Egypt’s new pharaoh. A major blow to the revolution that cld have dire consequences

In Gaza, Israeli forces appear to have seriously violated the ceasefire agreement.  The issue of changes in what constitutes the free fire zone along the Gaza-Israel border was widely reported to be in play in the Hamas-Israel negotiations mid-week.  Mixed signals went out to Gazans.  After the ceasefire, many Gazans approached the fence:

The old rule was that if you walked within 300 meters of the prison fence, you got killed.  It was a really stupid, cruel rule, that has led to a lot of killing of innocent Gazan inmates, many of them kids.

A lot of people came to believe the old rule was gone, until:

One adult has been killed and 10 teenagers wounded as Israeli soldiers, stationed at the border line between Khan Younis and Israel, opened fire at them, medical sources say.

Witnesses told Al Jazeera that the teenagers entered the disputed area of the “buffer zone”, which is 300m along all the Gaza-Israel borders.

Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston reporting from Gaza City said they had received reports that a number of farmers entered Khan Younis in the buffer zone, which ordinarily is a no go zone, to check on their crops.

She said they may have had confused information about that buffer zone as there has been lots of information about the easing of travel restrictions.

Other reports on the death seem more informative:

Medics said Anwar Qdeih, 23, was hit in the head by Israeli gunfire after he approached the security fence that runs along the Gaza frontier — an area that Israel has long declared a no-go zone for Gazans.

A relative of the dead man, who was at the scene, told Reuters that Qdeih had been trying to place a Hamas flag on the fence. He added that an Israeli soldier had fired into the air three times before Qdeih was hit in the head by a bullet.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: “We will contact the Egyptian mediator to discuss the incident.”

Abu Zuhri’s statement is reassuring, and may indicate Hamas truly wants this cease fire to hold.

This is a rapidly developing Black Friday story, and I may update it after I get some sleep.

Updated – 10:50 am PST:  Mondoweiss is running this video with the claim that it is of the shootings written about above:

The cease fire appears to be holding, though.

Winona LaDuke is a powerful voice in the global fight against a host of evil actions and ideas.  She is as progressive as progressive gets.  In my actions and ideals, I find her as an ally in many areas.  Currently, that has to do mostly with our unconnected fights against insane coal development projects.

On November 16th, she posted this at her main Facebook niche, Honor the Earth:

“…euro-americans in the United States can’t talk about Gaza, because we can’t talk about Israel. Because we can’t talk about the fact that the world is not suffering from a Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but that the world is suffering from the fact that Europe has never been able to deal with it’s ‘Jewish Question’ without some sort of intense barbarity and horror from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. And that Europe, in particular ‘Great’ Britain, the masters of divide an conquer ‘solved’ the problem by supporting the radical, terrorist, extremist Zionists and their mad plan to resettle the ‘homeland.’ We can’t talk about Israel because we can’t talk about Wounded Knee. Because we can’t talk about Sand Creek or Carlisle ‘Boarding School.’ Because we can’t talk about forced sterilization or small pox blankets or Kit Carson and his scorched earth policy in the Southwest. Because we have Andrew Jackson on our twenty dollar bill. Because we are one huge settlement on stolen land. We can’t talk about Israel because we are Israel.”

Comments at the Facebook post were dominated by a couple or few people who were hostile to anything that might be critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza this past week.

Early Wednesday, Adam Horowitz posted LaDuke’s Facebook entry in its entirety at Mondoweiss, pretty much without introduction or commentary on it.  Most commenters there perceived LaDuke’s brief statement as positive or interesting.  Some did not, possibly misinterpreting what LaDuke was saying.  I was bothered by one long-time Mondoweiss commenter’s – American – brief rant:

American says:

November 21, 2012 at 12:27 pm

I. Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev is one or the smoothest operators out there among world-class apparatchiks.  Like Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson for the press, Avital Leibovich, he is unperturbed when being asked vexing questions about the dubious morality of Israeli military policy.  Early in the weekend, Leibovich was questioned by RT TV about the bombing of a building in Gaza City which housed offices, equipment and reporters for several news agencies.  She claimed it was impossible to avoid hurting journalists, because Hamas was using them as “human shields.”

Now the Israelis have again attacked a building housing news gatherers:

After a second Israeli attack on a media building in two days, this time killing two journalists, the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, Mark Regev explains to al-Jazeera English that because the journalists were Palestinian the Israel military considered them legitimate “targets.” Regev’s remarks were made just a few hours after the November 19, 2012 bombing of al-Shuruq Tower and another building used to house the offices of several media outlets, including both Palestinian and international networks.

Speaking to al-Jazeera, Regev said, “We took out the target that we wanted to take out.” When pressed by al-Jazeera over the injuries of eight journalists the previous day, where one lost his leg, Regev continued:

“Oh you’re talking about… oh first of all maybe we have a discussion about who is a journalist and if you’ll allow me I will elaborate on this. There is the al-Aqsa station, which is a station that is a Hamas command and control facility, just as in other totalitarian regimes; the media is used by the regime for command and control and also for security purposes. From our point of view that’s not a legitimate journalist.”

Al-Jazeera’s correspondent then followed-up by asking, “So what are you saying? That a local Arab journalist life is any less than an internationalist journalist?”Apparently for Regev, yes, in Gaza there are no legitimate Palestinian journalists, only targets. [emphasis added]

I don’t think international law makes a distinction between journalists working for outlets within authoritarian regimes and others.  Nor do I think Mr. Regev or Ms. Leibovich care.  There may be Palestinian journalists working in Gaza who are not somehow connected to Hamas, but to get their credentials they have to apply to the local government – Hamas – to get them.

Kevin Gosztola covered the earlier attacks in a great article here early Sunday, titled Israel’s Targeting Media is a War Crime.  Here is his accounting of worldwide media reaction:
Read the rest of this entry →

I.  As the civilian death toll in Gaza mushroomed Sunday, the son of long comatose Ariel Sharon invoked mushroom clouds, in a stark metaphor of eliminationism toward the people of Gaza:

The son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called on Israel to escalate its current military assault and “flatten all of Gaza”.

In an inflammatory op-ed article for The Jerusalem Post,  Gilad Sharon dismisses any concern over the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians as a result.

“The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas,” he writes.

“We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.”

Sharon was far from alone.  A line was crossed Saturday when Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai called for a Holocaust against Palestinians:

“The more qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” he said.

Anonymous has been claiming since shortly after the November 6th election that they foiled a nefarious plot by Karl Rove to steal enough of the electronic vote in key swing states to have given the presidency to George Mitt Romney.

Before the election, Anonymous warned Rove’s people:

After the election, they claim that they did act:

We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another king while looking the other way.

After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of his ORCA. This was an easy task in that barn doors were left open and his wind swept us inside.

We coded and created, what we call The Great Oz. A targeted password protected firewall that we tested and refined over the past weeks. We placed this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destination that Karl’s not so smart worker bees planned to use on election night. We noticed that these tunnels were strategically placed to allow tunnel rats to race to the server sewers from three different states.  Ah yes, Karl tried to make it look like there were more than three but we quickly saw the folly of his ploy.

We watched as Karl’s weak corrupters repeatedly tried to penetrate The Great Oz.  These children of his were at a loss-how many times and how many passwords did they try-exactly 105.

There have been several articles on the web about Anonymous’s claim.  I am not claiming that they actually did what they purport to having done.  However, Friday, I watched as Anonymous claimed to be bringing down one key Israeli web site after another.  Checking their work as it was announced and described on twitter, they appeared to be doing what they claimed:

As the conflict in Gaza escalated this week, hacker group Anonymous launched a series of attacks on websites owned by the Israeli military, government and other institutions within Israel.

Dubbed “OpIsrael,” the mass disruption began early Thursday with hundreds of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which websites are flooded with traffic until they crash.

Since then, the scope of attacks has widened to include the deletion of government and financial databases, and the posting of more than 2,000 email addresses and passwords from an Israeli real estate website.

A series of tweets from @YourAnonNews, a Twitter account associated with the hacktivist group, claimed that databases belonging to Bank Jerusalem and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been deleted.

Late Saturday, Anonymous appears to have upped the ante by posting this video:

I wrote earlier in the week about how the intensity of the cyber war aspects of the widening Gaza campaign appear to be a new element.  The implications of what this anonymous worldwide campaign against a state war machine may imply are somewhat stunning, especially if they can actually influence how the campaign develops in any meaningful way.  If Anonymous, in a matter of weeks, can change the outcome of the American presidential election and influence the conduct of a war a third of the way around the world, we are indeed in a new world.