Deaths in Gaza, squabbles in activist-land

The scenes from Gaza just get more terrible, with the death toll now passing way above 1,000 and allegations of all sorts of very nasty unconventional munitions being used - the kinds of things that unspeakably sick people in laboratories dream up to make human flesh burn and wounds expand and extend across bones and organs.
Non-combatants, as usual, make up the vast majority of casualties, with around a third of them children. The ongoing destruction of power and communications infrastructure means that the moving and powerful blog posts from TalesToTell have now been replaced by occasional grim facts posted by a friend in the UK from occasional phone calls when the networks are sporadically up.
The civilian/ combatant figures quoted by the mainstream press are incredibly misleading anyway, as any adult male is classed as a potential combatant - so the teachers, garbage collectors, medics, factory workers, taxi drivers, fishermen, weavers, woodcarvers and any other man who gets burned or sliced to bits or crushed by Israeli weaponry is painted as a 'legitimate' casualty of war.
The spectacle at home is unedifying, to go with it. Depressingly, many of the vigils have degenerated into the usual paper-selling competition between the SWP and FRFI cliques. The chant-chant-slogan-slogan-slogan format has gone beyond tedious into ill-considered and dangerous, with calls for Palestine to be free "from the river to the sea" or "Israel, down down" both denying the presence of millions of Israeli Jewish civilians, many of whom don't support their government's actions and who have lived In Israel for generations. Yes, economic, political and cultural justice for Palestinians should be a no-brainer, and addressing the Palestinian Right of Return will have to be a high priority in any (ha!?!) peace negotations, but that is not the same as calling for the triumph of reactionary nationalisms of whatever nation.
Using such chants is also tactically cretinous, playing directly into the hands of those who would dismiss all pro-Palestinian calls as anti-semitic and as supporting a wholesale massacre or ethnic cleansing of Jews. There are plenty of people out there who claim to support Palestine who do have such fundamentally revolting views (I have to deal with the many nauseatingly offensive posts they leave on the Free Gaza Facebook group I moderate), but they must be rejected as actively and robustly as the arch-Zionists who pepper such groups with comments about 'sandniggers' and nuking Gaza.
On the other hand, so-called 'anarchists' who tie themselves in such knots about their personal intellectual purity that they can't bear to be on a demo where nationalists are present also seem pretty disassociated from either basic human compassion or, indeed, the real world. Whether Indymedia is a useful or intelligent forum for that debate is a whole other issue...
So, more encouragingly, I'm ending with a post from LA Indymedia. Plenty of the more rabid supposedly pro-Palestinians present blanket condemnations of Israel and the USA. They miss the word 'state' out of those, and this US action by Jewish groups is a thing of beauty and a reminder that actions that come out of decency and compassion cross all boundaries and should overcome all ideological fallings-out: http://la.indymedia.org/news/2009/01/223875.php
All the photos reproduced in this post are courtesy of handouts from "Jewish People of Conscience"