Tuesday, July 29, 2014

We're putting a forest on a climate-change fast-track

28 July 2014 by Adrian Barnett
Magazine issue 2979. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Interviews and Climate Change Topic Guides

An ambitious experiment that exposes a natural woodland to rising carbon dioxide levels will tell us what's in store for the world's trees, says Rob Mackenzie

You head the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research. How will it stand out?

One way it will stand out is a novel experiment called FACE – Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment. It will be the first in the world to take a mature, temperate, broad-leafed woodland ecosystem and, where it stands, expose it to predicted future atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. We will look at the effects of the CO₂ on the structure and functioning of the woodland.

With FACE we are responding to a lack of long-term data on the effects of CO₂ on woodland. People have been saying we need something like this for a long time.

How long will the experiment last?

The FACE experiment has been on the wish-list of UK scientists for years, but has never been possible at this scale because of funding insecurities. Now we are in the extremely fortunate situation of having received philanthropic funding. This allows us to plan for an experiment lasting at least 10 years. If our results are as significant as we expect, then we should be able to extend the run beyond 10 years.

How far forward will it look?

The CO₂ we will be adding corresponds to what we expect to be in the air 75 years from now at current rates of change.

How will you be monitoring the woodland?

We will be using developments in genomics to characterise biodiversity in unprecedented detail. For plant health we have a dedicated lab with the latest biomedical technology. And we will use the latest sensor technology to provide us with never-before-seen levels of detail about how semi-natural woodlands function.

Can't you just do all this in a lab?

You can learn a lot about how plants respond to changing CO₂ using greenhouses, plant growth chambers, even cell lines. But in nature 1+1 has a habit of not equalling 2, so you need to take away the walls, the fake growing media, the artificial climate and watch actual nature working. FACE is Gaia science, if you like.

What else will the institute be looking at?

The other topic in the early years is figuring out the microbiology of pathogen threats to plants.

Why focus your research on these things?

We don't think it's possible to understand the true value of woodlands and forests if we are uncertain about how resilient they are to biological and environmental challenges. These threats include things like ash dieback disease and, of course, human-induced climate change.

How vital are experiments like this?

This is part of an emerging experimental array that will do for ecology what the great atom smashers and telescopes have done for physics. Ultimately, we aim to provide fundamental science, social science and cultural research of relevance to forests anywhere in the world.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Fast-forwarding forests"

Profile

Rob Mackenzie is the director of the newly established Birmingham Institute of Forest Research at the University of Birmingham in the UK, where he is also a professor of atmospheric science

Genetic moderation is needed to debate our food future

28 July 2014 by Susan Watts
Magazine issue 2979. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Food and Drink , Comment and Analysis and GM Organisms Topic Guides

GM is now a term loaded with baggage. Scientists must allow for people's objections to show the public there's nothing "spooky" about it

WITH food security firmly on the international agenda, there's a growing appetite to look again at the opportunities promised by agricultural biotechnology.

Scientists working in this area are excited by new techniques that enable them to edit plant DNA with unprecedented accuracy. Even epigenetic markers, which modulate the activity of genes, can now be altered. The promise is to modify crops to make them more nutritious or resistant to disease.

But there's a problem, notably in Europe: genetic modification.

Much of agricultural biotechnology – including conventional breeding – involves genetic modification of one kind or another. But "GM" has come to mean something quite specific, and is loaded with baggage. To many people it means risky or unnatural mixing of genes from widely disparate species, even across the plant and animal kingdoms, to create hybrids such as corn with scorpion genes. That baggage now threatens to undermine mature debate about the future of food production.

It is no longer a simple yes/no choice between high-tech agribusiness and conventional production driven by something ill-defined as more "natural".

The battle lines of this latest wave of agricultural advance are already being drawn. The UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, for example, is working on a position statement on the new technologies, which it expects to release later this summer.

It is clear that, over the coming years, the general public will have to decide which of these technologies we find acceptable and which we do not.

So where did it all go wrong to begin with? In the late 1990s, when I was reporting on early GM research for the BBC's current affairs programme Newsnight, anti-GM protestors realised that vivid images made good TV and rampaged through fields in white boiler suits destroying trial crops.

On the other side, industry representatives brushed aside public concerns and tried to control the media message, thumping the table in the office of at least one bemused newspaper editor (who went on to co-script a TV drama about a darker side to GM). They also lobbied hard for the relaxation of regulations governing agribusiness.

In the middle was the public, just coming to terms with farming's role in the BSE crisis. There was little space for calm, rational debate. Instead, GM became the cuckoo in the nest of agricultural biotechnology and its industry backers became ogres, shouting down any discussion of alternatives.

As a result, many people remain unaware that there are other high-tech ways to create crops. Many of these techniques involve the manipulation of genes, but they are not primarily about the transfer of genes across species.

But for GM to be discussed alongside such approaches as just another technology, scientists will have to work harder to dispel the public's remaining suspicions.

I recently chaired a debate on biotech at the UK's Cambridge Festival of Plants, where one audience member identified a public unease about what he called the slightly "spooky" aspect of GM crops. He meant those scorpion genes, or fish genes placed into tomatoes – the type of research that helped to coin the phrase "yuck factor".

To my surprise, a leading plant scientist on the panel said she would be prepared to see cross-species manipulation of food crops put on hold if the public was overwhelmingly uncomfortable with it. Ottoline Leyser, director of the University of Cambridge's Sainsbury Laboratory, said she believed valuable GM crop development could still be done even if scientists were initially restricted to species that can swap their genes naturally, outside of the laboratory. An example of this might be adding a trait from one variety of rice to another.

Nevertheless, Leyser remains adamant that there is "nothing immensely fishy about a fish gene". What's more, she added, the notion of a natural separation between species is misplaced: gene-swapping between species in the wild is far more prevalent than once thought.

But Leyser insisted that scientists must respect the views of objectors – even if "yuck" is their only complaint. That concession from a scientist is unusual. I've spoken to many of her peers who think such objections are irrational.

Scientists cannot expect people to accept their work blindly and they must make time to listen. Above all, more of them should be prepared to halt experiments that the public is uncomfortable with. And it's beginning to happen.

Paul Freemont is co-director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London. He designs organisms from scratch but would be prepared to discontinue projects that the public is unhappy about. He says scientists need an occasional reality check.

"We are going to have to address some of the consequences of what we're doing, and have agreements about what's acceptable to society in terms of manipulating biology at this level," Freemont says.

Scientists funded with public money may already feel some obligation to adopt this approach. But those working in industry should consider its advantages too. A more open and engaged conversation with the public could surely benefit the companies trying to sell us novel crop technologies.

Society, for its part, will need to listen to the experts with an open mind. And as we work out how to feed an expanding population, we will need to ask questions that are bigger than "GM: yes or no?"

This article appeared in print under the headline "Genetic moderation"

Susan Watts is a journalist and broadcaster. She was science editor of Newsnight until the post was closed

Strange dark stuff is making the universe too bright

17 July 2014 by Lisa Grossman
Magazine issue 2978. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide

LIGHT is in crisis. The universe is far brighter than it should be based on the number of light-emitting objects we can find, a cosmic accounting problem that has astronomers baffled.

"Something is very wrong," says Juna Kollmeier at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California.

Solving the mystery could show us novel ways to hunt for dark matter, or reveal the presence of another unknown "dark" component to the cosmos.

"It's such a big discrepancy that whatever we find is going to be amazing, and it will overturn something we currently think is true," says Kollmeier.

The trouble stems from the most recent census of objects that produce high-energy ultraviolet light.

Some of the biggest known sources are quasars – galaxies with actively feeding black holes at their centres. These behemoths spit out plenty of UV light as matter falling into them is heated and compressed. Young galaxies filled with hot, bright stars are also contributors.

Ultraviolet light from these objects ionises the gas that permeates intergalactic space, stripping hydrogen atoms of their electrons. Observations of the gas can tell us how much of it has been ionised, helping astronomers to estimate the amount of UV light that must be flying about.

But as our images of the cosmos became sharper, astronomers found that these measurements don't seem to tally with the number of sources found.

Kollmeier started worrying in 2012, when Francesco Haardt at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy, and Piero Madau at the University of California, Santa Cruz, compiled the results of several sky surveys and found far fewer UV sources than previously suggested.

Then in February, Charles Danforth at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues released the latest observations of intergalactic hydrogen by the Hubble Space Telescope. That work confirmed the large amount of gas being ionised. "It could have been that there was much more neutral hydrogen than we thought, and therefore there would be no light crisis," says Kollmeier. "But that loophole has been shut."

Now Kollmeier and her colleagues have run computer simulations of intergalactic gas and compared them with the Hubble data, just to be sure. They found that there is five times too much ionised gas for the number of known UV sources in the modern, nearby universe.

Strangely, their simulations also show that, for the early, more distant universe, UV sources and ionised gas match up perfectly, suggesting something has changed with time (Astrophysical Journal Letters, doi.org/tqm).

This could be down to dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up more than 80 per cent of the matter in the universe.

The leading theoretical candidates for dark matter are weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. There are many proposed versions of WIMPs, including some non-standard varieties that would decay and release UV photons.

Knowing that dark matter in the early universe worked like a scaffold to create the cosmic structure we see today, we have a good idea how much must have existed in the past. That suggests dark matter particles are stable for billions of years before they begin to decay.

Theorists can now consider the UV problem in their calculations and see if any of the proposed particles start to decay at the right time to account for the extra light, says Kathryn Zurek, a dark matter expert at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. If so, that could explain why the excess only shows up in the modern cosmos.

If WIMPS aren't the answer, the possible explanations become even more bizarre, such as mysterious "dark" objects that can emit UV light but remain shrouded from view. And if all else fails, there's even a chance something is wrong with our basic understanding of hydrogen.

"We don't know what it is, or we would be reporting discovery instead of crisis," says Kollmeier.

"The point is to bring this to everyone's attention so we can figure it out as a community."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Why is the cosmos too bright to bear?"

Psychedelic cells are fruit of Alan Turing's equations

29 July 2014 by Jacob Aron
Magazine issue 2979. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Picture of the day and Books and Art Topic Guides

(Image: Jonathan McCabe)

WE ALL know the world can look weird and wonderful under the microscope, but who knew cells could look this pretty? Actually, you won't find these psychedelic blobs in any living creature on Earth, because contrary to appearances this image has been created by a computer.

Generative artist Jonathan McCabe works with algorithms first developed by mathematician Alan

Turing to create pictures like this. "I don't guide the production of any particular image, the program runs from start to finish without input," McCabe says, though he does tweak the software to produce different results. "The trick is to try to make a system that generates interesting output by itself."

Turing is most famous for his pioneering work in computing Movie Camera

, but he was also interested in how living creatures produce biological patterns such as a tiger's stripes. He came up with a system of equations that describe how two chemicals react together, resulting in surprisingly lifelike arrangements.

McCabe developed his algorithm based on Turing's ideas. His program treats colours as different liquids that can't mix together because of an artificial surface tension, which is what gives them a cell-like appearance. "You get structures which look like cell membranes and mitochondria because at the microscopic scale surface tension forces are strong," says McCabe.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Rise of the blobs"

Cagey material acts as alcohol factory

2 hours ago by Kate Greene

Some chemical conversions are harder than others. Refining natural gas into an easy-to-transport, easy-to-store liquid alcohol has so far been a logistic and economic challenge. But now, a new material, designed and patented by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is making this process a little easier. The research, published earlier this year in Nature Chemistry, could pave the way for the adoption of cheaper, cleaner-burning fuels.

"Hydrocarbons like ethane and methane could be used as fuel, but they're hard to store and transport because they're gases," says Dianne Xiao, graduate student at the University of California Berkeley.
"But if you have a catalyst that can selectively turn them into alcohols, which are much easier to transfer and store," she says, "that would make things a lot easier."
Xiao and Jeffrey Long, scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and professor of chemistry at the UC Berkeley, focused this project on converting ethane to ethanol.
Ethanol is a potential alternative fuel that burns cleaner and has a higher energy density than other alternative fuels like methanol. One problem with ethanol, however, is that current methods for production require extreme heat, which makes it expensive.

The innovation came when Long and Xiao designed a material called Fe-MOF-74, in a class of materials called metal-organic frameworks or MOFs. Because of their cage-shaped structures, MOFs boast a high surface area, which mean they can absorb extremely large amounts of gas or liquid compared to the weight of the MOF itself.

Since MOFs are essentially structured like a collection of tiny cages, they can capture other molecules, acting as a filter. Additionally, they can perform chemistry as molecules pass through the cages, becoming little chemical factories that convert one substance to another.
It's this chemical-conversion feature of MOFs that Long and Xiao took advantage of. Ethane is a molecule made of two carbon atoms where each atom is surrounded by atoms of hydrogen. Ethanol is also made of two carbon atoms bonded to hydrogen atoms, but one of its carbon atoms is also bonded to a hydrogen-oxygen ion called a hydroxyl.

Previous attempts to add a hydroxyl ion to ethane to make ethanol have required high pressure and high temperatures that range from 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. It's costly and inconvenient.
But by using a specially designed MOF—one in which a kind of iron was added inside the tiny molecular cages—the researchers were able to reduce the need for extreme heat, converting ethane to alcohol at just 75 degrees Celsius.

"This is getting toward a holy grail in chemistry which is to be able to cleanly take alkanes to alcohols without a lot of energy," says Long. Long and Xiao worked closely with researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the University of Turin to design, model, and characterize the MOF and resultant ethanol production.

Next steps involve tweaking the concentrations of iron in the MOF to produce a more efficient conversion, says Xiao. "It's a promising proof of principle," she says. "It's exciting that we can do this now at low temperature and low pressures."

Explore further: Metal-organic framework helps convert one chemical to another

More information: "Oxidation of ethane to ethanol by N2O in a metal–organic framework with coordinatively unsaturated iron(II) sites." Dianne J. Xiao, et al. Nature Chemistry 6, 590–595 (2014) DOI: 10.1038/nchem.1956. Received 17 December 2013 Accepted 14 April 2014 Published online 18 May 2014
Journal reference: Nature Chemistry

Direct reaction heavy atoms to catalyst surface demonstrated

1 hour ago

The experiment. — Ruthenium crystal covered with oxygen atoms in the experimental set-up Harpoen. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)

Researchers from FOM Institute DIFFER are the first to have demonstrated that heavier atoms in a material surface can react directly with a surrounding gas. The so-called Eley-Rideal reaction has never previously been demonstrated for atoms heavier than hydrogen. The Eley-Rideal process requires less energy than a reaction between two atoms that are both attached to the material. The discovery could lead to more efficient catalysts for the production of synthetic fuel, for example. The researchers published the results on 29 July online in Physical Review Letters.

Most chemical reactions on a material surface (catalyst) follow the Langmuir-Hinshelwood scheme: atoms from the surroundings adhere to the material and move randomly across the surface until they meet each other. At that spot the atoms react with each other and are subsequently released from the surface. In Eley-Rideal reactions a particle on the surface instead reacts directly with an atom from the surroundings that is rapidly moving past it. According to the theory, this type of reaction takes place most easily with light, rapidly moving atoms. In practice, the Eley-Rideal reaction has only been demonstrated with the lightest atom, hydrogen. The team from DIFFER, the Materials innovation institute M2i and the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences in Amsterdam have now demonstrated for the first time that heavier atoms such as nitrogen and oxygen can also undergo an Eley-Rideal reaction.

Reactions between atoms on surfaces. — The direct Eley-Rideal reaction between the surrounding gas and an atom that is attached to the surface had never previously been observed for heavier atoms. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)

Rebound

"In our set-up, Harpoen, we can directly observe the difference between the two types of reaction", explains research leader Dr Teodor Zaharia. His team covered a surface of ruthenium with a layer of oxygen atoms and fired a focused beam of nitrogen atoms at this to obtain the reaction product nitrogen oxide. "The Eley-Rideal reaction takes place within a fraction of a second: the original kinetic energy of the nitrogen is conserved and you can therefore observe the reaction product rebounding from the surface at the same angle as which the original nitrogen atom collided with it." In the Langmuir-Hinshelwood reaction, however, there is no link between the direction of movement of the original atoms and the reaction products; due to the random walk across the surface the information about the original direction of movement is lost. Using detectors that can measure the direction of the reaction product, Zaharia and his team could unequivocally observe the fingerprint of the Eley-Rideal reaction.

The higher energy of the reaction products also revealed that an Eley-Rideal reaction had taken place: just one of the reacting atoms needs to break its attachment to the surface as a result of which less energy is needed. The Eley-Rideal reaction between heavier atoms is therefore attractive for applications in catalysis. The reaction pathway offers extra control over which particles react and that could lead to new ways of producing and processing materials. The research will be continued in a collaboration between DIFFER and the Center of Interface Dynamic for Sustainability that fellow researcher and former director of DIFFER Aart Kleyn has set up in the Chinese city of Chengdu.

Explore further: Scientists discover channel used by catalyst to produce ammonia, vital for food and fuel crops

More information: 'Eley-Rideal reactions with N atoms at Ru(0001): Formation of NO and N₂^'T. Zaharia, A. Kleijn, M. Gleeson, Physical Review Letters, 21 July 2014.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-reaction-heavy-atoms-catalyst-surface.html#jCp

Ali A. Rizvi Become a fan Pakistani-Canadian writer, physician and musician

7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict

Posted: 07/28/2014 2:07 pm EDT Updated: 07/28/2014 2:59 pm EDT

Are you "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine"? It isn't even noon yet as I write this, and I've already been accused of being both.

These terms intrigue me because they directly speak to the doggedly tribal nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You don't hear of too many other countries being universally spoken of this way. Why these two? Both Israelis and Palestinians are complex, with diverse histories and cultures, and two incredibly similar (if divisive) religions. To come down completely on the side of one or the other doesn't seem rational to me.

It is telling that most Muslims around the world support Palestinians, and most Jews support Israel. This, of course, is natural -- but it's also problematic. It means that this is not about who's right or wrong as much as which tribe or nation you are loyal to. It means that Palestinian supporters would be just as ardently pro-Israel if they were born in Israeli or Jewish families, and vice versa. It means that the principles that guide most people's view of this conflict are largely accidents of birth -- that however we intellectualize and analyze the components of the Middle East mess, it remains, at its core, a tribal conflict.

By definition, tribal conflicts thrive and survive when people take sides. Choosing sides in these kinds of conflicts fuels them further and deepens the polarization. And worst of all, you get blood on your hands.

So before picking a side in this latest Israeli-Palestine conflict, consider these 7 questions:

***
1. Why is everything so much worse when there are Jews involved?

Over 700 people have died in Gaza as of this writing. Muslims have woken up around the world. But is it really because of the numbers?

Bashar al-Assad has killed over 180,000 Syrians, mostly Muslim, in two years -- more than the number killed in Palestine in two decades. Thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Syria have been killed by ISIS in the last two months. Tens of thousands have been killed by the Taliban. Half a million black Muslims were killed by Arab Muslims in Sudan. The list goes on.

But Gaza makes Muslims around the world, both Sunni and Shia, speak up in a way they never do otherwise. Up-to-date death counts and horrific pictures of the mangled corpses of Gazan children flood their social media timelines every day. If it was just about the numbers, wouldn't the other conflicts take precedence? What is it about then?

If I were Assad or ISIS right now, I'd be thanking God I'm not Jewish.

Amazingly, many of the graphic images of dead children attributed to Israeli bombardment that are circulating online are from Syria, based on a BBC report. Many of the pictures you're seeing are of children killed by Assad, who is supported by Iran, which also funds Hezbollah and Hamas. What could be more exploitative of dead children than attributing the pictures of innocents killed by your own supporters to your enemy simply because you weren't paying enough attention when your own were killing your own?

This doesn't, by any means, excuse the recklessness, negligence, and sometimes outright cruelty of Israeli forces. But it clearly points to the likelihood that the Muslim world's opposition to Israel isn't just about the number of dead.

Here is a question for those who grew up in the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries like I did: if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories tomorrow, all in one go -- and went back to the 1967 borders -- and gave the Palestinians East Jerusalem -- do you honestly think Hamas wouldn't find something else to pick a fight about? Do you honestly think that this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they are Jews? Do you recall what you watched and heard on public TV growing up in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt?

Yes, there's an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it's a human rights disaster. But it is also true that much of the other side is deeply driven by anti-Semitism. Anyone who has lived in the Arab/Muslim world for more than a few years knows that. It isn't always a clean, one-or-the-other blame split in these situations like your Chomskys and Greenwalds would have you believe. It's both.

***
2. Why does everyone keep saying this is not a religious conflict?

There are three pervasive myths that are widely circulated about the "roots" of the Middle East conflict:
Myth 1: Judaism has nothing to do with Zionism.
Myth 2: Islam has nothing to do with Jihadism or anti-Semitism.
Myth 3: This conflict has nothing to do with religion.
To the "I oppose Zionism, not Judaism!" crowd, is it mere coincidence that this passage from the Old Testament (emphasis added) describes so accurately what's happening today?

"I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you. Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods." - Exodus 23:31-32

Or this one?

"See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land the Lord swore he would give to your fathers -- to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- and to their descendants after them." - Deuteronomy 1:8

There's more: Genesis 15:18-21, and Numbers 34 for more detail on the borders. Zionism is not the "politicization" or "distortion" of Judaism. It is the revival of it.
And to the "This is not about Islam, it's about politics!" crowd, is this verse from the Quran (emphasis added) meaningless?

"O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you--then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people." - Quran, 5:51

What about the numerous verses and hadith quoted in Hamas' charter? And the famous hadith of the Gharqad tree explicitly commanding Muslims to kill Jews?
Please tell me -- in light of these passages written centuries and millennia before the creation of Israel or the occupation -- how can anyone conclude that religion isn't at the root of this, or at least a key driving factor? You may roll your eyes at these verses, but they are taken very seriously by many of the players in this conflict, on both sides. Shouldn't they be acknowledged and addressed? When is the last time you heard a good rational, secular argument supporting settlement expansion in the West Bank?
Denying religion's role seems to be a way to be able to criticize the politics while remaining apologetically "respectful" of people's beliefs for fear of "offending" them. But is this apologism and "respect" for inhuman ideas worth the deaths of human beings?
People have all kinds of beliefs -- from insisting the Earth is flat to denying the Holocaust. You may respect their right to hold these beliefs, but you're not obligated to respect the beliefs themselves. It's 2014, and religions don't need to be "respected" any more than any other political ideology or philosophical thought system. Human beings have rights. Ideas don't. The oft-cited politics/religion dichotomy in Abrahamic religions is false and misleading. All of the Abrahamic religions are inherently political.
*** 3. Why would Israel deliberately want to kill civilians?
This is the single most important issue that gets everyone riled up, and rightfully so.
Again, there is no justification for innocent Gazans dying. And there's no excuse for Israel's negligence in incidents like the killing of four children on a Gazan beach. But let's back up and think about this for a minute.
Why on Earth would Israel deliberately want to kill civilians?
When civilians die, Israel looks like a monster. It draws the ire of even its closest allies. Horrific images of injured and dead innocents flood the media. Ever-growing anti-Israel protests are held everywhere from Norway to New York. And the relatively low number of Israeli casualties (we'll get to that in a bit) repeatedly draws allegations of a "disproportionate" response. Most importantly, civilian deaths help Hamas immensely.
How can any of this possibly ever be in Israel's interest?
If Israel wanted to kill civilians, it is terrible at it. ISIS killed more civilians in two days (700 plus) than Israel has in two weeks. Imagine if ISIS or Hamas had Israel's weapons, army, air force, US support, and nuclear arsenal. Their enemies would've been annihilated long ago. If Israel truly wanted to destroy Gaza, it could do so within a day, right from the air. Why carry out a more painful, expensive ground incursion that risks the lives of its soldiers?
*** 4. Does Hamas really use its own civilians as human shields?
Ask Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas how he feels about Hamas' tactics.
"What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?" he asks. "I don't like trading in Palestinian blood."
It isn't just speculation anymore that Hamas puts its civilians in the line of fire.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri plainly admitted on Gazan national TV that the human shield strategy has proven "very effective."
The UN relief organization UNRWA issued a furious condemnation of Hamas after discovering hidden rockets in not one, but two children's schools in Gaza last week.
Hamas fires thousands of rockets into Israel, rarely killing any civilians or causing any serious damage. It launches them from densely populated areas, including hospitals and schools.
Why launch rockets without causing any real damage to the other side, inviting great damage to your own people, then putting your own civilians in the line of fire when the response comes? Even when the IDF warns civilians to evacuate their homes before a strike, why does Hamas tell them to stay put?
Because Hamas knows its cause is helped when Gazans die. If there is one thing that helps Hamas most -- one thing that gives it any legitimacy -- it is dead civilians. Rockets in schools. Hamas exploits the deaths of its children to gain the world's sympathy. It uses them as a weapon.
You don't have to like what Israel is doing to abhor Hamas. Arguably, Israel and Fatah are morally equivalent. Both have a lot of right on their side. Hamas, on the other hand, doesn't have a shred of it.
*** 5. Why are people asking for Israel to end the "occupation" in Gaza?
Because they have short memories.
In 2005, Israel ended the occupation in Gaza. It pulled out every last Israeli soldier. It dismantled every last settlement. Many Israeli settlers who refused to leave were forcefully evicted from their homes, kicking and screaming.
This was a unilateral move by Israel, part of a disengagement plan intended to reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians. It wasn't perfect -- Israel was still to control Gaza's borders, coastline, and airspace -- but considering the history of the region, it was a pretty significant first step.
After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.
But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.
Hamas did not build any bomb shelters for its people. It did, however, build a few for its leaders to hide out in during airstrikes. Civilians are not given access to these shelters for precisely the same reason Hamas tells them to stay home when the bombs come.
Gaza was given a great opportunity in 2005 that Hamas squandered by transforming it into an anti-Israel weapons store instead of a thriving Palestinian state that, with time, may have served as a model for the future of the West Bank as well. If Fatah needed yet another reason to abhor Hamas, here it was.
*** 6. Why are there so many more casualties in Gaza than in Israel?
The reason fewer Israeli civilians die is not because there are fewer rockets raining down on them. It's because they are better protected by their government.
When Hamas' missiles head towards Israel, sirens go off, the Iron Dome goes into effect, and civilians are rushed into bomb shelters. When Israeli missiles head towards Gaza, Hamas tells civilians to stay in their homes and face them.
While Israel's government urges its civilians to get away from rockets targeted at them, Gaza's government urges its civilians to get in front of missiles not targeted at them.
The popular explanation for this is that Hamas is poor and lacks the resources to protect its people like Israel does. The real reason, however, seems to have more to do with disordered priorities than deficient resources (see #5). This is about will, not ability. All those rockets, missiles, and tunnels aren't cheap to build or acquire. But they are priorities. And it's not like Palestinians don't have a handful of oil-rich neighbors to help them the way Israel has the US.
The problem is, if civilian casualties in Gaza drop, Hamas loses the only weapon it has in its incredibly effective PR war. It is in Israel's national interest to protect its civilians and minimize the deaths of those in Gaza. It is in Hamas' interest to do exactly the opposite on both fronts.
*** 7. If Hamas is so bad, why isn't everyone pro-Israel in this conflict?
Because Israel's flaws, while smaller in number, are massive in impact.
Many Israelis seem to have the same tribal mentality that their Palestinian counterparts do. They celebrate the bombing of Gaza the same way many Arabs celebrated 9/11. A UN report recently found that Israeli forces tortured Palestinian children and used them as human shields. They beat up teenagers. They are often reckless with their airstrikes. They have academics who explain how rape may be the only truly effective weapon against their enemy. And many of them callously and publicly revel in the deaths of innocent Palestinian children.
To be fair, these kinds of things do happen on both sides. They are an inevitable consequence of multiple generations raised to hate the other over the course of 65 plus years. To hold Israel up to a higher standard would mean approaching the Palestinians with the racism of lowered expectations.
However, if Israel holds itself to a higher standard like it claims -- it needs to do much more to show it isn't the same as the worst of its neighbors.
Israel is leading itself towards increasing international isolation and national suicide because of two things: 1. The occupation; and 2. Settlement expansion.
Settlement expansion is simply incomprehensible. No one really understands the point of it. Virtually every US administration -- from Nixon to Bush to Obama -- has unequivocally opposed it. There is no justification for it except a Biblical one (see #2), which makes it slightly more difficult to see Israel's motives as purely secular.
The occupation is more complicated. The late Christopher Hitchens was right when he said this about Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories:

"In order for Israel to become part of the alliance against whatever we want to call it, religious barbarism, theocratic, possibly thermonuclear theocratic or nuclear theocratic aggression, it can't, it'll have to dispense with the occupation. It's as simple as that.
It can be, you can think of it as a kind of European style, Western style country if you want, but it can't govern other people against their will. It can't continue to steal their land in the way that it does every day.And it's unbelievably irresponsible of Israelis, knowing the position of the United States and its allies are in around the world, to continue to behave in this unconscionable way. And I'm afraid I know too much about the history of the conflict to think of Israel as just a tiny, little island surrounded by a sea of ravening wolves and so on. I mean, I know quite a lot about how that state was founded, and the amount of violence and dispossession that involved. And I'm a prisoner of that knowledge. I can't un-know it."

As seen with Gaza in 2005, unilateral disengagement is probably easier to talk about than actually carry out. But if it Israel doesn't work harder towards a two-state (maybe three-state, thanks to Hamas) solution, it will eventually have to make that ugly choice between being a Jewish-majority state or a democracy.
It's still too early to call Israel an apartheid state, but when John Kerry said Israel could end up as one in the future, he wasn't completely off the mark. It's simple math. There are only a limited number of ways a bi-national Jewish state with a non-Jewish majority population can retain its Jewish identity. And none of them are pretty.
*** Let's face it, the land belongs to both of them now. Israel was carved out of Palestine for Jews with help from the British in the late 1940s just like my own birthplace of Pakistan was carved out of India for Muslims around the same time. The process was painful, and displaced millions in both instances. But it's been almost 70 years. There are now at least two or three generations of Israelis who were born and raised in this land, to whom it really is a home, and who are often held accountable and made to pay for for historical atrocities that are no fault of their own. They are programmed to oppose "the other" just as Palestinian children are. At its very core, this is a tribal religious conflict that will never be resolved unless people stop choosing sides.
So you really don't have to choose between being "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine." If you support secularism, democracy, and a two-state solution -- and you oppose Hamas, settlement expansion, and the occupation -- you can be both.
If they keep asking you to pick a side after all of that, tell them you're going with hummus.

Follow Ali A. Rizvi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/aliamjadrizvi

A Medley of Potpourri

Search This Blog