Just World Educational, January 6, 2019
A “FaceBook Live” session on Operation Cast Lead and its legacies, featuring the talented Gaza-Palestinian activist Yousef Al-Jamal, will be held Saturday, January 12, at 11 am Central Time (7 pm Palestine.)
Yousef was in Gaza during Cast Lead. He was a contributor to the Gaza Writes Back short-story collection; editor of The Prisoners’ Diaries; a participant in the 3-week speaking tour three young Gaza writers made of the United States back in 2014; and a key resource in the #GazaChat on Twitter organized in the summer of 2017.
Please be sure to put this January 12 FB-Live appearance on your calendar so you can watch it in real time and take part in the discussion there!
Equally important, if you have questions that you want him to address, send them to us in advance or tweet them to @JustWorldEd using the #CastLeadPlus10 hashtag.
These are the materials that we’ve developed especially for the #CastLeadPlus10 campaign.
Our podcast miniseries:
(A mini-series of audio interviews exploring different aspects of Operation Cast Lead and its legacies with a range of experts. Each episode is about 30 minutes long.)
- Recalling Operation Cast Lead with Richard Falk, part 1 of 2. (We also have a blog post of highlights of this episode.)
- Richard Falk on the lasting legacies of Cast Lead.
- Gaza’s Dr. Basem Naim recalls the horrors of Cast Lead.
- Gaza’s Dr. Basem Naim on after-effects of Cast Lead and Great March of Return.
- … and a lot more to come!
You can access all our podcasts, now and in the future, at this portal page. Or, you can subscribe to the new episodes as they come out, here.
Our “day-by-day slides” and their compilation:
Throughout the 22 days of the 10th anniversary of Cast Lead, we’ve been posting onto our Twitter and Facebook accounts daily slides that compile the essential facts of what happened that day in Gaza and Israel. If you’re on either platform, please follow/”Like” us and retweet or share these slides as often as you can.
In case you’re not on those platforms, or missed the daily slides as they appeared, here’s a 4-minute slideshow on Youtube that presents all the slides December 27 through January 5. (You may see some blurred images at the end of the first minute. We’re working to correct those errors.)
A guide to other great materials
Here is our collection of background materials in English on Operation Cast Lead. We still plan to update it further! If you have materials available in English on the internet, that you’d like to propose for inclusion, please let us know!
- Background materials from the Journal of Palestine Studies, Issue #151.
- Gazans’ experiences of Cast Lead.
- Palestinian politics and Cast Lead.
- Israeli politics and Cast Lead.
- International politics and Cast Lead.
- Damage assessments after Cast Lead.
- Breaking the Silence testimonies, etc.
- Goldstone Report and other attempts at accountability.
- Flotillas and other global civil-society actions.
- After-effects of Cast Lead for Palestinians.
- Background information about Gaza, 10 years after Cast Lead.
1. Background materials from the Journal of Palestine Studies, Issue #151.
- This Winter 2009 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies contains a very rich, well-documented special section on Cast Lead, and has a detailed day-by-day account of its events in the “Chronology” section at the back. From December 27, 2018 through the end of January 2019, the Institute for Palestine Studies is making this whole issue freely available to researchers and the public via this portal, as a way to mark the tenth anniversary of Cast Lead.
2. Gazans’ experiences of Cast Lead.
- Powerful 46-minute documentary from Journeyman Pictures:“Israel/Palestine: The Gaza War from Ground Level” (Also has coverage from southern Israel.)
- “They Never Came Home”. Memories of the events of December 27, 2008, authored by Sarah Gherbawi, then a school student. (Published in Electronic Intifada, December 26, 2018.)
- “Gaza Mom” Laila El-Haddad’s writings on her blog during Cast Lead, as published in her 2010 book Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between. Though she was in the U.S. at the time, she includes many descriptions of convos she had with her physician parents inside Gaza at the time. Here are her entries for Dec 27 and Dec 28, 2008 in PDF. More days’ entries will be uploaded later.
- “Fatalities During Cast Lead”, from B’tselem. This page is a portal through which you can access detailed listings of the names, ages, and circumstances of killing/death of all 1,411 Palestinians in Gaza (and 7 in the West Bank) whom B’tselem’s researchers found had been killed during Cast Lead.
- “Report: 23 emergency service personnel killed during ‘Cast Lead’”, by Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Gaza (Electronic Intifada, March 19, 2009.) Also, here.
- April 2009 report from Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights (Gaza), “The Use of Palestinian Civilians as Human Shields by the Israeli Occupation Forces.”
- “Israeli TV admits: No rockets were ever fired from UNRWA schools in Gaza during ‘Cast Lead’”, Electronic Intifada, 25 October 2011.
- Many stories in Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, edited by Refaat Alareer (Just World Books, 2014.)
3. Palestinian politics and Cast Lead.
- “What Does Hamas Want?” Helena Cobban, Just World News, December 9, 2008
4. Israeli politics and Cast Lead.
- Wikipedia page about Ehud Olmert, outgoing PM of Israel at the time Cast Lead was launched.
- “Israel’s War in Gaza: Stakes and Prospects”, Helena Cobban in Just World News, December 28, 2009.
- “Why Israel Named Its Gaza War After a Haukkah Poem”, Ethan Perlson, Daily Beast, December 30, 2008.
5. International politics and Cast Lead.
6. Damage assessments after Cast Lead.
- Satellite-based Gaza Strip Damage assessment Overview, from UNITAR/UNOSAT, 10 March 2009. Access page, map in PDF.
- UN Development Program report, “Gaza One Year After”: Access page, PDF of report.
7. Breaking the Silence testimonies, etc.
- BtS report: “Soldiers Talk About Operation Cast Lead 2009” (PDF).
- Digest of BtS’s main findings, from Wessex Scene, May 2011.
8. “Goldstone Report” (UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict), Sept. 2009, & other attempts at accountability.
- Thorough Wikipedia page about the Goldstone Report.
- Text of the report itself (PDF, 3.5 MB.)
- Judge Goldstone’s retraction, April 2011.
- “Op-Ed Doesn’t Close the book on Cast Lead” by Jessica Montell, The Forward, April 5, 2011.
- Amira Hass on the investigation of responsibility for the massacre of the Samouni family (Haaretz, October 2010.)
- “IDF closes book on al-Samouni killings, whitewashes massacre”, by Richard Silverstein, May 2012.
- “Israel Won’t Apologize for killing daughters of Gaza Doctor”, Al-Monitor, December 7, 2018.
9. Flotillas and other global civil-society actions.
10. After-effects of Cast Lead for Palestinians.
- A powerful report by Refaat Alareer and Ahmed Abd El-Al, “Haunted by the Horrors of Cast Lead” (Electronic Intifada, January 17, 2018.)
11. Background information about Gaza, 10 years after Cast Lead.
- Our factsheet from last June (a downloadable PDF), “Understanding Gaza and Hamas”.
- A list of Good places for breaking news/updates from Gaza.
- Background on the Palestinians’ Right of Return.