500 Citzens of Sderot Contradict the Israeli Government
By Janine Roberts
www.palestinechronicle.com
Much has been made of Hamas' reported failure to honour last year's truce. But, an extraordinary correspondence between Jewish residents of the much-rocketed town of Sderot, nearby kibbutz, and the Palestinians living within sight in the Gaza strip paints a very different picture of that truce from that repeatedly given by the Israeli government.
Barrack Obama was taken to Sderot last year to show him the effects of rocketing. He remarked on how Israeli towns looked like American from the air and offered his full support to the town’s citizens, promising to invite its representatives to the White House soon after taking office. At the time in mid-July Sderot was safe to visit. There had been no casualties from rockets since the ceasefire started 4 weeks earlier.
On July 12th 2008, a Gaza resident, using the pseudonym of “Peaceman,” emailed friends in Sderot to say. “The situation is calm … and this make people happy a lot, because there are no dead and wounded [but] the border is still closed… I myself have been waiting two years to go to Europe to study.’ Nevertheless ‘we have now a golden opportunity to try to build a new world without violence.’
His friends replied to say how much better it was now the rockets had stopped. They told how they cycled along the Gaza borders and were greeted with waves by Gaza residents. They revelled in the freedom from danger. A joint children’s holiday was planned and greetings cards exchanged. (See samples at end)
One such message read “I live with my family in Kibbutz Beeri, close enough to Gaza to see the houses and the sea. On weekends I ride my bike with my husband through the fields along the border … I hope the violence will come to an end and the Palestinian State will be established with peace between our peoples and peace within each of our countries between the extremists on each side. ”
Sderot is built on the lands of Najd, a Palestinian village ethnically cleansed by Jewish militia in 1948. Its residents probably fled into the Gaza strip. Most of Gaza’s population is descended from such refugees. However, this history was not allowed to prevent this growing friendship – nor were the deaths of people from both towns in the months preceding the ceasefire.
The ceasefire was still intact months after Obama’s visit. In October 2008 an Israeli in Sderot, using the pseudonym “Hopeman,” emailed his friend in Gaza to say: “We have lived for almost 5 months in a ceasefire situation. On my side of the border, things returned to normal and we once again felt safe. Kids played freely outdoors, streets filled once again with people, and the constant fear of the rocket alerts disappeared. My kids went to sleep in their room again, instead of the safe room, and I could walk out to the fields surrounding the town without the fear of being out in the open with nowhere to hide.”
On October 9th an Israeli newspaper, the Star, headlined: ‘Israeli town celebrates end to daily rocket fire. It reported: “Besieged residents of Sderot were relieved by the quiet start to Yom Kippur, thanks to the ceasefire with Hamas …Young boys horsed around on their bicycles, families hurried to make last-minute purchases at the downtown supermarket, and food stands did a steady business in shawarma and beer.”
“Everything is different," exulted Jasmine Aboukrat, 25, sales clerk at the Cochovit Dress Shop near Hagofer St, "People go out more." “Now you see all the children outdoors, playing," said David Coyne, 38, who owns a candy shop in the centre of town. "It's secure.”
The paper explained: “For seven years, local residents barely went out at all. But, late last June, under Egyptian mediation, the Israeli government reached a ceasefire agreement with the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Since then, with only a few violations, the rocket salvoes from Gaza have stopped.”
Sderot is “a rambling community of boxy bungalows and low-rise apartment blocks. interspersed by palm, cypress and eucalyptus trees” with a library with nearly as many books in Russian as Hebrew, reflecting its recent arrivals. Its people “say they are hugely pleased with the new air of tranquillity that now permeates their town.”
The newspaper also reported that there were no more “punitive Israeli military incursions into the neighbouring strip – attacks that had been a frequent and deadly feature of Palestinian existence prior to the laying down of arms in June.”
But Hopeman emailed from Sderok: “During this time I have been in touch with many friends of mine in Gaza, and from them I heard a very dark and troubling reality…The siege Israel had imposed on them continues. They have many power shortages and very little fuel and cooking gas.”
On the 4th November, the day when Americans were watching the results of the Presidential election, the Israeli army broke the ceasefire by raiding the strip. Six Palestinians were killed. Next day the Palestinians reacted as could be expected by sending a shower of rockets and Israel immediately slashed supplies of medicine, fuel, food, cooking gas for the 1.5 million people of Gaza. The number of truckloads fell from October’s daily average of 123 trucks to less than 5 trucks. Some families were reduced to easting bread made from animal feed. Others were reduced to eating grass.
An email was sent: “Peace Man and I talk every day. We support each other and worry for each other’s well being. I am in contact with others in Gaza and share my situation while hearing of theirs. Much fear and pain on both sides. Once again we should all call to end the violence, open the siege, start talking and bring back hope to us, civilians on both sides, pawns in the unbearable senseless political game.”
Then Hamas told Israel that a renewed ceasefire must be accompanied by an end to the increasingly cruel siege, but Israel refused to accept this.
The friends “realized that the situation was about to deteriorate into total chaos” said Arik Yalin, 43, of Sderot, the spokesman for this Israeli-Arab group. They put up a website that stated: “Up until now we have cried, called, demonstrated, and asked our leaders to do something about this insane reality in which we live. The leaders have tried every possible idea that involves violence and military force – with no success at all.
“We shoot at them and they shoot at us. We retaliate and they strike back.
“This is an endless and vicious cycle.
“Today we say: ENOUGH! It is our turn to take our destiny into our own hands and to ACT to stop the cycle of bloodshed.”
They sent a petition to the Israeli Government in the name of their group; ‘Kol Acher’ (The Other Voice). Five hundred citizens of Sderot signed it as well as another 1300 Israeli and Palestinian citizens. It read:
“Kol Acher from Sderot and the communities around Gaza calls on the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister to act urgently to restore calm in the area.
“The ceasefire changed the lives of the people of Sderot, Ashkelon and the region beyond recognition, allowing all of us to experience again a life that is more normal and sane. The continuation of this calm is essential and critical to the residents of the region from every possible aspect: physical, mental, spiritual and economic.
“Another round of escalation may break our already brittle spirit, and take us all to another round of self-destruction and pointless bloodshed. It is not certain that we will survive. And you must be aware of that, if you indeed care about the residents of this area. We’ve been through this movie too many years–and results speak for themselves: feeling trapped, abandonment, and hopelessness for our children and us!
“On the other side of the border live a million and a half Palestinians under unbearable conditions, and most of them want, like we do, calm and the opportunity of a future for themselves and their families.
“We live in the feeling that you have wasted that period of calm, instead of using it to advance understandings and begin negotiations, as well as for fortifying the houses of residents as promised.
“We call on the Prime Minister and the Defence minister not to listen to the voices of incitement and do everything they can to avoid another round of escalation, to secure the continuation of the calm and to work...towards direct or indirect negotiations with the Palestinian leadership in Gaza in order to reach long term understandings.
“We prefer a cold war without a single rocket to a hot war with dozens of victims and innocent fatalities on both sides.
“We ask you to offer us the possibility of political arrangement and hope and not an endless cycle of blood.”
Their petition had no effect. On December 27th, while politicians in the West were on holiday and the US had a lame duck President in his final weeks of office, Israel launched a savage assault.
That same day the Israeli Foreign Ministry changed its website, removing charts giving the numbers of rockets and mortars fired every month from the Gaza strip, perhaps because they revealed the near-total cessation of fire during the truce.
The removed Israeli government graph: 'Monthly distribution of rockets hits.'
These charts were based on statistics supplied by the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center and provide striking evidence of Hamas’ good faith. Contrary to government statements made repeatedly since then, Israeli government statistics show Hamas kept the ceasefire.
Together with a similar graph for mortar fire, these reveal that the total number of rocket and mortar attacks launched from Gaza fell from over a hundred a month to just 12 in all from the start of July to the end of October. The Ministry has replaced these graphs with one that is harder to interpret. It claims ‘227 rockets were fired during the lull in the fighting’ but notes that 203 of these were fired after November 4th, the date when Israel broke the ceasefire. This is still on the Government website.
Credit for the 12 rockets fired during the ceasefire were reportedly claimed by Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Islamic Jihad or the "Badr Forces.’ Hamas condemned them.
It is worth going back to what else Obama said in Sderot: “I will not wait until a few years into my term or my second term if I'm elected, in order to get the process moving. I think we have a window right now that needs to be taken advantage of. I think you've got a set of moderate Palestinian leaders who are interested. I think the Israeli people are interested in moving this process along. But I also think there's a population on both sides that is becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress. And where there's hopelessness and despair that can often turn in a bad direction.”
Obama on January 11th said he would be ready to do all he can to bring peace from the day he takes office. But – has Obama heard these voices of Sderot? I doubt he did when he went to their town, but, if he did, then he will know that the Israeli government is wrong to claim that the only way they can stop the rockets is by physically destroying Hamas with all the slaughter this entails.
Perhaps Obama should also take advice, not already doing so, from the former UK Ambassador to Israel, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. January 9, 2009 he unhesitatingly said during a BBC interview: “Hamas is not a terrorist organisation,” adding he knows from talking to them that they are focussed on ending the decades of military occupation. He also affirmed; “Israel broke the truce by its actions on 4th November.”'
Perhaps Obama should also listen to the Catholic priest, Fr. Latham, who preached in Bethlehem on Sunday 4th January, saying the Palestinians are being “crucified everyday.”
Note:
Find examples of the post cards sent from Sderot to Gaza Strip.
http://picasaweb.google.com/othervoice.org/EidUlFiterRoshHashanaGreetingsFromSderotRegionToGaza#
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Because it is generally accepted by the so-called "international community" that Hamas is a major threat to Israel, and therefore to world peace and security, France has dispatched a frigate to participate in a new blockade of the Gaza Strip. The Sunday Times reported that United States naval ships hunting pirates in the Gulf of Aden have been instructed to track down Iranian arms shipments (25 January). Many other European states offered their navies to assist. Indeed, United Nations Security Council resolution 1860 emphasized the need to prevent illicit trafficking in arms and ammunition.
Unfortunately not one European country offered to send its navy to render humanitarian assistance to the thousands of injured, hungry, cold and homeless people in Gaza rendered so as a result of Israel's attack. Perhaps helping children dying from white phosphorus burns, or just lack of clean water, would be seen as supporting "terrorism."
The perverse assumption behind all the offers of help to Israel seems to be that Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza fired rockets at Israel merely because rockets were available. Therefore, the logic goes, peace would prevail if the supply of rockets were curtailed.
Another strange assumption is that Hamas was freely importing rockets from Iran or elsewhere because Gaza's borders were open and free of any control.
This ignores the fact that since Israel "disengaged" from Gaza in the summer of 2005, the coastal territory was never allowed any free access to the outside world. Gaza has been under varied forms of siege and blockade by land, sea and air. Fishermen were not even free to fish without constant attacks by the Israeli navy.
The Rafah crossing linking Gaza to Egypt was kept closed on Israeli insistence until a regime for strict Israeli proxy surveillance, with European monitors acting on Israel's behalf, was established for it.
If Hamas, despite the blockade and total financial and diplomatic boycott managed to import so many rockets or the materials to make them, what level of further siege would guarantee an end to arms importation now?
But the glaring moral and legal question is why the "international community" is mobilizing its navies and political efforts to protect the aggressor, preserve the occupation, and deny the victims any means to defend themselves? If they do not want Palestinians to resist, why do they not themselves confront the aggressor and force an end to the occupation, the siege and dispossession?
In the better past when war broke out in a region the immediate response was often to impose an arms embargo on all sides. But when the defenseless population in Gaza were under attack from the region's strongest army all calls were to prevent the victims from defending themselves. Meanwhile, endless supplies of sophisticated weaponry were sent to the occupier despite its already massive dominance and indiscriminate and criminal attacks on civilians.
Without objective and daring diagnosis of the conflict's root causes there is no chance of any effective treatment. Sadly this lesson has never been learned, although it has been written repeatedly with much innocent blood.
When Palestinians started their first unarmed uprising in 1987, 40 years after their expulsion from their homes and 20 years after the brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began, they had no rockets; they had only stones to confront heavily armed occupation forces. Israel used its guns and deliberate, sadistic bone-breaking against unarmed demonstrators killing almost 1,500 and injuring tens of thousands in its failed efforts to crush that uprising. Only with the 1993 Oslo accords was it possible to put an end to the uprising.
Hamas, as a resistance movement, was born in 1988. Israel, desperate to break the political monopoly of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, tacitly allowed Hamas to flourish.
Before any Palestinian fired a single shot at the start of the second uprising, in September 2000, Israel had already gunned down dozens of unarmed demonstrators. Palestinians learned these lessons well: Israel will meet any peaceful challenge with lethal force so one had better be prepared to fight back.
We need to recall these facts to understand the pure folly and detachment from reality of international politics today. The tendency has been to choose as the "cause" of the conflict to be addressed only what is politically expedient and easy, whether it is wrong or right, just or unjust, legal or illegal. The starting point of history is chosen not from the origins of the problem, but from whatever point suits the narrative of the strong.
It is utterly misleading and dishonest to pretend -- as so many now do -- that the sum total of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a confrontation over what expired Palestinian Authority President and Israeli puppet Mahmoud Abbas himself referred to as "silly rockets." To pretend that stopping the supply of rockets will make any difference to the course of a conflict that results from the historic dispossession -- the Nakba -- of an entire nation, and its replacement with a racist rogue state that has exiled, occupied and massacred the survivors for 61 years is the height of delusion.
It is convenient for the occupier and aggressor to forget all these things and talk only of rockets. And it is convenient for the cowards who dress themselves in diplomats' suits and don't dare utter the truth.
Should we not acknowledge -- if there is any real desire to resolve this conflict -- that the resistance did not fire rockets just because they had them, and Israel did not carry out its barbarous massacres in Gaza just because it wanted to stop them? Should we not acknowledge the indisputable truth that Hamas did not break the truce, but Israel did when it attacked across the border on 4 November killing six Palestinians? Hamas did not refuse to renew the truce -- as Abbas and Egyptian officials confirmed. All they asked was that the halt to killing be extended to the West Bank (which Israel refused) and that the starvation siege that was quietly killing Palestinians in Gaza be lifted. Have we not been all along taught that blockade is an act of aggression and that occupation legitimizes resistance?
The gunboats that Europe is sending to police the inmates of the Gaza Ghetto are not manifestations of strength, neither are they -- or the recent shocking statements of European Union Humanitarian chief Louis Michel in Gaza blaming Hamas for Israel's crimes on 26 January -- acts of responsible diplomacy in pursuit of peace and stability; they are a new prescription, if not a clear endorsement, for further bloodshed and war crimes. They are signs of a moral weakness and corruption unparalleled since Europeans stood by silently at stations and watched as their compatriots were loaded onto Nazi trains. Who could have thought that in the 21st century such things would need to be said -- and to those we thought had overcome their terrible history? But silence is not, and should not be an option any more. For years we have been told we should learn from the darkest episode in Europe's history, but never make comparisons to it lest we diminish its enormity. But the horrifying atrocities in Gaza which an Israeli official proudly predicted last March would be a "bigger holocaust" compel us to cast our reservations aside.
There is a shortcut to calm, the elimination of violence and eventually peace. It is a lesson that should have been learned many years, and countless thousands of lives ago: justice.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author's permission.
Unfortunately not one European country offered to send its navy to render humanitarian assistance to the thousands of injured, hungry, cold and homeless people in Gaza rendered so as a result of Israel's attack. Perhaps helping children dying from white phosphorus burns, or just lack of clean water, would be seen as supporting "terrorism."
The perverse assumption behind all the offers of help to Israel seems to be that Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza fired rockets at Israel merely because rockets were available. Therefore, the logic goes, peace would prevail if the supply of rockets were curtailed.
Another strange assumption is that Hamas was freely importing rockets from Iran or elsewhere because Gaza's borders were open and free of any control.
This ignores the fact that since Israel "disengaged" from Gaza in the summer of 2005, the coastal territory was never allowed any free access to the outside world. Gaza has been under varied forms of siege and blockade by land, sea and air. Fishermen were not even free to fish without constant attacks by the Israeli navy.
The Rafah crossing linking Gaza to Egypt was kept closed on Israeli insistence until a regime for strict Israeli proxy surveillance, with European monitors acting on Israel's behalf, was established for it.
If Hamas, despite the blockade and total financial and diplomatic boycott managed to import so many rockets or the materials to make them, what level of further siege would guarantee an end to arms importation now?
But the glaring moral and legal question is why the "international community" is mobilizing its navies and political efforts to protect the aggressor, preserve the occupation, and deny the victims any means to defend themselves? If they do not want Palestinians to resist, why do they not themselves confront the aggressor and force an end to the occupation, the siege and dispossession?
In the better past when war broke out in a region the immediate response was often to impose an arms embargo on all sides. But when the defenseless population in Gaza were under attack from the region's strongest army all calls were to prevent the victims from defending themselves. Meanwhile, endless supplies of sophisticated weaponry were sent to the occupier despite its already massive dominance and indiscriminate and criminal attacks on civilians.
Without objective and daring diagnosis of the conflict's root causes there is no chance of any effective treatment. Sadly this lesson has never been learned, although it has been written repeatedly with much innocent blood.
When Palestinians started their first unarmed uprising in 1987, 40 years after their expulsion from their homes and 20 years after the brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began, they had no rockets; they had only stones to confront heavily armed occupation forces. Israel used its guns and deliberate, sadistic bone-breaking against unarmed demonstrators killing almost 1,500 and injuring tens of thousands in its failed efforts to crush that uprising. Only with the 1993 Oslo accords was it possible to put an end to the uprising.
Hamas, as a resistance movement, was born in 1988. Israel, desperate to break the political monopoly of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, tacitly allowed Hamas to flourish.
Before any Palestinian fired a single shot at the start of the second uprising, in September 2000, Israel had already gunned down dozens of unarmed demonstrators. Palestinians learned these lessons well: Israel will meet any peaceful challenge with lethal force so one had better be prepared to fight back.
We need to recall these facts to understand the pure folly and detachment from reality of international politics today. The tendency has been to choose as the "cause" of the conflict to be addressed only what is politically expedient and easy, whether it is wrong or right, just or unjust, legal or illegal. The starting point of history is chosen not from the origins of the problem, but from whatever point suits the narrative of the strong.
It is utterly misleading and dishonest to pretend -- as so many now do -- that the sum total of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a confrontation over what expired Palestinian Authority President and Israeli puppet Mahmoud Abbas himself referred to as "silly rockets." To pretend that stopping the supply of rockets will make any difference to the course of a conflict that results from the historic dispossession -- the Nakba -- of an entire nation, and its replacement with a racist rogue state that has exiled, occupied and massacred the survivors for 61 years is the height of delusion.
It is convenient for the occupier and aggressor to forget all these things and talk only of rockets. And it is convenient for the cowards who dress themselves in diplomats' suits and don't dare utter the truth.
Should we not acknowledge -- if there is any real desire to resolve this conflict -- that the resistance did not fire rockets just because they had them, and Israel did not carry out its barbarous massacres in Gaza just because it wanted to stop them? Should we not acknowledge the indisputable truth that Hamas did not break the truce, but Israel did when it attacked across the border on 4 November killing six Palestinians? Hamas did not refuse to renew the truce -- as Abbas and Egyptian officials confirmed. All they asked was that the halt to killing be extended to the West Bank (which Israel refused) and that the starvation siege that was quietly killing Palestinians in Gaza be lifted. Have we not been all along taught that blockade is an act of aggression and that occupation legitimizes resistance?
The gunboats that Europe is sending to police the inmates of the Gaza Ghetto are not manifestations of strength, neither are they -- or the recent shocking statements of European Union Humanitarian chief Louis Michel in Gaza blaming Hamas for Israel's crimes on 26 January -- acts of responsible diplomacy in pursuit of peace and stability; they are a new prescription, if not a clear endorsement, for further bloodshed and war crimes. They are signs of a moral weakness and corruption unparalleled since Europeans stood by silently at stations and watched as their compatriots were loaded onto Nazi trains. Who could have thought that in the 21st century such things would need to be said -- and to those we thought had overcome their terrible history? But silence is not, and should not be an option any more. For years we have been told we should learn from the darkest episode in Europe's history, but never make comparisons to it lest we diminish its enormity. But the horrifying atrocities in Gaza which an Israeli official proudly predicted last March would be a "bigger holocaust" compel us to cast our reservations aside.
There is a shortcut to calm, the elimination of violence and eventually peace. It is a lesson that should have been learned many years, and countless thousands of lives ago: justice.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author's permission.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Glenn Greenwald
Monday Jan. 26, 2009 07:02 EST
Continuing Bush policies in Israel and Afghanistan
By all accounts, the U.S. is suffering extreme economic woes. We continue to borrow trillions of dollars simply to prevent financial collapse. Our military resources are spread so thin that the establishment consensus view blames the failure of our seven-year (and counting) occupation of Afghanistan, at least in part, on the lack of necessary resources devoted to that occupation. And a significant (though not the only) reason why we are unable to extricate ourselves from the endless resource-draining and liberty-degrading involvement in Middle East conflicts is because our one-sided support for Israel ensures that we remain involved and makes ourselves the target of hatred around the world and, especially, in the Muslim world.
Despite all of that, the Bush administration, just days before it left office, entered into yet another new agreement with Israel pursuant to which the U.S. committed to use its resources to prevent guns and other weapons from entering Gaza. That agreement cites "the steadfast commitment of the United States to Israel's security" and "and to preserve and strengthen Israel's capability to deter and defend itself," and vows that the U.S. will "address the problem of the supply of arms and related materiel and weapons transfers and shipments to Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza."
Speaking about that new U.S./Israeli agreement on her show late last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (in the course of aggressively questioning an absurdly evasive Sen. Claire McCaskill on the wisdom of Obama's plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan and noting the cadre of Bush defense officials on whom Obama is relying -- video below) observed that the Obama administration has enthusiastically expressed its full support for the new Israeli agreement entered into in the last days of Bush's presidency. Maddow said (h/t Antiwar.com):
Also, not particularly change-like, then-President Bush made a deal in his final day in office with Israel about the terms of Israel's relationship with Gaza. I'm sorry - it wasn't his last day in office. It was within his last few days in office -- my mistake.
The U.S. under President Obama is bound by that last-minute agreement between the U.S. and Israel. And a statement from Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today says that President Obama supports the agreement fully.
That new agreement has already led the U.S. Navy last week to take risky and potential illegal actions in intercepting Iranian ships that were transporting arms. As The Jerusalem Post reported:
The interception of an Iranian arms ship by the US Navy in the Red Sea last week likely was conducted as a covert operation and is being played down by the US military due to the lack of a clear legal framework for such operations, an American expert on Iran told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday evening.
International media reported that an Iranian-owned merchant vessel flying a Cypriot flag was boarded early last week by US Navy personnel who discovered artillery shells on board.
The ship was initially suspected of being en route to delivering its cargo to smugglers in Sinai who would transfer the ammunition to Hamas in Gaza, but the US Navy became uncertain over the identity of the intended recipient since "Hamas is not known to use artillery," The Associated Press cited a defense official as saying. . . .
Prof. Raymond Tanter, president of the Washington-based Iran Policy Committee, said, "It is not surprising that the US Navy is reluctant to acknowledge the operation, which may have been covert," adding that maritime law posed challenges when it came to intercepting ships that fly the flag of a sovereign country. . . .
For the time being, the interceptions and searches are being carried out on the basis of the memorandum of understanding signed between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on January 16, which is "aimed at halting arms smuggling into Gaza as part of efforts to clinch the cease-fire," Tanter said.
The article quoted Emily Landau, director of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, as arguing that the risk of provoking a confrontation with Iran from such interceptions is low -- but not non-existent -- because "Iran is not looking for an armed confrontation [with the US Navy] at this point."
And Haaretz reports that preventing Palestinians in Gaza from re-arming itself is now -- for some reason -- an ongoing military operation of the United States:
A United States naval taskforce has been ordered to hunt down weapons ships sent by Iran to rearm its Islamist ally Hamas in Gaza, The Sunday Times reported.
Quoting U.S. diplomatic sources, the British daily said that Combined Task Force 151, which is countering pirates in the Gulf of Aden, has been instructed to track Iranian arms shipments.
There were several aspects of the Israeli attack on Gaza that made it even more horrifying than the standard atrocities of war: (1) the civilian population was trapped -- imprisoned -- in a tiny densely-populated strip and were unable to escape the brutal attacks; and (2) it was a completely one-sided war, because one side (Israel) is armed to teeth with the world's most sophisticated and deadly weapons, while the other side (the Palestinians) is virtually defenseless, possessing only the most primitive and (against a force like the IDF) impotent weapons.
What possible justification is there for the U.S. (as opposed to Israel) to use its military and the money of its taxpayers to ensure that the Palestinians remain defenseless? In exactly the way that the U.S. felt free to invade Iraq (with its decayed, sanctions-destroyed "military") but not North Korea or Iran (with its much more formidable forces), it's precisely because the conflict is so one-sided that Israel feels no real pressure to cease the activities that, in part, feed this conflict (beginning with still-expanding West Bank settlements and the truly inhumane blockade of Gaza).
Obviously, where one side has its foot on the throat of the other, the side with the far more dominant position has less incentive to resolve the dispute than the side being choked. And it's perfectly natural -- not just for Israel but in general -- for a party to want to maintain dominance over its adversaries and to want to prevent its enemies from obtaining weapons that can be used against it. It's entirely rational for Israel to desire a continuation of that particular state of affairs -- i.e., for only Israel, but not the enemies with whom it has intractable territorial and religious conflicts, to have a real military force.
But what does any of that have to do with the U.S. Navy and the American taxpayer? What possible justification is there for using American resources -- the American military -- to patrol the Red Sea in order to ensure that Gazans remain defenseless? That question is particularly pronounced given that the U.S. is already shoveling, and will continue to shovel, billions and billions of dollars to Israel in military and other aid. Why, on top of all of that, are increasingly scarce American resources, rather than Israeli resources, being used to bar Palestinians from obtaining weapons? And why -- as it is more vital than ever that we extricate ourselves from Middle Eastern conflicts -- are we making ourselves still more of a partisan and combatant in this most entrenched and religiously-driven territorial dispute over the West Bank and Gaza Strip?
Israel is hardly the only country which the U.S. expends vast resources -- including military resources -- to defend and protect, and all of those commitments ought to be seriously re-examined. But none of those other commitments entail anywhere near the costs -- on every level -- of our seemingly limitless willingness, eagerness, to involve ourselves so directly and self-destructively in every last conflict that Israel has. Given what we are constantly being told is the grave economic peril the U.S. faces, shouldn't we be moving in exactly the opposite direction than the imperial expansion which we continue to pursue?
Monday Jan. 26, 2009 07:02 EST
Continuing Bush policies in Israel and Afghanistan
By all accounts, the U.S. is suffering extreme economic woes. We continue to borrow trillions of dollars simply to prevent financial collapse. Our military resources are spread so thin that the establishment consensus view blames the failure of our seven-year (and counting) occupation of Afghanistan, at least in part, on the lack of necessary resources devoted to that occupation. And a significant (though not the only) reason why we are unable to extricate ourselves from the endless resource-draining and liberty-degrading involvement in Middle East conflicts is because our one-sided support for Israel ensures that we remain involved and makes ourselves the target of hatred around the world and, especially, in the Muslim world.
Despite all of that, the Bush administration, just days before it left office, entered into yet another new agreement with Israel pursuant to which the U.S. committed to use its resources to prevent guns and other weapons from entering Gaza. That agreement cites "the steadfast commitment of the United States to Israel's security" and "and to preserve and strengthen Israel's capability to deter and defend itself," and vows that the U.S. will "address the problem of the supply of arms and related materiel and weapons transfers and shipments to Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza."
Speaking about that new U.S./Israeli agreement on her show late last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (in the course of aggressively questioning an absurdly evasive Sen. Claire McCaskill on the wisdom of Obama's plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan and noting the cadre of Bush defense officials on whom Obama is relying -- video below) observed that the Obama administration has enthusiastically expressed its full support for the new Israeli agreement entered into in the last days of Bush's presidency. Maddow said (h/t Antiwar.com):
Also, not particularly change-like, then-President Bush made a deal in his final day in office with Israel about the terms of Israel's relationship with Gaza. I'm sorry - it wasn't his last day in office. It was within his last few days in office -- my mistake.
The U.S. under President Obama is bound by that last-minute agreement between the U.S. and Israel. And a statement from Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today says that President Obama supports the agreement fully.
That new agreement has already led the U.S. Navy last week to take risky and potential illegal actions in intercepting Iranian ships that were transporting arms. As The Jerusalem Post reported:
The interception of an Iranian arms ship by the US Navy in the Red Sea last week likely was conducted as a covert operation and is being played down by the US military due to the lack of a clear legal framework for such operations, an American expert on Iran told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday evening.
International media reported that an Iranian-owned merchant vessel flying a Cypriot flag was boarded early last week by US Navy personnel who discovered artillery shells on board.
The ship was initially suspected of being en route to delivering its cargo to smugglers in Sinai who would transfer the ammunition to Hamas in Gaza, but the US Navy became uncertain over the identity of the intended recipient since "Hamas is not known to use artillery," The Associated Press cited a defense official as saying. . . .
Prof. Raymond Tanter, president of the Washington-based Iran Policy Committee, said, "It is not surprising that the US Navy is reluctant to acknowledge the operation, which may have been covert," adding that maritime law posed challenges when it came to intercepting ships that fly the flag of a sovereign country. . . .
For the time being, the interceptions and searches are being carried out on the basis of the memorandum of understanding signed between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on January 16, which is "aimed at halting arms smuggling into Gaza as part of efforts to clinch the cease-fire," Tanter said.
The article quoted Emily Landau, director of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at the Institute of National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, as arguing that the risk of provoking a confrontation with Iran from such interceptions is low -- but not non-existent -- because "Iran is not looking for an armed confrontation [with the US Navy] at this point."
And Haaretz reports that preventing Palestinians in Gaza from re-arming itself is now -- for some reason -- an ongoing military operation of the United States:
A United States naval taskforce has been ordered to hunt down weapons ships sent by Iran to rearm its Islamist ally Hamas in Gaza, The Sunday Times reported.
Quoting U.S. diplomatic sources, the British daily said that Combined Task Force 151, which is countering pirates in the Gulf of Aden, has been instructed to track Iranian arms shipments.
There were several aspects of the Israeli attack on Gaza that made it even more horrifying than the standard atrocities of war: (1) the civilian population was trapped -- imprisoned -- in a tiny densely-populated strip and were unable to escape the brutal attacks; and (2) it was a completely one-sided war, because one side (Israel) is armed to teeth with the world's most sophisticated and deadly weapons, while the other side (the Palestinians) is virtually defenseless, possessing only the most primitive and (against a force like the IDF) impotent weapons.
What possible justification is there for the U.S. (as opposed to Israel) to use its military and the money of its taxpayers to ensure that the Palestinians remain defenseless? In exactly the way that the U.S. felt free to invade Iraq (with its decayed, sanctions-destroyed "military") but not North Korea or Iran (with its much more formidable forces), it's precisely because the conflict is so one-sided that Israel feels no real pressure to cease the activities that, in part, feed this conflict (beginning with still-expanding West Bank settlements and the truly inhumane blockade of Gaza).
Obviously, where one side has its foot on the throat of the other, the side with the far more dominant position has less incentive to resolve the dispute than the side being choked. And it's perfectly natural -- not just for Israel but in general -- for a party to want to maintain dominance over its adversaries and to want to prevent its enemies from obtaining weapons that can be used against it. It's entirely rational for Israel to desire a continuation of that particular state of affairs -- i.e., for only Israel, but not the enemies with whom it has intractable territorial and religious conflicts, to have a real military force.
But what does any of that have to do with the U.S. Navy and the American taxpayer? What possible justification is there for using American resources -- the American military -- to patrol the Red Sea in order to ensure that Gazans remain defenseless? That question is particularly pronounced given that the U.S. is already shoveling, and will continue to shovel, billions and billions of dollars to Israel in military and other aid. Why, on top of all of that, are increasingly scarce American resources, rather than Israeli resources, being used to bar Palestinians from obtaining weapons? And why -- as it is more vital than ever that we extricate ourselves from Middle Eastern conflicts -- are we making ourselves still more of a partisan and combatant in this most entrenched and religiously-driven territorial dispute over the West Bank and Gaza Strip?
Israel is hardly the only country which the U.S. expends vast resources -- including military resources -- to defend and protect, and all of those commitments ought to be seriously re-examined. But none of those other commitments entail anywhere near the costs -- on every level -- of our seemingly limitless willingness, eagerness, to involve ourselves so directly and self-destructively in every last conflict that Israel has. Given what we are constantly being told is the grave economic peril the U.S. faces, shouldn't we be moving in exactly the opposite direction than the imperial expansion which we continue to pursue?
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The president can't afford to continue the Bush administration's policies toward Israel.
Jan. 26, 2009 | Lest President Barack Obama's opportunistic silence when Israel began the Gaza offensive that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians (more than 400 of them children) be misinterpreted, his aides pointed reporters to comments made six months earlier in the Israeli town of Sderot. "If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama had said in reference to the missiles Hamas was firing from Gaza. "I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
Residents of Gaza might have wondered what Obama would have done had he been unfortunate enough to be a resident of, say, Jabaliya refugee camp. What if, like the vast majority of Gazans, his grandfather had been driven from his home in what is now Israel, and barred by virtue of his ethnicity from ever returning? What if, like the majority of the residents of this refugee ghetto-by-the-sea, he had voted for Hamas, which had vowed to fight for his rights and was not corrupt like the Fatah strongmen with whom the Israelis and Americans liked to deal?
And what if, as a result of that vote, he had found himself under an economic siege, whose explicit purpose was to inflict deprivation in order to force him to reverse his democratic choice? What might a Gazan Obama have made of the statement, soon after that election, by Dov Weissglass, a top aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, that Israel's blockade would put him and his family "on [a] diet"?
"The Palestinians will get a lot thinner," Weissglass had chortled, "but [they] won't die."
Starting last June, the Sderot Obama would have noticed that, as a result of a truce brokered by Egypt, the rocket fire from Gaza had largely ceased. For the Jabaliya Obama, however, the "Weissglass Diet" remained in place. Even before Israel's recent offensive, the Red Cross had reported that almost half the children under 2 in Gaza were anemic due to their parents' inability to feed them properly.
Who knows what the Jabaliya Obama would have made of the Hamas rockets that, in November, once again began flying overhead toward Israel, as Hamas sought to break the siege by creating a crisis that would lead to a new cease-fire under better terms. He might well have had misgivings, but he would also have had plenty of reason to hope for the success of the Hamas strategy.
Ever committed to regime change in Gaza, Israel, however, showed no interest in a new cease-fire. As Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Fox News, "Expecting us to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda." (Barak apparently assumed Americans would overlook the fact that he had, indeed, been party to just such a cease-fire since June 2008, and looks set to be party to another now that the Gaza operation is over.)
A canny Sderot Obama would have been all too aware that Israel's leaders need his vote in next month's elections and hope to win it by showing how tough they can be on the Gazans. Then again, a Sderot Obama might not have been thinking much beyond his immediate anger and fear -- and would certainly have been unlikely to try to see the regional picture through the eyes of the Jabaliya Obama.
Nonetheless, not all Israelis were as sanguine about the Israeli offensive as the Sderot Obama appears to have been. "What luck my parents are dead," wrote the Israeli journalist Amira Hass in Haaretz. Survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, her mother and father had long hated the Orwellian twists of language in which Israeli authorities couched their military actions against Palestinians.
"My parents despised all their everyday activities -- stirring sugar into coffee, washing the dishes, standing at a crosswalk -- when in their mind's eye they saw, based on their personal experience, the terror in the eyes of children, the desperation of mothers who could not protect their young ones, the moment when a huge explosion dropped a house on top of its inhabitants and a smart bomb struck down entire families...
"Because of my parents' history they knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area ... How lucky it is that they are not alive to see how these incarcerated people are bombarded with all the glorious military technology of Israel and the United States ... My parents' personal history led them to despise the relaxed way the news anchors reported on a curfew. How lucky they are not here and cannot hear the crowd roaring in the coliseum."
The passions of the crowd may have been satisfied. Or not. Certainly, Israel's three-week-long military operation appears to have done little more than reestablish the country's "deterrent" -- quantified in the 100-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths.
Hamas remains intact, as does the bulk of its fighting force. And if, as appears likely, a new truce provides for a lifting, however partial, of the economic siege of Gaza, and also for the reintegration of Hamas into the Palestinian Authority -- which would be a blunt repudiation of three years of U.S. and Israeli efforts -- the organization will claim victory, even if the Obamas of Jabaliya refugee camp, now possibly without homes, wonder at what cost.
If President Barack Obama is to have any positive impact on this morbid cycle of destruction and death, he must be able to understand the experience of Jabaliya just as much as he does the experience of Sderot. Curiously enough, he might be helped in that endeavor by none other than the man who directed Israel's latest operation, Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Asked by a journalist during his successful 1999 campaign for prime minister what he'd have done if he'd been born Palestinian, Barak answered simply and bluntly: "I'd have joined a terrorist organization."
Obama's Gaza Opportunity
The catastrophe in Gaza has, counterintuitively enough, presented President Barack Obama with an opportunity to restart the peace process -- precisely because it has demonstrated the catastrophic failure of the approach adopted by the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the raft of domestic and economic challenges facing the 44th president may tempt Obama to keep many Bush foreign policies on autopilot for now.
The plan brokered by the Bush administration in its last months for an American withdrawal from Iraq will, for instance, probably remain largely in effect; Obama will actually double the troop commitment to Afghanistan; and on Iran, Obama's idea of direct talks may not prove that radical a departure from the most recent version of the Bush approach -- at least if the purpose of such talks is simply to have U.S. diplomats present a warmed-over version of the carrot-and-stick ultimatums on uranium enrichment that have been on offer, via the Europeans, for the past three years.
As Gaza has clearly demonstrated, however, continuing the Bush policy on Israel and the Palestinians is untenable. The Bush administration may have talked of a Palestinian state, but it had limited itself to orchestrating a series of cozy chats between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, aimed at creating the illusion of a "process."
There was no real process, not in the sense that the term is commonly understood, anyway -- reciprocal steps by the combatant parties to disengage and move toward a settlement that changes political boundaries and power arrangements. But the illusion of progress was a necessary part of the administration's policy of dividing the Middle East on Cold War-type lines in a supposedly epic struggle between "moderates" and "radicals."
The "moderates" included Israel, Abbas and the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf States. The radicals were Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizballah, intractable enemies of peace, democracy and stability.
Democracy?! Yes, the chutzpah of Bush and his people was legendary -- after all, Hamas and Hizballah had been democratically elected, which is more than you could say for the Arab "moderates" they championed. Even Iran holds elections more competitive than any in Egypt.
Adding to the irony, Abbas' term of office as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) has now expired, but you can bet your Obama inauguration souvenir program that he won't be required by Washington to seek a new mandate from the voters; indeed, it's doubtful that the Israelis would allow another Palestinian election in the West Bank, which they essentially control.
Ongoing peace talks with Palestinian "moderates," no matter how fruitless, provided important cover for Arab regimes who wanted to stand with the U.S. and Israel on the question of Iran's growing power and influence. But there could, of course, be no talks with the "radicals," even if those radicals were more representative than the "moderates." (Sure, Egypt's Mubarak stands with Israel against Hamas, but that's because Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which might well trounce Mubarak if Egypt held free and fair elections.)
Thus, Washington chose to ignore the opportunity that Hamas' historic 2006 decision to contest the Palestinian Authority legislative election offered. The organization had previously boycotted the institutions of the PA as the illegitimate progeny of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which they had rejected. Caught off-guard when the Palestinian electorate then repudiated Washington's chosen "moderate" regime, the U.S. responded by imposing sanctions on the new Palestinian government, while pressuring the Europeans and Arab regimes on whose funding the PA depended to do the same. These sanctions eventually grew into a siege of Gaza.
The financial blockade would continue, the U.S. and its allies insisted, until Hamas renounced violence, recognized Israel, and bound itself to previous agreements. Exactly the same three preconditions for engaging Hamas were recently reiterated by incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at her confirmation hearings.
A Failed Doctrine
The Gaza debacle has made one thing perfectly clear: Any peace process that seeks to marginalize, not integrate, Hamas is doomed to fail -- and with catastrophic consequences. That's why the position outlined by Obama's secretary of state-designate is dysfunctional at birth, because it repeats the mistake of trying to marginalize Hamas. For its part, Hamas officials have sent a number of signals in recent years indicating the organization's willingness to move in a pragmatic direction. Its leaders wouldn't bother to regularly explain their views in the Op-Ed pages of American newspapers if they did not believe a different relationship with the U.S. -- and so Israel -- was possible.
For the new Obama administration reinforcing and, as they say in Washington, incentivizing the pragmatic track in Hamas is the key to reviving the region's prospects for peace.
Hamas has demonstrated beyond doubt that it speaks for at least half of the Palestinian electorate. Many observers believe that, were new elections to be held tomorrow, the Islamists would probably not only win Gaza again, but take the West Bank as well. Demanding what Hamas would deem a symbolic surrender before any diplomatic conversation even begins is not an approach that will yield positive results. Renouncing violence was never a precondition for talks between South Africa and Nelson Mandela's ANC, or Britain and the Irish Republican Army. Indeed, Israel's talks with the PLO began long before it had publicly renounced violence.
"Recognizing" Israel is difficult for Palestinians because, in doing so, they are also being asked to renounce the claims of refugee families to the land and homes they were forced out of in 1948 and were barred from recovering by one of the founding acts of the State of Israel. For an organization such as Hamas, such recognition could never be a precondition to negotiations, only the result of them (and then with some reciprocal recognition of the rights of the refugees).
Hamas' decision to engage the election process created by Oslo was, in fact, a pragmatic decision opposed by hard-liners in its own ranks. Doing so bound it to engage with the Israelis and also to observe agreements under which those electoral institutions were established (as Hamas mayors on the West Bank had already learned). In fact, Hamas made clear that it was committed to good governance and consensus, and recognized Abbas as president, which also meant explicitly recognizing his right to continue negotiating with the Israelis.
Hamas agreed to abide by any accord approved by the Palestinians in a democratic referendum. By 2007, key leaders of the organization had even begun talking of accepting a Palestinian state based on a return to 1967 borders in a swap for a generational truce with Israel.
Hamas' move onto the electoral track had, in fact, presented a great opportunity for any American administration inclined toward grown-up diplomacy, rather than the infantile fantasy of reengineering the region's politics in favor of chosen "moderates." So, in 2006, the U.S. immediately slapped sanctions on the new government, seeking to reverse the results of the Palestinian election through collective punishment of the electorate. The U.S. also blocked Saudi efforts to broker a Palestinian government of national unity by warning that Abbas would be shunned by the U.S. and Israel if he opted for rapprochement with the majority party in his legislature. Washington appears to have even backed a coup attempt by U.S.-trained, Fatah-controlled militia in Gaza, which resulted in Fatah's bloody expulsion from there in the summer of 2007.
The failed U.S.-Israeli strategy of trying to depose Hamas reached its nadir in the pre-inauguration blood bath in Gaza, which not only reinforced Hamas politically, but actually weakened those anointed as "moderates" as part of a counterinsurgency strategy against Hamas and its support base.
It is in America's interest, and Israel's, and the Palestinians' that Obama intervene quickly in the Middle East, but that he do so on a dramatically different basis than that of his two immediate predecessors.
Peace is made between the combatants of any conflict; "peace" with only chosen "moderates" is an exercise in redundancy and pointlessness. The challenge in the region is to promote moderation and pragmatism among the political forces that speak for all sides, especially the representative radicals.
And speaking of radicals and extremists, there's palpable denial, bordering on amnesia, when it comes to Israel's rejectionists. Ariel Sharon explicitly rejected the Oslo peace process, declaring it null and void shortly after assuming power. Instead, he negotiated only with Washington over unilateral Israeli moves.
Ever since, Israeli politics has been moving steadily rightward, with the winner in next month's elections expected to be the hawkish Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. If so, he will govern in a coalition with far-right rejectionists and advocates of "ethnic cleansing." Netanyahu even rejected Ariel Sharon's 2005 Gaza pullout plan, and he has made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in sustaining the illusion of talks over a "final status" agreement, even with Washington's chosen "moderates."
Israelis, by all accounts, have generally given up on the idea of pursuing a peace agreement with the Palestinians any time soon, and for the foreseeable future, no Israeli government will willingly undertake the large-scale evacuation of the West Bank settlers, essential to any two-state solution but likely to provoke an Israeli civil war.
This political situation should serve as a warning to Obama and his people to avoid the pitfalls of the Clinton administration's approach to brokering Middle East peace. Clinton's basic guideline was that the pace and content of the peace process should be decided by Israel's leaders, and that nothing should ever be put on the negotiating table that had not first been approved by them. Restricting the peace process to proposals that fall within the comfort zone only of the Israeli government is the diplomatic equivalent of allowing investment banks to regulate themselves -- and we all know where that landed us.
It is fanciful, today, to believe that, left to their own devices, Israel and the Palestinians will agree on where to set the border between them, on how to share Jerusalem, or on the fate of Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlements. A two-state solution, if one is to be achieved, will have to be imposed by the international community, based on a consensus that already exists in international law (UN Resolutions 242 and 338), the Arab League peace proposals, and the Taba non-paper that documented the last formal final-status talks between the two sides in January 2001.
Had Barack Obama taken office in a moment of relative tranquility in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian relationship, he might have had the luxury of putting it on the back burner. Indeed, any move to change the Bush approach might have been challenged as unnecessarily risky and disruptive.
In Gaza in the last few weeks, however, the Bush approach imploded, leaving Obama no choice but to initiate a new policy of his own. Hopefully, it will be one rooted in the pragmatism for which the new president is renowned.
Jan. 26, 2009 | Lest President Barack Obama's opportunistic silence when Israel began the Gaza offensive that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians (more than 400 of them children) be misinterpreted, his aides pointed reporters to comments made six months earlier in the Israeli town of Sderot. "If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama had said in reference to the missiles Hamas was firing from Gaza. "I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
Residents of Gaza might have wondered what Obama would have done had he been unfortunate enough to be a resident of, say, Jabaliya refugee camp. What if, like the vast majority of Gazans, his grandfather had been driven from his home in what is now Israel, and barred by virtue of his ethnicity from ever returning? What if, like the majority of the residents of this refugee ghetto-by-the-sea, he had voted for Hamas, which had vowed to fight for his rights and was not corrupt like the Fatah strongmen with whom the Israelis and Americans liked to deal?
And what if, as a result of that vote, he had found himself under an economic siege, whose explicit purpose was to inflict deprivation in order to force him to reverse his democratic choice? What might a Gazan Obama have made of the statement, soon after that election, by Dov Weissglass, a top aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, that Israel's blockade would put him and his family "on [a] diet"?
"The Palestinians will get a lot thinner," Weissglass had chortled, "but [they] won't die."
Starting last June, the Sderot Obama would have noticed that, as a result of a truce brokered by Egypt, the rocket fire from Gaza had largely ceased. For the Jabaliya Obama, however, the "Weissglass Diet" remained in place. Even before Israel's recent offensive, the Red Cross had reported that almost half the children under 2 in Gaza were anemic due to their parents' inability to feed them properly.
Who knows what the Jabaliya Obama would have made of the Hamas rockets that, in November, once again began flying overhead toward Israel, as Hamas sought to break the siege by creating a crisis that would lead to a new cease-fire under better terms. He might well have had misgivings, but he would also have had plenty of reason to hope for the success of the Hamas strategy.
Ever committed to regime change in Gaza, Israel, however, showed no interest in a new cease-fire. As Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Fox News, "Expecting us to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda." (Barak apparently assumed Americans would overlook the fact that he had, indeed, been party to just such a cease-fire since June 2008, and looks set to be party to another now that the Gaza operation is over.)
A canny Sderot Obama would have been all too aware that Israel's leaders need his vote in next month's elections and hope to win it by showing how tough they can be on the Gazans. Then again, a Sderot Obama might not have been thinking much beyond his immediate anger and fear -- and would certainly have been unlikely to try to see the regional picture through the eyes of the Jabaliya Obama.
Nonetheless, not all Israelis were as sanguine about the Israeli offensive as the Sderot Obama appears to have been. "What luck my parents are dead," wrote the Israeli journalist Amira Hass in Haaretz. Survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, her mother and father had long hated the Orwellian twists of language in which Israeli authorities couched their military actions against Palestinians.
"My parents despised all their everyday activities -- stirring sugar into coffee, washing the dishes, standing at a crosswalk -- when in their mind's eye they saw, based on their personal experience, the terror in the eyes of children, the desperation of mothers who could not protect their young ones, the moment when a huge explosion dropped a house on top of its inhabitants and a smart bomb struck down entire families...
"Because of my parents' history they knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area ... How lucky it is that they are not alive to see how these incarcerated people are bombarded with all the glorious military technology of Israel and the United States ... My parents' personal history led them to despise the relaxed way the news anchors reported on a curfew. How lucky they are not here and cannot hear the crowd roaring in the coliseum."
The passions of the crowd may have been satisfied. Or not. Certainly, Israel's three-week-long military operation appears to have done little more than reestablish the country's "deterrent" -- quantified in the 100-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths.
Hamas remains intact, as does the bulk of its fighting force. And if, as appears likely, a new truce provides for a lifting, however partial, of the economic siege of Gaza, and also for the reintegration of Hamas into the Palestinian Authority -- which would be a blunt repudiation of three years of U.S. and Israeli efforts -- the organization will claim victory, even if the Obamas of Jabaliya refugee camp, now possibly without homes, wonder at what cost.
If President Barack Obama is to have any positive impact on this morbid cycle of destruction and death, he must be able to understand the experience of Jabaliya just as much as he does the experience of Sderot. Curiously enough, he might be helped in that endeavor by none other than the man who directed Israel's latest operation, Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Asked by a journalist during his successful 1999 campaign for prime minister what he'd have done if he'd been born Palestinian, Barak answered simply and bluntly: "I'd have joined a terrorist organization."
Obama's Gaza Opportunity
The catastrophe in Gaza has, counterintuitively enough, presented President Barack Obama with an opportunity to restart the peace process -- precisely because it has demonstrated the catastrophic failure of the approach adopted by the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the raft of domestic and economic challenges facing the 44th president may tempt Obama to keep many Bush foreign policies on autopilot for now.
The plan brokered by the Bush administration in its last months for an American withdrawal from Iraq will, for instance, probably remain largely in effect; Obama will actually double the troop commitment to Afghanistan; and on Iran, Obama's idea of direct talks may not prove that radical a departure from the most recent version of the Bush approach -- at least if the purpose of such talks is simply to have U.S. diplomats present a warmed-over version of the carrot-and-stick ultimatums on uranium enrichment that have been on offer, via the Europeans, for the past three years.
As Gaza has clearly demonstrated, however, continuing the Bush policy on Israel and the Palestinians is untenable. The Bush administration may have talked of a Palestinian state, but it had limited itself to orchestrating a series of cozy chats between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, aimed at creating the illusion of a "process."
There was no real process, not in the sense that the term is commonly understood, anyway -- reciprocal steps by the combatant parties to disengage and move toward a settlement that changes political boundaries and power arrangements. But the illusion of progress was a necessary part of the administration's policy of dividing the Middle East on Cold War-type lines in a supposedly epic struggle between "moderates" and "radicals."
The "moderates" included Israel, Abbas and the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf States. The radicals were Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizballah, intractable enemies of peace, democracy and stability.
Democracy?! Yes, the chutzpah of Bush and his people was legendary -- after all, Hamas and Hizballah had been democratically elected, which is more than you could say for the Arab "moderates" they championed. Even Iran holds elections more competitive than any in Egypt.
Adding to the irony, Abbas' term of office as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) has now expired, but you can bet your Obama inauguration souvenir program that he won't be required by Washington to seek a new mandate from the voters; indeed, it's doubtful that the Israelis would allow another Palestinian election in the West Bank, which they essentially control.
Ongoing peace talks with Palestinian "moderates," no matter how fruitless, provided important cover for Arab regimes who wanted to stand with the U.S. and Israel on the question of Iran's growing power and influence. But there could, of course, be no talks with the "radicals," even if those radicals were more representative than the "moderates." (Sure, Egypt's Mubarak stands with Israel against Hamas, but that's because Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which might well trounce Mubarak if Egypt held free and fair elections.)
Thus, Washington chose to ignore the opportunity that Hamas' historic 2006 decision to contest the Palestinian Authority legislative election offered. The organization had previously boycotted the institutions of the PA as the illegitimate progeny of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which they had rejected. Caught off-guard when the Palestinian electorate then repudiated Washington's chosen "moderate" regime, the U.S. responded by imposing sanctions on the new Palestinian government, while pressuring the Europeans and Arab regimes on whose funding the PA depended to do the same. These sanctions eventually grew into a siege of Gaza.
The financial blockade would continue, the U.S. and its allies insisted, until Hamas renounced violence, recognized Israel, and bound itself to previous agreements. Exactly the same three preconditions for engaging Hamas were recently reiterated by incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at her confirmation hearings.
A Failed Doctrine
The Gaza debacle has made one thing perfectly clear: Any peace process that seeks to marginalize, not integrate, Hamas is doomed to fail -- and with catastrophic consequences. That's why the position outlined by Obama's secretary of state-designate is dysfunctional at birth, because it repeats the mistake of trying to marginalize Hamas. For its part, Hamas officials have sent a number of signals in recent years indicating the organization's willingness to move in a pragmatic direction. Its leaders wouldn't bother to regularly explain their views in the Op-Ed pages of American newspapers if they did not believe a different relationship with the U.S. -- and so Israel -- was possible.
For the new Obama administration reinforcing and, as they say in Washington, incentivizing the pragmatic track in Hamas is the key to reviving the region's prospects for peace.
Hamas has demonstrated beyond doubt that it speaks for at least half of the Palestinian electorate. Many observers believe that, were new elections to be held tomorrow, the Islamists would probably not only win Gaza again, but take the West Bank as well. Demanding what Hamas would deem a symbolic surrender before any diplomatic conversation even begins is not an approach that will yield positive results. Renouncing violence was never a precondition for talks between South Africa and Nelson Mandela's ANC, or Britain and the Irish Republican Army. Indeed, Israel's talks with the PLO began long before it had publicly renounced violence.
"Recognizing" Israel is difficult for Palestinians because, in doing so, they are also being asked to renounce the claims of refugee families to the land and homes they were forced out of in 1948 and were barred from recovering by one of the founding acts of the State of Israel. For an organization such as Hamas, such recognition could never be a precondition to negotiations, only the result of them (and then with some reciprocal recognition of the rights of the refugees).
Hamas' decision to engage the election process created by Oslo was, in fact, a pragmatic decision opposed by hard-liners in its own ranks. Doing so bound it to engage with the Israelis and also to observe agreements under which those electoral institutions were established (as Hamas mayors on the West Bank had already learned). In fact, Hamas made clear that it was committed to good governance and consensus, and recognized Abbas as president, which also meant explicitly recognizing his right to continue negotiating with the Israelis.
Hamas agreed to abide by any accord approved by the Palestinians in a democratic referendum. By 2007, key leaders of the organization had even begun talking of accepting a Palestinian state based on a return to 1967 borders in a swap for a generational truce with Israel.
Hamas' move onto the electoral track had, in fact, presented a great opportunity for any American administration inclined toward grown-up diplomacy, rather than the infantile fantasy of reengineering the region's politics in favor of chosen "moderates." So, in 2006, the U.S. immediately slapped sanctions on the new government, seeking to reverse the results of the Palestinian election through collective punishment of the electorate. The U.S. also blocked Saudi efforts to broker a Palestinian government of national unity by warning that Abbas would be shunned by the U.S. and Israel if he opted for rapprochement with the majority party in his legislature. Washington appears to have even backed a coup attempt by U.S.-trained, Fatah-controlled militia in Gaza, which resulted in Fatah's bloody expulsion from there in the summer of 2007.
The failed U.S.-Israeli strategy of trying to depose Hamas reached its nadir in the pre-inauguration blood bath in Gaza, which not only reinforced Hamas politically, but actually weakened those anointed as "moderates" as part of a counterinsurgency strategy against Hamas and its support base.
It is in America's interest, and Israel's, and the Palestinians' that Obama intervene quickly in the Middle East, but that he do so on a dramatically different basis than that of his two immediate predecessors.
Peace is made between the combatants of any conflict; "peace" with only chosen "moderates" is an exercise in redundancy and pointlessness. The challenge in the region is to promote moderation and pragmatism among the political forces that speak for all sides, especially the representative radicals.
And speaking of radicals and extremists, there's palpable denial, bordering on amnesia, when it comes to Israel's rejectionists. Ariel Sharon explicitly rejected the Oslo peace process, declaring it null and void shortly after assuming power. Instead, he negotiated only with Washington over unilateral Israeli moves.
Ever since, Israeli politics has been moving steadily rightward, with the winner in next month's elections expected to be the hawkish Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. If so, he will govern in a coalition with far-right rejectionists and advocates of "ethnic cleansing." Netanyahu even rejected Ariel Sharon's 2005 Gaza pullout plan, and he has made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in sustaining the illusion of talks over a "final status" agreement, even with Washington's chosen "moderates."
Israelis, by all accounts, have generally given up on the idea of pursuing a peace agreement with the Palestinians any time soon, and for the foreseeable future, no Israeli government will willingly undertake the large-scale evacuation of the West Bank settlers, essential to any two-state solution but likely to provoke an Israeli civil war.
This political situation should serve as a warning to Obama and his people to avoid the pitfalls of the Clinton administration's approach to brokering Middle East peace. Clinton's basic guideline was that the pace and content of the peace process should be decided by Israel's leaders, and that nothing should ever be put on the negotiating table that had not first been approved by them. Restricting the peace process to proposals that fall within the comfort zone only of the Israeli government is the diplomatic equivalent of allowing investment banks to regulate themselves -- and we all know where that landed us.
It is fanciful, today, to believe that, left to their own devices, Israel and the Palestinians will agree on where to set the border between them, on how to share Jerusalem, or on the fate of Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlements. A two-state solution, if one is to be achieved, will have to be imposed by the international community, based on a consensus that already exists in international law (UN Resolutions 242 and 338), the Arab League peace proposals, and the Taba non-paper that documented the last formal final-status talks between the two sides in January 2001.
Had Barack Obama taken office in a moment of relative tranquility in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian relationship, he might have had the luxury of putting it on the back burner. Indeed, any move to change the Bush approach might have been challenged as unnecessarily risky and disruptive.
In Gaza in the last few weeks, however, the Bush approach imploded, leaving Obama no choice but to initiate a new policy of his own. Hopefully, it will be one rooted in the pragmatism for which the new president is renowned.
"As the Arabs see the Jews"
His Majesty King Abdullah,
The American Magazine
November, 1947
I am especially delighted to address an American audience, for the tragic problem of Palestine will never be solved without American understanding, American sympathy, American support.
So many billions of words have been written about Palestine—perhaps more than on any other subject in history—that I hesitate to add to them. Yet I am compelled to do so, for I am reluctantly convinced that the world in general, and America in particular, knows almost nothing of the true case for the Arabs.
We Arabs follow, perhaps far more than you think, the press of America. We are frankly disturbed to find that for every word printed on the Arab side, a thousand are printed on the Zionist side.
There are many reasons for this. You have many millions of Jewish citizens interested in this question. They are highly vocal and wise in the ways of publicity. There are few Arab citizens in America, and we are as yet unskilled in the technique of modern propaganda.
The results have been alarming for us. In your press we see a horrible caricature and are told it is our true portrait. In all justice, we cannot let this pass by default.
Our case is quite simple: For nearly 2,000 years Palestine has been almost 100 per cent Arab. It is still preponderantly Arab today, in spite of enormous Jewish immigration. But if this immigration continues we shall soon be outnumbered—a minority in our home.
Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews. We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more.
Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.
We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.
Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that?
Because of our perfectly natural dislike of being overwhelmed in our own homeland, we are called blind nationalists and heartless anti-Semites. This charge would be ludicrous were it not so dangerous.
No people on earth have been less "anti-Semitic" than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West. Jews, themselves, will admit that never since the Great Dispersion did Jews develop so freely and reach such importance as in Spain when it was an Arab possession. With very minor exceptions, Jews have lived for many centuries in the Middle East, in complete peace and friendliness with their Arab neighbours.
Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and other Arab centres have always contained large and prosperous Jewish colonies. Until the Zionist invasion of Palestine began, these Jews received the most generous treatment—far, far better than in Christian Europe. Now, unhappily, for the first time in history, these Jews are beginning to feel the effects of Arab resistance to the Zionist assault. Most of them are as anxious as Arabs to stop it. Most of these Jews who have found happy homes among us resent, as we do, the coming of these strangers.
I was puzzled for a long time about the odd belief which apparently persists in America that Palestine has somehow "always been a Jewish land." Recently an American I talked to cleared up this mystery. He pointed out that the only things most Americans know about Palestine are what they read in the Bible. It was a Jewish land in those days, they reason, and they assume it has always remained so.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is absurd to reach so far back into the mists of history to argue about who should have Palestine today, and I apologise for it. Yet the Jews do this, and I must reply to their "historic claim." I wonder if the world has ever seen a stranger sight than a group of people seriously pretending to claim a land because their ancestors lived there some 2,000 years ago!
If you suggest that I am biased, I invite you to read any sound history of the period and verify the facts.
Such fragmentary records as we have indicate that the Jews were wandering nomads from Iraq who moved to southern Turkey, came south to Palestine, stayed there a short time, and then passed to Egypt, where they remained about 400 years. About 1300 BC (according to your calendar) they left Egypt and gradually conquered most—but not all—of the inhabitants of Palestine.
It is significant that the Philistines—not the Jews—gave their name to the country: "Palestine" is merely the Greek form of "Philistia."
Only once, during the empire of David and Solomon, did the Jews ever control nearly—but not all—the land which is today Palestine. This empire lasted only 70 years, ending in 926 BC. Only 250 years later the Kingdom of Judah had shrunk to a small province around Jerusalem, barely a quarter of modern Palestine.
In 63 BC the Jews were conquered by Roman Pompey, and never again had even the vestige of independence. The Roman Emperor Hadrian finally wiped them out about 135 AD. He utterly destroyed Jerusalem, rebuilt under another name, and for hundreds of years no Jew was permitted to enter it. A handful of Jews remained in Palestine but the vast majority were killed or scattered to other countries, in the Diaspora, or the Great Dispersion. From that time Palestine ceased to be a Jewish country, in any conceivable sense.
This was 1,815 years ago, and yet the Jews solemnly pretend they still own Palestine! If such fantasy were allowed, how the map of the world would dance about!
Italians might claim England, which the Romans held so long. England might claim France, "homeland" of the conquering Normans. And the French Normans might claim Norway, where their ancestors originated. And incidentally, we Arabs might claim Spain, which we held for 700 years.
Many Mexicans might claim Spain, "homeland" of their forefathers. They might even claim Texas, which was Mexican until 100 years ago. And suppose the American Indians claimed the "homeland" of which they were the sole, native, and ancient occupants until only some 450 years ago!
I am not being facetious. All these claims are just as valid—or just as fantastic—as the Jewish "historic connection" with Palestine. Most are more valid.
In any event, the great Moslem expansion about 650 AD finally settled things. It dominated Palestine completely. From that day on, Palestine was solidly Arabic in population, language, and religion. When British armies entered the country during the last war, they found 500,000 Arabs and only 65,000 Jews.
If solid, uninterrupted Arab occupation for nearly 1,300 years does not make a country "Arab", what does?
The Jews say, and rightly, that Palestine is the home of their religion. It is likewise the birthplace of Christianity, but would any Christian nation claim it on that account? In passing, let me say that the Christian Arabs—and there are many hundreds of thousands of them in the Arab World—are in absolute agreement with all other Arabs in opposing the Zionist invasion of Palestine.
May I also point out that Jerusalem is, after Mecca and Medina, the holiest place in Islam. In fact, in the early days of our religion, Moslems prayed toward Jerusalem instead of Mecca.
The Jewish "religious claim" to Palestine is as absurd as the "historic claim." The Holy Places, sacred to three great religions, must be open to all, the monopoly of none. Let us not confuse religion and politics.
We are told that we are inhumane and heartless because do not accept with open arms the perhaps 200,000 Jews in Europe who suffered so frightfully under Nazi cruelty, and who even now—almost three years after war’s end—still languish in cold, depressing camps.
Let me underline several facts. The unimaginable persecution of the Jews was not done by the Arabs: it was done by a Christian nation in the West. The war which ruined Europe and made it almost impossible for these Jews to rehabilitate themselves was fought by the Christian nations of the West. The rich and empty portions of the earth belong, not to the Arabs, but to the Christian nations of the West.
And yet, to ease their consciences, these Christian nations of the West are asking Palestine—a poor and tiny Moslem country of the East—to accept the entire burden. "We have hurt these people terribly," cries the West to the East. "Won’t you please take care of them for us?"
We find neither logic nor justice in this. Are we therefore "cruel and heartless nationalists"?
We are a generous people: we are proud that "Arab hospitality" is a phrase famous throughout the world. We are a humane people: no one was shocked more than we by the Hitlerite terror. No one pities the present plight of the desperate European Jews more than we.
But we say that Palestine has already sheltered 600,000 refugees. We believe that is enough to expect of us—even too much. We believe it is now the turn of the rest of the world to accept some of them.
I will be entirely frank with you. There is one thing the Arab world simply cannot understand. Of all the nations of the earth, America is most insistent that something be done for these suffering Jews of Europe. This feeling does credit to the humanity for which America is famous, and to that glorious inscription on your Statue of Liberty.
And yet this same America—the richest, greatest, most powerful nation the world has ever known—refuses to accept more than a token handful of these same Jews herself!
I hope you will not think I am being bitter about this. I have tried hard to understand that mysterious paradox, and I confess I cannot. Nor can any other Arab.
Perhaps you have been informed that "the Jews in Europe want to go to no other place except Palestine."
This myth is one of the greatest propaganda triumphs of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the organisation which promotes with fanatic zeal the emigration to Palestine. It is a subtle half-truth, thus doubly dangerous.
The astounding truth is that nobody on earth really knows where these unfortunate Jews really want to go!
You would think that in so grave a problem, the American, British, and other authorities responsible for the European Jews would have made a very careful survey, probably by vote, to find out where each Jew actually wants to go. Amazingly enough this has never been done! The Jewish Agency has prevented it.
Some time ago the American Military Governor in Germany was asked at a press conference how he was so certain that all Jews there wanted to go to Palestine. His answer was simple: "My Jewish advisors tell me so." He admitted no poll had ever been made. Preparations were indeed begun for one, but the Jewish Agency stepped in to stop it.
The truth is that the Jews in German camps are now subjected to a Zionist pressure campaign which learned much from the Nazi terror. It is dangerous for a Jew to say that he would rather go to some other country, not Palestine. Such dissenters have been severely beaten, and worse.
Not long ago, in Palestine, nearly 1,000 Austrian Jews informed the international refugee organisation that they would like to go back to Austria, and plans were made to repatriate them.
The Jewish Agency heard of this, and exerted enough political pressure to stop it. It would be bad propaganda for Zionism if Jews began leaving Palestine. The nearly 1,000 Austrian are still there, against their will.
The fact is that most of the European Jews are Western in culture and outlook, entirely urban in experience and habits. They cannot really have their hearts set on becoming pioneers in the barren, arid, cramped land which is Palestine.
One thing, however, is undoubtedly true. As matters stand now, most refugee Jews in Europe would, indeed, vote for Palestine, simply because they know no other country will have them.
If you or I were given a choice between a near-prison camp for the rest of our lives—or Palestine—we would both choose Palestine, too.
But open up any other alternative to them—give them any other choice, and see what happens!
No poll, however, will be worth anything unless the nations of the earth are willing to open their doors—just a little—to the Jews. In other words, if in such a poll a Jew says he wants to go to Sweden, Sweden must be willing to accept him. If he votes for America, you must let him come in.
Any other kind of poll would be a farce. For the desperate Jew, this is no idle testing of opinion: this is a grave matter of life or death. Unless he is absolutely sure that his vote means something, he will always vote for Palestine, so as not to risk his bird in the hand for one in the bush.
In any event, Palestine can accept no more. The 65,000 Jews in Palestine in 1918 have jumped to 600,000 today. We Arabs have increased, too, but not by immigration. The Jews were then a mere 11 per cent of our population. Today they are one third of it.
The rate of increase has been terrifying. In a few more years—unless stopped now—it will overwhelm us, and we shall be an important minority in our own home.
Surely the rest of the wide world is rich enough and generous enough to find a place for 200,000 Jews—about one third the number that tiny, poor Palestine has already sheltered. For the rest of the world, it is hardly a drop in the bucket. For us it means national suicide.
We are sometimes told that since the Jews came to Palestine, the Arab standard of living has improved. This is a most complicated question. But let us even assume, for the argument, that it is true. We would rather be a bit poorer, and masters of our own home. Is this unnatural?
The sorry story of the so-called "Balfour Declaration," which started Zionist immigration into Palestine, is too complicated to repeat here in detail. It is grounded in broken promises to the Arabs—promises made in cold print which admit no denying.
We utterly deny its validity. We utterly deny the right of Great Britain to give away Arab land for a "national home" for an entirely foreign people.
Even the League of Nations sanction does not alter this. At the time, not a single Arab state was a member of the League. We were not allowed to say a word in our own defense.
I must point out, again in friendly frankness, that America was nearly as responsible as Britain for this Balfour Declaration. President Wilson approved it before it was issued, and the American Congress adopted it word for word in a joint resolution on 30th June, 1922.
In the 1920s, Arabs were annoyed and insulted by Zionist immigration, but not alarmed by it. It was steady, but fairly small, as even the Zionist founders thought it would remain. Indeed for some years, more Jews left Palestine than entered it—in 1927 almost twice as many.
But two new factors, entirely unforeseen by Britain or the League or America or the most fervent Zionist, arose in the early thirties to raise the immigration to undreamed heights. One was the World Depression; the second the rise of Hitler.
In 1932, the year before Hitler came to power, only 9,500 Jews came to Palestine. We did not welcome them, but we were not afraid that, at that rate, our solid Arab majority would ever be in danger.
But the next year—the year of Hitler—it jumped to 30,000! In 1934 it was 42,000! In 1935 it reached 61,000!
It was no longer the orderly arrival of idealist Zionists. Rather, all Europe was pouring its frightened Jews upon us. Then, at last, we, too, became frightened. We knew that unless this enormous influx stopped, we were, as Arabs, doomed in our Palestine homeland. And we have not changed our minds.
I have the impression that many Americans believe the trouble in Palestine is very remote from them, that America had little to do with it, and that your only interest now is that of a humane bystander.
I believe that you do not realise how directly you are, as a nation, responsible in general for the whole Zionist move and specifically for the present terrorism. I call this to your attention because I am certain that if you realise your responsibility you will act fairly to admit it and assume it.
Quite aside from official American support for the "National Home" of the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist settlements in Palestine would have been almost impossible, on anything like the current scale, without American money. This was contributed by American Jewry in an idealistic effort to help their fellows.
The motive was worthy: the result were disastrous. The contributions were by private individuals, but they were almost entirely Americans, and, as a nation, only America can answer for it.
The present catastrophe may be laid almost entirely at your door. Your government, almost alone in the world, is insisting on the immediate admission of 100,000 more Jews into Palestine—to be followed by countless additional ones. This will have the most frightful consequences in bloody chaos beyond anything ever hinted at in Palestine before.
It is your press and political leadership, almost alone in the world, who press this demand. It is almost entirely American money which hires or buys the "refugee ships" that steam illegally toward Palestine: American money which pays their crews. The illegal immigration from Europe is arranged by the Jewish Agency, supported almost entirely by American funds. It is American dollars which support the terrorists, which buy the bullets and pistols that kill British soldiers—your allies—and Arab citizens—your friends.
We in the Arab world were stunned to hear that you permit open advertisements in newspapers asking for money to finance these terrorists, to arm them openly and deliberately for murder. We could not believe this could really happen in the modern world. Now we must believe it: we have seen the advertisements with our own eyes.
I point out these things because nothing less than complete frankness will be of use. The crisis is too stark for mere polite vagueness which means nothing.
I have the most complete confidence in the fair-mindedness and generosity of the American public. We Arabs ask no favours. We ask only that you know the full truth, not half of it. We ask only that when you judge the Palestine question, you put yourselves in our place.
What would your answer be if some outside agency told you that you must accept in America many millions of utter strangers in your midst—enough to dominate your country—merely because they insisted on going to America, and because their forefathers had once lived there some 2,000 years ago?
Our answer is the same.
And what would be your action if, in spite of your refusal, this outside agency began forcing them on you?
Ours will be the same.
Justified Slaughter: The Gaza Story Since June 2008
When the LORD your God delivers them into your power and defeats them, you must put them to death. … for you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the Lord your God chose you out of all nations on earth to be his special possession.
– Deuteronomy, 7:2-6
And Joshua said to the army, . . . “The Lord has given you the city. The city shall be under solemn ban: everything in it belongs to the Lord. No one is to be spared except the prostitute Rahab.”
– Joshua, 6:17
Now listen to the voice of the LORD. This is the very word of the LORD of Hosts: … “Spare no one; put them all to death, men and women, children and babes in arms, herds and flocks, camels and asses.”
– 1 Samuel 15:2-4
Throughout modern history powerful nations have waged war against relatively weak neighbors with the expectation that they would both win and somehow benefit from having done so–as they usually do. But they also realize the need to justify their aggression by seeming as if they are somehow threatened by their victims. They themselves are presumably under attack, but fortunately big and powerful enough to win in the end. This fraudulent cultivation of public support was perhaps best (and most laughably) illustrated by Hitler’s frenzied speeches denouncing Poland’s military threat against Germany in order to justify its 1939 invasion. The same approach was used by the American government in the Mexican War (with the shelling of Fort Brown) , the Spanish-American War (with the sinking of the Maine), the Vietnam War (with the Tonkin incident), the 1989 invasion of Panama (with one dead marine), and of course the 2003 Iraq invasion (with the bogus WMD threat). Israel has done the same at the expense of Palestinians since 1948, as documented by Donald Neff’s three books through the 1967 war. Israel’s current assault on Gaza once again fits the pattern, this time by imposing a tight embargo and occasional incursions to provoke harmless rocket attacks that can be publicized to justify a full-scale assault on a relatively defenseless population of 1.5 million inhabitants trapped in Gaza.
Surprise attacks by weak nations against superior enemies have been a different matter. The most famous example, of course, was Japan’s 1941 air strike against Pearl Harbor. George Washington resorted to surprise attacks against Hessian troops in 1776 and the British at Yorktown in 1781. Arab nations did the same against Israel in the 1973 Gaza War. Many other such examples may be cited across the world, some of which have resulted in victory. What I am suggesting here is that the effectiveness of Israel’s present assault on Gaza results from its combination of self-serving propaganda typical of dominant aggressor-nations with its use of an overwhelming surprise attack that could only be considered a defensive necessity by the public at large because of a relentlessly supportive editorial bias in the American news media. Israel has maintained an extravagant 100-1 kill ratio at the expense of Palestinians, roughly 40 percent of whose fatalities have been identified as civilians, and yet public opinion in both Israel and the United States continues to accept the excuse that Israel’s effort is entirely defensive.
Even the New York Times (hereafter NYT) and Washington Post (hereafter WP), two of the most responsible American newspapers succumb to this bias despite their effort to seem otherwise. Such may be observed when they explicitly defend their coverage, for example in Clark Hoyt’s January 11 NYT editorial piece, “Standing Between Enemies,” and when they explicitly defend Israel itself, for example in Steven Erlanger’s January 17 NYT article, “Weighing Crimes and Ethics In the Fog of Urban Warfare.” Here every sentence–every period and comma–is favorable to Israel’s role despite ample evidence to the contrary. The presence of Hamas fighters is repeatedly cited to justify killing civilians in the presence of U.N. workers who insist to anybody who will listen that there have been no Hamas fighters in the vicinity. And the euphemistic notion of “asymmetrical” casualties replaces the uncomfortable word combination “kill ratio,” but with no indication to what extent asymmetry has been stretched.
Also painful is Erlanger’s neglect of the Zeitoun massacre last week compared to the more specific reports of Tom Eley and Tim Butcher published elsewhere as well as Taghreed el-Khodary and Isabel Kershner’s January 10 NYT report, “For Arab Clan, Days of Agony in a Cross-Fire.” Erlanger neglects to recount how Israeli troops herded many dozens of captured civilians into a single Zeitoun building, then bombed it three times, or how the building was packed for days with dead and dying Palestinians, or how those who tried to escape were shot down by Israeli troops stationed nearby for this purpose, or how Red Cross workers defied the threat of Israeli troops to shoot and kill them as well if they tried to retrieve four small children tucked against their mother’s rotting corpse, all of them too weak to remove themselves. If anything this horrific ever happened to an Israeli mother and children, there would probably be a four-column photograph across the top of the front page and the story would pass into media legend as a modern counterpart to the Holocaust.
Not that NYT and WP coverage is invariably biased favorable to Israel. In his January 19 NYT News Analysis, “Parsing Gains of Gaza War,” Ethan Bronner concedes the excessive violence of Israel’s invasion, quoting Israeli pundits who describe it with the Hebrew phrase, “baal habayit hishtageya” (“the boss has lost it”), the use of calculated rage to intimidate lesser people. After summarizing the typical litany of complaints against Hamas, Bronner also concedes its victory in the sense that its leadership has suffered few losses comparable to the death and injury of Palestinian civilians. By implication, further conflict would be undesirable because it can be expected to increase Israeli casualties in house-to-house combat as well as lifting the 40 percent civilian kill ratio to an excessive level for retaining international public support.
In the same issue of the NYT, Sabrina Tavernise and Taghreed el-Khodary’s piece “Shocked and Grieving Gazans Find Bodies Under the Rubble of Homes,” confirms the earlier reports of Eley, Kershner, and Butcher & Khodary regarding the extreme violence against Palestinians. And a third article in the same issue, Isabel Kershner’s “Rebuilding Begins Upon a Wobbly Truce,” treats with relative optimism the broad effort at this point to initiate negotiations. There is little to criticize in these three articles as a comprehensive assessment of the present situation in Gaza. One only regrets that the coverage was less adequate just days before, when its full impact on American public opinion might have helped to discourage Israel’s tactics at an earlier stage.
Apropos of the Gaza crisis preceding the January 6 invasion, this bias supportive of Israel has played a significant role in at least two instances: first the NYT’s almost total neglect of Israel’s November 4 surprise attack which provoked Hamas’ resumption of rocket fire that could be publicized to justify the December 27 air attack on Gaza; and, secondly, the total lack coverage for a day or so preceding the Dec. 27 attack, helping to guarantee its success as a surprise attack. These two surprise attacks (the first no less than the second) set the stage for a military campaign of crucial importance to Israel, the Palestinians, and the region as a whole. Yet the American press inclusive of both the NYT and WP fell short of providing a full account of the confusion preliminary to Israel’s attack exactly when it mattered the most, and in both instances with obvious benefit to Israel’s strategy.
It is to be conceded that the NYT’s neglect of the Gaza story was generally sparse once the April, 2008, peace accord between Hamas and Israel seemed to result in an effective modus vivendi beneficial to all parties concerned. There seemed to be no story to tell. If mentioned at all, Gaza coverage was accordingly kept on the back pages, completely overshadowed by the U.S. election campaign and events in the Near East. The NYT and WP only took interest again after the Nov. 4 attack with reports emphasizing Hamas rocket fire that obliged Israeli incursions as retaliation against this rocket fire, of course with the cause-and-effect sequence reversed favorable to the Israeli cause. As a result, the American public at large remained sympathetic with Israel once the propaganda spigots were fully opened after the December 27 surprise attack. However, the situation was all too plain for those who had paid closer attention. A clear and impartial grasp of Israel’s intentions was already possible based on reports published by the NYT and WP as late as a few days before the attack, especially if these were checked against leftist and Arab sources, the latter including Al Jazeera, Al Manar, imemc.org, Electronic Intifada, Uruknet.info, not to forget Israel’s version of the NYT, Haaretz.
*****
But first a bit of history just a few years earlier in Gaza. In the year 2003. the “Road Map” peace plan sought by England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair obliged Israel to engage in serious negotiations toward a peace treaty with Palestinians in exchange for Britain’s participation in Iraq‘s invasion and occupation [see Con Coughlin’s American Ally, pp. 274-75]. By 2004, however, Prime Minister Sharon could dilute this quid pro quo by substituting Gaza and a couple of West Bank settlements for a full-scale peace treaty. In response, Palestinians elected the Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas to be their President at the beginning of 2005 with the primary objective of resuming the effort to obtain a full-scale peace settlement. However, Sharon refused to negotiate, after which Palestinians elected the more militant Hamas party a year later. Surprisingly, Hamas’s chose as Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, the most peaceable member of its top leadership, who soon joined with Abbas in seeking a 10-year peace settlement with Israel. However, Sharon responded once again with an intensification of hostilities, culminating with Operation Summer Rains in June and the occupation of Beit Hanoun in November. This escalation caused a split between Hamas and Fatah that was nevertheless resolved with the creation of a coalition, the Palestinian National Unity Government, whose primary objective was once again a peace settlement. However, Israel with the support of the U.S. plotted a Fatah coup d’etat that was thwarted by Hamas, ending with Fatah’s expulsion from Gaza in June, 2007. Israel’s siege of Gaza followed despite the Road Map, the Arab League’s 2002 and 2008 peace proposals, and President Bush’s abortive Annapolis Conference in November of the same year.
By June, 2008, hostilities between Israel and Gaza dominated by Hamas had persisted to such an extent that a resumption of negotiations seemed long overdue. This is when our story begins, almost exactly six months ago, told in the present tense and with wording as close as possible to the original reports in order to emphasize the sense of immediacy. The NYT coverage is emphasized, but with frequent additions from the WP as well as a variety of other sources.
Isabel Kershner’s June 17 NYT article, “Israel Seems to Make Progress in Talks,” suggests a possible truce with Hamas. According to Haniya, “talks brokered by Egypt for a period of calm with Israel [are] nearing completion and that he [hopes’ for a ‘happy ending.’” Kershner explains, “”towns and villages in southern Israel have been under continual rocket and mortar fire from Gaza in recent months, while Gaza has been subject to frequent Israeli military strikes aimed at militants and incursions.” Most recently, Israeli troops killed three militants in Gaza as they were trying to plant explosive by the border fence, one Israeli civilian was lightly wounded by rocket fire, and at least one Palestinian militant was killed in a retaliatory strike.
Isabel Kershner’s June 18 NYT article, “Israel Agrees to Truce with Hamas on Gaza” makes the surprise disclosure that “Egypt has been mediating the truce for months” behind the scenes and that “an Egyptian-brokered deal” between Hamas and Israel would include “an end to frequent military strikes” as well as “an easing of some of the economic sanctions on Gaza in exchange for the halt of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza . . . that has killed four Israeli civilians this year.” No indication is given here how many Palestinians have been killed over the same period. Apparently the duration of the treaty would be six months. Israel is expected to open the commercial crossings as soon as the truce comes into effect, and two weeks later Egypt would host talks at reopening the Rafah crossing on its border with Gaza. The article ends, “Israel is insisting that Hamas halt all fire from Gaza, and will hold it responsible for actions by smaller groups.” Last minute hostilities preceding the acceptance of the accord include three Israeli air strikes in Gaza, killing six Palestinian militants and in retaliation 10 rockets fired at Israel.
Griff Witte and Ellen Knickmeyer’s June 18 WP article, “Israel, Hamas Agree on Gaza Strip Truce,” emphasizes that the agreement would be implemented in phases, with Israel easing the year-old siege on Gaza if Hamas stops attacks, and with Israel granting permission to open the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt if there is progress on the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. It is estimated that Israel could begin allowing more supplies into Gaza as early as Sunday, June 22. Additionally it is disclosed that Hamas at first lobbied for the truce to apply to both Gaza and the West Bank, but Israel limited negotiations to Gaza. It is also disclosed that Israel had contemplated an invasion of Gaza to oust Hamas, but Olmert and his top aides rejected this option out of concern that the campaign would bog down against Palestinian counterinsurgents. Nevertheless, an unnamed Israeli official warns, ‘If this [accord] breaks down, there will not be another attempt at a cease-fire. There will be a large-scale Israeli operation. This has to hold.”
The unsigned June 19 WP editorial, “Truce in Gaza - A Middle East Conflict is Postponed,” explains, “Hamas is the immediate beneficiary of the deal - one reason the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert [has been] slow to agree to it. One year after it drove out the secular administration of President Mahmoud Abbas, the Islamist movement has consolidated control over Gaza as well as having demonstrated that it can force Israel into acknowledging its authority. If a border crossing with Egypt is reopened, as the agreement contemplates, relatively normal life and commerce could resume in the territory.” Obviously, such an outcome would be at least dangerous in the opinion of whoever wrote the editorial.
Isabel Kershner’s June 20 NYT article, “Truce Starts for Israel and Hamas in Gaza,” stresses that many Israeli and Palestinians sense that the truce is “doomed from the start.” In fact, most Israeli believe that Hamas will “exploit the quiet to increase its strength, or will fail to control other militant groups in Gaza, making a military confrontation unavoidable in the end.” Among the Gaza Palestinians, on the other hand, there is a widespread optimism that border crossings will open in the immediate future. Because Israel’s earlier strategy was to “squeeze Hamas out of power in Gaza,” the truce is generally considered a victory for Hamas. Obviously more constrained, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority Salam Fayyad, describes the truce as “a good thing” and offers the assurance,“Our platform is based on nonviolence.”
Isabel Kershner’s June 25 NYT article, “Rockets Hit Israel, Breaking Hamas Truce,” tells of Palestinian rocket fire as a breach of the five-day old truce. The Islamic Jihad, a small extremist group, takes responsibility for attack, saying it has been “a response to an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Nablus at dawn on Tuesday, in which a senior Islamic Jihad operative and another Palestinian man were killed.” Nevertheless, the truce applies only to Gaza, so retaliatory attacks from Gaza in response to Israeli operations on the West Bank are felt to be unacceptable according to the terms of the truce.
Griff Witte and Samuel Sockol’s June 25 WP article, “Gazan Rockets Threaten Truce,” etc. confirms the reaction of Israel to the rocket attack. An Israeli official is quoted to the effect that Israel would not open its border crossings with the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as planned, and would stay closed until further notice. Also mentioned is a visit of Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert to Egyptian President Mubarek to discuss the arrangement. Among the issues discussed is the fate of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who is being held captive in Gaza. “We demanded, and we received, promises that the Rafah crossing will not be opened until the solving of the Shalit issue,” insists an official in Olmert’s office, but Mubarak explains in a later TV interview that the issues should not be linked. According to Hamas officials, the Shalit release can only be linked with the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Isabel Kersher’s June 27 NYT article, “Truce is Strained as Militants Launch Rockets and Israel Keeps Goods Out of Gaza,” indicates that two rockets launched against Israel are used to justify a continuation of the embargo for a second day. A rocket attack three days earlier justified Israel sealing the border crossings on Wednesday, which in turn has led to the rocket attack on Thursday. Meanwhile, Gaza farmers have reported that Israeli troops along the border opened fire on them to keep them away from agricultural land near the border fence. Two elderly Palestinian men have been seriously wounded by the army gunfire, including an 82-year-old farmer. Also, Israeli Navy vessels have fired on Palestinian fishermen to keep them outside proscribed areas close to the shore. Members of the Islamic Jihad have admitted firing three rockets in retaliation for an Israeli raid that killed one of the group’s senior commanders in the West Bank. A spokesman for Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades explains, “The rocket attack on Thursday was in response to Israeli violations.” He adds, “Any calm deal must end Israeli attacks on our people in the West Bank, too.”
There is almost a total lack of NYT and WP coverage for the better part of the next five months relevant to the peace accord except for a couple of stories about the effectiveness of the embargo in response to continuing rocket attacks. This relatively peaceful interlude is suddenly interrupted by an unsigned November 6 NYT piece, “Gaza: Rocket Fire and Israeli Strike Disrupt Cease-Fire,” which reports an event of pivotal importance–Israel’s November 4 incursion into Gaza that breaks the ceasefire with Hamas. Coincidentally, this is the same day as the U.S. presidential election that makes Obama the next U.S. President. The article is only 67 words long, short enough to be quoted here in its entirety:
Hamas fired dozens of rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday after Israeli forces killed at least five Palestinian militants in an eruption of violence that disrupted a four-month-old truce. The rockets caused no deaths. Israeli forces later killed a Palestinian who the military said had taken part in the rocket attack.
Significantly, the article neglects to indicate how many Israeli troops were involved and the fact that Israeli force included tanks and helicopters additional to the troops. Nor does it provide any indication that this is the first major transgression against the June accord, initiating Hamas’s resumption of rocket attacks on Israel for the next two months as well as the restoration of incursions by Israeli troops into Gaza. It is not until December 19 that Ethan Bronere’s NYT article, “A Gaza Truce Undone by Flaws May Be Revived by Necessity,” finally mentions this escalation in the third-to-last paragraph, attributing it to Israel’s decision to destroy a tunnel Hamas had been digging near the border. [More about Bronner’s useful article later]
It should be mentioned that a useful January 12 summary of the press response to the Nov. 4 incursion, Jim Lobe and Ai Gharib’s Electronic Intifada piece, “U.S. media didn’t report Israeli ceasefire violation,” mentions a slight enlargement of the story in a later NYT edition on November 5 and cites British, Canadian, and Australian sources that actually took into account with the magnitude of the issue at the time. Lobe and Rharib also mention a Tzipi Livni “Meet the Press” interview in which she totally neglects to mention the November 4 episode, and they indicate that a Nexis search “made no reference to the raid in the transcripts of any television public-affairs broadcast during the period.” They emphasize that this is “a particularly significant omission given the fact that about 70 percent of U.S. citizens say their main source of international news comes through that medium.”
A November 5 WP article attributed to Reuters, “Hamas Fires Rockets At Israel After Airstrike,” starts by referring to “35 rockets [fired at] Israel on Wednesday, hours after the Israeli arm killed gunmen in the Hamas-ruled territory.” It then indicates no damage has been done and that Hamas has asserted responsibility for the attacks, the first such military action since June. It also explains that five of the six gunmen were killed in air strikes late in the afternoon after they fired missiles at Israeli forces who were destroying a tunnel built by Hamas fighters to kidnap an Israeli soldier at a later date. A sixth was supposedly killed by Israeli troops while advancing to destroy the tunnel. Other reports have reversed this sequence, suggesting that the five were killed in the tunnel and the sixth (or seventh) while firing rockets at a later time. The Israeli incursion is described as a “rare” Israeli military operation since the cease fire began. A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, is quoted saying that the Nov. 4 raid is a major violation of the accord and proves that Israel is not interested in continuing the cease-fire. However, an Israeli army spokeswoman offers the assurance, “this is a pinpoint operation to thwart an immediate threat and there is no intention to bring about the end of the cease fire.”
A November 6 WP article, just a day later, by Nidal al-Mughrabi of Reuters [very possibly the same author], “Israel-Hamas Truce Tenuous After Violence,” indicates in its first sentence that the incident has “disrupted a four-month-old truce along the Gaza Strip’s frontier.” It also tells of Hamas rocket attacks in retaliation, including salvos that landed on the coastal city of Ashkelon without having caused any casualties. It quotes Hamas sources who indicate that “calm could return if Israel held its fire,” and Israel’s defense minister [Barak] is also quoted insisting, “Israel [does] not want the truce to collapse,” and “We have no intention of violating the quiet. We have an interest in perpetuating the calm. … But whenever it is necessary to thwart operations against Israel Defense Force soldiers or the civilians on the Gaza outskirts, we will act.” Barack Obama is also quoted to the effect that “resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be a priority for hs administration.” It is disclosed that a summit is planned in Cairo the following week and that Condaleezza Rice is scheduled to arrive in the region on Thursday, presumably to participate in the summit. One of the most important issues to be resolved according to al-Mughrabi is the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for an acceptable number of Palestinian prisoners who have not killed Israeli. Significantly, there is no reference to the Cairo “summit” in any of the other news reports.
Several additional reports can also be mentioned here relevant to the November 4 attack. Published on November 5, an International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) report, “Israeli army kills five Qassam fighters in Gaza,” indicates that Israeli soldiers supported by tanks and armored vehicles have invaded the central Gaza Strip early Tuesday evening and fired several shells at a number of homes. At the same time, Military helicopters hovered over the area firing flares and missiles. Israeli army spokesmen nevertheless assure reporters that the invasion does not constitute a violation of the cease-fire but has instead been a “legitimate step to remove an immediate threat to Israel from Gaza.”
In a November 5 IMEMC report, “Israeli invasion ongoing; seven fighters killed,” the IMEMC quotes an Israeli military spokesperson that the attack has been intended to prevent the use of a tunnel to abduct an Israeli soldier. Israeli troops were forced to detonate the tunnel, which was dug under one of the buildings, thereby killing the Palestinian fighters inside the tunnel. Otherwise, the Israeli spokesman insisted, “This invasion has a certain target and does not aim at violating the truce.”
According to a November 5 BBC report, “Rockets fired after Gaza clashes,” “Tuesday evening’s fighting broke out after Israeli tanks and a bulldozer moved 250m into the central part of the coastal enclave, backed by military aircraft … Residents of central Gaza’s el-Bureij refugee camp said a missile fired from an unmanned Israeli drone flying over the area injured another three Hamas gunmen.”
Ten days later, Sara Flounder’s article in workers.org, “Israel Invades Gaza again; Palestinian resistance continues,” provides even more information about what happened:
The Israeli Army invaded the Gaza Strip on Nov. 4 with tanks, helicopters and jet aircraft. … According to reports in the Palestinian media, Israeli soldiers and tanks accompanied by military helicopters firing flares and missiles invaded an area east of Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, while Israeli jets shelled an area east of Kahn Younis in the southern part of Gaza. The next day Israeli tanks moved into Beit Hanoun in the northern part of Gaza.
Here the sequence seems plain once the Nov. 5 Israeli incursion is taken into account: (1) an Israeli incursion early on Nov. 4; (2) Hamas’s rocket attack later in the day; and (3) a second Israeli incursion the next day. Like a typical starter motor, Israel’s two incursions put the cycle of retaliatory strikes back in motion again seven weeks preceding the December 27 air attack.
In retrospect, it cannot be discounted that the supposedly preemptive attack of Nov. 4 is conducted on the day of the U.S. election, when the world’s attention is focused on Obama’s victory instead of events in the Near East. This presumably accidental timing would suggest Israel seeks to intensify hostilities against Hamas with a minimum of publicity, thereby letting Hamas’ acts of retaliation be publicized as unprovoked hostility to justify Israel’s invasion of Gaza. This sequence is in fact what later happens–the question remains to what extent it has been planned in advance with the November 4 attack setting the stage for all that followed. It should also be taken into account that Hamas might have been more circumspect in response to the Nov. 4 and 5 attacks if the Israeli blockade of Gaza were not so devastating to its inhabitants.
A November 15 WP article by Linda Gradstein, “As Israel-Hamas Clashes Continue, Gazans Face Crisis - Closed Border Halts Food Aid from U.N.,” indicates that Israeli and Palestinian fighters have clashed repeatedly since the Nov. 4 attack, leaving at least 10 Hamas fighters dead. Meanwhile, there is a shortage of medicine in Gaza hospitals, and the U.N. announces on Nov. 9 that it is closing its food-distribution program because it cannot resupply its warehouses. Moreover, most of Gaza City has been dark since Thursday night [November 13]. when Gaza’s main power plant ran out of fuel. “It is unprecedented that the U.N. is unable to get its supplies in to a population under such obvious distress,” John Ging, the senior U.N. official in Gaza, says in a telephone interview. He also indicates that the present crisis would not have occurred if U.N. suppliers had not been prohibited from building up their reserves during the cease fire. According to al-Khodari, 80 percent of Gazans live below the poverty line and the average per capita income is $2 per day. Israeli spokesman Peter Lerner says Israel had planned to open the border crossings, but maintained the closure after Israeli intelligence warned that Palestinian gunmen planned to attack the crossings.
A month later, in a December 14 NYT article, “Hamas, Showing Split, Hints It may Extend Truce,” Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner tell of a mixed response by the Hamas leadership to the impending cessation of the June Peace Accord. On one hand, Khaled Mashal, an exiled leader in Damascus, insists on Hamas’s satellite TV station Al Quds that “the truce was limited to six months and ends on Dec. 19.” However, Mahmoud Zahar, the senior Hamas leader in Gaza, says there will be a meeting of the leadership of Hamas and other groups on the following Sunday, December 21, to determine the possibility of renewing the treaty. Addressing a large crowd of 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas’ Prime Minister Haniya criticizes Israel for its strict embargo and continuing aggression, but avoids making any definitive pronouncements about the extension of the truce. The choice is thereby left open. Meanwhile, Israeli spokesmen express their readiness to extend the truce. The senior Israeli Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad goes to Cairo to discuss extending the truce with Egyptian mediators. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Olmert announces, “Israel has been willing, and continues to be willing, to abide by the understandings reached with the Egyptians,” but then adds that calm [is] conditioned on Hamas stopping the daily rocket fire from Gaza.
In their article, El-Khodary and Kershner also summarize events since June: “A tense calm largely prevailed for the first months of the truce, showing that Hamas has been able to control smaller militant groups in Gaza.” But that began to unravel Nov. 4, they explain, when Israeli forces entered Gaza for the first time since June to blow up a tunnel that, according to Israel, Hamas was planning to use to capture soldiers along the border. Six Hamas militants were killed on the night of the tunnel raid. Since then, Hamas has fired some 250 rockets and mortar shells from Gaza at Israel without killing anybody, whereas at least 10 more Palestinian militants have been killed in Israeli strikes. Meanwhile, Israel has tightened its blockade of Israel, and life in the Israeli towns and villages around Gaza has become intolerable.
In his long and eloquent Dec. 15 piece, over a month later, “Israel’s Crime Against Humanity,” in Truthdig, Chris Hedges quotes Princeton law professor Richard Falk to the effect that Israel’s embargo of Gaza constitutes a “crime against humanity” suggestive of the Warsaw Ghetto. More specifically, Falk suggests, it constitutes “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Hedges details all of the problems endured in Gaza without food, drugs, water, electric power, adequate hospital care, and the rest of the necessities of life. He also summarizes the sequence of events in the simplest possible terms:
The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no Israeli casualties.
Actually, the accord had been obtained in June, not July, and four Israeli citizens had been killed by rocket attacks by this time in December. Otherwise, this retrospective account is entirely accurate–more than can be said of earlier U.S. coverage.
In his Dec. 19 NYT article, “A Gaza Truce Undone by Flaws May Be Revived by Necessity,” Ethan Bronner tells of Hamas rocket fire having increased as well as Israel’s warplanes firing missiles and even further tightening of the border crossings by Israel. In other words, Bronner says, the June 19 agreement is over. Each side accuses the other of bad faith and violations of the accord. Rockets from Gaza never stopped entirely during the truce, and Israel never allowed a major renewed flow of goods into Gaza. The reason, Bronner explains, is that the agreement had “no mutually agreed text or enforcement mechanism.” Hamas officials emphasize their understanding on June 19 that Israel would open the crossings within two weeks and allow the transfer of goods that had been banned during the previous year. They argue that their effort to step the rockets has been largely successful, indicating that while more than 300 rockets had been fired into Israel in May, only from 10 to 20 were fired in July. In August from 10 to 30 were fired, and in September from 5 to 10. In contrast, the shipment of goods into Gaza never increased more than 25 to 30 percent, far short of the 500 to 600 truckloads delivered daily before the border was closed a year earlier. In response, Shlomo Dror, chief spokesman for Israel’s Defense Ministry, explains, “The Palestinians wanted to have one or two rockets a week to keep our people in tension. … The moment we fail to react to one rocket we encourage them. Our only choice was to close the crossings when rockets came in.”
A December 20 AP article published by the NYT, “Israel: Hamas Formally Ends Truce,” is short enough to quote in its entirety:
Hamas formally announced the end of its unwritten, often-breached truce with Israel on Friday, as Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired four rockets into southern Israel. The Israeli military said two rockets were fired Friday morning and two more after sunset. It also said troops guarding Israeli farmers in fields adjoining Gaza came under sniper fire from across the border. No injuries were reported. In a statement posted on its Web site, Hamas said it was Israel that had ended the truce by imposing an economic blockade on Gaza carrying out military strikes and hunting down Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Thousands of Gazans rallied in Khan Yunis, … in support of the militant group Islamic Jihad.
A December 20 WP article by Steve Weizman, “Hamas Formally Suspends Truce - Gazans Accuse Israel of Breaches, etc.,” quotes Hamas, “Since the enemy did not abide with the conditions … we hold the enemy fully responsible for ending the truce, and we confirm that the Palestinian resistance factions headed by Hamas will act.” Israeli spokesmen insist that the truce [does] not have an official expiration date and that Israel is interested in prolonging understandings with Hamas. An opinion poll this week indicates that 74 percent of Palestinians and 51 percent of Israelis want the truce to be extended.
A December 22 WP article by Ben Lynfield,“Livni and Netanyahu vow to oust Hamas after Gaza rocket,” tells of 20 Palestinian rockets having been fired against southern Israel since the six-month cease fire ended two days ago. In response both Tzipi Livni and Benyamin Netanyahu vow to topple Hamas in Gaza despite Prime Minister Olmert’s warning, “A responsible government doesn’t rush into battle, neither does it shy away.” Barak, the Labour leader, warns that more than 20,000 troups would be needed to stop the rocket fire. Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, Likud’s security expert, recommends the assassination of Hamas leaders, but Yossi Alpher, a leading analyst, suggests it is time for Israel to admit it lacks a “workable strategy.”
On the other hand, a December 22 Reuters article, “Hamas says open to new truce in Gaza,” by Nidal Mughrabi, Aziz el-Kaissouni, Dan Williams, and Adam Entous, indicates that Palestinian armed groups have halted rocket fire against Israel for 24 hours at the request of Egyptian mediators. Shortly before the truce is set to expire, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh telephones Turkish Prime Minister Tavyip Erdogan to ask that he convince Israel to lift its blockade, and Erdogan assured him he would. Isaac Herzog, a minister of Olmert’s security cabinet, assured Israel’s public, “I like many of my colleagues, am ready to continuing the calm, on terms that are comfortable for Israel.”
A December 23 WP article by Matti Friedman, “Hamas Tells Fighters to Hold Fire for 24 Hours, etc.” indicates that Hamas has ordered gunmen to hold their fire for 24 hours on December 22 because of the possibility that the truce with Israel can be restored. Also, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar indicates on Israel’s Channel 10 TV that the Palestinian Islamist group is interested in renewing the truce with Israel. However, since three rockets have fallen by nightfall, Israel signals that the cargo crossings remain sealed and it is preparing for a possible offense. Mubarak, who brokered the initial truce, invites Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Lvvni to Cairo to discuss a new arrangement. Her spokesmen say she is prepared to listen but would also complain about the rockets and mortar fire. Analysts nevertheless think both sides want to renew the truce, since past incursions have not stopped the rocket fire and an Israeli ground operation into Gaza would probably result in heavy casualties for both sides.
A December 23 WP editorial , “More Rockets from Gaza,” etc., predicts that if and when full-scale hostilities begin, Hamas will shift from homemade rockets to Iranian missiles that could reach large Israeli cities. It is also suggests that a ground invasion might trigger bloody conflict that could spread to the West Bank and Lebanon. The author also mentions the apparent decision of Hamas’s Damascus-based leadership to end the cease-fire regardless of the suffering this might bring, apparently with the expectation that Israel would be forced to lift the blockade on Gaza. What seems ignored by the Damascus leadership is the fact that Israel is in the midst of a heated election campaign with two leading candidates both of whom are taking a “predictably hawkish tack.” With the U.S. in the midst of a presidential transition, it would be unlikely to impose any outcome unacceptable to Israel’s new government.
A December 24 AP article published by the NYT, “Israel: 3 Militants Killed in Gaza,” is short enough to quote in its entirety:
Israeli forces killed three Palestinian militants on the Gaza border on Tuesday, the deadliest clash since a truce expired Friday between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza. Israel said the three militants were planting explosives in northern Gaza along the border fence. Soldiers crossed a few yards into Gaza and engaged the Palestinians, who threw grenades. The soldiers returned fire, killing the three, according to Israeli news media.
A December 24 NYT article by Isabel Kershner, “Gaza Rocket Fire Intensifies,” indicates that a Hamas militant has been killed in an Israeli air strike, while more than 60 rockets and mortar shells have been fired at Israel without killing anybody. Most of the rockets fired out of Gaza are locally made, Kershner reports, “short-range projectiles that fall within a few miles of the border.” But at least two of those fired Wednesday [Dec. 24] are imported Katyusha-type rockets with a longer range. Kershner also reports that Israel’s security cabinet has held a meeting that has lasted about five hours, but with no details having been made public regarding any decisions about Gaza.” Israel’s official spokesman Mark Regev says, “a renewal of mutual calm [is] possible but that Israel’s patience [is] running out.” Some Israeli officials call for tough military action, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak maintain a policy of restraint. Unnamed defense officials are quoted to the effect that a military invasion would be costly in lives on both sides and would not guarantee an end to the rocket fire.” Also quoted is Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas official, to the effect that “Hamas would consider renewing the truce if border crossings were opened to allow the regular transfer of goods into Gaza.” Kershner ends the article by quoting a nameless Israeli official that Israel would have allowed about 40 trucks of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza on Wednesday, but cancelled those plans as a result of the heavy rocket and mortar fire.”
In a December 26 NYT article provided by Reuters, “Israel Issues an Appeal to Palestinians in Gaza,” Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert is quoted as having issued on Christmas a “last minute” appeal to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to reject the militant leadership of Hamas and stop firing rockets at Israel, warning that he would not hesitate to use force. According to the article, “He [Olmert} issued what amounted to a public call to Gazans to overthrow Hamas, the Islamic group that controls the territory. “I’m telling them now,” he [says]. “It may be the last minute. There will be more blood there. Who wants it? We don’t want it.” Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a leading candidate in the Feb. 10 election, holds emergency talks with President Mubarak of Egypt, who cautions against escalation. Ms. Livni says Hamas [has] to pay for “unbearable” rocket fire, insisting, “Enough is enough.” According to a Palestinian official, an unnamed Egyptian source is quoted as having appealed to Hamas leaders “to calm the situation so as to avoid an Israeli military escalation.” In Gaza, however, a Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, warns that Israel would “pay the price” for any attack.
Significantly, neither the NYT nor WP provides any coverage whatsoever on December 27, the day of Israel’s surprise air attack. The question suggests itself whether these two newspapers and/or anybody in the federal government is aware of this likelihood. Is the American press so closely aligned with Israel’s government that it actually participates in a news blackout exactly when it is needed in order to mount a surprise invasion?
On December 27, as indicated, Israel finally launches a full-scale air attack against Gaza. As recounted by Taghreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner in their NYT December 28 article, “More than 225 Die in Gaza as Israel Strikes at Hamas,” a major Israeli surprise air attack is launched on Saturday, December 27, that produces the highest death toll for Gaza in years. Many of the victims are shoppers and school children who have been freely walking in the Central Food Market as well as police cadets in a nearby graduation ceremony held in an open square. About 500 Palestinians are also wounded in what amounts to a totally successful surprise attack. Despite Israeli claims of targeting Hamas fighters and security posts, according to IMEMC’s December 28 article, “Israeli Offensive in Gaza,” “the army [shells] mosques, blacksmith workshops, local media agencies, charitable societies, police stations, detainees’ affairs societies and … the Islamic University in Gait. It is estimated that there have been at least a hundred targets, including the Saraya security compound in Gaza city, the municipal building of the town Beit Hanoun, the police station of the Shija’via neighborhood of eastern Gaza city, two additional Hamas police posts in central Gaza Strip, and a variety of Hamas-run charities.
As on November 4, the surprise attack has been undertaken with total success. According to Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid on December 28 in “Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about,” “Israel [had] continued to send out disinformation in announcing it would open the crossings to the Gaza Strip and that Olmert would decide whether to launch the strike following three more deliberations on Sunday - one day after the actual order to launch the operation was issued.” Ravid also discloses that Israeli Defense Minister Barak had initiated plans for the invasion as early as March, 2008, three months before the June accord, and had made these plans operational beginning in November, supposedly in response to Hamas’ resumption of rocket attacks in early November after Israel’s November 4 incursion.
Further trickery is suggested by Les Blough, Editor of Axis of Logic in his provocative article, “The 2008 Attack on the People of Gaza is Like-No-Other and the World Responds,” dated on December 28, “On the day before the attack, the Israeli government [lies] to the Palestinians, telling them they have opened the borders to receive the first shipment of food and humanitarian supplies in 2 months. The Palestinians have been waiting for relief and instead are bombed.”
The exact timing is another matter. Undoubtedly the planes have been scheduled to arrive during the graduation ceremony in order to maximize fatalities among police officers as potential combatants once the invasion begins. According to the Jerusalem Report, as recounted by David Brooks in his January 6 NYT column, “The Confidence Game, ”In the first wave 80 Israeli planes hit more than 100 targets and nearly all of the Hamas military compounds within 3 minutes 40 seconds.” Aerial attacks are sustained throughout the following day, and in response Palestinians shoot dozens of rockets into southern Israel, but without killing anybody. By the end of the year four days later as many as 400 Palestinians have been killed, between twenty and thirty percent of them children, mostly from incessant air strikes, artillery strikes, and gunfire from Israeli warships off the coast. In contrast, only 4 Israeli have been killed by Palestinian rockets.
And thus the initial air bombardment. On January 4, after eight days of incessant bomb attacks, Israeli troops invade Gaza. The invasion has begun.
*****
What is one to conclude from this entire narrative stretching over the past six months and with every chance of persisting into the indefinite future? Several generalizations seem appropriate.
First and foremost, contrary to the repeated insistence of Zionists, Gaza’s Hamas government is not a terrorist organization to be excluded from negotiations. Hamas was first organized in 1987 to provide social services as well as resistance against Israel’s occupation–not much different from Israel’s leadership opposed to British occupation when it took power in 1948. There is also ample evidence the creation and initial growth of Hamas was encouraged by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, as a counterweight to the Fatah movement. When Hamas won the 2006 popular election in Gaza, its new prime minister, Ismail Haniya, turned out to be the most conciliatory member of its top leadership, and he soon joined with the Fatah President Abbas in promoting a peace settlement along the lines proposed by the Arab League in both 2002 and 2007. Once again it was Prime Minister Sharon who refused to negotiate, putting into motion everything that has happened since. Moreover, as explained in Khalid Amayreh’s pivotal 2004 article based on inside Knesset sources, “The Second Intifada - An Israeli Strategy,” the conscious intention of Israel ‘s leadership since the beginning has been to intensify violence in order to intimidate and encourage the departure of the Palestinian people. In other words, it is primarily the Israeli who have kept up the role of terrorists, not the Palestinians.
Secondly, Zionist apologists have also repeatedly attacked Hamas for seeking the destruction of Israel, but this is an obvious equivocation on their part. Indeed, some members of Hamas want to “destroy” Israel in the sense of crushing it and reducing its people to devastation, just as many Israeli want to do the same with Palestinians. However, what most of Hamas’ leadership mean by “destroy” is to terminate Israel’s “democratic” theocracy, replacing it with a genuine democracy in which all citizens have equal rights–Palestinians and Christians as well as the Zionist Jews. On the other hand, contrary to Zionist protestations, much of Hamas’ leadership is actually willing to accept a two-state solution whereby the Israeli and Palestinians coexist in two adjoining nations, an arrangement that would permit Israel’s continuation of its anachronistic theocratic status.
Third, there is ample evidence that Hamas and the residents of Gaza wanted (and expected) to avoid warfare. The Dec. 15 NYT article of el-Khodary and Kershner indicates a mixed response among Gaza’s Hamas leadership–as opposed to its exiled Damascus leadership–to the renewal of a peace accord with Israel. Such a renewal was advocated by Zahar and not rejected by Haniya. As indicated in a recent opinion poll reported by Weizman in his December 20 WP article, 74 percent of the Palestinians overall, as opposed to only 51 percent of the Israeli, wanted the truce to be extended. What primarily brought a renewal of overt hostilities was the continuing embargo on Gaza as well as two decisive steps taken by Israel. First its Nov. 4 attack provoked the resumption of rocket fire from Hamas; and second, Israel’s December 27 air attack terminated all talk of a renewed peace accord that had persisted through Christmas and even, arguably, the morning of the attack. It may also be mentioned here that Olmert’s demands as reported by Reuters on December 26 might seem an explicit warning of an impending invasion, but, as reported By Ravid of Haaretz on December 28, the misinformation available to Gaza’s residents that Israel’s war cabinet would meet on Sunday, the day after the attack, to decide the appropriate choice gave Palestinians the false impression that they were safe at least until Monday. Also, Olmert’s demand, as reported by Reuters, that Gaza inhabitants reject its elected leadership on the brink of its invasion was necessarily gratuitous and imposed an impossible condition. It could only be ignored, thus justifying an invasion only in the opinion of the aggressors.
Fourth, both Israel and the Palestinians have repeatedly broken the June verbal accord, but on balance Israel was more culpable than the Palestinians. The tradeoff accepted by both parties was for the Palestinians to terminate rocket attacks in exchange for Israel’s cessation of the embargo against Gaza as well as the termination of military incursions into Gaza. As Bronner documents in his December 19 NYT article, Palestinian rocket fire has been substantially reduced over the past six months as compared to the relentless continuation of Israel’s embargo and its Gaza incursions. As indicated in Gradstein’s Nov. 15 WP article, the effect of this embargo has been severe poverty and sufficient hostility that Hamas rocket attacks could be incited by the November 4 incursion.
Fifth, the explanation for the inability of Hamas to curtail rocket fire entirely is that most of the early rocket attacks were conducted by the Islamic Jihad, a radical group loosely connected with Hamas that kept up these attacks to retaliate against Israeli attacks on the Jihad on the West Bank. Hamas itself did not resume rocket attacks until Nov. 4, after Israeli forces killed six Palestinian fighters in their surprise attack on election day in the United States. As earlier indicated, the imprudence of Hamas in accepting the bait was probably because of the effectiveness of Israel’s embargo at the time as well as the impact of the surprise attack in and of itself.
Sixth, most of the rockets used by the Palestinians have been relatively harmless homemade Kazam rockets, thus accounting for the exceptionally low casualty rate among Israeli as the result of rocket attacks. Not more than eight Israeli were killed during the entire year once the total of four mentioned in Kershner’s June 18 NYT article is added to the four killed after the December 27 attack. It accordingly seems more than likely that Kazam rocket attacks were useful to Israel as a “good” excuse for mounting both the air attack and invasion that followed. Whatever the benefit of these rocket attacks to Hamas’ defense strategy, they have been far more helpful to Israel’s government in producing almost no damage whatsoever while obtaining the needed public support for an enlargement of its operations against the Palestinians. One almost wonders if Zionist agent provocateurs aren’t somehow responsible for what seem to many the dubious use of rockets in the Palestinian cause.
Seventh, the overall kill ratio since December 27 has actually been sustained at 100-1, culminating at the time of the January 17 cease-fire at thirteen hundred Palestinians as opposed to thirteen Israeli troops, four of whom having been killed by friendly fire. Any kill ratio this disproportionate suggests an egregious double standard on the part of the winning side. Do Zionists actually believe the Biblical nonsense that they are God’s chosen people with the license to engage in such one-sided slaughter against their supposed enemies? Not so. All human lives must be treated as being sacred–even Palestinians, including the men, women and children killed since December 27. Those portions of the Bible that say otherwise (Deuteronomy, 7:2-6, etc.) can and ought to be ignored.
Eighth, the question necessarily suggests itself whether Israel had tightened the embargo and mounted its Nov. 4 attack as planned from the very beginning in order to obtain exactly the results that wereproduced, a cessation of the June peace accord followed by a full invasion that could be blamed on Hamas instead of Israel, followed by negotiations on a heavily favorable basis for Israel. Barak Ravid’s disclosure in his December 27 Haaretz article should be no surprise–that Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF “to prepare the operation over six months ago.” Barak was said to explain to fellow IDF strategists, “Although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare as well.” It accordingly seems more than likely that everything starting with the June peace accord was planned on a contingency basis well in advance. Of primary importance in reverse order of conception was the invasion of Gaza, whose occurrence would be most opportune preceding the September 20, 2008, U.S. inauguration (thus providing the international “surprise” predicted by Vice President Biden, if a couple months earlier than predicted). Then in reverse sequence came a suitable provocation scheduled in time to renew the cycle of violence needed to stir up public support for the invasion (and what better date than the U.S. election?). Finally, at the very beginning, the June peace agreement would provide the time needed to make sufficient preparations over the following six months. This hypothetical game plan might seem absurd verging on paranoia, but we must remember than Barak is an intricate thinker–a clock maker in his spare time. He can be expected to play chess in foreign relations as opposed to the relatively simple strategy of Palestinians, something between checkers and tic-tac-toe as with most of the rest of us.
Ninth, as suggested in Entous’ December 22 WP article, Israel’s upcoming February 10 election cannot be ignored. As an additional bonus to Israel’s current government, the Gaza invasion has tipped Israel’s public support from Netanyahu, an arch-conservative Likud candidate for Prime Minister, to Tzipi Livni supported by Ehud Barak, relatively progressive candidates both of whom have supported a two-state solution one time or another. By proving themselves to be sufficiently hawkish, Livni and Barak have enhanced their image among Israeli voters who would otherwise support the arch-conservative Netanyahu. Once in office, Livni and Barak might actually be able to work with Palestinians and the Obama administration in pursuit of an acceptable two-state resolution of the conflict, presumably with both Hamas and Fatah involved in the creation of their own political entity within the 1967 border suitably adjusted. However, there would be serious problems if such a strategy is in the works. The results would be risky at best and at too great a cost in Palestinian lives. Moreover, if such a strategy fails, a destabilization of Arab states can be expected throughout the region, and the political climate in Israel inclusive of all its parties would shift even further to the right than today. Once Hamas has been crushed–as it can be if Gaza is totally flattened and many thousands more are killed–Fatah would provide a relatively easy target, Abbas himself reduced to nothing more than a “plucked chicken” as once described by Sharon. Zionism’s triumph would be at the expense of the Palestinian people and ultimately, one suspects, the Israeli people as well–at least their self-respect.
And tenth, the option cannot be discounted that Israel’s victory might set the stage for the prevention of any Palestinian state whatsoever. The avoidance of a two-state solution is mostly sought by Israeli who seek full possession of the greater Israel for themselves alone. At present they cannot exactly reject both the current one-state and two-state options, since the only alternative would be the dispersal of Palestinians into cantons equivalent to Native-American reservations and their eventual “transfer” to adjoining states–a modern Palestinian Diaspora entailing everything offensive to Jews about their own historic experience. The immediate tactic is therefore to keep relations in perpetual disruption toward the possibility of such a transfer when it finally presents itself as a reasonable choice. In other words, Ben Gurion and Sharon’s basic strategy (“We must expel Arabs and take their place”) still seems in effect at least as an option relevant to the outcome of the present Gaza operation. Chances seem excellent once again that Israel’s conservative leadership will somehow thwart genuine negotiations in the hope and expectation of obtaining the eventual opportunity to rid the “greater Israel” of its Palestinians once Hamas is out of the picture. The strategy is reminiscent of God’s ultra-chauvinistic pronouncements in the Old Testament and Hitler’s effort to rid Europe of its Jewish population. It’s basically the same motive all over again, though Israel can be expected to avoid an “existential” final solution. One or two Warsaw episodes might be O.K. such as in Gaza right now, but without any need for concentration camps–at least not yet.
When the LORD your God delivers them into your power and defeats them, you must put them to death. … for you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the Lord your God chose you out of all nations on earth to be his special possession.
– Deuteronomy, 7:2-6
And Joshua said to the army, . . . “The Lord has given you the city. The city shall be under solemn ban: everything in it belongs to the Lord. No one is to be spared except the prostitute Rahab.”
– Joshua, 6:17
Now listen to the voice of the LORD. This is the very word of the LORD of Hosts: … “Spare no one; put them all to death, men and women, children and babes in arms, herds and flocks, camels and asses.”
– 1 Samuel 15:2-4
Throughout modern history powerful nations have waged war against relatively weak neighbors with the expectation that they would both win and somehow benefit from having done so–as they usually do. But they also realize the need to justify their aggression by seeming as if they are somehow threatened by their victims. They themselves are presumably under attack, but fortunately big and powerful enough to win in the end. This fraudulent cultivation of public support was perhaps best (and most laughably) illustrated by Hitler’s frenzied speeches denouncing Poland’s military threat against Germany in order to justify its 1939 invasion. The same approach was used by the American government in the Mexican War (with the shelling of Fort Brown) , the Spanish-American War (with the sinking of the Maine), the Vietnam War (with the Tonkin incident), the 1989 invasion of Panama (with one dead marine), and of course the 2003 Iraq invasion (with the bogus WMD threat). Israel has done the same at the expense of Palestinians since 1948, as documented by Donald Neff’s three books through the 1967 war. Israel’s current assault on Gaza once again fits the pattern, this time by imposing a tight embargo and occasional incursions to provoke harmless rocket attacks that can be publicized to justify a full-scale assault on a relatively defenseless population of 1.5 million inhabitants trapped in Gaza.
Surprise attacks by weak nations against superior enemies have been a different matter. The most famous example, of course, was Japan’s 1941 air strike against Pearl Harbor. George Washington resorted to surprise attacks against Hessian troops in 1776 and the British at Yorktown in 1781. Arab nations did the same against Israel in the 1973 Gaza War. Many other such examples may be cited across the world, some of which have resulted in victory. What I am suggesting here is that the effectiveness of Israel’s present assault on Gaza results from its combination of self-serving propaganda typical of dominant aggressor-nations with its use of an overwhelming surprise attack that could only be considered a defensive necessity by the public at large because of a relentlessly supportive editorial bias in the American news media. Israel has maintained an extravagant 100-1 kill ratio at the expense of Palestinians, roughly 40 percent of whose fatalities have been identified as civilians, and yet public opinion in both Israel and the United States continues to accept the excuse that Israel’s effort is entirely defensive.
Even the New York Times (hereafter NYT) and Washington Post (hereafter WP), two of the most responsible American newspapers succumb to this bias despite their effort to seem otherwise. Such may be observed when they explicitly defend their coverage, for example in Clark Hoyt’s January 11 NYT editorial piece, “Standing Between Enemies,” and when they explicitly defend Israel itself, for example in Steven Erlanger’s January 17 NYT article, “Weighing Crimes and Ethics In the Fog of Urban Warfare.” Here every sentence–every period and comma–is favorable to Israel’s role despite ample evidence to the contrary. The presence of Hamas fighters is repeatedly cited to justify killing civilians in the presence of U.N. workers who insist to anybody who will listen that there have been no Hamas fighters in the vicinity. And the euphemistic notion of “asymmetrical” casualties replaces the uncomfortable word combination “kill ratio,” but with no indication to what extent asymmetry has been stretched.
Also painful is Erlanger’s neglect of the Zeitoun massacre last week compared to the more specific reports of Tom Eley and Tim Butcher published elsewhere as well as Taghreed el-Khodary and Isabel Kershner’s January 10 NYT report, “For Arab Clan, Days of Agony in a Cross-Fire.” Erlanger neglects to recount how Israeli troops herded many dozens of captured civilians into a single Zeitoun building, then bombed it three times, or how the building was packed for days with dead and dying Palestinians, or how those who tried to escape were shot down by Israeli troops stationed nearby for this purpose, or how Red Cross workers defied the threat of Israeli troops to shoot and kill them as well if they tried to retrieve four small children tucked against their mother’s rotting corpse, all of them too weak to remove themselves. If anything this horrific ever happened to an Israeli mother and children, there would probably be a four-column photograph across the top of the front page and the story would pass into media legend as a modern counterpart to the Holocaust.
Not that NYT and WP coverage is invariably biased favorable to Israel. In his January 19 NYT News Analysis, “Parsing Gains of Gaza War,” Ethan Bronner concedes the excessive violence of Israel’s invasion, quoting Israeli pundits who describe it with the Hebrew phrase, “baal habayit hishtageya” (“the boss has lost it”), the use of calculated rage to intimidate lesser people. After summarizing the typical litany of complaints against Hamas, Bronner also concedes its victory in the sense that its leadership has suffered few losses comparable to the death and injury of Palestinian civilians. By implication, further conflict would be undesirable because it can be expected to increase Israeli casualties in house-to-house combat as well as lifting the 40 percent civilian kill ratio to an excessive level for retaining international public support.
In the same issue of the NYT, Sabrina Tavernise and Taghreed el-Khodary’s piece “Shocked and Grieving Gazans Find Bodies Under the Rubble of Homes,” confirms the earlier reports of Eley, Kershner, and Butcher & Khodary regarding the extreme violence against Palestinians. And a third article in the same issue, Isabel Kershner’s “Rebuilding Begins Upon a Wobbly Truce,” treats with relative optimism the broad effort at this point to initiate negotiations. There is little to criticize in these three articles as a comprehensive assessment of the present situation in Gaza. One only regrets that the coverage was less adequate just days before, when its full impact on American public opinion might have helped to discourage Israel’s tactics at an earlier stage.
Apropos of the Gaza crisis preceding the January 6 invasion, this bias supportive of Israel has played a significant role in at least two instances: first the NYT’s almost total neglect of Israel’s November 4 surprise attack which provoked Hamas’ resumption of rocket fire that could be publicized to justify the December 27 air attack on Gaza; and, secondly, the total lack coverage for a day or so preceding the Dec. 27 attack, helping to guarantee its success as a surprise attack. These two surprise attacks (the first no less than the second) set the stage for a military campaign of crucial importance to Israel, the Palestinians, and the region as a whole. Yet the American press inclusive of both the NYT and WP fell short of providing a full account of the confusion preliminary to Israel’s attack exactly when it mattered the most, and in both instances with obvious benefit to Israel’s strategy.
It is to be conceded that the NYT’s neglect of the Gaza story was generally sparse once the April, 2008, peace accord between Hamas and Israel seemed to result in an effective modus vivendi beneficial to all parties concerned. There seemed to be no story to tell. If mentioned at all, Gaza coverage was accordingly kept on the back pages, completely overshadowed by the U.S. election campaign and events in the Near East. The NYT and WP only took interest again after the Nov. 4 attack with reports emphasizing Hamas rocket fire that obliged Israeli incursions as retaliation against this rocket fire, of course with the cause-and-effect sequence reversed favorable to the Israeli cause. As a result, the American public at large remained sympathetic with Israel once the propaganda spigots were fully opened after the December 27 surprise attack. However, the situation was all too plain for those who had paid closer attention. A clear and impartial grasp of Israel’s intentions was already possible based on reports published by the NYT and WP as late as a few days before the attack, especially if these were checked against leftist and Arab sources, the latter including Al Jazeera, Al Manar, imemc.org, Electronic Intifada, Uruknet.info, not to forget Israel’s version of the NYT, Haaretz.
*****
But first a bit of history just a few years earlier in Gaza. In the year 2003. the “Road Map” peace plan sought by England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair obliged Israel to engage in serious negotiations toward a peace treaty with Palestinians in exchange for Britain’s participation in Iraq‘s invasion and occupation [see Con Coughlin’s American Ally, pp. 274-75]. By 2004, however, Prime Minister Sharon could dilute this quid pro quo by substituting Gaza and a couple of West Bank settlements for a full-scale peace treaty. In response, Palestinians elected the Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas to be their President at the beginning of 2005 with the primary objective of resuming the effort to obtain a full-scale peace settlement. However, Sharon refused to negotiate, after which Palestinians elected the more militant Hamas party a year later. Surprisingly, Hamas’s chose as Prime Minister, Ismail Haniya, the most peaceable member of its top leadership, who soon joined with Abbas in seeking a 10-year peace settlement with Israel. However, Sharon responded once again with an intensification of hostilities, culminating with Operation Summer Rains in June and the occupation of Beit Hanoun in November. This escalation caused a split between Hamas and Fatah that was nevertheless resolved with the creation of a coalition, the Palestinian National Unity Government, whose primary objective was once again a peace settlement. However, Israel with the support of the U.S. plotted a Fatah coup d’etat that was thwarted by Hamas, ending with Fatah’s expulsion from Gaza in June, 2007. Israel’s siege of Gaza followed despite the Road Map, the Arab League’s 2002 and 2008 peace proposals, and President Bush’s abortive Annapolis Conference in November of the same year.
By June, 2008, hostilities between Israel and Gaza dominated by Hamas had persisted to such an extent that a resumption of negotiations seemed long overdue. This is when our story begins, almost exactly six months ago, told in the present tense and with wording as close as possible to the original reports in order to emphasize the sense of immediacy. The NYT coverage is emphasized, but with frequent additions from the WP as well as a variety of other sources.
Isabel Kershner’s June 17 NYT article, “Israel Seems to Make Progress in Talks,” suggests a possible truce with Hamas. According to Haniya, “talks brokered by Egypt for a period of calm with Israel [are] nearing completion and that he [hopes’ for a ‘happy ending.’” Kershner explains, “”towns and villages in southern Israel have been under continual rocket and mortar fire from Gaza in recent months, while Gaza has been subject to frequent Israeli military strikes aimed at militants and incursions.” Most recently, Israeli troops killed three militants in Gaza as they were trying to plant explosive by the border fence, one Israeli civilian was lightly wounded by rocket fire, and at least one Palestinian militant was killed in a retaliatory strike.
Isabel Kershner’s June 18 NYT article, “Israel Agrees to Truce with Hamas on Gaza” makes the surprise disclosure that “Egypt has been mediating the truce for months” behind the scenes and that “an Egyptian-brokered deal” between Hamas and Israel would include “an end to frequent military strikes” as well as “an easing of some of the economic sanctions on Gaza in exchange for the halt of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza . . . that has killed four Israeli civilians this year.” No indication is given here how many Palestinians have been killed over the same period. Apparently the duration of the treaty would be six months. Israel is expected to open the commercial crossings as soon as the truce comes into effect, and two weeks later Egypt would host talks at reopening the Rafah crossing on its border with Gaza. The article ends, “Israel is insisting that Hamas halt all fire from Gaza, and will hold it responsible for actions by smaller groups.” Last minute hostilities preceding the acceptance of the accord include three Israeli air strikes in Gaza, killing six Palestinian militants and in retaliation 10 rockets fired at Israel.
Griff Witte and Ellen Knickmeyer’s June 18 WP article, “Israel, Hamas Agree on Gaza Strip Truce,” emphasizes that the agreement would be implemented in phases, with Israel easing the year-old siege on Gaza if Hamas stops attacks, and with Israel granting permission to open the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt if there is progress on the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. It is estimated that Israel could begin allowing more supplies into Gaza as early as Sunday, June 22. Additionally it is disclosed that Hamas at first lobbied for the truce to apply to both Gaza and the West Bank, but Israel limited negotiations to Gaza. It is also disclosed that Israel had contemplated an invasion of Gaza to oust Hamas, but Olmert and his top aides rejected this option out of concern that the campaign would bog down against Palestinian counterinsurgents. Nevertheless, an unnamed Israeli official warns, ‘If this [accord] breaks down, there will not be another attempt at a cease-fire. There will be a large-scale Israeli operation. This has to hold.”
The unsigned June 19 WP editorial, “Truce in Gaza - A Middle East Conflict is Postponed,” explains, “Hamas is the immediate beneficiary of the deal - one reason the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert [has been] slow to agree to it. One year after it drove out the secular administration of President Mahmoud Abbas, the Islamist movement has consolidated control over Gaza as well as having demonstrated that it can force Israel into acknowledging its authority. If a border crossing with Egypt is reopened, as the agreement contemplates, relatively normal life and commerce could resume in the territory.” Obviously, such an outcome would be at least dangerous in the opinion of whoever wrote the editorial.
Isabel Kershner’s June 20 NYT article, “Truce Starts for Israel and Hamas in Gaza,” stresses that many Israeli and Palestinians sense that the truce is “doomed from the start.” In fact, most Israeli believe that Hamas will “exploit the quiet to increase its strength, or will fail to control other militant groups in Gaza, making a military confrontation unavoidable in the end.” Among the Gaza Palestinians, on the other hand, there is a widespread optimism that border crossings will open in the immediate future. Because Israel’s earlier strategy was to “squeeze Hamas out of power in Gaza,” the truce is generally considered a victory for Hamas. Obviously more constrained, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority Salam Fayyad, describes the truce as “a good thing” and offers the assurance,“Our platform is based on nonviolence.”
Isabel Kershner’s June 25 NYT article, “Rockets Hit Israel, Breaking Hamas Truce,” tells of Palestinian rocket fire as a breach of the five-day old truce. The Islamic Jihad, a small extremist group, takes responsibility for attack, saying it has been “a response to an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Nablus at dawn on Tuesday, in which a senior Islamic Jihad operative and another Palestinian man were killed.” Nevertheless, the truce applies only to Gaza, so retaliatory attacks from Gaza in response to Israeli operations on the West Bank are felt to be unacceptable according to the terms of the truce.
Griff Witte and Samuel Sockol’s June 25 WP article, “Gazan Rockets Threaten Truce,” etc. confirms the reaction of Israel to the rocket attack. An Israeli official is quoted to the effect that Israel would not open its border crossings with the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as planned, and would stay closed until further notice. Also mentioned is a visit of Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert to Egyptian President Mubarek to discuss the arrangement. Among the issues discussed is the fate of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who is being held captive in Gaza. “We demanded, and we received, promises that the Rafah crossing will not be opened until the solving of the Shalit issue,” insists an official in Olmert’s office, but Mubarak explains in a later TV interview that the issues should not be linked. According to Hamas officials, the Shalit release can only be linked with the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Isabel Kersher’s June 27 NYT article, “Truce is Strained as Militants Launch Rockets and Israel Keeps Goods Out of Gaza,” indicates that two rockets launched against Israel are used to justify a continuation of the embargo for a second day. A rocket attack three days earlier justified Israel sealing the border crossings on Wednesday, which in turn has led to the rocket attack on Thursday. Meanwhile, Gaza farmers have reported that Israeli troops along the border opened fire on them to keep them away from agricultural land near the border fence. Two elderly Palestinian men have been seriously wounded by the army gunfire, including an 82-year-old farmer. Also, Israeli Navy vessels have fired on Palestinian fishermen to keep them outside proscribed areas close to the shore. Members of the Islamic Jihad have admitted firing three rockets in retaliation for an Israeli raid that killed one of the group’s senior commanders in the West Bank. A spokesman for Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades explains, “The rocket attack on Thursday was in response to Israeli violations.” He adds, “Any calm deal must end Israeli attacks on our people in the West Bank, too.”
There is almost a total lack of NYT and WP coverage for the better part of the next five months relevant to the peace accord except for a couple of stories about the effectiveness of the embargo in response to continuing rocket attacks. This relatively peaceful interlude is suddenly interrupted by an unsigned November 6 NYT piece, “Gaza: Rocket Fire and Israeli Strike Disrupt Cease-Fire,” which reports an event of pivotal importance–Israel’s November 4 incursion into Gaza that breaks the ceasefire with Hamas. Coincidentally, this is the same day as the U.S. presidential election that makes Obama the next U.S. President. The article is only 67 words long, short enough to be quoted here in its entirety:
Hamas fired dozens of rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday after Israeli forces killed at least five Palestinian militants in an eruption of violence that disrupted a four-month-old truce. The rockets caused no deaths. Israeli forces later killed a Palestinian who the military said had taken part in the rocket attack.
Significantly, the article neglects to indicate how many Israeli troops were involved and the fact that Israeli force included tanks and helicopters additional to the troops. Nor does it provide any indication that this is the first major transgression against the June accord, initiating Hamas’s resumption of rocket attacks on Israel for the next two months as well as the restoration of incursions by Israeli troops into Gaza. It is not until December 19 that Ethan Bronere’s NYT article, “A Gaza Truce Undone by Flaws May Be Revived by Necessity,” finally mentions this escalation in the third-to-last paragraph, attributing it to Israel’s decision to destroy a tunnel Hamas had been digging near the border. [More about Bronner’s useful article later]
It should be mentioned that a useful January 12 summary of the press response to the Nov. 4 incursion, Jim Lobe and Ai Gharib’s Electronic Intifada piece, “U.S. media didn’t report Israeli ceasefire violation,” mentions a slight enlargement of the story in a later NYT edition on November 5 and cites British, Canadian, and Australian sources that actually took into account with the magnitude of the issue at the time. Lobe and Rharib also mention a Tzipi Livni “Meet the Press” interview in which she totally neglects to mention the November 4 episode, and they indicate that a Nexis search “made no reference to the raid in the transcripts of any television public-affairs broadcast during the period.” They emphasize that this is “a particularly significant omission given the fact that about 70 percent of U.S. citizens say their main source of international news comes through that medium.”
A November 5 WP article attributed to Reuters, “Hamas Fires Rockets At Israel After Airstrike,” starts by referring to “35 rockets [fired at] Israel on Wednesday, hours after the Israeli arm killed gunmen in the Hamas-ruled territory.” It then indicates no damage has been done and that Hamas has asserted responsibility for the attacks, the first such military action since June. It also explains that five of the six gunmen were killed in air strikes late in the afternoon after they fired missiles at Israeli forces who were destroying a tunnel built by Hamas fighters to kidnap an Israeli soldier at a later date. A sixth was supposedly killed by Israeli troops while advancing to destroy the tunnel. Other reports have reversed this sequence, suggesting that the five were killed in the tunnel and the sixth (or seventh) while firing rockets at a later time. The Israeli incursion is described as a “rare” Israeli military operation since the cease fire began. A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, is quoted saying that the Nov. 4 raid is a major violation of the accord and proves that Israel is not interested in continuing the cease-fire. However, an Israeli army spokeswoman offers the assurance, “this is a pinpoint operation to thwart an immediate threat and there is no intention to bring about the end of the cease fire.”
A November 6 WP article, just a day later, by Nidal al-Mughrabi of Reuters [very possibly the same author], “Israel-Hamas Truce Tenuous After Violence,” indicates in its first sentence that the incident has “disrupted a four-month-old truce along the Gaza Strip’s frontier.” It also tells of Hamas rocket attacks in retaliation, including salvos that landed on the coastal city of Ashkelon without having caused any casualties. It quotes Hamas sources who indicate that “calm could return if Israel held its fire,” and Israel’s defense minister [Barak] is also quoted insisting, “Israel [does] not want the truce to collapse,” and “We have no intention of violating the quiet. We have an interest in perpetuating the calm. … But whenever it is necessary to thwart operations against Israel Defense Force soldiers or the civilians on the Gaza outskirts, we will act.” Barack Obama is also quoted to the effect that “resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be a priority for hs administration.” It is disclosed that a summit is planned in Cairo the following week and that Condaleezza Rice is scheduled to arrive in the region on Thursday, presumably to participate in the summit. One of the most important issues to be resolved according to al-Mughrabi is the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for an acceptable number of Palestinian prisoners who have not killed Israeli. Significantly, there is no reference to the Cairo “summit” in any of the other news reports.
Several additional reports can also be mentioned here relevant to the November 4 attack. Published on November 5, an International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) report, “Israeli army kills five Qassam fighters in Gaza,” indicates that Israeli soldiers supported by tanks and armored vehicles have invaded the central Gaza Strip early Tuesday evening and fired several shells at a number of homes. At the same time, Military helicopters hovered over the area firing flares and missiles. Israeli army spokesmen nevertheless assure reporters that the invasion does not constitute a violation of the cease-fire but has instead been a “legitimate step to remove an immediate threat to Israel from Gaza.”
In a November 5 IMEMC report, “Israeli invasion ongoing; seven fighters killed,” the IMEMC quotes an Israeli military spokesperson that the attack has been intended to prevent the use of a tunnel to abduct an Israeli soldier. Israeli troops were forced to detonate the tunnel, which was dug under one of the buildings, thereby killing the Palestinian fighters inside the tunnel. Otherwise, the Israeli spokesman insisted, “This invasion has a certain target and does not aim at violating the truce.”
According to a November 5 BBC report, “Rockets fired after Gaza clashes,” “Tuesday evening’s fighting broke out after Israeli tanks and a bulldozer moved 250m into the central part of the coastal enclave, backed by military aircraft … Residents of central Gaza’s el-Bureij refugee camp said a missile fired from an unmanned Israeli drone flying over the area injured another three Hamas gunmen.”
Ten days later, Sara Flounder’s article in workers.org, “Israel Invades Gaza again; Palestinian resistance continues,” provides even more information about what happened:
The Israeli Army invaded the Gaza Strip on Nov. 4 with tanks, helicopters and jet aircraft. … According to reports in the Palestinian media, Israeli soldiers and tanks accompanied by military helicopters firing flares and missiles invaded an area east of Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, while Israeli jets shelled an area east of Kahn Younis in the southern part of Gaza. The next day Israeli tanks moved into Beit Hanoun in the northern part of Gaza.
Here the sequence seems plain once the Nov. 5 Israeli incursion is taken into account: (1) an Israeli incursion early on Nov. 4; (2) Hamas’s rocket attack later in the day; and (3) a second Israeli incursion the next day. Like a typical starter motor, Israel’s two incursions put the cycle of retaliatory strikes back in motion again seven weeks preceding the December 27 air attack.
In retrospect, it cannot be discounted that the supposedly preemptive attack of Nov. 4 is conducted on the day of the U.S. election, when the world’s attention is focused on Obama’s victory instead of events in the Near East. This presumably accidental timing would suggest Israel seeks to intensify hostilities against Hamas with a minimum of publicity, thereby letting Hamas’ acts of retaliation be publicized as unprovoked hostility to justify Israel’s invasion of Gaza. This sequence is in fact what later happens–the question remains to what extent it has been planned in advance with the November 4 attack setting the stage for all that followed. It should also be taken into account that Hamas might have been more circumspect in response to the Nov. 4 and 5 attacks if the Israeli blockade of Gaza were not so devastating to its inhabitants.
A November 15 WP article by Linda Gradstein, “As Israel-Hamas Clashes Continue, Gazans Face Crisis - Closed Border Halts Food Aid from U.N.,” indicates that Israeli and Palestinian fighters have clashed repeatedly since the Nov. 4 attack, leaving at least 10 Hamas fighters dead. Meanwhile, there is a shortage of medicine in Gaza hospitals, and the U.N. announces on Nov. 9 that it is closing its food-distribution program because it cannot resupply its warehouses. Moreover, most of Gaza City has been dark since Thursday night [November 13]. when Gaza’s main power plant ran out of fuel. “It is unprecedented that the U.N. is unable to get its supplies in to a population under such obvious distress,” John Ging, the senior U.N. official in Gaza, says in a telephone interview. He also indicates that the present crisis would not have occurred if U.N. suppliers had not been prohibited from building up their reserves during the cease fire. According to al-Khodari, 80 percent of Gazans live below the poverty line and the average per capita income is $2 per day. Israeli spokesman Peter Lerner says Israel had planned to open the border crossings, but maintained the closure after Israeli intelligence warned that Palestinian gunmen planned to attack the crossings.
A month later, in a December 14 NYT article, “Hamas, Showing Split, Hints It may Extend Truce,” Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner tell of a mixed response by the Hamas leadership to the impending cessation of the June Peace Accord. On one hand, Khaled Mashal, an exiled leader in Damascus, insists on Hamas’s satellite TV station Al Quds that “the truce was limited to six months and ends on Dec. 19.” However, Mahmoud Zahar, the senior Hamas leader in Gaza, says there will be a meeting of the leadership of Hamas and other groups on the following Sunday, December 21, to determine the possibility of renewing the treaty. Addressing a large crowd of 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas’ Prime Minister Haniya criticizes Israel for its strict embargo and continuing aggression, but avoids making any definitive pronouncements about the extension of the truce. The choice is thereby left open. Meanwhile, Israeli spokesmen express their readiness to extend the truce. The senior Israeli Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad goes to Cairo to discuss extending the truce with Egyptian mediators. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Olmert announces, “Israel has been willing, and continues to be willing, to abide by the understandings reached with the Egyptians,” but then adds that calm [is] conditioned on Hamas stopping the daily rocket fire from Gaza.
In their article, El-Khodary and Kershner also summarize events since June: “A tense calm largely prevailed for the first months of the truce, showing that Hamas has been able to control smaller militant groups in Gaza.” But that began to unravel Nov. 4, they explain, when Israeli forces entered Gaza for the first time since June to blow up a tunnel that, according to Israel, Hamas was planning to use to capture soldiers along the border. Six Hamas militants were killed on the night of the tunnel raid. Since then, Hamas has fired some 250 rockets and mortar shells from Gaza at Israel without killing anybody, whereas at least 10 more Palestinian militants have been killed in Israeli strikes. Meanwhile, Israel has tightened its blockade of Israel, and life in the Israeli towns and villages around Gaza has become intolerable.
In his long and eloquent Dec. 15 piece, over a month later, “Israel’s Crime Against Humanity,” in Truthdig, Chris Hedges quotes Princeton law professor Richard Falk to the effect that Israel’s embargo of Gaza constitutes a “crime against humanity” suggestive of the Warsaw Ghetto. More specifically, Falk suggests, it constitutes “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Hedges details all of the problems endured in Gaza without food, drugs, water, electric power, adequate hospital care, and the rest of the necessities of life. He also summarizes the sequence of events in the simplest possible terms:
The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no Israeli casualties.
Actually, the accord had been obtained in June, not July, and four Israeli citizens had been killed by rocket attacks by this time in December. Otherwise, this retrospective account is entirely accurate–more than can be said of earlier U.S. coverage.
In his Dec. 19 NYT article, “A Gaza Truce Undone by Flaws May Be Revived by Necessity,” Ethan Bronner tells of Hamas rocket fire having increased as well as Israel’s warplanes firing missiles and even further tightening of the border crossings by Israel. In other words, Bronner says, the June 19 agreement is over. Each side accuses the other of bad faith and violations of the accord. Rockets from Gaza never stopped entirely during the truce, and Israel never allowed a major renewed flow of goods into Gaza. The reason, Bronner explains, is that the agreement had “no mutually agreed text or enforcement mechanism.” Hamas officials emphasize their understanding on June 19 that Israel would open the crossings within two weeks and allow the transfer of goods that had been banned during the previous year. They argue that their effort to step the rockets has been largely successful, indicating that while more than 300 rockets had been fired into Israel in May, only from 10 to 20 were fired in July. In August from 10 to 30 were fired, and in September from 5 to 10. In contrast, the shipment of goods into Gaza never increased more than 25 to 30 percent, far short of the 500 to 600 truckloads delivered daily before the border was closed a year earlier. In response, Shlomo Dror, chief spokesman for Israel’s Defense Ministry, explains, “The Palestinians wanted to have one or two rockets a week to keep our people in tension. … The moment we fail to react to one rocket we encourage them. Our only choice was to close the crossings when rockets came in.”
A December 20 AP article published by the NYT, “Israel: Hamas Formally Ends Truce,” is short enough to quote in its entirety:
Hamas formally announced the end of its unwritten, often-breached truce with Israel on Friday, as Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired four rockets into southern Israel. The Israeli military said two rockets were fired Friday morning and two more after sunset. It also said troops guarding Israeli farmers in fields adjoining Gaza came under sniper fire from across the border. No injuries were reported. In a statement posted on its Web site, Hamas said it was Israel that had ended the truce by imposing an economic blockade on Gaza carrying out military strikes and hunting down Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Thousands of Gazans rallied in Khan Yunis, … in support of the militant group Islamic Jihad.
A December 20 WP article by Steve Weizman, “Hamas Formally Suspends Truce - Gazans Accuse Israel of Breaches, etc.,” quotes Hamas, “Since the enemy did not abide with the conditions … we hold the enemy fully responsible for ending the truce, and we confirm that the Palestinian resistance factions headed by Hamas will act.” Israeli spokesmen insist that the truce [does] not have an official expiration date and that Israel is interested in prolonging understandings with Hamas. An opinion poll this week indicates that 74 percent of Palestinians and 51 percent of Israelis want the truce to be extended.
A December 22 WP article by Ben Lynfield,“Livni and Netanyahu vow to oust Hamas after Gaza rocket,” tells of 20 Palestinian rockets having been fired against southern Israel since the six-month cease fire ended two days ago. In response both Tzipi Livni and Benyamin Netanyahu vow to topple Hamas in Gaza despite Prime Minister Olmert’s warning, “A responsible government doesn’t rush into battle, neither does it shy away.” Barak, the Labour leader, warns that more than 20,000 troups would be needed to stop the rocket fire. Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, Likud’s security expert, recommends the assassination of Hamas leaders, but Yossi Alpher, a leading analyst, suggests it is time for Israel to admit it lacks a “workable strategy.”
On the other hand, a December 22 Reuters article, “Hamas says open to new truce in Gaza,” by Nidal Mughrabi, Aziz el-Kaissouni, Dan Williams, and Adam Entous, indicates that Palestinian armed groups have halted rocket fire against Israel for 24 hours at the request of Egyptian mediators. Shortly before the truce is set to expire, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh telephones Turkish Prime Minister Tavyip Erdogan to ask that he convince Israel to lift its blockade, and Erdogan assured him he would. Isaac Herzog, a minister of Olmert’s security cabinet, assured Israel’s public, “I like many of my colleagues, am ready to continuing the calm, on terms that are comfortable for Israel.”
A December 23 WP article by Matti Friedman, “Hamas Tells Fighters to Hold Fire for 24 Hours, etc.” indicates that Hamas has ordered gunmen to hold their fire for 24 hours on December 22 because of the possibility that the truce with Israel can be restored. Also, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar indicates on Israel’s Channel 10 TV that the Palestinian Islamist group is interested in renewing the truce with Israel. However, since three rockets have fallen by nightfall, Israel signals that the cargo crossings remain sealed and it is preparing for a possible offense. Mubarak, who brokered the initial truce, invites Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Lvvni to Cairo to discuss a new arrangement. Her spokesmen say she is prepared to listen but would also complain about the rockets and mortar fire. Analysts nevertheless think both sides want to renew the truce, since past incursions have not stopped the rocket fire and an Israeli ground operation into Gaza would probably result in heavy casualties for both sides.
A December 23 WP editorial , “More Rockets from Gaza,” etc., predicts that if and when full-scale hostilities begin, Hamas will shift from homemade rockets to Iranian missiles that could reach large Israeli cities. It is also suggests that a ground invasion might trigger bloody conflict that could spread to the West Bank and Lebanon. The author also mentions the apparent decision of Hamas’s Damascus-based leadership to end the cease-fire regardless of the suffering this might bring, apparently with the expectation that Israel would be forced to lift the blockade on Gaza. What seems ignored by the Damascus leadership is the fact that Israel is in the midst of a heated election campaign with two leading candidates both of whom are taking a “predictably hawkish tack.” With the U.S. in the midst of a presidential transition, it would be unlikely to impose any outcome unacceptable to Israel’s new government.
A December 24 AP article published by the NYT, “Israel: 3 Militants Killed in Gaza,” is short enough to quote in its entirety:
Israeli forces killed three Palestinian militants on the Gaza border on Tuesday, the deadliest clash since a truce expired Friday between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza. Israel said the three militants were planting explosives in northern Gaza along the border fence. Soldiers crossed a few yards into Gaza and engaged the Palestinians, who threw grenades. The soldiers returned fire, killing the three, according to Israeli news media.
A December 24 NYT article by Isabel Kershner, “Gaza Rocket Fire Intensifies,” indicates that a Hamas militant has been killed in an Israeli air strike, while more than 60 rockets and mortar shells have been fired at Israel without killing anybody. Most of the rockets fired out of Gaza are locally made, Kershner reports, “short-range projectiles that fall within a few miles of the border.” But at least two of those fired Wednesday [Dec. 24] are imported Katyusha-type rockets with a longer range. Kershner also reports that Israel’s security cabinet has held a meeting that has lasted about five hours, but with no details having been made public regarding any decisions about Gaza.” Israel’s official spokesman Mark Regev says, “a renewal of mutual calm [is] possible but that Israel’s patience [is] running out.” Some Israeli officials call for tough military action, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak maintain a policy of restraint. Unnamed defense officials are quoted to the effect that a military invasion would be costly in lives on both sides and would not guarantee an end to the rocket fire.” Also quoted is Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas official, to the effect that “Hamas would consider renewing the truce if border crossings were opened to allow the regular transfer of goods into Gaza.” Kershner ends the article by quoting a nameless Israeli official that Israel would have allowed about 40 trucks of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza on Wednesday, but cancelled those plans as a result of the heavy rocket and mortar fire.”
In a December 26 NYT article provided by Reuters, “Israel Issues an Appeal to Palestinians in Gaza,” Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert is quoted as having issued on Christmas a “last minute” appeal to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to reject the militant leadership of Hamas and stop firing rockets at Israel, warning that he would not hesitate to use force. According to the article, “He [Olmert} issued what amounted to a public call to Gazans to overthrow Hamas, the Islamic group that controls the territory. “I’m telling them now,” he [says]. “It may be the last minute. There will be more blood there. Who wants it? We don’t want it.” Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a leading candidate in the Feb. 10 election, holds emergency talks with President Mubarak of Egypt, who cautions against escalation. Ms. Livni says Hamas [has] to pay for “unbearable” rocket fire, insisting, “Enough is enough.” According to a Palestinian official, an unnamed Egyptian source is quoted as having appealed to Hamas leaders “to calm the situation so as to avoid an Israeli military escalation.” In Gaza, however, a Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, warns that Israel would “pay the price” for any attack.
Significantly, neither the NYT nor WP provides any coverage whatsoever on December 27, the day of Israel’s surprise air attack. The question suggests itself whether these two newspapers and/or anybody in the federal government is aware of this likelihood. Is the American press so closely aligned with Israel’s government that it actually participates in a news blackout exactly when it is needed in order to mount a surprise invasion?
On December 27, as indicated, Israel finally launches a full-scale air attack against Gaza. As recounted by Taghreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner in their NYT December 28 article, “More than 225 Die in Gaza as Israel Strikes at Hamas,” a major Israeli surprise air attack is launched on Saturday, December 27, that produces the highest death toll for Gaza in years. Many of the victims are shoppers and school children who have been freely walking in the Central Food Market as well as police cadets in a nearby graduation ceremony held in an open square. About 500 Palestinians are also wounded in what amounts to a totally successful surprise attack. Despite Israeli claims of targeting Hamas fighters and security posts, according to IMEMC’s December 28 article, “Israeli Offensive in Gaza,” “the army [shells] mosques, blacksmith workshops, local media agencies, charitable societies, police stations, detainees’ affairs societies and … the Islamic University in Gait. It is estimated that there have been at least a hundred targets, including the Saraya security compound in Gaza city, the municipal building of the town Beit Hanoun, the police station of the Shija’via neighborhood of eastern Gaza city, two additional Hamas police posts in central Gaza Strip, and a variety of Hamas-run charities.
As on November 4, the surprise attack has been undertaken with total success. According to Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid on December 28 in “Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about,” “Israel [had] continued to send out disinformation in announcing it would open the crossings to the Gaza Strip and that Olmert would decide whether to launch the strike following three more deliberations on Sunday - one day after the actual order to launch the operation was issued.” Ravid also discloses that Israeli Defense Minister Barak had initiated plans for the invasion as early as March, 2008, three months before the June accord, and had made these plans operational beginning in November, supposedly in response to Hamas’ resumption of rocket attacks in early November after Israel’s November 4 incursion.
Further trickery is suggested by Les Blough, Editor of Axis of Logic in his provocative article, “The 2008 Attack on the People of Gaza is Like-No-Other and the World Responds,” dated on December 28, “On the day before the attack, the Israeli government [lies] to the Palestinians, telling them they have opened the borders to receive the first shipment of food and humanitarian supplies in 2 months. The Palestinians have been waiting for relief and instead are bombed.”
The exact timing is another matter. Undoubtedly the planes have been scheduled to arrive during the graduation ceremony in order to maximize fatalities among police officers as potential combatants once the invasion begins. According to the Jerusalem Report, as recounted by David Brooks in his January 6 NYT column, “The Confidence Game, ”In the first wave 80 Israeli planes hit more than 100 targets and nearly all of the Hamas military compounds within 3 minutes 40 seconds.” Aerial attacks are sustained throughout the following day, and in response Palestinians shoot dozens of rockets into southern Israel, but without killing anybody. By the end of the year four days later as many as 400 Palestinians have been killed, between twenty and thirty percent of them children, mostly from incessant air strikes, artillery strikes, and gunfire from Israeli warships off the coast. In contrast, only 4 Israeli have been killed by Palestinian rockets.
And thus the initial air bombardment. On January 4, after eight days of incessant bomb attacks, Israeli troops invade Gaza. The invasion has begun.
*****
What is one to conclude from this entire narrative stretching over the past six months and with every chance of persisting into the indefinite future? Several generalizations seem appropriate.
First and foremost, contrary to the repeated insistence of Zionists, Gaza’s Hamas government is not a terrorist organization to be excluded from negotiations. Hamas was first organized in 1987 to provide social services as well as resistance against Israel’s occupation–not much different from Israel’s leadership opposed to British occupation when it took power in 1948. There is also ample evidence the creation and initial growth of Hamas was encouraged by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, as a counterweight to the Fatah movement. When Hamas won the 2006 popular election in Gaza, its new prime minister, Ismail Haniya, turned out to be the most conciliatory member of its top leadership, and he soon joined with the Fatah President Abbas in promoting a peace settlement along the lines proposed by the Arab League in both 2002 and 2007. Once again it was Prime Minister Sharon who refused to negotiate, putting into motion everything that has happened since. Moreover, as explained in Khalid Amayreh’s pivotal 2004 article based on inside Knesset sources, “The Second Intifada - An Israeli Strategy,” the conscious intention of Israel ‘s leadership since the beginning has been to intensify violence in order to intimidate and encourage the departure of the Palestinian people. In other words, it is primarily the Israeli who have kept up the role of terrorists, not the Palestinians.
Secondly, Zionist apologists have also repeatedly attacked Hamas for seeking the destruction of Israel, but this is an obvious equivocation on their part. Indeed, some members of Hamas want to “destroy” Israel in the sense of crushing it and reducing its people to devastation, just as many Israeli want to do the same with Palestinians. However, what most of Hamas’ leadership mean by “destroy” is to terminate Israel’s “democratic” theocracy, replacing it with a genuine democracy in which all citizens have equal rights–Palestinians and Christians as well as the Zionist Jews. On the other hand, contrary to Zionist protestations, much of Hamas’ leadership is actually willing to accept a two-state solution whereby the Israeli and Palestinians coexist in two adjoining nations, an arrangement that would permit Israel’s continuation of its anachronistic theocratic status.
Third, there is ample evidence that Hamas and the residents of Gaza wanted (and expected) to avoid warfare. The Dec. 15 NYT article of el-Khodary and Kershner indicates a mixed response among Gaza’s Hamas leadership–as opposed to its exiled Damascus leadership–to the renewal of a peace accord with Israel. Such a renewal was advocated by Zahar and not rejected by Haniya. As indicated in a recent opinion poll reported by Weizman in his December 20 WP article, 74 percent of the Palestinians overall, as opposed to only 51 percent of the Israeli, wanted the truce to be extended. What primarily brought a renewal of overt hostilities was the continuing embargo on Gaza as well as two decisive steps taken by Israel. First its Nov. 4 attack provoked the resumption of rocket fire from Hamas; and second, Israel’s December 27 air attack terminated all talk of a renewed peace accord that had persisted through Christmas and even, arguably, the morning of the attack. It may also be mentioned here that Olmert’s demands as reported by Reuters on December 26 might seem an explicit warning of an impending invasion, but, as reported By Ravid of Haaretz on December 28, the misinformation available to Gaza’s residents that Israel’s war cabinet would meet on Sunday, the day after the attack, to decide the appropriate choice gave Palestinians the false impression that they were safe at least until Monday. Also, Olmert’s demand, as reported by Reuters, that Gaza inhabitants reject its elected leadership on the brink of its invasion was necessarily gratuitous and imposed an impossible condition. It could only be ignored, thus justifying an invasion only in the opinion of the aggressors.
Fourth, both Israel and the Palestinians have repeatedly broken the June verbal accord, but on balance Israel was more culpable than the Palestinians. The tradeoff accepted by both parties was for the Palestinians to terminate rocket attacks in exchange for Israel’s cessation of the embargo against Gaza as well as the termination of military incursions into Gaza. As Bronner documents in his December 19 NYT article, Palestinian rocket fire has been substantially reduced over the past six months as compared to the relentless continuation of Israel’s embargo and its Gaza incursions. As indicated in Gradstein’s Nov. 15 WP article, the effect of this embargo has been severe poverty and sufficient hostility that Hamas rocket attacks could be incited by the November 4 incursion.
Fifth, the explanation for the inability of Hamas to curtail rocket fire entirely is that most of the early rocket attacks were conducted by the Islamic Jihad, a radical group loosely connected with Hamas that kept up these attacks to retaliate against Israeli attacks on the Jihad on the West Bank. Hamas itself did not resume rocket attacks until Nov. 4, after Israeli forces killed six Palestinian fighters in their surprise attack on election day in the United States. As earlier indicated, the imprudence of Hamas in accepting the bait was probably because of the effectiveness of Israel’s embargo at the time as well as the impact of the surprise attack in and of itself.
Sixth, most of the rockets used by the Palestinians have been relatively harmless homemade Kazam rockets, thus accounting for the exceptionally low casualty rate among Israeli as the result of rocket attacks. Not more than eight Israeli were killed during the entire year once the total of four mentioned in Kershner’s June 18 NYT article is added to the four killed after the December 27 attack. It accordingly seems more than likely that Kazam rocket attacks were useful to Israel as a “good” excuse for mounting both the air attack and invasion that followed. Whatever the benefit of these rocket attacks to Hamas’ defense strategy, they have been far more helpful to Israel’s government in producing almost no damage whatsoever while obtaining the needed public support for an enlargement of its operations against the Palestinians. One almost wonders if Zionist agent provocateurs aren’t somehow responsible for what seem to many the dubious use of rockets in the Palestinian cause.
Seventh, the overall kill ratio since December 27 has actually been sustained at 100-1, culminating at the time of the January 17 cease-fire at thirteen hundred Palestinians as opposed to thirteen Israeli troops, four of whom having been killed by friendly fire. Any kill ratio this disproportionate suggests an egregious double standard on the part of the winning side. Do Zionists actually believe the Biblical nonsense that they are God’s chosen people with the license to engage in such one-sided slaughter against their supposed enemies? Not so. All human lives must be treated as being sacred–even Palestinians, including the men, women and children killed since December 27. Those portions of the Bible that say otherwise (Deuteronomy, 7:2-6, etc.) can and ought to be ignored.
Eighth, the question necessarily suggests itself whether Israel had tightened the embargo and mounted its Nov. 4 attack as planned from the very beginning in order to obtain exactly the results that wereproduced, a cessation of the June peace accord followed by a full invasion that could be blamed on Hamas instead of Israel, followed by negotiations on a heavily favorable basis for Israel. Barak Ravid’s disclosure in his December 27 Haaretz article should be no surprise–that Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF “to prepare the operation over six months ago.” Barak was said to explain to fellow IDF strategists, “Although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare as well.” It accordingly seems more than likely that everything starting with the June peace accord was planned on a contingency basis well in advance. Of primary importance in reverse order of conception was the invasion of Gaza, whose occurrence would be most opportune preceding the September 20, 2008, U.S. inauguration (thus providing the international “surprise” predicted by Vice President Biden, if a couple months earlier than predicted). Then in reverse sequence came a suitable provocation scheduled in time to renew the cycle of violence needed to stir up public support for the invasion (and what better date than the U.S. election?). Finally, at the very beginning, the June peace agreement would provide the time needed to make sufficient preparations over the following six months. This hypothetical game plan might seem absurd verging on paranoia, but we must remember than Barak is an intricate thinker–a clock maker in his spare time. He can be expected to play chess in foreign relations as opposed to the relatively simple strategy of Palestinians, something between checkers and tic-tac-toe as with most of the rest of us.
Ninth, as suggested in Entous’ December 22 WP article, Israel’s upcoming February 10 election cannot be ignored. As an additional bonus to Israel’s current government, the Gaza invasion has tipped Israel’s public support from Netanyahu, an arch-conservative Likud candidate for Prime Minister, to Tzipi Livni supported by Ehud Barak, relatively progressive candidates both of whom have supported a two-state solution one time or another. By proving themselves to be sufficiently hawkish, Livni and Barak have enhanced their image among Israeli voters who would otherwise support the arch-conservative Netanyahu. Once in office, Livni and Barak might actually be able to work with Palestinians and the Obama administration in pursuit of an acceptable two-state resolution of the conflict, presumably with both Hamas and Fatah involved in the creation of their own political entity within the 1967 border suitably adjusted. However, there would be serious problems if such a strategy is in the works. The results would be risky at best and at too great a cost in Palestinian lives. Moreover, if such a strategy fails, a destabilization of Arab states can be expected throughout the region, and the political climate in Israel inclusive of all its parties would shift even further to the right than today. Once Hamas has been crushed–as it can be if Gaza is totally flattened and many thousands more are killed–Fatah would provide a relatively easy target, Abbas himself reduced to nothing more than a “plucked chicken” as once described by Sharon. Zionism’s triumph would be at the expense of the Palestinian people and ultimately, one suspects, the Israeli people as well–at least their self-respect.
And tenth, the option cannot be discounted that Israel’s victory might set the stage for the prevention of any Palestinian state whatsoever. The avoidance of a two-state solution is mostly sought by Israeli who seek full possession of the greater Israel for themselves alone. At present they cannot exactly reject both the current one-state and two-state options, since the only alternative would be the dispersal of Palestinians into cantons equivalent to Native-American reservations and their eventual “transfer” to adjoining states–a modern Palestinian Diaspora entailing everything offensive to Jews about their own historic experience. The immediate tactic is therefore to keep relations in perpetual disruption toward the possibility of such a transfer when it finally presents itself as a reasonable choice. In other words, Ben Gurion and Sharon’s basic strategy (“We must expel Arabs and take their place”) still seems in effect at least as an option relevant to the outcome of the present Gaza operation. Chances seem excellent once again that Israel’s conservative leadership will somehow thwart genuine negotiations in the hope and expectation of obtaining the eventual opportunity to rid the “greater Israel” of its Palestinians once Hamas is out of the picture. The strategy is reminiscent of God’s ultra-chauvinistic pronouncements in the Old Testament and Hitler’s effort to rid Europe of its Jewish population. It’s basically the same motive all over again, though Israel can be expected to avoid an “existential” final solution. One or two Warsaw episodes might be O.K. such as in Gaza right now, but without any need for concentration camps–at least not yet.
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