Gaza at War
By Israel Shamir
Cold wintery evening in Tel Aviv, the
evening of the ground invasion, a new step in the escalation
of what may become a new big war. There were hundreds of
demonstrators – many young people, a lot of families
with children, all sorts of Israelis and Palestinians, under
red banners calling to end the warfare in Gaza. In
Jerusalem, deep fog all but covered the walls of the Old
City.
But even deeper is the fog of war. It is
too early to predict the future developments. We still do
not know what the goals of the Israeli invasion are, and we
do not know the strength of Palestinian resistance. Fighters
decide the future now, not the pundits. The war may go on to
confrontation with Iran; it may bring too long rule of Hosni
Mubarak to an abrupt end, it may cause a new intifada, it
may re-shape the Middle East.
First week of war did not bring much
success to Israel. The attack began as a firestorm of fury,
but its only “success” was a surprising bombing of a
graduation ceremony at the Gaza police school with some
three hundred casualties, mainly young graduates. Next time,
they may bomb schools on September 1st with even
better results. Besides, the Light-unto-Nations-people
bombed the university and a few mosques, and killed a few
babies as a late tribute to King Herod on the Innocent
Martyrs Day. Certainly war crime, undoubtedly mass murder,
but hardly the holocaust they
promised.
The Israeli drag-queen of the Defence
Minister Ehud Barak improved his
ratings: 53 percent of Jews are satisfied with his
performance (Gawd, they are easy to satisfy!) compared to
just 34 percent about six months ago. “Polls now predict
five additional Knesset seats for his Labor Party in the
coming February general election. That's 40 Palestinian
corpses per seat. No wonder Barak promises it's just the
beginning: at this pace, it will take Labor just about two
thousand additional corpses to go from rags to riches, from
a dead political party to an absolute majority in parliament
like in the good old days”, noted
Ran ha-Cohen.
Barak’s roundish Pickwickesque figure has
been marketed by his PR campaigners as Der Fuhrer (Ha-manhig)
of his folk, “he is not nice, but he is a leader”. “He is
not nice; he is murderer” – replied the demonstrators in Tel
Aviv. Barak is quite unlikely fuhrer, with his feminine
face, a perfect mate to the masculine butch Tsipi Livni who
is being marketed as “another Fuhrer”. Our friend and
Livni’s cousin Gilad Atzmon wrote of these gender-confused
characters in charge of the Jewish state: “Both Livni and
Barak have to provide the Israeli voter with some real
exhibition of devastating carnage, so the Israelis can trust
their leadership.”
Meanwhile they do not make much progress.
Despite daily bombardments, the Gazans keep shooting back,
improving their hits and their weapons, reaching as far as
Beer Sheba. Moreover, they are not begging for unconditional
ceasefire, and the Israeli wish-list of ceasefire conditions
appear as hopeless as that they had vis-à-vis Hezbollah two
years ago. The initiative remained firmly in the Hamas hands
– until today.
The Gaza leadership made a daring if
calculated risk when they refused to extend the lapsed
ceasefire agreement unless the Jews lift the siege off the
Strip and agree to observe it on the West Bank as well.
These demands infuriated the petty fuhrers who were used to
decide the questions of war and peace alone, and propelled
them into action.
The Israeli government miscalculated:
their action received justifiably hostile response all over
the world. Some of the best pieces against Israeli
aggression appeared in the Western mainstream: by
Mark Steel and other writers of the Independent. With
expected exception of President Bush’ administration, the
West speaks and
demonstrates against the invasion. For sure graffiti on
a synagogue wall brings out more demonstrators than bombing
of a mosque and killing of all worshippers, but still it is
possible that the Jewish yoke over the Western public
opinion may be broken in the result of this intervention.
What is unexpected, is that Russian media, usually strongly
pro-Jewish, speaks in one voice against Israeli aggression.
Now it is the time to demonstrate, to
call for ostracism of Israel, for resignation of Mubarak,
and it is the time to support the legitimate government of
Gaza. Stay tuned.
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Mark Steel: So what have the Palestinians
got to complain about?
To portray this as a conflict between equals requires some
imagination
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
THE INDEPENDENT
When you read the statements from Israeli and US
politicians, and try to match them with the pictures of
devastation, there seems to be only one explanation. They
must have one of those conditions, called something like
"Visual Carnage Responsibility Back To Front Upside Down
Massacre Disorder".
For example, Condoleezza Rice, having observed that more
than 300 Gazans were dead, said: "We are deeply concerned
about the escalating violence. We strongly condemn the
attacks on Israel and hold Hamas responsible."
Someone should ask her to comment on teenage knife-crime, to
see if she'd say: "I strongly condemn the people who've been
stabbed, and until they abandon their practice of wandering
around clutching their sides and bleeding, there is no hope
for peace."
The Israeli government suffers terribly from this confusion.
They probably have adverts on Israeli television in which a
man falls off a ladder and screams, "Eeeeugh", then a voice
says, "Have you caused an accident at work in the last 12
months?" and the bloke who pushed him gets £3,000.
The gap between the might of Israel's F-16 bombers and
Apache helicopters, and the Palestinians' catapulty thing is
so ridiculous that to try and portray the situation as
between two equal sides requires the imagination of a
children's story writer.
The reporter on News at Ten said the rockets "may be
ineffective, but they ARE symbolic." So they might not have
weapons but they have got symbolism, the canny brutes.
It's no wonder the Israeli Air Force had to demolish a few
housing estates, otherwise Hamas might have tried to mock
Israel through a performance of expressive dance.
The rockets may be unable to to kill on the scale of the
Israeli Air Force, said one spokesman, but they are
"intended to kill".
Maybe he went on: "And we have evidence that Hamas
supporters have dreams, and that in these dreams bad things
happen to Israeli citizens, they burst, or turn into cactus,
or run through Woolworths naked, so it's not important
whether it can happen, what matters is that they WANT it to
happen, so we blew up their university."
Or there's the outrage that Hamas has been supported by
Iran. Well that's just breaking the rules. Because say what
you will about the Israelis, they get no arms supplies or
funding or political support from a country that's more
powerful than them, they just go their own way and make all
their weapons in an arts and crafts workshop in Jerusalem.
But mostly the Israelis justify themselves with a
disappointing lack of imagination, such as the line that
they had to destroy an ambulance because Hamas cynically put
their weapons inside ambulances.
They should be more creative, and say Hamas were planning to
aim the flashing blue light at Israeli epileptics in an
attempt to make them go into a fit, get dizzy and wander off
into Syria where they would be captured.
But they prefer a direct approach, such as the statement
from Ofer Schmerling, an Israeli Civil Defence official who
said on al-Jazeera, "I shall play music and celebrate what
the Israeli Air Force is doing."
Maybe they could turn it into a huge nationalfestival, with
decorations and mince pies and shops playing "I Wish We
Could Bomb Gaza Every Day".
In a similar tone Dov Weisglas, Ariel Sharon's chief of
staff, referred to the siege of Gaza that preceded this
bombing, a siege in which the Israelis prevented the
population from receiving essential supplies of food,
medicine, electricity and water, by saying, "We put them on
a diet."
It's the arrogance of the East End gangster, so it wouldn't
be out of character if the Israeli Prime Minister's press
conference began: "Oh dear or dear. It looks like those
Palestinians have had a little, er, accident. All their
buildings have been knocked down – they want to be more
careful, hee hee."
And almost certainly one of the reasons this is happening
now is because the government wants to appear hard as it
wants to win an election. Maybe with typical Israeli
frankness they'll show a party political broadcast in which
Ehud Olmert says, "This is why I think you should vote for
me", then shows film of Gaza and yells: "Wa-hey, that bloke
in the corner is on FIRE."
And Condoleezza Rice and her colleagues, and the specially
appointed Middle East Peace Envoy, could then all shake
their heads and say: "Disgraceful. The way he's flapping
around like that could cause someone to have a nasty
accident."
Johann Hari: The true story behind this
war is not the one Israel is telling
The Independent
Monday, 29 December 2008
The world isn't just watching the Israeli
government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it
self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every
morning until this punishment beating ends, the young people
of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and
more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide vests
or rockets. Israeli leaders have convinced themselves that
the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will
become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis
will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still
be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.
To understand how frightening it is to be
a Gazan this morning, you need to have stood in that small
slab of concrete by the Mediterranean and smelled the
claustrophobia. The Gaza Strip is smaller than the Isle of
Wight but it is crammed with 1.5 million people who can
never leave. They live out their lives on top of each other,
jobless and hungry, in vast, sagging tower blocks. From the
top floor, you can often see the borders of their world: the
Mediterranean, and Israeli barbed wire. When bombs begin to
fall – as they are doing now with more deadly force than at
any time since 1967 – there is nowhere to hide.
There will now be a war over the story of
this war. The Israeli government says, "We withdrew from
Gaza in 2005 and in return we got Hamas and Qassam rockets
being rained on our cities. Sixteen civilians have been
murdered. How many more are we supposed to sacrifice?" It is
a plausible narrative, and there are shards of truth in it,
but it is also filled with holes. If we want to understand
the reality and really stop the rockets, we need to rewind a
few years and view the run-up to this war dispassionately.
The Israeli government did indeed
withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – in order to be able
to intensify control of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon's senior
adviser, Dov Weisglass, was unequivocal about this,
explaining: "The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually
formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is
necessary so that there will not be a political process with
the Palestinians... this whole package that is called the
Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda
indefinitely."
Ordinary Palestinians were horrified by
this, and by the fetid corruption of their own Fatah
leaders, so they voted for Hamas. It certainly wouldn't have
been my choice – an Islamist party is antithetical to all my
convictions - but we have to be honest. It was a free and
democratic election, and it was not a rejection of a
two-state solution. The most detailed polling of
Palestinians, by the University of Maryland, found that 72
per cent want a two-state solution on the 1967 borders,
while fewer than 20 per cent want to reclaim the whole of
historic Palestine. So, partly in response to this pressure,
Hamas offered Israel a long, long ceasefire and a de facto
acceptance of two states, if only Israel would return to its
legal borders.
Rather than seize this opportunity and
test Hamas's sincerity, the Israeli government reacted by
punishing the entire civilian population. It announced that
it was blockading the Gaza Strip in order to "pressure" its
people to reverse the democratic process. The Israelis
surrounded the Strip and refused to let anyone or anything
out. They let in a small trickle of food, fuel and medicine
– but not enough for survival. Weisglass quipped that the
Gazans were being "put on a diet". According to Oxfam, only
137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza last month to feed
1.5 million people. The United Nations says poverty has
reached an "unprecedented level." When I was last in
besieged Gaza, I saw hospitals turning away the sick because
their machinery and medicine was running out. I met hungry
children stumbling around the streets, scavenging for food.
It was in this context – under a
collective punishment designed to topple a democracy – that
some forces within Gaza did something immoral: they fired
Qassam rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities. These
rockets have killed 16 Israeli citizens. This is abhorrent:
targeting civilians is always murder. But it is hypocritical
for the Israeli government to claim now to speak out for the
safety of civilians when it has been terrorising civilians
as a matter of state policy.
The American and European governments are
responding with a lop-sidedness that ignores these
realities. They say that Israel cannot be expected to
negotiate while under rocket fire, but they demand that the
Palestinians do so under siege in Gaza and violent military
occupation in the West Bank.
Before it falls down the memory hole, we
should remember that last week, Hamas offered a ceasefire in
return for basic and achievable compromises. Don't take my
word for it. According to the Israeli press, Yuval Diskin,
the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet,
"told the Israeli cabinet [on 23 December] that Hamas is
interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its
terms." Diskin explained that Hamas was requesting two
things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on
the West Bank. The cabinet – high with election fever and
eager to appear tough – rejected these terms.
The core of the situation has been
starkly laid out by Ephraim Halevy, the former head of
Mossad. He says that while Hamas militants – like much of
the Israeli right-wing – dream of driving their opponents
away, "they have recognised this ideological goal is not
attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future."
Instead, "they are ready and willing to see the
establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary
borders of 1967." They are aware that this means they "will
have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their
original goals" – and towards a long-term peace based on
compromise.
The rejectionists on both sides – from
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Bibi Netanyahu of Israel –
would then be marginalised. It is the only path that could
yet end in peace but it is the Israeli government that
refuses to choose it. Halevy explains: "Israel, for reasons
of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the
start of a diplomatic process with Hamas."
Why would Israel act this way? The
Israeli government wants peace, but only one imposed on its
own terms, based on the acceptance of defeat by the
Palestinians. It means the Israelis can keep the slabs of
the West Bank on "their" side of the wall. It means they
keep the largest settlements and control the water supply.
And it means a divided Palestine, with responsibility for
Gaza hived off to Egypt, and the broken-up West Bank
standing alone. Negotiations threaten this vision: they
would require Israel to give up more than it wants to. But
an imposed peace will be no peace at all: it will not stop
the rockets or the rage. For real safety, Israel will have
to talk to the people it is blockading and bombing today,
and compromise with them.
The sound of Gaza burning should be
drowned out by the words of the Israeli writer Larry Derfner.
He says: "Israel's war with Gaza has to be the most
one-sided on earth... If the point is to end it, or at least
begin to end it, the ball is not in Hamas's court – it is in
ours."