Hamas announced an immediate ceasefire by its militants and allied groups in Gaza on Sunday, giving Israel a week to pull out its troops from the coastal territory.
The move came after Israel announced a unilateral cease-fire late Saturday, ending its offensive against the Palestinian Islamist group in Gaza.
“Hamas and the factions announce a ceasefire in Gaza starting immediately and give Israel a week to withdraw,” said Ayman Taha, a Hamas official in Cairo for talks with Egypt on a truce deal.
Hamas also demanded that Israel open all of the Gaza Strip’s border crossings to allow in food and other goods to meet the “basic needs for our people.”
Damascus-based Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk confirmed the cease-fire on Syrian television. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment (updated) — It looks like Hamas has succeeded in grabbing the diplomatic initiative here by turning the tables on Israel. Israel said it will pull out of Gaza if the rocket fire stops but now Hamas is going to demonstrate that it retains command and control of Gaza by giving Israel a week to clear out. That leaves Israel in a bind. If they start pulling out right away they will appear to be complying with Hamas’ terms. If they drag their feet and as a consequence rocket fire resumes, they will appear to have squandered an opportunity to end the fighting.
The crucial element — from Hamas’ point of view — is that by maintaining a disciplined truce it provides a very visible demonstration that it retains control on the levers of power in Gaza. This sends a strong message to Israel and the rest of the world: Hamas was not crushed and it has the capacity and willingness to engage in a truce.
And the underlying message is the message that Israel and its allies have thus far been extraordinarily obstinate in refusing to learn: Hamas is not going away. They can either be fought or engaged but those who still cling to the fantasy of Hamas’ annihilation are nursing a destructive delusion.
UPDATE: Although Israel initially said it wanted “to allow the dust to settle and see how Hamas reacts” before it would start pulling troops out of Gaza, the fact that Israel began pulling troops back almost immediately after Hamas made its own ceasefire declaration, suggests — even if Israel won’t admit it — that they are implementing a deal. Both sides have a stake in maintaining an uncompromising posture but what we are witnessing now is mutually understood language being translated into actions.
The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel’s ongoing appropriation of their land and resources. Israel’s war against the Palestinians has turned Gaza and the West Bank into a pair of gigantic political prisons. There is nothing symmetrical about this war in terms of principles, tactics or consequences. Israel is responsible for launching and intensifying it, and for ending the most recent lull in hostilities.
Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides… against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war. Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.
We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders. We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions. [See the over 300 academic signatories]
Israel stands accused of perpetrating a series of war crimes during a sustained 12-hour assault on a village in southern Gaza last week in which 14 people died.
In testimony collected from residents of the village of Khuza’a by the Observer, it is claimed that Israeli soldiers entering the village:
attempted to bulldoze houses with civilians inside;
killed civilians trying to escape under the protection of white flags;
opened fire on an ambulance attempting to reach the wounded;
used indiscriminate force in a civilian area and fired white phosphorus shells.
If the allegations are upheld, all the incidents would constitute breaches of the Geneva conventions. [continued…]
“We won,” Ehud Olmert declared to the Israel public on Saturday night. His declaration of victory coincided with the implementation of a unilateral ceasefire — it might better simply be called a fleeting Inauguration lull. A tourniquet will be applied to Gaza for just along enough that Israel can claim it did its best not shower blood on Washington’s parade.
It is important for Israel that this be a unilateral ceasefire because for its current leadership there is greater political jeopardy in being perceived as having made a deal with Hamas than there is in the likelihood that the fighting will drag on without any clear resolution.
Israel’s ideological investment in the claim that Hamas cannot be negotiated with provides the conceptual bedrock for the argument that the organization must be crushed. For that reason, Israel has been concerned that Hamas’ solid record in being able to enforce last year’s truce must now be obscured (as I previously documented) and negotiations at establishing a real truce take place without Israel demonstrating good faith.
Obama’s challenge, once in three days he is forced to engage in a crisis that he has thus far merely “monitored,” is quite simple: Can he approach this issue in the same spirit with which he has already demonstrated he intends to confront every other issue — by being practical, pragmatic and empirical?
The roadblock to political progress right now is ideological intransigence — on the Israeli-US side. This has led to the current implausible situation: the idea that a ceasefire can be set in place without Hamas’ agreement. It’s like watching a driver who is stuck in the mud and who insists the best way of getting out is by spinning his wheels even faster. This is not a practical, pragmatic or empirical way of dealing with the problem.
Obama’s inclination at this point may well be that he does not want to rush into a situation where the risks seem high and the rewards elusive. Yet he is surely realistic enough to be able to see that Israel’s myopic leaders are incapable of digging themselves out of the crisis they have created.
On one point Obama needs to be absolutely clear right from the outset: the charade in which the US and its allies persist in talking about making “progress” in the “peace process” needs to be abandoned. The process has broken down; it has failed. Those who still claim that they are inching the process forward have as much credibility as the auto executives in Detroit who claim they are the visionaries who can save America’s car industry.
By Amjad Atallah and Daniel Levy, The Guardian, January 18, 2009
The unilateral nature of the Israeli declaration is no coincidence. In Saturday’s declaration of a ceasefire, Israel is hoping to send the message that Hamas is not a legitimate actor.
So who is the ceasefire actually with? It is, not coincidentally, consistent to some extent with the Egyptian-Turkish-Hamas negotiations which called for a ceasefire for 10 days during which the parties would agree to border crossing mechanisms, followed by an Israeli withdrawal, and an opening of the borders to humanitarian and economic aid.
However, by making the ceasefire a unilateral affair, accompanied only by an arrangement with the US (with whom Israel signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Friday regarding the prevention of weapons smuggling), Israel can continue its attempts to politically isolate and ostracise the Hamas government in Gaza.
That obviously serves the election campaign narrative of the Israeli governing coalition – yet if Hamas has no political stake in maintaining the ceasefire, it obviously will have little incentive to keep the peace. No one watching the news in the last weeks will have missed Hamas officials shuttling back and forth to Cairo and Doha for both the private and public relations component of preparing a ceasefire. There was a practical reason for the diplomatic activity that included them – they were the ones ruling Gaza. [continued…]
Barack Obama said last month that his election offered “a unique opportunity to reboot America’s image around the world and in the Muslim world in particular”, and that he planned to make a speech in a Muslim capital during his first 100 days in office denouncing terrorism and emphasising shared values. In the wake of the three-week bloodbath Israel has inflicted on Gaza, it should be clear to Mr Obama that he would be wasting his breath.
Hostility towards the US in the Muslim world is not based on a misunderstanding of America’s values: it is based on a clear vision of America’s policies. The bombs and missiles that destroyed Gaza, and the aircraft that delivered them, are American. And Washington blocked ceasefire efforts, in line with Israel’s wishes, to give its military efforts more time.
Seeking the overthrow of Hamas through an economic blockade of Gaza while boosting Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank has been the main thrust of US policy there for the past three years. Gaza has demonstrated the bloody futility of that policy, and Mr Obama will be judged in the Muslim world largely by how he reacts to that failure. Responding in an effective and balanced way requires a decisive break from the policies of his predecessors, which is not something he has shown a great willingness to do And yes, that’s predecessors, plural: a new policy needs to avoid the errors of both the Bush administration and the Clinton one before it. [continued…]
The diplomatic timing for the war looked lovely. The U.S. president who loved military action was still in power, though fading into the shadows. The new president, dynamic and popular, hadn’t yet entered office. There was no one to interfere, to pressure us to stop.
We don’t know if the Olmert-Livni-Barak triumvirate deliberately picked that window of opportunity. If so, it already looks like another of the war’s mistakes – perhaps the only welcome miscalculation. For instead of preventing American involvement, their decision to go to war on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration may well force him to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and push for a diplomatic solution.
In recent months, foreign-policy experts from Obama’s camp have debated whether there’s any point in a new peace initiative. Robert Malley, known as the most dovish veteran of Bill Clinton’s peace team, has written – surprisingly – that such an effort is hopeless. In an article in the New York Review of Books (written with Hussein Agha), Malley argues that the weakness of Israel’s leadership and the Palestinian political rift will prevent a two-state solution at present. Arguing the opposite, former ambassador Martin Indyk – who is likely to join the Obama administration – writes in Foreign Affairs of the “urgent need for a diplomatic effort.” The Middle East can’t be ignored, say Indyk and co-author Richard Haass. It will “force itself onto the U.S. president’s agenda.”
The Gaza War proves Indyk’s thesis. After the years of neglect under Bush, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has blown up again, on Obama’s doorstep. Grim photos appear in the media. Relations between Israel and Turkey, both American allies, are crumbling. While careful not to conduct foreign relations before the inauguration, Obama promised last week that his team would become “immediately engaged in the Middle East peace process.” At her confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton spoke of the “tragic humanitarian costs” borne by Gazans and of the incoming administration’s “determination to seek a peace agreement.” [continued…]
Hamas rising By Fawaz A. Gerges, Middle East Online, January 17, 2009
I have just returned from the Middle East and witnessed how Israel’s assault on Gaza is radicalizing mainstream Muslim opinion. Shown endlessly on Arab and Muslim television stations, the massive killing of civilians is fueling rage against Israel and its superpower patron, the United States, among mainstream and moderate voices who previously believed in co-existence with the Jewish state. Now, they are questioning their basic assumptions and raising doubts about Israel’s future integration into the region.
Many professionals, both Christian and Muslim Arabs, previously critical of Hamas, are bitter about what they call Israel’s “barbaric conduct” against Palestinian noncombatants, particularly women and children. No one I have encountered believes Israel’s narrative that this is a war against Hamas, not the Palestinian people. A near consensus exists among Arabs and Muslims that Israel is battering the Palestinian population in an effort to force it to revolt against Hamas, just as it tried to force the Lebanese people to revolt against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. But Hezbollah weathered that Israeli storm, acquired a sturdier immune system and became the most powerful institution in Lebanon. In so doing it shattered Israeli deterrence, delivered a blow to US Mideast policy and expanded the influence of Iran, Hezbollah’s main supporter in the region.
In my recent travels I was struck by the widespread popular support for Hamas — from college students and street vendors to workers and intellectuals. Very few ventured criticism of Hamas, and many said they felt awed by the fierce resistance put forward by its fighters. Israel’s onslaught on Gaza has effectively silenced critics of Hamas and politically legitimized the militant resistance movement in the eyes of many previously skeptical Palestinians and Muslims. Regardless of how this war ends, Hamas will likely emerge as a more powerful political force than before and will likely top Fatah, the ruling apparatus of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. [continued…]
In most of the world, the Israeli attack on Gaza is viewed as an intensely controversial act and, more commonly, an excessive, unjustifiable, and brutal assault on a trapped civilian population. But not in the United States—at least not among America’s political and opinion-making elite. Here one finds a bipartisan consensus as simplistic as it is unquestioned: Israel’s bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza are right and just, and it is the duty of the U.S. to support these actions unequivocally.
From the moment Israel began dropping bombs on Gaza, leaders of America’s two major political parties rushed to announce their total support, competing to see who could most fulsomely praise the offensive. So complete was the agreement that they all seemed to be reading from the same script. While other Western governments issued even-handed statements condemning both Israel and Hamas and their diplomats worked furiously to forge a ceasefire agreement, America’s political leaders stood on the sidelines, cheering with increasing fervor.
When it comes to Israel’s various military actions, there is far more dissent within Israel, where one commonly finds prominent, vehement criticism of the Israeli government, than there is within the U.S., where such criticism is all but nonexistent. Indeed, in the U.S. Congress, there is far more unqualified support for Israel’s wars than for America’s own. [continued…]
Israel’s message By Ilan Pappe, London Review of Books, January 14, 2009
In 2004, the Israeli army began building a dummy Arab city in the Negev desert. It’s the size of a real city, with streets (all of them given names), mosques, public buildings and cars. Built at a cost of $45 million, this phantom city became a dummy Gaza in the winter of 2006, after Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south.
When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense neighbourhood of Gaza City’. A week into the bombardment of Gaza, Ehud Barak attended a rehearsal for the ground war. Foreign television crews filmed him as he watched ground troops conquer the dummy city, storming the empty houses and no doubt killing the ‘terrorists’ hiding in them.
‘Gaza is the problem,’ Levy Eshkol, then prime minister of Israel, said in June 1967. ‘I was there in 1956 and saw venomous snakes walking in the street. We should settle some of them in the Sinai, and hopefully the others will immigrate.’ Eshkol was discussing the fate of the newly occupied territories: he and his cabinet wanted the Gaza Strip, but not the people living in it. [continued…]
What prompts the fantasy that you can “kill all the terrorists” without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed. They will be recorded as numbers, perhaps, but they will pass out of the awareness of the world. That is not the way things work, of course. There are people in the world — not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of millions — who feel more closely allied to the killed than they do to the killers.
“Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” In every culture and every civilization, to kill the innocent is evil. Fifty civilians who live in a neighborhood where one terrorist has built a hidden sniper’s nest are understood to be innocent. If you kill the fifty, you have done something worse than not killing the one.
Yet to put it like that brings up the revaluation of state terror that entered our language with the Sharon-Bush doctrine, first propounded in 2001-02. According to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction. This, no matter what the impediments on your freedom of movement, no matter how unconscious you may be of the existence of the terrorist, no matter how much your toleration of him may have been driven by fear. [continued…]
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