Israel’s lies By Henry Siegman, London Rivew of Books, January 29, 2009
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’ [continued…]
A bitter struggle is taking place over the right to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, even as the leadership of Hamas emerges from the rubble of areas that were devastated by 23 days of Israeli bombardment.
The international community insists that it cannot channel billions of dollars in reconstruction aid to Hamas, and is calling for the involvement of the more moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. But Hamas is insisting on sole control of Gaza’s rebuilding, as well as claiming moral leadership of the Palestinian people.
In the week since Israel and Hamas declared unilateral ceasefires to bring an end to more than three weeks of fighting, in which almost 1,500 Gazans died, the movement has acted rapidly to assert its control over assistance to civilians. [continued…]
The Palestinians are so fragmented politically and geographically that half of U.S. diplomacy is going to be about how to make peace between Palestinians, and build their institutions, so there is a coherent, legitimate decision-making body there — before we can make peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Second, Hamas now has a veto over any Palestinian peace deal. It’s true that Hamas just provoked a reckless war that has devastated the people of Gaza. But Hamas is not going away. It is well armed and, despite its suicidal behavior of late, deeply rooted.
The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank will not make any compromise deal with Israel as long as it fears that Hamas, from outside the tent, would denounce it as traitorous. Therefore, Job 2 for the U.S., Israel and the Arab states is to find a way to bring Hamas into a Palestinian national unity government. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Here’s a measure of how serious the situation is: Thomas Friedman gets how serious it is. He is even bold enough to suggest something that thus far Obama officials have been too timid to acknowledge: Hamas has to be included in any political process.
But this is where Friedman runs into his own conceptual road blocks. His vision of Hamas being “merged” into a Palestinian government sounds very much like a vision of Hamas being pacified as though it poses a threat that merely needs defusing without actually being politically addressed.
And what’s Israel to do while the US focuses on knocking the Palestinians into shape? Oh yeah — fulfill that golden promise: freeze the settlements. As though merely freezing settlement growth would be such a stupendous political accomplishment that no greater feat could ever be expected of an Israeli government.
The US must expect so little from an Israel because it has so consistently delivered even less.
If all the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these are the words that stuck in my mind: “You are on the wrong side of history.”
He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should ponder these words
In the last few days I have heard a lot of declarations from Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Olmert. And every time, these eight words came back to haunt me: “You are on the wrong side of history!”
Obama was speaking as a man of the 21st century. Our leaders speak the language of the 19th century. They resemble the dinosaurs that once terrorized their neighborhood and were quite unaware of the fact that their time had already passed. [continued…]
President Barack Obama is facing warnings that the US risks repeating some of its errors in Iraq as the new administration turns its focus to Afghanistan, where Nato forces are engaged in a conflict which has already lasted longer than the Second World War.
Having received a briefing on his first day in office from General David Petraeus, the top US commander in the region, Mr Obama is preparing to meet his military chiefs to decide on the size and shape of the Afghanistan reinforcements he promised during his election campaign. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, said just before Christmas that up to 30,000 more troops could be sent by summer, nearly doubling the size of the US force in the country. Britain, the next largest contributor in the 41-nation international force, has fewer than 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, which means American dominance of the campaign against the Taliban is set to increase.
“There are fears that this could become a US war rather than a Nato one,” said Christopher Langton, senior fellow for conflict at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. “With other Nato members already planning to scale back, the US could find itself isolated. Rather than being an international operation, it would become another ‘coalition of the willing’, as in Iraq – though with the crucial difference that the Afghan mission has had a United Nations mandate throughout.” [continued…]
It was near sunset when the tire on one of the armored vehicles blew out on the way back through the village of Khuga Kheyl this month. The U.S. Army convoy stopped dead in a narrow, rocky cleft between two small mountains. A gang of Afghan boys ran down a nearby slope toward the convoy as it jerked to a halt near the border with Pakistan.
That morning, Capt. Jay Bessey had warned his platoon not to waste time and to stay tight. There was word that a suicide attacker might try to infiltrate his small base in a remote district in the eastern Afghan province of Nangahar. There was also a rumor that Taliban forces may have planted more than a dozen bombs along the convoy’s route near another isolated district close by.
A flat tire an hour before sunset was the last thing Bessey needed. Yet there he sat, waiting for another unit to arrive with a spare. The incident underscored what all U.S. forces operating near the 1,500-mile-long border know: that the tyranny of the terrain is almost as formidable an obstacle to their goals here as the treachery of the Taliban. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — “… the tyranny of the terrain is almost as formidable an obstacle to their goals here as the treachery of the Taliban” — that a statement like this can be made eight years after 9/11 is tragically absurd. At that time any American capable of looking at a topographical map and understanding the tell-tale features of difficult terrain and who was willing to give a cursory glance at the history of military operations in the Hindu Kush, could have quickly concluded (as many of us did) that launching a war in this region would be an act of folly. All we needed to do was exercise the same level of military prudence that Hitler used in deciding not to invade Switzerland. There is no military might that is capable of crushing mountains.
Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, a Delaware-size chunk of territory with 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.
After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants’ farthest advance eastward into Pakistan’s so-called settled areas, residents and government officials from the region say.
With the increasing consolidation of their power, the Taliban have taken a sizable bite out of the nation. And they are enforcing a strict interpretation of Islam with cruelty, bringing public beheadings, assassinations, social and cultural repression and persecution of women to what was once an independent, relatively secular region, dotted with ski resorts and fruit orchards and known for its dancing girls. [continued…]
As majestic and spacious as it is vague, President Obama’s draft executive order directing the shuttering of the prison colony at Guantánamo is at once transformative and evasive.
Obama has taken a critical step in the right direction. But he has also evaded the hardest moral and legal quagmires of the Bush administration, denying both his critics a target and the many innocent detainees the swift relief they deserve. The result is a masterpiece of subtle political indirection — one that captures and exploits the moral poverty and specious reasoning of national debate over Guantánamo, even as it offers a promissory note for transformation in the future.
To understand the draft executive order’s acuity and its limits, it’s helpful to recall a term popularized by Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor, former Obama adviser, and the new head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — “minimalism.” [continued…]
President Obama’s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.
Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is “scattered throughout the executive branch,” a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.
Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority. [continued…]
Everyone agrees that the order shuttering the camp is the easy part; figuring out what to do with the 245 detainees there is far tougher. Amid all the hooting and hollering you’ll be hearing from around the world today, hard questions linger about how many of the detainees left at the camp are the “worst of the worst” (in the parlance of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) and how many simply can’t be returned to sender. Are most of the detainees terrorist masterminds or just luckless wanderers? If the former is true, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is right to be terrified that they will all be dropped off in his back yard at Leavenworth. If the latter is true, the Center for Constitutional Rights is correct in suggesting that closing the camp isn’t nearly as hard as it’s been made out to be. This is not a moral or political or existential question. It’s an empirical one, and presumably this matter can be resolved by the “prompt and thorough” review mandated by the president’s executive order.
One thing that will not help anyone, going forward, is the kind of hyperbole we’ve seen from both sides, suggesting that the whole camp is teeming with assassins or choirboys. So how many truly bad guys remain at Guantanamo? Here’s a start to sorting that out. [continued…]
Here [in Anbar], the new Iraq looks like the old one, imbued with politics that might be familiar to Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and adventurer who drew the country’s borders after World War I.
There is a saying heard these days in Anbar: “Everyone claims they have the love of Laila, but Laila loves none of them.” In other words, Laila gets to choose. The same might be said of the tribes, whose mantle everyone claims and which often demand a tidy sum for their support. Coddled and cultivated, the tribes are kingmakers. [continued…]
President Obama did not offer his patented poetry in his Inaugural Address. He did not add to his cache of quotations in Bartlett’s. He did not recreate J.F.K.’s inaugural, or Lincoln’s second, or F.D.R.’s first. The great orator was mainly at his best when taking shots at Bush and Cheney, who, in black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Wicked Witch of the West.
Such was the judgment of many Washington drama critics. But there’s a reason that this speech was austere, not pretty. Form followed content. Obama wasn’t just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now.
Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don’t-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture. We did so while a supposedly cost-free, off-the-books war, usually out of sight and out of mind, helped break the bank along with our nation’s spirit and reputation. [continued…]
Early this month, Barack Obama was meeting with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and other lawmakers when Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, began nervously cracking a knuckle.
Mr. Obama then turned to complain to Mr. Emanuel about his noisy habit.
At which point, Mr. Emanuel held the offending knuckle up to Mr. Obama’s left ear and, like an annoying little brother, snapped off a few special cracks.
The episode, confirmed by Mr. Emanuel’s office, underscores some essential truths about Mr. Emanuel: He is brash, has a deep comfort level with his new boss, and has been ever-present at Mr. Obama’s side of late, in meetings, on podiums and in photographs. [continued…]
President Barack Obama urged Israel on Thursday to open its borders with Gaza.
The plea came in a speech that signalled the new US administration’s shift from Bush-era policy on the Middle East and the world as a whole. In a high-profile address on his second day in office, just hours after he signed an executive order to close the centre at Guantánamo Bay, Mr Obama proclaimed that the US would “actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians” in the wake of this month’s Gaza war.
“The outline for a durable ceasefire is clear: Hamas must end its rocket fire: Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza: the US and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot re-arm,” the US president said.
“As part of a lasting ceasefire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime, with the international and Palestinian Authority participating.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Anyone who’s been paying attention for long enough knows that one of the primary causes of the war on Gaza was Israel’s unwillingness to lift the siege. Hamas wasn’t firing Qassams at Sderot in the hope of destroying Israel; its aim was to get a crippling economic embargo lifted. So when Obama calls for the borders to open “to allow the flow of aid and commerce” he is posing to challenge to Israel. This really should be headline news for every major American newspaper. But it isn’t. This suggests that, at least when it comes to Israel-related issues, Obama is going to face an unprecedented task: how does an American president effectively use the bully pulpit in front of a press corps that willfully ignores what he’s saying?
President Obama yesterday eliminated the most controversial tools employed by his predecessor against terrorism suspects. With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the “war on terror,” as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the U.S. government in battling its enemies will not be limitless.
While Obama says he has no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad, the notion that a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war was halted by executive order in the Oval Office.
Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001. [continued…]
President Barack Obama intends to use conservative values for progressive ends. He will cast extreme individualism as an infantile approach to politics that must be supplanted by a more adult sense of personal and collective responsibility. He will honor government’s role in our democracy and not degrade it. He wants America to lead the world, but as much by example as by force.
And in trying to do all these things he will confuse a lot of people.
One of the wondrous aspects of Obama’s inaugural address is the extent to which those on the left and those on the right both claimed our new president as their own. [continued…]
The graves are dug, the wounded tended, but the battle over what happened in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s 22-day offensive remains unfinished.
International organizations, citing videos and witnesses, say Israel may have committed war crimes in Gaza’s villages and city alleys. The Israel Defense Forces deny such allegations, issuing their own video clips and assessments.
Ninety-four percent of Israelis supported the campaign to stop Hamas from its long- standing practice of indiscriminately firing hundreds of rockets a week into southern Israel. Human rights organizations say the Palestinian militant group’s targeting of towns such as Sderot and Ashkelon also constitutes war crimes, as does the practice by Hamas leaders, regarded by the West and a number of Arab countries as terrorists, of using civilians as human shields.
The legal implications of the deaths of at least 1,300 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, will be debated, with much of the wrangling likely to concern such issues as proportionality, targeting and how careful efforts to not harm the innocent can go horribly wrong when tank shells stray from their coordinates. [continued…]
When members of the Sultan family ran from their home as an Israeli tank shelled its northern wall, there was no time to shut the front door. There was also no need.
The house, which family patriarch Samir al-Sultan began building at the age of 15, was all but destroyed as Israeli forces advanced into the Gaza Strip in early January, turning the house’s contents into a mangled mess of glass and mortar.
With no home to return to and no prospects for rebuilding, the Sultans on Thursday were among the thousands of Palestinians in Gaza searching for somewhere to go. [continued…]
The government is set to approve a bill Sunday to grant aid and support to Israel Defense Forces officers in cases where they face suits for alleged war crimes from Operation Cast Lead.
The bill, titled “strengthening the IDF’s hand after Operation Cast Lead”, was put forward by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and coordinated by the Ministry or Defense, Ministry of Justice and State Prosecutor. There is growing concern at the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of Justice that Israeli officers will be singled out in a wave of suits for alleged human rights violations. [continued…]
Former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who serves on the executive board of Christians United for Israel, says Mitchell is not the right man for the job.
“George Mitchell has a reputation on his previous work in the Middle East as being evenhanded between Israel and the Palestinian extremists. And for me that means the appointment is bad because I don’t believe we should be evenhanded between Israel and the Palestinians,” he contends. “I think Israel is our only reliable ally in the Middle East. I believe that they are right in this ongoing war that is being waged against them.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Gary Bauer joins Abe Foxman and others in an ongoing effort to attack the idea that the United States should play the role of honest broker in the Middle East. Instead, they assert that America’s sole responsibility is to stand up as Israel’s defender. By doing this, they are actually opening a space for an honest debate. They are correct in pointing to an ambiguity in the position of anyone who professes an unwavering commitment to Israel’s security at the same time as supporting impartial mediation between Israel and the Palestinians.
In fact, Israel’s national security should solely be the concern of the Israeli government. By making Israel’s security the concern of the US government, Washington allows itself to be held hostage to every Israeli policy and action that is done in the name of security. What the Obama administration needs to do is to say to Israel, as your ally we will support you in so far as you act both in your national interests and in the interests of regional peace. But when you fail to meet this measure, you will also lose our support. Our support is not unconditional.
The shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend’s cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.
But everywhere one looks, among the speeches and the desperate diplomacy, there is no real way forward. A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions.
Although it’s hard to realize after the horrors we’ve just witnessed, the state of war between the Jews and Palestinians has not always existed. In fact, many of the divisions between Jews and Palestinians are recent ones. The very name “Palestine” was commonly used to describe the whole area, even by the Jews who lived there, until 1948, when the name “Israel” came into use.
Jews and Muslims are cousins descended from Abraham. Throughout the centuries both faced cruel persecution and often found refuge with one another. Arabs sheltered Jews and protected them after maltreatment at the hands of the Romans and their expulsion from Spain in the Middle Ages.
The history of Israel/Palestine is not remarkable by regional standards — a country inhabited by different peoples, with rule passing among many tribes, nations and ethnic groups; a country that has withstood many wars and waves of peoples from all directions. This is why it gets so complicated when members of either party claims the right to assert that it is their land. [continued…]
Israel’s objectives from the war on Gaza were set long before its launch: to remove the Hamas movement and government, achieve the reinstallation of the Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in Gaza, and end the armed resistance. Two other objectives were not announced. First, restore the Israeli public’s wavering confidence in its armed forces after its defeat by Hezbollah in 2006. Second, boost the coalition government in the coming elections.
Accordingly, we declare that Israel lost, and lost decisively. What did it achieve? The killing of large numbers of civilians, children and women, and the destruction of homes, ministry buildings and other infrastructure with the most advanced US weapons and other internationally banned chemical and phosphorous elements. Almost 2,000 children were killed and injured in desperate pursuit of political goals. Many international organisations called these attacks war crimes, yet barely a word of denunciation was uttered by any western leader. What message does the EU mean to send Palestinians by its shameful silence on these crimes, when it speaks incessantly on human rights?
If anything, the last three weeks, and previous 18 months, have proved that the Palestinians can never be broken by either starvation, economic strangulation or brutal attack. European leaders have only one option: to recognise the outcome of a democratic process they had called for and supported. [continued…]
The political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, says that the time has come for the West to lift its boycott on his Palestinian Islamist movement.
In a speech aired on Arab satellite TV, the exiled chief said it was “time to start talking to Hamas”…
“I tell European nations… three years of trying to eliminate Hamas is enough. It is time for you to deal with Hamas, which has gained legitimacy through struggle,” Mr Meshaal said in a speech from the Syrian capital, Damascus. [continued…]
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 two in Gaza were anemic due to their parents’ inability to feed them properly. [continued…]
Israeli’s leaders, the last practitioners of the Bush doctrine, might want to consider another course more in line with a key inaugural theme of President Barack Obama:
“Power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please, ” Obama declaimed on the Capitol steps. Instead, “our power grows through its prudent use, our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”
(That, by the way, is pure Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian to whom Obama credits his worldview. His reflections on the use and limits of American power offer a better clue to where Obama is headed than any immediate policy decision which will necessarily be constrained by actions already set in motion by the previous administration.)
The place to start on a new course is to leave the “war on terror” behind and recognize that Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban — all of which have legitimate nationalist aspirations, but wrapped in Islamist garb — cannot be lumped into the same category as the cosmic terrorists of Al Qaeda who want to attack the US directly. The former you can negotiate with by addressing their grievances. You can’t deal with Al Qaeda because their claims are in another realm beyond this earth.
Dealing with Hamas or the Taliban doesn’t mean that if Obama talks to them they will roll over. It means that the use of force alone cannot work. It means that ignoring them won’t make them go away. [continued…]
On the morrow of the return of the last Israeli soldier from Gaza, we can determine with certainty that they had all gone out there in vain. This war ended in utter failure for Israel.
This goes beyond the profound moral failure, which is a grave matter in itself, but pertains to its inability to reach its stated goals. In other words, the grief is not complemented by failure. We have gained nothing in this war save hundreds of graves, some of them very small, thousands of maimed people, much destruction and the besmirching of Israel’s image.
What seemed like a predestined loss to only a handful of people at the onset of the war will gradually emerge as such to many others, once the victorious trumpeting subsides. The initial objective of the war was to put an end to the firing of Qassam rockets. This did not cease until the war’s last day. It was only achieved after a cease-fire had already been arranged. Defense officials estimate that Hamas still has 1,000 rockets. [continued…]
With the rule of Hamas in Gaza apparently unchallenged and its popularity growing in the West Bank, the new Obama administration faces an immediate policy choice: support a Palestinian unity government, as Egypt and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, want, or continue to isolate Hamas and concentrate on building up the West Bank as a political alternative to radical Islam. [continued…]
With just three weeks before voters go to the polls, the center-left government is getting high marks from the Israeli public for its pounding offensive in Gaza. But Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and her ruling centrist Kadima Party may fall victim to the military’s success. [continued…]
President Obama signed executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said. [continued…]
In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration. [continued…]
Faced with the risk that Taliban attacks could imperil the main supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan, the United States military has obtained permission to move troop supplies through Russia and Central Asia, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in the Middle East, said on Tuesday. [continued…]
Martin Luther King Day is celebrated. Barack Hussein Obama is inaugurated. The confluence of dates at the beginning of this week seems a culmination of hopes from the past, an auspicious omen for those with even greater hopes for the future. And in a general sense among Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East (whose satellite channels delight in using the new president’s middle name) there is a shared sense of new possibilities opening up. This, even though their attention—their fear, their anger—has been focused on the carnage in Gaza these last three weeks.
What the vast majority of Arabs have been slow to realize, however, is the profound connection that exists between the history of the struggle that opened the way for Obama to become president, and the future of their own fight for freedom and dignity, and not only in the face of Israeli occupation, but under the tyrannies of so many Arab dictators. We talk about remembering Martin Luther King because of the power of his vision, of his language, of his morality and of his faith. But mainly we remember him because he adopted a strategy of nonviolent confrontation with an insidious and pervasive system of repression—and broke it—and broke through it. We remember him because his way worked. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Resistance — whether it is violent or non-violent — carries the same message. It says: we cannot be crushed. The problem with violent resistance aimed at civilians (aside from its questionable morality) is that it allows the oppressor to cast himself as the victim. But the choice between violent and non-violent resistance should not be reduced to observations about which approach appears to be more effective.
In Gaza and the West Bank, a non-violent resistance movement — even if it springs up from the grass roots — will succeed or fail depending on its ability to establish itself as a mass movement that truly expresses Palestinian solidarity. That requires political leadership and Israel has demonstrated again and again its willingness to imprison or murder defiant Palestinian national political leaders.
From the perspective of Israel’s political leadership, Palestinian solidarity threatens Israel much more than Palestinian violence.
So, the question is not whether Palestinians can mobilize a non-violent resistance movement; it’s whether they can develop a robust solidarity movement and whether Israel will continue to succeed in thwarting such an effort. United we stand, divided we fall, is a timeless truth.
As residents of the Gaza Strip continued to sift through the rubble and mourn their dead, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon toured the seaside Palestinian enclave Tuesday and declared himself “deeply grieved by what I have seen today.”
Ban entered Gaza from Israel in a convoy of armored vehicles. Speaking to reporters in front of the smoldering remains of a U.N. food warehouse set ablaze last week by an Israeli tank shell, a somber Ban said he had witnessed “heartbreaking” scenes of destruction.
“I have seen only a fraction of the damage,” he said. “This is shocking and alarming.”
Ban later visited the southern Israeli town of Sderot, long a target for rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian militants. He called the attacks against Israeli residents “appalling and unacceptable.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Suppose that for the last eight years, an underground militia in Sderot had been contructing homemade rockets and firing them into Gaza. And suppose the firing rates and casualty and property damage rates on both sides were roughly the same.
In such a situation, neither Ban Ki-moon nor any other international political leader would be travelling to Sderot and saying how appalled they were at the suffering being inflicted on the residents of Sderot. Instead there would be a collective shrug as everyone wondered why this seemingly futile exchange of fire persisted.
What the UN Secretary-General and others do when they visit Sderot is to serve as Israel apologists who validate the sense of self-righteousness that provided the moral driving force that has been used to justify the massacre of Palestinians. When Ban goes to Gaza and says how appalled he is and then for the sake of diplomatic “balance” matches his response to the suffering of Israelis (real but miniscule in comparison), all his words end up ringing hollow.
The great danger for Barack Obama, with his natural charm and grace, is that he will try to please everyone. But he began his presidency with no glad hands — avoiding the easy applause lines and instead telling people things they might not want to hear.
The new president opened his inaugural address by reminding us how bad things are. He spoke not of sunny skies and amber waves but of “gathering clouds and raging storms.”
And he told us that it was partly our fault. The economic crisis wasn’t just a result of “greed and irresponsibility on the part of some” but a consequence of “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”
We all know the Pogo line about how “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” Obama implicitly seemed to embrace it. We have been an immature country; we want things that are in conflict. We favor lower taxes and more services; we want balanced budgets and more spending on entitlements. We want progress, so long as it doesn’t threaten the status quo. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — As much as Obama’s arrival in the White House marks a genuine turning point in not only America’s history but also the history of the world, as Americans we should restrain ourselves from using this as an opportunity for undeserved self-praise.
America did not quite evolve to reach this point – it got lucky. Had the economic crisis struck a mere three months later, America in its collective wisdom could easily have put McCain and Palin in charge and made yet another catastrophic miscalculation of Titanic proportions.
In as much as such a mass of hope and optimism is currently being invested in Obama as he presents himself as a man exceptionally suited to this moment, his arrival does not represent the awakening of American consciousness. Can he become the catalyst for that to happen? I certainly hope so. But we aren’t there yet.
As Obama said, “the world has changed, and we must change with it.” We need to change because we haven’t changed yet.
For the past year the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has negotiated with Israel on a peace settlement, knowing full well that nothing would come out of it. Why bother? Palestinian officials insisted a “process” was worth pursuing if only to hand the new American administration something to work with as soon as it takes office.
Barack Obama will be dragged into the Middle East conflict from day one. Unfortunately, before he picks up a peace process, he has to manage the aftermath of a devastating Gaza crisis, where a fragile ceasefire needs urgent American attention, an enraged Middle East urgently needs calm, and America’s sinking image needs urgent damage control. [continued…]
The wheat and potato fields of this kibbutz, or communal farm, in southern Israel stretch right up to the Gaza border fence. In almost surreal proximity on the other side rise the apartment buildings, water towers and minarets of the Palestinian village of Abasan.
Israel’s deadly offensive against Hamas in Gaza ended on Sunday, with each side having unilaterally declared a cease-fire. Yet there was little sense of triumph here in the days after, more a nagging feeling of something missed or incomplete.
Elad Katzir, a potato farmer, was nervous as he drove through the lush fields, agreeing to stop the car only behind clumps of trees or bushes as cover in case of sniper fire. By one thicket, nestled among wildflowers, was a memorial to a soldier who was shot dead here while on patrol seven years ago.
“I do not feel any victory,” Mr. Katzir said. “I still do not feel safe.” [continued…]
Israel slowed its withdrawal of forces from Gaza on Tuesday as the two-day cease-fire with Hamas suffered its first violations. Israeli troops twice came under fire, and eight mortar shells were shot at Israel, all falling short. Israel responded with airstrikes on launching sites.
Thousands of Palestinians supported Hamas at four rallies here while the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, visited to express support for those who had suffered in the war. An Arab meeting in Kuwait aimed at helping Gaza ended in disarray.
Israel would not comment on the pace of withdrawal, but Israel Radio’s military affairs correspondent reported that some soldiers held positions in northern Gaza to make sure Hamas did not retake rocket-launching sites. [continued…]
Hurray! We lost! By Henryk M. Broder, Der Spiegel, January 20, 2009
Johann Cruyff was born in Amsterdam in 1947 and is still considered the best football player Holland ever produced. His name can be mentioned in the same breath with Beckenbauer, Pelé and Maradona. The Dutch honor him even today not only for his swift legs, but also for his original turns of phrase. When he was the coach of Ajax Amsterdam, he reportedly told his players before a match against a weaker team: “They cannot win against us, but we can lose against them.”
Israel finds itself in exactly this type of situation when it comes to Hamas. The Palestinians militants are never going to defeat the Israeli military. But the end of “Operation Cast Lead” has confirmed that Israel can lose to Hamas. By waging a war that has killed 1,300 Palestinians and wounded several thousand, Israel has not only succeeded in turning global public opinion against itself; it has also invited sanctions that will be much heavier than a few negative editorials in the New York Times or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. [continued…]
An international order will emerge if a system of compatible priorities comes into being. It will fragment disastrously if the various priorities cannot be reconciled.
The nadir of the international financial system coincides with simultaneous political crises around the globe. Never have so many transformations occurred at the same time in so many different parts of the world and been made accessible via instantaneous communication. The alternative to a new international order is chaos.
The financial and political crises are, in fact, closely related partly because, during the period of economic exuberance, a gap had opened up between the economic and the political organisation of the world. The economic world has been globalised. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point.
So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves. [continued…]
The US is not just another country and its president is not just another politician. Who he is, the choices he makes, matter to billions of people around the globe.
There is no need to tell President Barack Obama that the world is messy and complicated or to list the many things that need to be done. We hope that Mr Obama and his team have also noted the places that have seen steady, sometimes dramatic, progress in recent years – China, Indonesia, Brazil and central Europe to name a few.
Successes can look after themselves. It is the problems and failures that he and others will have to focus on. In many cases, we understand the nature of the problem and even know what the solution looks like. Sometimes – in the Middle East, for example – we have known for years. The real question is how to implement it. [continued…]
The distressed state of the Arab world was on full display last week on two fronts: The massive Arab emotional reaction against Israel’s ferocious attack on Gaza, and the slightly ridiculous holding of three separate Arab summit meetings — with not a single practical result expected from any of them. The deeper reality that plagues the Arab world is that the average Arab citizen faces an unsatisfying choice between a brand of Islamist-nationalist military resistance that triggers enormous Israeli attacks and Arab death and destruction, and a brand of Arab autocratic governance that breeds mediocrity, corruption and perpetual vulnerability and dependence.
The choice is stark: Hamas or Fateh in Palestine; Hizbullah or Hariri in Lebanon; Mubarak & Son or Muslim Brothers in Egypt — and the list continues through every Arab country. The slow gravitation and polarization of the modern Arab state system over the past three generations into two broad camps of status quo conservatives and resistance fighters is more apparent than ever, and equally frustrating.
The powerful Islamist-nationalist resistance and social-political movements that have come into being in recent decades are first and foremost a response to the poor performance and low credibility of the power elite that has dominated the modern Arab world. Movements like Hamas and Hizbullah have gained additional strength and legitimacy from fighting the Israeli occupation, which the established Arab power structure has not done very well in most cases, despite half a dozen wars since 1948. [continued…]
Turkey’s value to Europe and the US as a close partner helping manage regional problems has been re-emphasised by the Gaza crisis. As the fighting threatened to spin out of control, Turkish diplomats showed they could reach parts other diplomats cannot by talking directly to the senior Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, in Damascus.
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, personally consulted Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria as part of a wider mediation effort. And it was Erdogan, a careful cultivator of relations with Tehran, who kept open lines of communication to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an ardent Hamas supporter.
The successful expansion of Turkish influence in the Middle East and beyond under Erdogan’s moderate Islamist government has been dubbed “neo-Ottomanism”, suggesting a revival by other means of Turkey’s once extensive but now defunct empire. Hurriyet newspaper has claimed Turkish diplomacy has entered a new “golden age”, acting as a crossroads between east and west, Islam and secular Christendom. [continued…]
The Saudi king said Monday his country will donate $1 billion to help rebuild the Gaza Strip after the devastating Israeli offensive and told Israel that an Arab initiative offering peace will not remain on the table forever.
King Abdullah’s comments at an Arab economic summit in Kuwait City were his first since Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas declared a fragile cease-fire to halt three weeks of violence in Gaza that killed more than 1,250 Palestinians.
“Israel has to understand that the choice between war and peace will not always stay open and that the Arab peace initiative that is on the table today will not stay on the table,” said Abdullah during a speech. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Will Israel’s leaders be troubled by King Abdullah’s warning? I doubt it. What Saudi Arabia, Jordan (whose own Abdullah still insists the 18-year old peace process should not be abandoned) and Egypt have showcased over the last three weeks — whatever they might assert — is their own political impotence. If there is going to be any new initiative it seems more likely it will come from Ankara, Damascus of Doha.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan criticized world leaders for leaving Hamas out of the peace process, saying it was a democratically elected political party.
He also warned that the situation in Gaza could take on a very different dimension if “Western countries” did not show appropriate sensitivity toward Hamas.
“This political party Hamas won an election with nearly 75 percent of the vote. The West, which has shown no respect for this embracing of democracy, is responsible for this situation,” Erdogan told a news conference.
Syrian President Bashar Assad says he’s prepared to work with US President-elect Barack Obama. “The new American government must be prepared to engage in a serious peace process. We are prepared for any form of cooperation,” Assad told Spiegel in an interview. But he has a few conditions.
Until now, Bashar Assad says, his country has waged war against Israel, viewed Americans as its opponents and offered Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal and other top leaders exile as well as employment opportunities. Nevertheless, Assad says, he sees opportunities for less violence. “We would be happy to do our part to stabilize the region,” he told Spiegel in an interview to be published on Monday.
But he also insisted that his country’s relations with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran would not be dictated by outsiders.
“Good relations with Washington cannot mean that we have bad ones with Tehran,” he said.
The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.
“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.
It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.
The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza, especially because Israel’s antirocket attacks in previous years had been more measured.
When Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniya, appeared on Hamas television from his hiding spot last Monday, he picked up on the Israeli archetype, referring in Arabic to the battle under way as “el harb el majnouna,” the mad or crazy war.
For most, of course, feeling abused like this has created deep rage at Israel.
“If you want to make peace with the Palestinians, they are tired of bombs, drones and planes,” said Mohammad Abu Muhaisin, a 35-year-old resident of the southern city of Rafah who is affiliated with Fatah, the rival to Hamas that rules in the West Bank and was ejected from Gaza in June 2007. “But a guy whose child has just been killed doesn’t want peace. He wants war.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — As Tzipi Livni makes her own personal assessment of gains from the war, she cannot have failed to notice that despite frequent reports that Kadima was being bolstered by the military campaign, their polling numbers have actually got worse. On December 27, AP reported:
A poll by the Dahaf Research Institute showed Livni’s Kadima Party winning 29 of parliament’s 120 seats — the same number it has now — and Netanyahu’s Likud taking 26 if elections were held today. A TNS Teleseker survey gave Kadima 31 seats to Likud’s 29.
The Jerusalem Post today reports that a Channel 2/Ma’agar Mohot poll predicted a 31-23 Likud victory over Kadima, while a Channel 10/Dialog poll said Likud would win 29-26.
As for what Ehud Olmert hopes to gain from the war, perhaps it could be viewed as one of the most audacious efforts at jury tampering in history.
On Saturday evening, Israel announced not a ceasefire – in the sense of an agreement between the parties to end a conflict – but a decision that its forces will unilaterally halt their fire. It said it would await the Hamas response, any timetable for a withdrawal of Israeli forces being contingent on an end to rocket fire from Gaza.
Yesterday, the resistance movements in Gaza, including Hamas, unilaterally announced a cessation of military action for one week, by the end of which time they demand that all Israeli forces should have departed Gaza. Implicit in this initiative is the threat that, were they to fail to leave within seven days, Hamas and the other groups would resume the firing of rockets into Israel.
At one level, this unilateralist outcome resolves none of the core problems that were at the source of the conflict in the first place. Hamas remains in control in Gaza; its military capacity has not been substantially degraded: 40 missiles were fired at Israel on Saturday, and at least a further 16 were launched before Hamas announced the ceasefire yesterday. And nothing has been settled in terms of the opening of the crossings from Israel into Gaza, or in respect of the Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza. The release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli captive, has not advanced. [continued…]
Israel is preparing for a wave of lawsuits by pro-Palestinian organizations overseas against Israelis involved in the Gaza fighting, claiming they were responsible for war crimes due to the harsh results stemming from the IDF’s actions against Palestinian civilians and their property.
Senior Israeli ministers have expressed serious fears during the past few days about the possibility that Israel will be pressed to agree to an international investigation of the losses among non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead; or alternately, that Israelis will be faced with personal suits, such as happened to Israeli officers who were accused of war crimes in Britain for their actions during the second intifada.
“When the scale of the damage in Gaza becomes clear, I will no longer take a vacation in Amsterdam, only at the international court in The Hague,” said one minister. It was not clear whether he was trying to make a joke or not. [continued…]
Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor who worked in Gaza’s hospitals during the conflict, said that Israel was using so-called Dime (dense inert metal explosive) bombs designed to produce an intense explosion in a small space. The bombs are packed with tungsten powder, which has the effect of shrapnel but often dissolves in human tissue, making it difficult to discover the cause of injuries.
Dr Fosse said he had seen a number of patients with extensive injuries to their lower bodies. “It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wounds,” he said. “Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.” However, the injuries matched photographs and descriptions in medical literature of the effects of Dime bombs.
“All the patients I saw had been hit by bombs fired from unmanned drones,” said Dr Fosse, head of the Norwegian Aid Committee. “The bomb hit the ground near them and exploded.” His colleague, Mads Gilbert, accused Israel of using the territory as a testing ground for a new, “extremely nasty” type of explosive. “This is a new generation of small explosive that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 metres,” he said.
According to military databases, Dime bombs are intended for use where conventional weapons might kill or injure bystanders – to kill combatants in a house, for example, without harming people next door. Instead of being made from metal, which sprays shrapnel across a wide area, the casing is carbon fibre. Part of the motive for developing the bombs was to replace the use of depleted uranium, but Dr Fosse said the cancer risk from tungsten powde was well known. “These patients should be followed up to see if there are any carcinogenic effects,” he said. [continued…]
All day, thousands of Gazans have been rushing back to their neighbourhoods to see what is left after Israel’s campaign of bombing and shelling.
Gaping holes and fire-blackened cars litter the streets in the areas hit hardest by the fighting.
I have spoken to some people who say they have not even been able to find their way round their bomb-damaged neighbourhoods, never mind find the remains of their homes.
Many simply turned round and returned to the UN-run schools they fled to amid the fighting.
But for some Gazans even attempting to return home is virtually unimaginable. [continued…]
Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner where they hate to be.”
Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
In January 2006, five months after the Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing, and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.
To make matters worse, the national unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into Gaza. [continued…]
After several days of following the Al-Jazeera coverage of Gaza, I’ve never seen a live interview with an Israeli, neither a politician nor a civilian. In the Al-Jazeera version, the Gaza conflict has only two participants: the Israeli army – an impersonal force represented as tanks and planes on the map – and the Palestinian civilians, often shown entering the hospital on makeshift stretchers. There are few Hamas rockets and no Israeli families. It’s not hard to see why Al-Jazeera is accused of deliberately inflaming regional enmity and instability.
But in a larger sense, Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.
For an American, to watch Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza is to realize that you’ve become alienated not just from war, but even from the representation of war as a real thing. As Americans, we’re used to hearing the sound of heavy artillery, machine guns, and bombs in action films and video games. Yet here on the news, they seem strangely out of place. You could argue that Al-Jazeera uses images of civilian violence to foment public outrage against Israel. This might well be true. At the same time, these images acknowledge human suffering and civilian death and stand strongly against them – and in doing so, foment outrage against war itself. [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…]
Hamas will not accept Israeli conditions for a cease-fire in Gaza and would continue armed resistance until the offensive ends, Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Palestinian Islamist group, said on Friday.
Speaking at the opening of an emergency meeting on Gaza in Doha, Meshal called on the leaders present to cut all ties with Israel.
Meshal joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in making the surprise appearance at the summit, aiming to show their weight in diplomatic efforts surrounding the Gaza crisis.
Hamas is set to send a delegation to Cairo later on Friday to discuss Egyptian efforts to mediate a cease-fire in Gaza, a Hamas official told Al Jazeera television. [continued…]
Turkey’s prime minister on Friday said Israel should be barred from the United Nations while it ignores the body’s calls to stop fighting in Gaza.
“How is such a country, which totally ignores and does not implement resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, allowed to enter through the gates of the UN (headquarters)?” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
Erdogan’s comments reflected a growing anger in Turkey, Israel’s best friend in the Muslim world, over Israel’s Gaza operation.
He spoke before U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was due to arrive in Ankara to discuss the conflict. Ban is on a weeklong trip to the region to promote a truce after both sides ignored a U.N. resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire.
“The U.N. building in Gaza was hit while the U.N. secretary-general was in Israel,” Erdogan said. “This is an open challenge to the world, teasing the world.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Erdogan is right: Israel is thumbing its nose at global opinion with a conviction — so far well-founded — that it can act with impunity. Likewise, the killing of Hamas’ Interior Minister Said Sayyam, one of the group’s three most senior leaders, in an airstrike on Thursday, was, Haaretz reported: “apparently an attempt by Israel to deliver an image of victory in its offensive against Hamas.”
A victory blow in the minds of Israel’s leaders, but is this the way to secure a ceasefire? Israel’s leaders seem to have acquired the diplomatic finesse of the Soprano Family.
By mid-week, it seemed as though the imminent inauguration of Obama along with Israel’s desire to cut a deal on an intelligence agreement for which Condoleezza Rice’s signature would be needed before she left office today — that these factors in combination with a widening consensus that Israel could not accomplish any more militarily, seemed to suggest that before the end of the week an agreement would be reached on an initial ceasefire.
What the Israel’s don’t seem to have grasped is that is that if a ceasefire comes into effect before Obama takes office, this will serve Israel’s interests much more than Hamas’.
Israel now appears to be acting out a victory lust. Israel and its leaders have become intoxicated by their destructive capabilities to a point where they have lost their grip on reality. Israel is in a state of national psychosis.
“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people”, said Moshe Yaalon, the then Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief-of-staff in 2002. The war launched by Israel in the Gaza strip at the end of 2008 is designed in part to force the Hamas movement too to internalise this belief. It will not and cannot work; indeed, it is my argument that the war will have the opposite effect.
After three weeks of intense and round-the-clock attacks by air, land and sea, Israel is far from achieving either its immediate aim of halting rocket-attacks from Gaza or the larger “psychological” aim enunciated by Moshe Yaalon. It has become apparent that the war itself will instead convince many more Palestinians that their ability again to withstand an assault by the fourth most powerful army in the world is a source of their power rather than their weakness.
In this, the 1.5 million Palestinians under siege in Gaza are writing a new chapter in their own uncompleted modern history. They are also demonstrating a more general lesson of warfare: that wars and armed conflicts have unexpected consequences, including often the creation of a new reality quite different from what it was launched to achieve. [continued…]
Someone has to stop this rampant madness. Right now. It may seem as though the cabinet hasn’t decided on the “third stage” of the war yet, Amos Gilad is discussing a cease fire in Cairo, the end of the fighting seems close – but all this is misleading.
The streets of Gaza Thursday looked like killing fields in the midst of the “third stage” and worse. Israel is arrogantly ignoring the Security Council’s resolution calling for a cease-fire and is shelling the UN compound in Gaza, as if to show its real feeling toward that institution. Emergency supplies intended for Gaza residents are going up in flames in the burning warehouses. Thick black smoke is rising from the burning flour sacks and the fuel reserves near them, covering the streets.
In the streets, people are running back and forth in panic, holding children and suitcases in their hands, helpless as the shells fall around them. Nobody in the diplomatic corridors is in any hurry to help those unfortunates who have nowhere to run. [continued…]
Pressure is mounting on Israel and Hamas to find a way of ending the war in Gaza. Both sides have responded positively, if tentatively, to Egyptian proposals for a phased truce that would begin with a lull in fighting for a defined period (10 days by some accounts). That interlude would then allow for the brokering of a more comprehensive cease-fire. But each side’s goals from any truce remain antagonistic to those of the other, and reaching an agreement that bridges the vast gap between them remains a Herculean diplomatic challenge.
Even before the Israeli invasion began late December, Hamas had offered to renew its six-month cease-fire with Israel on condition that the border crossings from Egypt and Israel into Gaza be opened. Those crossings have been closed as part of a strategy of imposing economic deprivation on the people of Gaza in the hope that they would turn on Hamas; Israel remains reluctant to agree to reopen them as part of a cease-fire deal, since that would be claimed as a victory by Hamas. Hamas also insists on a full and immediate withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza. Israel is reluctant to comply until mechanisms are in place to prevent Hamas rearming.
Israel’s declared purpose in launching Operation Cast Lead was to halt Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza, and prevent Hamas from being able to rearm through smuggling weapons from Egypt. Israel remains committed, however, to a long-term goal of ending Hamas control of Gaza, and it insists that the movement should gain no “recognition” or “legitimacy” as part of any truce — a tough call since Hamas is the key combatant on the Palestinian side. [continued…]
Inquiries with people uninvolved in the spat between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reveal that his version of the lead-up to America’s vote on last week’s Security Council resolution is closer to the truth than hers.
Last Wednesday, the only proposal on the council’s table was a completely one-sided Libyan resolution. Since it was clear to everyone that the United States would veto it, Israel had no reason to worry. But then, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a former senior World Bank official, decided that this was the moment to make use of his Washington connections.
Fayyad persuaded the Americans to support a softened version of the resolution, which called for a prompt cease-fire, hoping that such a resolution would speed up the ongoing truce talks. He asked the British and French for help, and they agreed. Rice signaled her French and British counterparts, Bernard Kouchner and David Miliband, that she was on board. [continued…]
From Gaza to Kandahar, the new Obama administration is confronted with two kinds of Islamist movements: the ones with a global agenda (al-Qaida and its local subsidiaries) and the others with a territorial and national agenda (Taliban, Hamas, most of its Iraqi opponents). There is nothing to negotiate with the global jihadists, but the Islamo-nationalist movements simply cannot be ignored or suppressed.
Hamas is nothing else than the traditional Palestinian nationalism with an Islamic garb. The Taliban express more a Pashtu identity than a global movement. The Iraqi factions are competing not over Iran or Saudi Arabia, but over sharing (or monopolizing) the power in Iraq.
The “war on terror” during the Bush years has blurred this essential distinction by merging all the armed opponents to U.S.-supported governments under the label of terrorism. The concept of a “war on terror” has thwarted any political approach to the conflicts in favor of an elusive military victory. [continued…]
Seven years on from 9/11 it is clear that we need to take a fundamental look at our efforts to prevent extremism and its terrible offspring, terrorist violence. Since 9/11, the notion of a “war on terror” has defined the terrain. The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats, the need for solidarity, and the need to respond urgently – where necessary, with force. But ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available. We must. The question is how.
The idea of a “war on terror” gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The reality is that the motivations and identities of terrorist groups are disparate. Lashkar-e-Taiba has roots in Pakistan and says its cause is Kashmir. Hezbollah says it stands for resistance to occupation of the Golan Heights. The Shia and Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq have myriad demands. They are as diverse as the 1970s European movements of the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, and Eta. All used terrorism and sometimes they supported each other, but their causes were not unified and their cooperation was opportunistic. So it is today.
The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Baby steps in the right direction are to be welcomed but David Miliband’s recognition that the concept of a “war on terror” has been counterproductive only goes so far. What he advocates is replacing the Bush paradigm with the Thatcher paradigm: “The best response is to refuse to be cowed.” Up to a point…
The problem is that this philosophy — we will not let the terrorists disrupt our lives — does nothing to address the grievances that are being channelled into violence.
Resistance movements don’t come out of nowhere. If you want to dismantle a resistance movement, cutting off the flow of weapons doesn’t go to the root. You have to take away the foundation of the movement by showing that there are effective non-violent means through which its aims can be achieved.
Many Israelis will counter that there is no political approach to an organization like Hamas if its sole aim is the destruction of Israel.
Hamas’s actions, however, paint a different story than the rhetoric with which it gets stereotyped.
Qassam rockets and calls for the destruction of “the Zionist entity” do not pose an existential threat to Israel. Hamas’s willingness to hold the reigns of government, on the other hand, places it in a much more vulnerable position than it would be in as a purely militant organization. In other words, by pursuing practical political goals Hamas has taken a bigger risk than it would have had it chosen to remain outside the political domain. (Well before it entered the democratic arena, it had demonstrated its ability to survive a campaign of Israeli “targeted assassinations” and “surgical strikes.”)
Suppose the attempted US-backed coup through which Mohammed Dahlan’s security force tried to oust Hamas in June 2007 had succeeded. And suppose Fatah and the Palestinian Authority had effectively swept Hamas off the political stage. Would this have destroyed Hamas? Of course not. The Islamist group would simply have re-focused its efforts on militant operations while Israel’s “peace partner” would be wringing its hands saying it was doing all it could to limit attacks on Israel. Gaza would have been spared the current onslaught but rockets would still be fired on Israel — as they were before Hamas won the elections.
The irony is that if Israel ever decides it really wants to negotiate peace, the group that can really deliver is the group most Israelis want to see destroyed.
But this isn’t news to Israel’s current leaders. Despite all their claims that they refuse to negotiate with Hamas that is what they are currently doing — again through Egyptian mediation. The difference now from the negotiations last summer is that Hamas will not be satisfied with a verbal understanding on which Israel can renege. This time the deal — if there is one — needs to be codified in a written agreement.
The fighting in Gaza is “war deluxe.” Compared with previous wars, it is child’s play – pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles, combat engineering troops destroying entire streets in their ominous protected vehicles without facing serious opposition. A large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight. All this must be said openly, before we begin exulting in our heroism and victory.
This war is also child’s play because of its victims. About a third of those killed in Gaza have been children – 311, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, 270 according to the B’Tselem human rights group – out of the 1,000 total killed as of Wednesday. Around 1,550 of the 4,500 wounded have also been children according to figures from the UN, which says the number of children killed has tripled since the ground operation began.
This is too large a proportion by any humanitarian or ethical standard.
It is enough to look at the pictures coming from Shifa Hospital to see how many burned, bleeding and dying children now lie there. History has seen innumerable brutal wars take countless lives.
But the horrifying proportion of this war, a third of the dead being children, has not been seen in recent memory. [continued…]
Israel hoped that the war in Gaza would not only cripple Hamas, but eventually strengthen its secular rival, the Palestinian Authority, and even allow it to claw its way back into Gaza.
But with each day, the authority, its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and its leading party, Fatah, seem increasingly beleaguered and marginalized, even in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which they control. Protesters accuse Mr. Abbas of not doing enough to stop the carnage in Gaza — indeed, his own police officers have used clubs and tear gas against those same protesters.
The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from average Palestinians.
“The Palestinian Authority is one of the main losers in this war,” said Ghassan Khatib, an independent Palestinian analyst in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “How can it make gains in a war in which it is one of the casualties?”
Israel is proposing, with the tacit agreement of Egypt and the United States, to place the Palestinian Authority at the heart of an ambitious program to rebuild Gaza, administering reconstruction aid and securing Gaza’s borders. But that plan is already drawing skepticism. Mr. Khatib, for example, called the idea of any Palestinian Authority role in postwar Gaza “silly” and “naïve.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Since George Bush has been the preeminent proponent of this piece of strategic folly, it seems fitting that he should be remembered in what I now dub The Bush Law.
How does it work?
Find an opponent you want to weaken and then set about making him stronger. Find an ally you want to strengthen and then set about making him weaker.
At any other time there would be nothing notable about Benjamin Netanyahu reminding everyone that he thinks that “at the end of the day” there is “no alternative” but to “bring down” Hamas. But at a time when the ostensible aims of the war Israel has waged for 18 days have fallen rather short of that, it can hardly fail to have an impact. The leader of the right-wing opposition party Likud, and the man the polls predict could become prime minister in less than a month’s time chose to do it, moreover, during a fluent session with foreign journalists in which – for much of the time at least – he cast himself as a statesman comfortable on the global stage and determined to remain above party politics at a time of war.
He said he was looking forward, if elected, to working with Senator Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, without the slightest hint of the friction that existed between him and her husband, President Bill Clinton, when the Likud leader was prime minister in the Nineties.
Justifying a vote by a Knesset committee this week to ban two Arab parties from contesting the elections, he smoothly quoted a remark by the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza that “democracy allows all the freedoms except the freedom to destroy democracy”. And even at his most bellicose, he eschewed the rhetoric his main rival, Tzipi Livni, has unashamedly used about Israel “going wild”. Instead he declared at one point of the many hundreds of Palestinian casualties: “We grieve for every one of them; we genuinely do,” before adding, inevitably: “But a responsible government does not give immunity to criminal terrorists who fire at us while using civilians as a human shield.” [continued…]
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s rightwing opposition leader and favourite to win next month’s elections, said today Israel needed a “clear victory” against Hamas and that the movement should “ultimately be removed” from Gaza.
He called for a victory against the Islamist movement “that will cripple its capability” to attack. “At a minimum, the firing of rockets must stop and the smuggling corridors that have enabled Hamas to smuggle thousands of rockets into Gaza must be sealed,” he told a news conference. “We are fighting a just war, perhaps the most just war there is.” [continued…]
Defense Minister Ehud Barak is promoting a week-long “humanitarian cease-fire” in the Gaza Strip. In contrast, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert believes the military operation still has not achieved its goals.
Olmert is delaying a meeting with senior ministers in an effort to allow the military operations in Gaza to continue. [continued…]
A few days ago, I met a European ambassador stationed in Israel. The man, a great friend of Israel, launched an emotional monologue and spoke from the bottom of his heart.
“Make no mistake,” he said. “I understand why you embarked on the operation in Gaza, and many of my colleagues also understand and even support it, but a few days ago you started to cross red lines.”
The ambassador continued, reiterating his support and his love for Israel. “We too would like to damage Hamas, we too would not sit by quietly if they were firing rockets at us,” he said. “It was clear to us that innocent people would be hurt in any operation in Gaza, and we were prepared to accept that up to certain limit, but in the past few days it seems that your action is getting out of control, and the harm to civilians is tremendous.”
The straw that broke the camel’s back for that ambassador was the Red Cross report from Gaza that small children had been found wounded, near the corpses of their mothers, under the ruins of their homes, and other reports of civilians on the verge of dying in places ambulances could not reach because of the fighting.
“The international organizations in Gaza are talking about 200 dead children,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain these things to myself, never mind to my government,” added the ambassador. “Your action is brutal and you don’t realize how much damage this is causing you in the world. This is not only short term. It’s damage for years. Is this the Israel you want to be?” [continued…]
A statement by the British foreign minister David Miliband on “the appalling situation in Gaza” drew strong responses from both sides of parliament.
The Labour Member of Parliament Peter Kilfoyle asked the minister to “undertake to ensure that no arms at all go to Israel at the moment, given that it is guilty in many people’s eyes of state-sponsored terrorism with its activities in the Gaza strip”.
The Conservative MP Sir Patrick Cormack asked the minister to inform Britain’s Israeli ambassador “that many of us who have been in this House for a very long time and who have been proud to call ourselves friends of Israel now feel ashamed because Israel is not behaving as a civilised state should behave”.
The Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman said: “In congratulating [Mr Miliband] on steering resolution 1860 [calling for an immediate ceasefire] through the United Nations Security Council, may I ask him what the international reaction would be if Hamas had slaughtered nearly 900 Israelis and subjected nearly 1.5 million Israelis to degradation and deprivation? Is it not an incontrovertible fact that Olmert, Livni and Barak are mass-murderers and war criminals – [Interruption.] Yes. And they bring shame on the Jewish people whose star of David they use as a flag in Gaza, but whose ethos and morals go completely against what this Israeli government are doing.”
The MP Marsha Sing pointed out that condemnation has brought no relief to the people of Gaza. “The killing goes on. Is it not time for stronger action? Is it not time that we expelled the ambassador of Israel and brought our ambassador back from Israel? Is it not time that we called for international sanctions against Israel?” [continued…]
Israeli military officials said Tuesday that their 18-day offensive in the Gaza Strip had weakened Hamas but that a knockout blow was unlikely. The conflict showed no signs of ending as diplomats reported little progress in negotiating a cease-fire.
The Israeli officials said their strategy was to squeeze Hamas militarily as they try to pressure the Islamist movement into a truce that would include a long-term commitment to stop firing rockets into southern Israel. Some Hamas leaders have said they are willing to cut a deal, but others have pledged to continue fighting.
Despite public vows by Israeli politicians to destroy Hamas’s military capability, Israeli officials said Tuesday that the movement had lost only a fraction of its fighters and retained a large stockpile of rockets and other armaments. A “few hundred” Hamas fighters have been killed, out of a total force of 15,000, according to a senior Israeli military official. [continued…]
The round of international diplomacy that has just concluded has left this part of the Arab world incredulous, extremely angry and polarised. The demonstrations in Syria this weekend were marked by use of extreme slogans seldom heard in public, and images of Osama bin Laden were paraded at protests in Jordan. The feel is of strategic tremors that hint at some fundamental shifting of the plates of Muslim opinion.
The searing images emerging from Gaza have long since undergone a subconscious transfiguration: from originally being about Hamas they have metamorphosed into an archetypal image of Israel attacking the Gazan people, the Palestinian people and Islam. Happening as they did during Ashura, the Shia commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein – providing the backdrop to the speeches by the Secretary General of Hezbollah Sayed Hassan Nasrallah that have gripped the region – the attacks have Islamiised political discourse and given events in Gaza the aura of Hussein’s sacrifice in the face of injustice. [continued…]
As Europeans watch the humanitarian disaster in Gaza unfold on nightly news bulletins, many may wonder why this crisis seems to have left their governments groping in such apparent fumbling disarray. The answer is that it is the result of policies pulling in opposite directions – of an acute irreconcilability at the heart of their policy-making.
What has happened in Gaza was all too foreseeable. A few Israelis forewarned about this coming crisis, but the appeal of the “grand narrative” – of a global struggle between “moderates” and “extremists” – overrode their warnings to the Israeli electorate.
The thesis that literally “everything” must be done either to lever “moderates” into power, or prevent them from losing power – euphemistically called “supporting moderation” – lies at the heart of the Gaza crisis. [continued…]
In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: “Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico.”
Within hours scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Barak’s comparisons almost verbatim. In fact, in this very paper on January 9 House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying “America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana.” But let’s see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy.
Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players. [continued…]
A new audio message purportedly from the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, has called for all Muslims to launch a holy war to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to Islamist websites.
The recording, which the websites said was by Bin Laden, also condemned Arab governments for preventing their people from acting to “liberate Palestine”.
“Our brothers in Palestine, you have suffered a lot … the Muslims sympathise with you in what they see and hear. We, the mujahideen, sympathise with you also,” Reuters reported the speaker as saying in the 22-minute tape titled A Call for Jihad to Stop the Aggression Against Gaza. “We are with you and we will not let you down. Our fate is tied to yours in fighting the crusader-Zionist coalition, in fighting until victory or martyrdom.” [continued…]
As Israel’s barbaric war in Gaza enters its third week, there are four main reasons why its wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians continues unchecked.
The first is the terrible weakness of the UN Security Council in carrying out its declared task of maintaining international peace and security. Its inability to halt Israel’s aggression is largely due to the overly-intimate — some would say unhealthy — U.S.-Israeli relationship.
The second reason is that, as Hamas is the only Palestinian movement putting up armed resistance to Israel, it is the only remaining obstacle to Israel’s mastery of the whole of historic Palestine. Israel knows that if it fails to secure Hamas’ unconditional surrender, it will in due course have to enter into peace talks, and cede territory to an eventual Palestinian state — something it has long sought to avoid. At this decisive moment in the 100-year old Israeli-Palestinian struggle, there is, therefore, much at stake for both sides.
The third reason is the debilitating divisions in the Arab and Muslim world, which have robbed it of any effective leverage on events. These divisions are myriad — between so-called ‘moderate’ Arab states and their ‘radical’ rivals; between those who have made peace with Israel and those who have not; between those who rely on American aid and protection and those who do not; between those who loathe and fear Iran and those who rely on it for support; between Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims. This is by no means an exhaustive list. [continued…]
Iraeli troops advanced into Gaza suburbs for the first time early Tuesday, residents said, hours after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Islamic militants of an “iron fist” unless they agree to Israel’s terms to end the fighting. Hamas showed no signs of wavering, however, with its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, saying the militants were “closer to victory.”
Despite the tough words, Egypt said it was making slow but sure progress in brokering a truce, and special Mideast envoy Tony Blair said elements were in place for a cease-fire.
Sounds of the battle could be heard clearly before dawn Tuesday around the city of 400,0000 as the Israeli forces, backed by artillery and attack helicopters, moved into neighborhoods east and south of Gaza City. Israeli gunboats shelled the coast from the west. [continued…]
Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades said they captured an Israeli solider, who was taken to a safe location which was then bombed by the Israeli military.
Militants took the captured soldier to a home in Gaza, which was tracked by the Israeli army and targeted by Israeli warplanes only hours after the Israeli soldier was taken to the building, Brigades members clamied.
The Israeli military has made no comment on the report.
The soldier was killed instantly, the statement said, and presumed that Israeli military commanders would prefer to have their soldiers killed than have to negotiate their release or admit their failure at the hands of the Palestinian brigades. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Is this report a piece of Hamas psy-ops as it fights the information war? Quite possibly. Even so, it points to what is likely the IDF’s — and equally the Israeli government’s — greatest fear: that at the end of this war Gilad Shilat is no longer the only Israeli prisoner of war.
At a cabinet meeting on Sunday, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said: “Israel is nearing its goal [of changing] the security situation in the south so that our citizens can experience security and stability in the long term. We must not, at the last minute, squander what has been achieved in this unprecedented national effort that has restored a spirit of unity to our nation.”
Absent from that spirit are Israel’s Arab political parties and as a consequence they have been banned from Israel’s upcoming elections, The Associated Press reported.
After the 27-member Central Elections Committee reached its decision, Member of the Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, from the United Arab List-Ta’al told MK David Tal (Kadima), “You went to war as an elections campaign strategy. Every vote for Kadima is a bullet in the chest of a Palestinian child.” The Balad chairman, Jamal Zahalka, told the Kadima member: “You drink Palestinian blood. You are a racist.”
Mr Tibi later told the press in response to the decision that “this is a racist country. We are accustomed to these types of struggles and we will win,” Ynet said. [continued…]
The Israeli onslaught in Gaza is having a “profoundly acute and unhealthy” effect on British Muslim communities and “patience is running out”, a government minister has said.
The justice minister, Shahid Malik, told the Guardian there was “immense anger” in British Muslim communities over developments in the Middle East. He said: “There is a real feeling of helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness among Britain’s Muslims in the context of Gaza and the sense of grievance and injustice is both profoundly acute and obviously profoundly unhealthy.”
The comments by Malik, the first Muslim to be made a minister in any British government, were echoed by the Conservative shadow security minister, Pauline Neville-Jones, who said she was concerned at the effect the conflict was having on radicalism in the wider Arab world. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, is to make a statement to the Commons on Gaza later today. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — While Israel currently indulges in the apparent intoxication of its war fever, convinced by its own sense of righteousness that it is immune from any lasting damage from an international backlash, governments such as that in Britain are aware that the dangers of a domestic backlash are very real.
The next time we see a “martyrdom” video created by some hapless Western-born jihadist who decided to inflict his rage on innocent passers-by, it seems almost certain that high if not uppermost among the grievances he will be expressing will be his outrage at having witnessed the massacre of fellow Muslims in Gaza — a massacre that neither Arab nor Western governments had either the will or the power to prevent.
Mindful of this danger, the governments that Israel now takes for granted as its allies will sooner or later be forced to reconsider whether this strategic alliance has become an unacceptable liability.
If Israel’s go-it-alone spirit becomes a lonely reality, the hubris with which it is now buoyed up will evaporate as it wakes up to the fact that it has placed itself in a strategically untenable position.
Israel is facing growing demands from senior UN officials and human rights groups for an international war crimes investigation in Gaza over allegations such as the “reckless and indiscriminate” shelling of residential areas and use of Palestinian families as human shields by soldiers.
With the death toll from the 17-day Israeli assault on Gaza climbing above 900, pressure is increasing for an independent inquiry into specific incidents, such as the shelling of a UN school turned refugee centre where about 40 people died, as well as the question of whether the military tactics used by Israel systematically breached humanitarian law.
The UN’s senior human rights body approved a resolution yesterday condemning the Israeli offensive for “massive violations of human rights”. A senior UN source said the body’s humanitarian agencies were compiling evidence of war crimes and passing it on to the “highest levels” to be used as seen fit. [continued…]
Allegations about Israeli or Hamas abuses during the conflict in Gaza need to be investigated, David Miliband told MPs today.
In a statement on the Gaza crisis, the foreign secretary said more than 800 Palestinians had been killed, “apparently 250 of them children – the most terrible statistic of all”.
He reiterated the government’s demands for an immediate ceasefire and said allegations of war crimes needed to be properly investigated. [continued…]
The Obama team is tight with information, but I’ve got the scoop on the senior advisers he’s gathered to push a new Middle East policy as the Gaza war rages: Shibley Telhami, Vali Nasr, Fawaz Gerges, Fouad Moughrabi and James Zogby.
This group of distinguished Arab-American and Iranian-American scholars, with wide regional experience, is intended to signal a U.S. willingness to think anew about the Middle East, with greater cultural sensitivity to both sides, and a keen eye on whether uncritical support for Israel has been helpful.
O.K., forget the above, I’ve let my imagination run away with me. Barack Obama has no plans for this line-up on the Israeli-Palestinian problem and Iran.
In fact, the people likely to play significant roles on the Middle East in the Obama Administration read rather differently.
They include Dennis Ross (the veteran Clinton administration Mideast peace envoy who may now extend his brief to Iran); James Steinberg (as deputy secretary of state); Dan Kurtzer (the former U.S. ambassador to Israel); Dan Shapiro (a longtime aide to Obama); and Martin Indyk (another former ambassador to Israel who is close to the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.)
Now, I have nothing against smart, driven, liberal, Jewish (or half-Jewish) males; I’ve looked in the mirror. I know or have talked to all these guys, except Shapiro. They’re knowledgeable, broad-minded and determined. Still, on the diversity front they fall short. On the change-you-can-believe-in front, they also leave something to be desired. [continued…]
many have asked in the wake of Israel’s attack on Gaza, how Hamas, if it saw the consequences of ending the ceasefire — and Hamas did foresee the likelihood of disproportionate Israeli military action — nonetheless could have acquiesced to the inevitable bloodshed — bloodshed that an Israeli army, fixated on restoring its deterrence after its failed 2006 war with Hesballah, would visit on the citizens of Gaza. Some may read into this decision the cynicism of a movement that prioritises resistance; but to do so would be to misread how Hamas analyses their situation and understands the nature of resistance.
At one level, the six month ceasefire simply had failed to satisfy two key litmus tests: The circumstances of life of the Gazan people continually had deteriorated, and the ceasefire was not seen to be taking the Palestinian people any closer to a political solution. On the contrary, Hamas saw a settlement receding further into the distance.
In short, Israel — abetted by the US and Europe — had used the six month ‘ceasefire’ not as a building-block towards doing serious politics and real negotiation, but to squeeze the pips out of the people of Gaza in the hope that a desperate people would turn on their own representatives, leaving Hamas discredited and marginalised. No Israeli had died during this ceasefire, but instead of alleviating the conditions in Gaza, as agreed at the outset, Israel incrementally aggravated them. Not surprisingly, the calm eroded — and finally unravelled — following Israel’s military incursion and breach of the ceasefire with its armed incursion into Gaza on 5 November, in which six Hamas members were killed. [continued…]
Nearly seventy years ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.
Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.
Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured. [continued…]
It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause – even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.” [continued…]
“The clinic is completely destroyed with all its equipment and medical supplies,” reports Zack Sabella from the council’s Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees. The clinic was situated in Shaja’ih in Gaza city and is run by the Middle East Council of Churches. The clinic was totally destroyed, but no one was injured, since the building had been previously evacuated. “Minutes before the missile hit the building, which hosts the clinic, the Israeli Air Force fired a warning missile next to it, forcing all residents of the building and the adjacent buildings to flee the area. A short while after, the army directly hit the building and razed it completely.” The health clinic has been part of women’s and childrens health programmes in the area, and DanChurchAid recently started a programme checking more than 10.000 children for mal- and undernourishmanet. “Well have to see how to raise funds for a new clinic, once the war is over.” says Malene Sønderskov, Middle East Coordinator for DanChurchAid. [continued…]
he Israel Defense Forces said Sunday that there has been a dramatic drop in the ability of Hamas to launch rockets against Israel. Currently, the launches have dropped by 50 percent compared to to the first day of Operation Cast Lead, 17 days ago.
Meanwhile, Palestinian militants have continued their rocket fire on Israel every day since the offensive began.
A Grad rocket fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip scored a direct hit on a home in the northern Negev city of Ashkelon on Monday. Earlier Monday, a rocket fired from Gaza exploded in an open field near Kiryat Gat, causing no casualties or damages.
A total of 22 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip struck Israel on Sunday, one of which exploded in an empty school playground in the northern Negev city of Ashdod. There were no casualties in the incident. Gaza militants fired another 21 rockets at Israel on Saturday. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — To put these numbers in perspective, in 2008 the peak number of rockets fired from Gaza prior to the ceasefire was fewer than 9 a day. During the ceasefire (up until Israel broke it), rocket fire was down to three per month.
Israel will never turn armed might into strategic security. If need be, it could win a war against all its enemies combined. But if it wants peace it must face the decision it has avoided for 40 years: withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. Military victories and land grabs are futile. Security will come only with political resolution.
As it happens, these are not my sentiments, though I certainly share them. They were among some valedictory reflections offered by Ehud Olmert, Israel’s outgoing prime minister, when he announced his resignation last September.
Israel, Mr Olmert volunteered during an interview with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, had long looked to its military for answers. But, through all the country’s many wars had the generals learnt “a single thing”? Tanks, controlling territory, holding this or that hill – “these things are worthless”. Security lay in peace with its neighbours.
The moment had come for someone to break the spell. Save for negotiated land swaps, Israel had to hand back the West Bank to the Palestinians and to share control of Jerusalem. Peace with Syria was possible only with the return of the Golan Heights. “What I am saying here has never been said by a leader of Israel. But the time has come to say these things.”
He was right. Now, fast forward three months and the same Mr Olmert, serving out the last few weeks of his premiership, has sent Israel’s military to war against Hamas. The humanitarian tragedy in Gaza, we must conclude, is mirrored by a political tragedy in Israel. Even the authors of the latest invasion understand in their hearts its hopelessness. [continued…]
… the bulk of the western media would have us believe that the cause of this war is Hamas’s firing of mostly home-made rockets into Israel – which no state could tolerate without retaliation. In this myopic fantasy land, there is no 61-year national dispossession, no refugee camps, no occupations, no siege, no multiple Israeli violations of UN security council resolutions and the Geneva conventions, no illegal wall, no routine assassinations, no prisoners and no West Bank.
Nor would you have much sense that – as Akiva Eldar, the Israeli Ha’aretz columnist, wrote this week – “Gaza is still, practically and according to international law, occupied territory”, and part of one political entity with the occupied West Bank. Or that the US, Britain and the EU, while paying lip service to ceasefire calls, prepared the ground for this barbarity with money, arms and diplomatic support as hope of a viable two-state solution has disintegrated before our eyes.
Pressure now has to be brought to bear not only on Israel, but on those governments that support it – including Britain’s. That’s why the call by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, for an arms embargo on Israel and the suspension of the EU’s new cooperation agreement with Israel – the first mainstream party leader to do so – is so significant. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, calls it naive. In reality, the naivety lies in imagining that the west can continue to underwrite the injustice and bloodshed inflicted with no respite on the Palestinian people, without paying a price for it. [continued…]
This war, perhaps more than its predecessors, is exposing the true deep veins of Israeli society. Racism and hatred are rearing their heads, as is the impulse for revenge and the thirst for blood. The “inclination of the commander” in the Israel Defense Forces is now “to kill as many as possible,” as the military correspondents on television describe it. And even if the reference is to Hamas fighters, this inclination is still chilling.
The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as “exercising caution”: the frightening balance of blood – about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn’t raising any questions, as if we’ve decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.
Rightists, nationalists, chauvinists and militarists are the only legitimate bon ton in town. Don’t bother us about humaneness and compassion. Only at the edges of the camp can a voice of protest be heard – illegitimate, ostracized and ignored by media coverage – from a small but brave group of Jews and Arabs.
Alongside all this, rings another voice, perhaps the worst of all. This is the voice of the righteous and the hypocritical. My colleague, Ari Shavit, seems to be their eloquent spokesman. This week, Shavit wrote here (“Israel must double, triple, quadruple its medical aid to Gaza,” Haaretz, January 7): “The Israeli offensive in Gaza is justified … Only an immediate and generous humanitarian initiative will prove that even during the brutal warfare that has been forced on us, we remember that there are human beings on the other side.” [continued…]
Around two weeks after the start of fighting in Gaza, there are only vague reports on Israel’s success in damaging Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure. On the other hand, statistics on the harm done to civilians accumulate. More than 800 Palestinians have been killed and around 3,000 have been wounded, an overwhelming majority of them from air strikes. According to UN figures, half of those killed are civilians, and half of the civilians killed are women and children.
Alongside reports on the number of dead and injured are reports of doctors being denied entry, the inability of aid groups to reach refugees and give them food, and a serious shortage of medicine and supplies. Blame does not rest with the Israel Defense Forces for all these issues. Hamas and other Palestinian organizations deliberately fired at a food convoy heading to Gaza because it sought to enter the Strip through a different crossing than what Hamas had desired. Hamas also liquidates its adversaries at home and is not ready to adopt the Egyptian cease-fire initiative. But these cannot serve as a pretext for a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians. [continued…]
A majority of the Jewish public in Israel opposes a ceasefire in Gaza without kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit’s release, according to the monthly War and Peace Index poll conducted about a week and a half after the start of Operation Cast Lead.
Beyond the decisive support for the Israel Defense Forces’ operation, the public also backs the raid’s continuation even if Hamas holds fire under certain conditions.
The respondents were asked, “If a ceasefire agreement with Hamas could be reached, but without including Gilad Shalit’s release, do you believe Israel should or should not sign such an agreement?” About 76.5% gave a negative answer, while only 17.5% responded positively.
Asked whether Israel should or should not halt its military activity in the Strip if Hamas is ready to stop firing on southern communities in exchange for the opening of the crossings, 80% responded negatively. In other words, the majority of the public believes Israel should not halt its operation even if Hamas accepts such an offer. [continued…]
The deputy head of Hamas’ politburo Moussa Abu Marzuk has said that his Palestinian Islamist group no longer cares whether or not kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit has been wounded, the Lebanese daily Al-Hayat reported Sunday.
“Shalit may have been wounded, and he may not have been,” the paper quoted Abu Marzuk as saying. “The subject no longer interests us.” [continued…]
The U.S. military has sought to hire a merchant ship to deliver ammunition to Israel this month, tender documents show, but the Pentagon said the shipment was not linked to the conflict in the Gaza Strip.
A Pentagon spokesman said the ammunition was for a U.S. stockpile in Israel. The U.S. military pre-positions stockpiles in some countries in case it needs supplies at short notice.
In the tender documents, the U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as “ammunition” on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January. [continued…]
After Israel’s killings in Gaza, after the images and outrage, have come the inevitable stern warnings about culpability for war crimes.
In the aftermath of Monday’s Israeli shelling of a building full of members of the Saimouni clan in Zeitoun, killing 30, the call by Navi Pellay, the UN’s Human Rights Commissioner, for an independent investigation into whether war crimes had been committed came not a moment too soon.
This was not the only incident that inspired outrage. After the Israeli Defence Forces targeted a school –run by the UN refugee agency UNRWA – that was crowded with those fleeing the violence, there were claims that the attack was a crime against humanity. [continued…]
A plan to create a new foothold in Gaza for the Palestinian Authority and to bring in international monitors was being drawn up by diplomats yesterday as a UN ceasefire call was dismissed by both sides.
The plan would allow a return of the authority, led by the secular Fatah faction, to the territory 18 months after it was expelled by the Islamist Hamas. Diplomats are considering taking a triangle at the southern end of Gaza, including the Rafah crossing to Egypt and the Kerem Shalom crossing to Israel, to be policed by Turkish and French military monitors to stop arms smuggling into Gaza.
The zone would nominally be controlled by the authority, the internationally recognised Government. Such a plan would allow the crossings to reopen for the first time since Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007. [continued…]
The United Nations’ most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza. The warning came as Israeli troops pressed on with the deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for “credible, independent and transparent” investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law, and singled out an incident this week in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, where up to 30 Palestinians in one house were killed by Israeli shelling.
Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident “appears to have all the elements of war crimes”. [continued…]
When the first accounts emerged this week of what the Israeli armed forces did to the extended Samouni clan in Gaza they were initially lost in an already crowded chorus of civilian suffering.
But as more survivors surfaced to give largely consistent testimony the horrific realisation emerged what happened to the Samouni family could constitute war crimes by Israel.
Israel is barring foreign journalists from Gaza so it is difficult to verify completely the survivors’ accounts about an incident that left up to 70 civilians dead.
They contain allegations that Israeli forces shelled a building where they had previously put a large number of civilians, killed a child in cold blood, used human shields and failed to provide proper treatment to survivors. [continued…]
Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel’s acts.
The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an “armed attack” from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them — as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable — to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting. [continued…]
A plan to create a new foothold in Gaza for the Palestinian Authority and to bring in international monitors was being drawn up by diplomats yesterday as a UN ceasefire call was dismissed by both sides.
The plan would allow a return of the authority, led by the secular Fatah faction, to the territory 18 months after it was expelled by the Islamist Hamas. Diplomats are considering taking a triangle at the southern end of Gaza, including the Rafah crossing to Egypt and the Kerem Shalom crossing to Israel, to be policed by Turkish and French military monitors to stop arms smuggling into Gaza.
The zone would nominally be controlled by the authority, the internationally recognised Government. Such a plan would allow the crossings to reopen for the first time since Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007. [continued…]
On Friday, as Israeli forces continued a two-week-old offensive against Hamas, the armed Islamist movement that controls Gaza, scores of Egyptian doctors emerged from their union building in downtown Cairo. They clutched posters reading “Gaza Is Dying” and banners demanding the opening of the Rafah border crossing. One demonstrator held a baby doll, symbolizing a Palestinian child, in a white sheet covered with fake blood.
Black-clad riot police stood before them, grim-faced in their black helmets. Brandishing clubs, they blocked the protesters from entering the street.
“O Hamas, O Hamas, you are for all the people. We are behind you,” the protesters chanted. Then they went after Mubarak.
“O Mubarak, Mubarak, make a decision. Open the crossing. Remove the siege,” they chanted. “O Mubarak, Mubarak. Are you with us or against us?” [continued…]
Major Gen Uzi Dayan, the former Chairman of the Israeli National Security Council, said Israel’s real goal should be to surround the Gaza Strip and “dismantle” the Hamas regime.
Asked who would run Gaza in its place, Gen Dayan said this was none of Israel’s business.
“I prefer a vacuum to what is there now,” he told me.
Gen Dayan was giving his own view, not the official Israeli position, but as Israeli troops press home their campaign inside the Gaza Strip, and diplomacy fails to bring the conflict to an end, some are wondering whether Israel really knows where it is heading. [continued…]
Throughout the two-week bombardment of the Gaza Strip most journalists have been kept out by the Israeli government on the pretext of security. And the Israelis are pleased with the results.
Foreign journalists have been forced to report without getting to the detail of what is going on. That meant, at least in the early days of the bombardment, that reporters who would have been in Gaza were instead reporting from Israeli towns and cities under fire from Hamas, and Israeli officials found it easier to get themselves in front of a television camera.
An Israeli official told me they were delighted at a BBC TV correspondent broadcasting from Ashkelon in a flak jacket, reinforcing the impression that the Israeli city is a war zone when there is more chance of being hit by a car than a rocket. The notable exception is al-Jazeera TV, which has a bureau in Gaza City and has been broadcasting live from there. [continued…]
As Israel’s offensive in Gaza enters its third week, the Jewish state appears to be rapidly losing the public relations war abroad as criticism from United Nations officials and humanitarian agencies has mounted amid the constant stream of pictures of dead and wounded women and children.
Israeli strikes on UN convoys and schools sheltering hundreds of Palestinians who fled their homes, as well allegations that Israeli troops prevented medical workers from retrieving dead and injured Palestinians, have increasingly called into question Israel’s conduct of the war. [continued…]
A majority of the Jewish public in Israel opposes a ceasefire in Gaza without kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit’s release, according to the monthly War and Peace Index poll conducted about a week and a half after the start of Operation Cast Lead.
Beyond the decisive support for the Israel Defense Forces’ operation, the public also backs the raid’s continuation even if Hamas holds fire under certain conditions.
The respondents were asked, “If a ceasefire agreement with Hamas could be reached, but without including Gilad Shalit’s release, do you believe Israel should or should not sign such an agreement?” About 76.5% gave a negative answer, while only 17.5% responded positively. [continued…]
The Israeli commentator Aluf Benn has a name for the moment at which a “good” war goes bad. He calls it the “euphoria point”.
Answering his own question on what turns a bold military operation into a depressing war of attrition, he defines the moment thus: “Rapid success at the start of a campaign boosts the leaders’ spirits and encourages them to continue the fighting ‘until victory is achieved’ … [They] scornfully reject proposals for ceasefires … the enemy regroups … What began as a walk in the park ends in pointless attrition, or even in searing defeat.” [continued…]
At midnight Friday, according to Hamas’ interpretation of the Palestinian constitution, the tenure of Mahmoud Abbas as President of the Palestinian Authority comes to an end.
The confrontation in the Gaza Strip has granted Israel the opportunity to decide whether Abbas will lose his legitimacy before some of his nation, or will secure continued Fatah rule in the West Bank.
The decision to adopt the Egyptian-French-American compromise may bring an end to the fighting in the Strip and create the conditions for the resumption of the peace process. A decision to reject it may, instead of causing the collapse of Hamas rule in Gaza, bring about the crash of Abbas’ rule in the West Bank. And that will, by extension, destroy the road map. [continued…]
The Israeli military action in Gaza raises both moral questions and strategic ones. The moral issues are more complex than partisans on either side are prepared to admit. Not so the strategic issues: here the verdict is clear. Israel’s return to Gaza constitutes a tacit admission of strategic failure now stretching back four decades. As Barack Obama prepares to take office, that record of failure deserves careful consideration.
However deeply the Israeli army penetrates into Gaza and however long it stays, this much is certain: Operation Cast Lead will not put an end to violence between Israelis and Palestinians. No matter what this particular round of fighting may achieve, the conflict will continue. Indeed, the punishment inflicted on the residents of Gaza all but ensures its perpetuation.
Ever since it seized Gaza and the West Bank at the time of the 1967 War, Israel has assumed that allowing Palestinians to freely exercise their right of self-determination is incompatible with Israeli security. With expulsion infeasible and absorption unacceptable, a succession of Israeli governments set out to dictate the conditions under which Palestinians would live. This effort provoked intense resistance, manifested in a bloody chronicle of uprisings, incursions, invasions, and tit-for-tat retaliation. As the costs of occupation mounted, Israel began searching for ways to shed its Palestinian problem altogether, either through negotiation (the so-called peace process) or through unilateral action (partition). Here again, success proved elusive. [continued…]
Nearly everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip. [continued…]
Pope Benedict’s point man for justice and peace issues on Wednesday issued the Vatican’s toughest criticism of Israel since the latest Mideast crisis began, calling Gaza a “big concentration camp.”
Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, made his comments in an interview in the Italian online newspaper Il Sussidiario.net.
“Defenceless populations are always the ones who pay. Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp,” Martino, whose informal title is Vatican “justice minister,” was quoted as saying. [continued…]
Israel’s three top cabinet ministers cannot agree on the best way to end the military operation in the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak want to reach a deal, with the help of the United States and Egypt, that will guarantee long-term quiet in the south and keep Hamas from getting stronger. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni prefers to end the operation now, without an agreement.
Meanwhile, Barak ordered the Israel Defense Forces yesterday to get ready for a significant expansion of its activities in Gaza, which would focus on bringing reserve forces into the enclave. The preparations for the next phase of Operation Cast Lead are underway as the government considers Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s cease-fire proposal.
The decision about whether to expand the Gaza operation will be made over the next few days, political sources in Jerusalem said. In the meantime, the political-security cabinet decided yesterday that military activity will remain at its current level and humanitarian aid to Gaza residents will be expanded. [continued…]
When thousands of heavily armed Israeli soldiers poured into the Gaza Strip on Saturday night, Hamas pulled back.
Rather than stand and fight against the Middle East’s strongest army, the Islamist movement opted for a tactical withdrawal, with its fighters melting away into the strip’s sprawling cities and refugee camps, according to Gaza residents and Israeli military analysts and officers.
Now, Hamas appears to be daring the Israeli troops to follow.
“They’re hitting here and there with antitank missiles and mortars. Overall, though, they’re not confronting the Israeli presence in Gaza,” said retired Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. “They’re challenging the Israeli military to enter the built-up areas.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — No doubt the IDF would like its opponents to come out into the open and present themselves as easy targets. But as Hamas is denounced for using “human shields” it is likewise following the classic Maoist principle of guerilla warfare: The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. And lest we forget — this is a defensive form of warfare; it really only works for those defending their own turf.
Israel has killed and wounded almost four thousand men, women and children so far in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together in the ruins of their homes. As I write these words, news is breaking that Israeli bombs have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN school which they mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes from which Israel’s relentless barrage—and its deliberately terrorizing “warning” leaflets and prerecorded phone calls—had already driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis dropped on besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the same—“flee, flee for your lives!”). Mosques, schools, houses, apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those inside.
All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for rocket attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel in over a year. What happened to “an eye for an eye?”
As horrific as the toll of dead and injured already is, the scale of Israel’s bombing, and its targeting of ambulances and medical and rescue crews—several doctors and paramedics have been killed or wounded so far—means that the true totals are actually unknown. Countless numbers of victims have bled to death in the streets or in the ruins of their smashed homes. Calls for help aren’t getting through Gaza’s phone networks, battered to pieces along with the rest of the civilian infrastructure—its water, sewage, electricity systems, all already crumbling as a result of the years of siege. The victims that are evacuated—as often, these days, in civilian cars as in the remaining ambulances—make it to hospitals that are overwhelmed; many will die that might have otherwise been saved. [continued…]
At least three rockets fired from Lebanon exploded in northern Israel today in the first such attack since Israel launched an assault in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip nearly two weeks ago.
Israel fired artillery shells into Lebanon to retaliate for the rockets, which landed after daybreak around the town of Nahariya. Israeli medical workers said one of the rockets from Lebanon caused light shrapnel wounds to two women in a home for the elderly.
The Israeli military had been on alert for rocket attacks by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, a Hamas ally, since starting the Gaza offensive Dec. 27. Police said the rockets were Katyushas, the kind Hezbollah used during its 34-day war with Israel in mid-2006.
No group claimed responsibility for today’s rocket attacks. Small Palestinian groups unaffiliated with Hezbollah also possess Katyushas. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Is this the opening of the infamous “second front”? Highly improbable, I would say. Most likely a few guys who couldn’t stand it any more. In a somewhat meaningless act of defiance, they decided they would try and rattle Israeli nerves, though as a result there are probably now as many jangling nerves in Beirut as there are south of the border.
I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided.
After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.
Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.
We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day. [continued…]
Israel briefly paused its military operations in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday and said it planned to do so for three hours each day to allow for deliveries of humanitarian aid, as the Israeli cabinet met to consider how to respond to an Egyptian proposal for a more lasting ceasefire.
Military officials said operations would stop for three hours, between 1 pm and 4 pm local time each day, to give besieged Gaza residents an opportunity to emerge from their homes to seek food, fuel and other emergency supplies. Israel has allowed some aid deliveries since it began airstrikes Dec. 27 but relief workers said they have been unable to reach much of the population because of heavy fighting.
The opening of “humanitarian corridors” each day is meant to relieve a situation that international aid agencies say has reached crisis proportions.
The militant group Hamas, which is in charge of the Gaza Strip, said it would not launch any missiles during the three-hour pause. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Let’s be absolutely clear: this is not about providing relief; it’s about prolonging the agony. As Neve Gordon pointed out, Israeli television reporters have been quite explicit in explaining to their viewers that the purpose of providing humanitarian assistance is to provide a counterbalance to international pressure for an immediate ceasefire. “Not unlike raising animals for slaughter on a farm, the Israeli government maintains that it is providing Palestinians with assistance so that it can have a free hand in attacking them,” the Ben-Gurion University professor wrote.
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms”. But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. “Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties,” yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night’s butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive. [continued…]
I often visited Nizar Rayan, who was killed Thursday in a targeted assassination by Israel, at his house in the Jabaliya refugee camp when I was in Gaza. The house is now rubble. It was hit by two missiles fired by Israeli F-16 fighter jets. Rayan, who would meet me in his book-lined study, was decapitated in the blast. His body was thrown into the street by the explosions. His four wives and 11 children also were killed.
Rayan supported tactics, including suicide bombings, which are morally repugnant. His hatred of Israel ran deep. His fundamentalist brand of Islam was distasteful. But as he and I were students of theology our discussions frequently veered off into the nature of belief, Islam, the Koran, the Bible and the religious life. He was a serious, thoughtful man who had suffered deeply under the occupation and dedicated his life to resistance. He could have fled his home and gone underground with other Hamas leaders. Knowing him, I suspect he could not leave his children. Like him or not, he had tremendous courage.
Hamas, he constantly reminded me, began to target Israeli civilians in 1994 only after Palestinian worshipers were gunned down in a Hebron mosque by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein. Goldstein was a resident of the nearby Kiryat Arba settlement. He entered the mosque dressed in his army uniform, carrying an IMI Galil assault rifle and four magazines of ammunition. He opened fire on those in prayer, killing 29 people and injuring 125. He was rushed and beaten to death by the survivors.
“Before the massacre we targeted only the Israeli military,” Rayan said. “We can’t sit by and watch Palestinian civilians killed year after year and do nothing. When Israel stops killing our civilians we will stop killing their civilians.” [continued…]
I srael’s defiance of international opinion in refusing to countenance a ceasefire in Gaza contrasts sharply with its growing need for international assistance to extricate itself. Even if the Israeli forces break Hamas’s grip on power, officials admit any such “victory” may be temporary and will bring more difficulties in its wake. Behind the bombs and bitter-end bluster, Israel’s private message is: help wanted.
Previous Israeli governments resisted “internationalisation” of the country’s disputes but that stance is changing. The current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was glad to accept a strengthened UN force in southern Lebanon after his punitive expedition against Hezbollah in 2006 ran into the sand.
Israeli diplomats argue endlessly that the Iranian leadership’s threats, weapons programmes, and spreading regional influence are an international, not solely an Israeli problem. Foreign minister Tzipi Livni pressed home the point, face to face with Arab leaders, at a Qatar conference in April.
Now Israeli officials are pressing for an “international presence” along the Egyptian-Gaza border to ensure supply tunnels used by Hamas are not reopened. In short, they require foreign help to reduce the chances that Islamists will politically regroup and militarily re-arm. They cannot do it alone. [continued…]
For 18 months my people in Gaza have been under siege, incarcerated inside the world’s biggest prison, sealed off from land, air and sea, caged and starved, denied even medication for our sick. After the slow death policy came the bombardment. In this most densely populated of places, nothing has been spared Israel’s warplanes, from government buildings to homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and markets. More than 540 have been killed and thousands permanently maimed. A third are women and children. Whole families have been massacred, some while they slept.
This river of blood is being shed under lies and false pretexts. For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start. Israel was required to open crossings to Gaza, and extend the truce to the West Bank. It proceeded to tighten its deadly siege of Gaza, repeatedly cutting electricity and water supplies. The collective punishment did not halt, but accelerated – as did the assassinations and killings. Thirty Gazans were killed by Israeli fire and hundreds of patients died as a direct effect of the siege during the so-called ceasefire. Israel enjoyed a period of calm. Our people did not.
When this broken truce neared its end, we expressed our readiness for a new comprehensive truce in return for lifting the blockade and opening all Gaza border crossings, including Rafah. Our calls fell on deaf ears. Yet still we would be willing to begin a new truce on these terms following the complete withdrawal of the invading forces from Gaza.
No rockets have ever been fired from the West Bank. But 50 died and hundreds more were injured there last year at Israel’s hands, while its expansionism proceeded relentlessly. We are meant to be content with shrinking scraps of territory, a handful of cantons at Israel’s mercy, enclosed by it from all sides.The truth is Israel seeks a one-sided ceasefire, observed by my people alone, in return for siege, starvation, bombardment, assassinations, incursions and colonial settlement. What Israel wants is a gratuitous ceasefire.
The logic of those who demand that we stop our resistance is absurd. They absolve the aggressor and occupier – armed with the deadliest weapons of death and destruction – of responsibility, while blaming the victim, prisoner and occupied. Our modest, home-made rockets are our cry of protest to the world. Israel and its American and European sponsors want us to be killed in silence. But die in silence we will not.
What is being visited on Gaza today was visited on Yasser Arafat before. When he refused to bow to Israel’s dictates, he was imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded by tanks for two years. When this failed to break his resolve, he was murdered by poisoning.
Gaza enters 2009 just as it did 2008: under Israeli fire. Between January and February of last year 140 Gazans died in air strikes. And just before it embarked on its failed military assault on Lebanon in July 2006, Israel rained thousands of shells on Gaza, killing 240. From Deir Yassin in 1948 to Gaza today, the list of Israel’s crimes is long. The justifications change, but the reality is the same: colonial occupation, oppression, and never-ending injustice. If this is the “free world” whose “values” Israel is defending, as its foreign minister Tzipi Livni alleges, then we want nothing to do with it.
Israel’s leaders remain in the grip of confusion, unable to set clear goals for the attacks – from ousting the legitimately elected Hamas government and destroying its infrastructure, to stopping the rockets. As they fail to break Gaza’s resistance the benchmark has been lowered. Now they speak of weakening Hamas and limiting the resistance. But they will achieve neither. Gaza’s people are more united than ever, determined not to be terrorised into submission. Our fighters, armed with the justice of their cause, have already caused many casualties among the occupation army and will fight on to defend their land and people. Nothing can defeat our will to be free.
Once again, Washington and Europe have opted to aid and abet the jailer, occupier and aggressor, and to condemn its victims. We hoped Barack Obama would break with George Bush’s disastrous legacy but his start is not encouraging. While he swiftly moved to denounce the Mumbai attacks, he remains tongue-tied after 10 days of slaughter in Gaza. But my people are not alone. Millions of freedom-loving men and women stand by its struggle for justice and liberation – witness daily protests against Israeli aggression, not only in the Arab and Islamic region, but worldwide.
Israel will no doubt wreak untold destruction, death and suffering in Gaza. But it will meet the same fate in Gaza as it did in Lebanon. We will not be broken by siege and bombardment, and will never surrender to occupation. [continued…]
Inside Gaza City, windows are blown out, electricity is cut and drinking water scarce. While phones rang with the recorded threats against Hamas, leaflets dropped from airplanes littered the streets, saying: “Hamas is getting a taste of the power of the Israeli military after more than a week and we have other methods that are still harsher to deal with Hamas. They will prove very painful. For your safety, please evacuate your neighborhood.”
Israeli officials hope an eventual deal will be struck without engaging directly with Hamas, but Mark Regev, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Israel would not exclude a tacit understanding with Hamas.
“The endgame for us is threefold: that Hamas’s military machine would be substantially destroyed; two, Hamas understands that shooting rockets means paying a price they don’t want to pay; and three, there are mechanisms in place to prevent Hamas from rearming,” Mr. Regev said.
But as the offensive unfolds, so, too, evidence is mounting of a severe humanitarian crisis.
Maxwell Gaylard, United Nations humanitarian affairs coordinator, said at a Jerusalem news briefing on Monday that because of the attacks, people could not reach available food.
Children are hungry, cold, without electricity and running water, he said, “and above all, they’re terrified. That by any measure is a humanitarian crisis.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Are you paying attention Mr President-elect? Still “monitoring the situation” closely? Still calm? Or is that calm merely a cloak, hiding cowardice and calousness? Who would want to ruffle any feathers over a little spilt blood?
And here’s a question for all Israel apologists: Where is the much trumpeted Iranian threat? If the frequently and breathlessly repeated warnings were to be believed, by the time Israel relinquished its position of great restraint, Gaza was brissling with a massive arsenal of Iranian-supplied Katyusha and Grad rockets. For the past two years, right under the noses of Egypt’s Iran-hostile security forces, a steady flow of weaponry has been pouring through tunnels that run under the Egyptian border. But if that’s really true, how is that we now witness a mere 20 rockets a day being fired at Israel, mostly home-made Qassams and during ten days of war a mere handful of Grad rockets? Is Hamas keeping the bulk of its arsenal in reserve? Or is it possible that the whole “Iran-proxy”, “Iranian-armed Hamas” argument has been vastly overstated? Is it possible that the primary function of the so-called weapons pipeline, was instead a pipeline for everyday commodities that now fetch a premium in a siege-crippled economy?
“I keep the children away from the windows because the F-16s are in the air; I forbid them to play below because it’s dangerous. They’re bombing us from the sea and from the east, they’re bombing us from the air. When the telephone works, people tell us about relatives or friends who were killed. My wife cries all the time. At night she hugs the children and cries. It’s cold and the windows are open; there’s fire and smoke in open areas; at home there’s no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there’s no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tell me, are you normal?”
The question came from a resident of Gaza speaking by phone to the Israeli journalist Amira Hass. Like most of the foreign media she has been barred from entering Gaza by Israeli authorities in spite of the fact that Israeli Supreme Court ruled last week that eight foreign correspondents, from among the hundreds now struggling to report on this war, should be allowed to enter the Palestinian territory. [continued…]
While Americans may believe that the current violence in Gaza began Dec. 27, in fact Palestinians have been dying from bombardments for many weeks. On Nov. 4, when the Israeli-Palestinian truce was still in effect but global attention was turned to the U.S. elections, Israel launched a “preemptive” airstrike on Gaza, alleging intelligence about an imminent operation to capture Israeli soldiers; more assaults took place throughout the month.
The truce thus shattered, any incentive by Palestinian leaders to enforce the moratorium on rocket fire was gone. Any extension of the agreement or improvement of its implementation at that point would have required Israel to engage Hamas, to agree to additional trust-building measures and negotiation with our movement — a political impossibility for Israel, with its own elections only weeks away.
Not that the truce had been easy on Palestinians. In the six-month period preceding this week’s bombardment, one Israeli was killed, while dozens of Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli military and police actions, and numerous others died for want of medical care.
The war on Gaza should not be mistaken for an Israeli triumph. Rather, Israel’s failure to make the truce work, and its inevitable resort to bloodshed, demonstrate again that it cannot permit a future built on Palestinian political self-determination. The truce failed because Israel will not open Gaza’s borders, because Israel would rather be a jailer than a neighbor, and because its intransigent leadership forestalls Palestinian destiny and will not make peace with history. [continued…]
The IDF now faces two main military alternatives. The first is to step up the confrontation with Hamas in Gaza City and its environs. That will entail greater casualties among our soldiers, increase the hardships of the Palestinian population and lead to more calls from the international community to stop the fighting.
The second option is to expand the theater of operations and strive for a target that has not yet been set, which has been concealed or even denied: to bring down the Hamas government. Southern Command is capable of achieving this goal but is not enthusiastic about it, lest the Jabalya refugee camp turn into Somalia. In this context the IDF is afraid of being too successful.
In both cases it will take days before the cabinet that sent in the IDF is able to claim a lasting victory.
In these circumstances, with the IDF attempting to maneuver between two prohibitions − against bringing down Hamas on the one hand, and reaching an agreement with it on the other − Israel is dependent on the mercy of Hamas to allow it to declare victory. [continued…]
Israeli intelligence and military officials are increasingly pushing for the assault on Gaza to continue until it assures the eventual downfall of Hamas amid assertions that the 10 days of military bombardment have crippled the Islamist party’s ability to govern.
As the onslaught progresses, officials are more confident of “changing the equation” in Gaza and are predicting the collapse of the Hamas administration.
Last night, Israeli forces bombed the centre of Gaza, and there were reports of intense clashes with Hamas fighters on the edge of the city. But the fighting and the occupation of parts of the north and centre of the Gaza Strip did not stop Hamas from firing more than 40 rockets into Israel.
The death toll from 10 days of fighting has risen above 550. Those killed yesterday included 13 members of the same family killed in their house by Israeli tank fire east of Gaza city. [continued…]
Many analogies are being made between the ongoing Israeli attack against Hamas in Gaza and the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Here are the most important ones, in my view.
The first is about provenance: Hamas and Hezbollah did not exist before around 1982. They are the ideological step-children of the Likud Party and especially Ariel Sharon, whose embrace of violence, racism and colonization as the primary means of dealing with occupied Arab populations ultimately generated a will to resist. The trio currently carrying on Sharon’s legacy – Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni – seem blind to the fact that the more force and brutality Israel uses against Arabs, the greater is the response in the form of more effective resistance movements that have wider public support.
The second analogy is about technical proficiency. Hezbollah and Hamas have both consistently increased their determination and ability to use assorted rockets and missiles to harass and attack Israel. More importantly, they are better able to protect their rocket launchers from Israeli attacks.
The number of Israeli dead in recent years is in the low hundreds, compared to the thousands of Palestinians that Israel has killed. But destruction and dead body counts are not the most useful criteria to use in this analysis. The real measures of what matters politically are the nagging Israeli sense of vulnerability and the Palestinian sense of empowerment, defiance and capacity to fight back. [continued…]
If there is one issue separating Israel from its role models in the West, it is the perceived legitimacy of using force. In Europe, and in many parts of American public opinion, military power is seen as an option of last resort; a primitive, old-fashioned and often counterproductive tool of policy. To us, hitting our enemies once in a while feels like a necessary behavior in a tough neighborhood. It may backfire, as it often does, but still, most Israelis believe it’s impossible to survive in the Middle East without resorting to occasional aggression.
That is why in Washington, London or Paris, governments must sweat to build political consensus for going to war, while in Jerusalem, war resolutions enjoy wide parliamentary support. Israeli governments find it hard to pass peace treaties through the Knesset. That’s where political difficulty lies.
Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza, now in its 10th day, is an excellent example of this rule. The war enjoys strong public support among Israel’s Jewish majority. Only Israel’s Arabs, identifying with their Palestinian brothers, and the far political left, which is all but pacifist, have protested against it. All the rest have united behind the government, including the more established left. The novelist Amos Oz, a moral compass for Israel’s peace camp (and an eventual critic of the 2006 war in Lebanon), gave his blessing to the war. [continued…]
A war neither Israel nor Hamas truly wanted turned into a war both are willing to wage. The six-month ceasefire that expired on 19 December was far from ideal. Israel suffered through periodic rocket fire and the knowledge that its foe was amassing lethal firepower. Hamas endured a punishing economic blockade, undermining its hopes of ruling Gaza. A sensible compromise, entailing an end to rocket launches and an opening of the crossings should have been available. But without bilateral engagement, effective third party mediation or mutual trust, it inexorably came to this: a brutal military operation in which both feel they have something to gain.
As each day goes by, Israel hopes to further degrade Hamas’s military capacity and reduce the rocket risk; Hamas banks on boosting its domestic and regional prestige. Only urgent international action by parties viewed as credible and trustworthy by both sides can end this before the human and political toll escalates or before Israel’s land incursion – which was launched as this briefing went to press – turns into a venture of uncertain scope, undetermined consequence and all-too-familiar human cost.
From Hamas’s perspective, prolonging the ceasefire was appealing but only if that arrangement was modified. Relative calm had enabled it to consolidate power and cripple potential foes. But the siege never was lifted. Increasingly, Hamas leaders were in the uncomfortable position of appearing to want the truce for personal safety at the price of collective hardship. As the expiration date approached, rocket fire intensified, an unsubtle message that Hamas would use violence to force Israel to open the crossings. In the first days, Israel’s retaliatory air campaign shook Hamas’s Qassam fighters by its timing, intensity and scale. But it did not catch them unprepared. [continued…]
In an appeal to Arab leaders to hold an emergency summit and take a stance to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani said: “Once again, we see that the international community is not willing to listen to us and will not unless we assert our common will. Before asking the international community to listen to us, we should start by listening to the voices of our own Arab people.”
On Sunday, The Israeli president Shimon Peres ruled out the possibility of a ceasefire with Hamas as the French president Nicolas Sarkozy headed for the region on a renewed diplomatic push for a truce.
“We don’t intend neither to occupy Gaza nor to crush Hamas, but to crush terror. And Hamas needs a real and serious lesson. They are now getting it,” Mr Peres said in an American television interview. [continued…]
Egyptian officials said Monday that Cairo was set to demand an immediate cease-fire from Hamas in the Gaza Strip, as Israeli forces moved into their 10th day of a military offensive on the coastal territory.
Hamas plans to send a delegation to Egypt on Monday for the first diplomatic talks since the launch of a 10-day-old Israel Defense Forces offensive in the Gaza Strip, an official of the Islamist group has said.
Hamas official Ayman Taha said a Hamas delegation would head to Cairo “answering an Egyptian invitation to hold discussions.” A senior Palestinian official said on Friday that Egypt had launched contacts with Hamas to achieve a truce. [continued…]
Israel wants Operation Cast Lead to end in a political agreement based on a new monitoring system and the prevention of smuggling along the Egypt-Gaza border. The system would rely on an existing security committee comprising representatives from Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and the United States. Hamas would not be represented, nor would it be a party to understandings or agreements, though it is expected to continue to control the Gaza Strip.
That is the political process being advanced by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in conjunction with the ground incursion in Gaza. The idea was discussed at the meeting during which Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni approved the ground operation, and is being handled by the Prime Minister’s Bureau, together with officials from the defense and foreign ministries. The Bush administration is maintaining contact with Israel through phone calls and e-mails, and for the moment is holding off on sending even low-level envoys to the region. [continued…]
Those who believe in the peace process tooth fairy may hope that, after Israel gives Hamas a good whack, the prospects for serious negotiations will improve, particularly under a more committed Obama administration. This isn’t likely in the near term.
Israel’s prerequisite for ending the conflict with the Palestinians — a reformed or weakened Hamas or an emboldened Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, ready to meet Israel’s needs and requirements — is now more elusive than ever. As long as the Palestinian house remains divided, with Hamas strong and Abbas weak, the chances of a conflict-ending Israeli-Palestinian agreement are slim to none. Should Hamas survive its war with Israel in Gaza, such an agreement will remain more elusive than ever.
Beyond the tick tock of the current fighting lies an undeniable reality: only a political deal will end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And right now there are many obstacles standing in the way, including divisions within Israel and big gaps between the parties on the conflict’s core issues: borders, refugees, and the future of Jerusalem, among others.
But looming largest is the crisis that confronts the Palestinian national movement. It is a badly shattered humpty-dumpty — two polities, two armies, two ideologies, two sets of patrons — and putting it back together again does not look hopeful. Nor do the prospects for fostering the unity Palestinians require to negotiate with Israel, monopolize the use of violence in their society, or even struggle successfully for a Palestinian state. [continued…]
Barack Obama’s chances of making a fresh start in US relations with the Muslim world, and the Middle East in particular, appear to diminish with each new wave of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Gaza. That seems hardly fair, given the president-elect does not take office until January 20. But foreign wars don’t wait for Washington inaugurations.
Obama has remained wholly silent during the Gaza crisis. His aides say he is following established protocol that the US has only one president at a time. Hillary Clinton, his designated secretary of state, and Joe Biden, the vice-president-elect and foreign policy expert, have also been uncharacteristically taciturn on the subject.
But evidence is mounting that Obama is already losing ground among key Arab and Muslim audiences that cannot understand why, given his promise of change, he has not spoken out. Arab commentators and editorialists say there is growing disappointment at Obama’s detachment – and that his failure to distance himself from George Bush’s strongly pro-Israeli stance is encouraging the belief that he either shares Bush’s bias or simply does not care. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — I have previously voiced my criticism of Obama’s silence and I’m not holding my breath in anticipation of him making some bold move on Day One. There is however one tiny glimmer of hope. The Wall Street Journal reported that “Mr Obama and his senior aides have declined briefings from the Israeli government on the current crisis, said two people familiar with the Israeli outreach.” That might amount to nothing more an exercise in self-protection — an effort to avoid being seen as having given a behind-closed-doors green light to the Israeli operation on the unstated but implicit understanding that it gets wrapped up before Obama takes office. But it could also mean that Obama wants the Israelis to know that they should not make any assumptions about how he will act once the Bush administration has finally been disposed of in the trashcan of history.
Still, Obama is definitely being perceived as a man who in a time of crisis chooses to look the other way. Since he has done nothing to challenge that perception, at this point it’s hard to avoid concluding that it is valid.
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he shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend’s cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.
he United Nations’ most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza. The warning came as Israeli troops pressed on with the deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire.
or 18 months my people in Gaza have been under siege, incarcerated inside the world’s biggest prison, sealed off from land, air and sea, caged and starved, denied even medication for our sick. After the slow death policy came the bombardment. In this most densely populated of places, nothing has been spared Israel’s warplanes, from government buildings to homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and markets. More than 540 have been killed and thousands permanently maimed. A third are women and children. Whole families have been massacred, some while they slept.