You could be excused for thinking that Israeli jets are bombing the hell out of Gaza in order to stop the missiles falling on southern Israel. Every mainstream news outlet in the western world has been spouting that line, direct from the propaganda offices in Tel Aviv. Too bad it's a lie.See, here's the thing. Hamas and Israel had agreed a peace treaty that expired only a few weeks ago. You'd think that the problem was Hamas wouldn't renew it but the truth is that Israel violated it back in November, on the night of the US presidential election when most people were looking the other way. Israeli forces assassinated a number of leading Hamas members. What's more, the Israelis never implemented the terms of the treaty, which included lifting the horrific and illegal siege of Gaza, that has turned it into the world's largest open-air prison.
So, the idea that Israel was interested in peace with Hamas or is motivated by concern for the ineffectual rocket attacks on southern Israel is a non-starter. The present asymmetrical slaughter is motivated by two things:
1) Israel wants to restore its prestige after being humiliated by Hezbollah during its last invasion of Lebanon in 2006. As Mark Heller, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University put it: “There has been a nagging sense of uncertainty in the last couple years of whether anyone is really afraid of Israel anymore.” And, when you're a settler regime which owes its existence to the expulsion and continued exclusion and oppression of the indigenous Arab population - and you're surrounded by tens of millions more Arabs who understand that Israel's role is as America's enforcer - well, you better believe that maintaining fear is important. A bully who doesn't inspire fear isn't much of a bully. And if Israel isn't an effective bully, what use would it be to the United States, which forks over 1/3 of its entire direct foreign aid budget to Israel every year, plus billions more in indirect aid, loan forgiveness or just plain military hardware.
2) The present assault on Gaza has to be understood as part of the long term Israeli zionist project of all out genocide against the Palestinians. There have been detours, temporary pauses and the occasional minor reversal but Israel's leaders have never faltered in the long-term project to "spirit the penniless Arab population" out of greater Israel. This present assault is merely one more stepping stone on the way.
Will it work? The Palestinians are a proud and tenacious people who have endured generations of Israeli brutality (with the full support of the United States of America, history's most powerful and most vicious empire). The present bloodletting is unlikely to break them now. In fact, if anything, this will probably strengthen the hand of Hamas in the West Bank, now ruled by the quislings of the Palestine Authority under "president" Mahmoud Abbas. There is the danger that the strengthening of Hamas will provide an excuse to extend the horror from Gaza into the West Bank, to drive forward the genocide project.
But Israel is on increasingly thin ice regionally. The Palestinians never stood a chance on their own. They need the power of the Arab masses, particularly those in Egypt. Israel and the United States know this, that's why Egypt's ruling elite gets a fat paycheque from the US government every year - to keep their population down. But the Egyptian workers and peasants are increasingly restive, with strike waves and a burgeoning independent union movement, alongside a growing sense that Mubarak's pathetic dynasty must go. If Israel pushes too far they may topple the only Arab regime that really matters for their survival. Revelations that the Egyptian government may well have aided the Israelis in tricking Hamas into thinking an attack was unlikely will further inflame ordinary Egyptians. Already thousands are protesting around the Arab world. Israel is playing with fire, with its usual arrogance, we can only hope that, like 2006, its fingers get burned.
4 comments :
Great stuff, especially on debunking the myths of the ceasefire/peace treaty being violated by Hamas. It reminds me very much of the bullshit being peddled about Hezbollah violating some sort of agreement with Israel when it was clearly violated from the outset with Israel failing to uphold it from the first second it (whatever "it" was) was implemented. It is always incredible how Israel's narrative of events is just a straight out lie that flies in the face of the most incredibly obvious, tangible, concrete facts. And that the Western media is so loyal in peddling the lies through gaping omissions and every paragraph framed by a key word or phrase to distort and turn upside down reality.
Fuck!
Anyway, I'm glad you're back to blogging.
Doug - everything in relation to Israel is horseshit. It's the sine qua non of Israeli public relations - and US support. Horseshit and projection. It's infuriating to see - I was reading an article in the Globe in which Hamas is casually described as an "extremist" group, in a sentence that had nothing to do with their politics. The very next paragraph the writer quotes an Israeli Defense spokesperson with editorializing them - no "spokesperson for the genocidal IDF..."
Anyway, it's good to be back - for the moment. Fatherhood and work commitments may derail me again.
'Genocide' - You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. 87
Don't let my belief in the importance to the credibility of a cause of using the correct language, fool you into thinking that I don't agree with you in pretty much every other respect besides when you use that word.
Let me put it this way: if Israel ever really does actually adopt a policy of *genocide*, rather than slowball ethnic cleansing and displacement via random acts of murder (i.e. if they changed from wanting all Palestinians out to wanting them all dead), you will have no way of increasing your rhetoric: your objections will sound exactly the same then as they do now. You are already at '11'.
Hey Laroquod - The legal definition of genocide, according to the United Nations is as follows: "Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group."
I think that this applies in the context of the Palestinians since the long term goal has always been and continues to be, to eliminate Palestinian as a national group - the settlements that now divide up the West Bank is part of this process, as is the intensification of brutal conditions as a mechanism to drive out the population. This is not the same as saying that it is mainstream policy (yet) to commit a holocaust against the Palestinians. I don't believe that the Israeli state wants to physically exterminate the entire Palestinian population. For similar reasons, I don't refer to the Israeli state - as some do - as fascist or Nazi. It is hyperbolic and not helpful to do so.
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