When The Ex-Mossad Chief Thinks You're Crazy...

This article in the New York Times is interesting. The recently retired head of the Israeli Mossad (i.e. CIA) is using his newfound civilian freedoms to run around and say that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak are, basically, f***ing nuts. Now, anyone with access to information more substantive than FOX News has probably known or suspected for some time that the Israeli leadership are apartheid-organizing, ethnocratic, colonialist scum - but that some of the people in the top tiers of the Israeli leadership think Bibi and Ehud are bonkers it tells you something. Just to put it in perspective, the ex-Mossad chief is hardly a bleeding heart liberal or lover of freedom. As the Times notes:

While in office, Mr. Dagan served three prime ministers, was reappointed twice and oversaw a number of reported operations that Israelis consider great successes — forcing delays in Iran’s nuclear program through sabotaging its computers and assassinating scientists; setting the groundwork for an attack on a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007; and assassinating Imad Mughniyeh, a top Lebanese Hezbollah operative, in 2008 .

When Ariel Sharon, the prime minister in 2002, appointed Mr. Dagan, he was reported to have told him he wanted “a Mossad with a knife between its teeth.” Mr. Dagan is widely thought to have complied and is not seen as a soft-hearted liberal.

What this schism reflects is the pressure coming to bear on sections of the Israeli ruling class as a result of the Arab revolutions, which are causing the region to shift wildly under their feet, and the growing sense that Israel is a pariah state utterly uninterested in peace or justice. The only thing that really allows the Israelis to continue with their policies is American support - political, financial and military. Israel wouldn't last a day without America. But there is a weariness within a section of the American elite for the rabid nature of the Israeli leadership. It's still a minority strand, to be certain, but it is an expression of the fact that some doubt how useful is a despised Jewish Sparta, surrounded by a sea of resentful Arabs ruled by increasingly unpopular and unstable dictatorships (also sponsored by the USA).

Well, the more splits the merrier, as far as I'm concerned. Splits make it more difficult for the Israelis to attack Iran - as Dagan suggests the leadership around Netanyahu wants to do - and can create an opening for the Palestinians to drive a wedge, particularly if there are more successful revolutions in the Arab world and the revolution in Egypt deepens. For one thing, Israel is at risk of losing a key ideological prop: it's claim to be the only democracy in the middle east. That looks laughable as 80 million Egyptians build a vibrant democratic society next door and, meanwhile, the majority of the population under the effective control of the Israeli government (i.e. the Palestinians inside Israel and in the Israeli colonized and controlled Territories) have no civil or democratic rights over that government.

Gaza: Was There A Winner?

It may seem crass to talk about winning and losing in the face of the Gaza slaughter, as though it were a football game. But there is good reason when one considers that the final tally of a battle or a war shapes key future events, determining the likelihood of future victories or even whether other battles will be entered into by those involved.
And it is not only those directly involved who must be considered, for a victory or defeat by the army of choice will determine future actions. It is a truism about the Middle East, for instance, that Israel's 6-day, smashing victory over three Arab armies in 1967 secured them the sponsorship of the United States, which has sustained their superior position viz. their regional competitors.
Based upon a numbers count it would seem that Israel is the definite winner. There are, after all, something like 1300 dead Palestinians, plus another 5400 wounded, with well over half of the total being accounted for by civilians, even with only women and children being counted as such. This compares to 3 dead Israeli civilians and another 10 dead soldiers, most of them killed by friendly fire, apparently.
But we can't look at the present invasion in terms of crude - and deadly - numbers.
Israel has a massive military superiority over Hamas and its allied militias, like Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and DFLP. They have F-16s, guided bombs and missiles, Merkava tanks, phosphorous shells, unmanned surveillance drones, a navy, all the latest techno gizmos, access to US satellite intelligence - not to mention, apparently, the intelligence support of Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's favourite Palestinian collaborator, and leader of Fatah. All of this ensured that a Hamas military victory over Israel was utterly impossible and Hamas seems to have been smart enough to avoid direct confrontations in the open.
Israeli political leaders had set themselves a series of goals prior to and during the operation. Since Israel initiated the present conflict, planning it far in advance, prior even to the 6 months ceasefire negotiated with Hamas, and set the terms for its victory, it must be measured against those goals. In addition, other, unintended consequences must be looked at.
Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, along with Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have argued that the primary goal of the Gaza invasion was to stop Hamas lobbing rockets and mortars into southern Israel. If this were really the purpose of the attack, then certainly Israel has failed miserably, as demonstrated by the ceaseless firing of rockets throughout the invasion and even immediately following Israel's unilateral ceasefire. What's more, if the Israeli government wanted to end Gazan rocket fire the answer was very simple - meet the conditions of the original ceasefire negotiated with Hamas and agree to continue it. Hamas had, after all, met its terms - not only discontinuing Hamas' firing of rockets but putting a lid on rocket fire by rival militias such as Fatah and Islamic Jihad. Between June 19, when the ceasefire was agreed and November 4, when Israel launched a military raid, breaking the ceasefire, rocket and mortar fire was effectively nil (see attached pdf, p.6). It was Israel that failed to meet the terms of the ceasefire and which repeatedly provoked Hamas with attacks, arrests and killings.
The second stated goal was to prevent Hamas from re-arming. However, again, actions speak louder than words. If this were Israel's sole goal, they could have negotiated a deal with their pliant Egyptian ally or focused bombing strictly in the border region, where the smuggling tunnels exist. Nonetheless, even the head of Israel's intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, reports that the tunnel network hasn't been destroyed and that it will be up and running again in short order if Egypt doesn't clamp down.
In other words, stopping smuggling was never dependent upon bombing the hell out of Gaza - it couldn't even be effective. What was required was Egyptian cooperation. But Egypt is now less likely, not more, to agree to a politically unpopular clampdown against the Palestinians, after hundreds of thousands demonstrated in solidarity with Gaza and against the Egyptian dictatorship. That was made clear after Israel and the US signed an agreement - without telling the Egyptians - to tackle the tunnels on Egyptian soil. The Egyptian Foreign Minister responded saying that Israel and the US can "do what they wish with regard to the sea or any other country in Africa, but when it comes to Egyptian land, we are not bound by anything except the safety and national security of the Egyptian people and Egypt's ability to protect its borders." President-for-life Mubarak went on television to specifically state that foreign monitors would not be allowed in Egypt. But even if Egypt agrees to more American Army Engineers to help it police the border, or an increase in police numbers IDF officials don't believe that this will stop the smuggling. So, Israel's second policy goal is clearly a failure.
The real key for Israel was the need to restore its deterrent capability" - basically to instill fear in any and all Arabs who might think to challenge the occupation or any other Israeli strategic goals. New York Times billionaire columnist Thomas Friedman supportively referred to this as "educating" Hamas by "inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." This was, in other words, according to Israeli supporters and critics, a terrorist operation by the state of Israel. As Norman Finklestein pointed out in a recent interview: ""The goal of the operation was to terrorize the civilian population so that Palestinians would be afraid of Israel. This is the dictionary definition of terrorism."
Has Israel restored its deterrent capability, so badly damaged by its failed war in Lebanon in 2006, and its withdrawal under duress from Gaza in 2005 and southern Lebanon in 2000? Certainly every Israeli politician, journalist and military leader is claiming this. However, if the goal was simply to impress upon Hamas that they couldn't defeat Israel militarily, this was already known. Hamas has been trying since at least 2002 to agree a long term truce with Israel, only to face Israeli bombs and targeted assassinations. Certainly by now, any Palestinian knows that it doesn't matter what you do, Israel will try to kill you.

"it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days."

The irony is that this pattern almost ensures the continuation of violent resistance since even non-violence is met by Israeli attacks. At a certain point, Israel's deterrent capability is undermined by the fact that only utter defeat and an acceptance of genocide would prevent Palestinians from resisting Israel's aggression. Certainly Hamas was suitably unbowed to fire off nearly two dozen rockets after Israel's unilateral ceasefire and to demand a withdrawal within one week or they would restart hostilities. What's more, everyone can see, as they did in Lebanon in 2006, that while Israel could defeat three Arab armies in six days in 1967, after three weeks fighting a starved, blockaded, disarmed population in Gaza, the IDF didn't take more than a corner of Gaza City.
Ultimately, of course, it will be in the coming days that the interpretation of events will unfold, depending upon the actual state of Hamas and other resistance organizations. It is likely that while Arabs throughout the region will of course remember that Israel can, in fact, destroy unarmed populations, that it is possible to resist and survive. What's more, Hamas will likely be strengthened politically, while Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization will be fatally weakened. Israel, the US, EU and their Arab client regimes may try to hold him up but everyone knows that they are now dead as a resistance movement and thus in the eyes of the Palestinian people.
This makes it more likely that Israel will, as a result of this onslaught, be forced to recognize Hamas as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians, as will the international community. The 18 month campaign to destroy the results of the democratic election of Hamas, first by arming Fatah and fomenting a civil war and now with a direct intervention, have utterly failed.
And outside of the Middle East, Israel has managed to discredit itself even further, spurring into being a massive movement in solidarity with the Palestinians and against Israel. They have shattered the myth that Israel is the victim and the Palestinians the aggressors. This movement, the heroic resistance of the Palestinians and the images of Israel's utter brutality, which they were unable to hide, though they barred all journalists from entering Gaza, has pushed even Israel's staunchest allies to criticize them. Turkey, Israel's only Muslim ally, strongly rebuked Israel, demanding their exclusion from the UN until they implemented the Security Council resolution. Egypt, the biggest Arab nation and paid billions by the US to play with Israel, has been made even more unstable by the slaughter, creating concern for the US' major Arab bulwark in the region. Jordan recalled their ambassador in protest. And there is even suggestion in a fascinating article by Justin Raimondo that the US ruling class is growing tired of Israel's mad dog routine, which threatens US hegemony in the region by alienating Arab allies and threatening others with domestic political upheaval because of Israel's penchant for killing Arab civilians.
It's unclear how all this will pan out over the medium term. But it is clear that the Gaza operation, which Israel was forced to end before Obama's inauguration, has not all gone the way Israel hoped. It may not even go the way that Livni and Barak hoped it would in terms of their electoral prospects, with the ultra-war mongers in Likud making most of the gains from the invasion. 

Hamas and the Palestinian people will live to fight another day, with a much larger international movement, one in which the call for boycott and divestment may get a major hearing. And the whole region has been destabilized thanks to Israel's compulsive need to avoid peace at any costs. The blowback is looking to be much worse than what they started out fighting, as they have internationalized the conflict.

Israel Wants Only War And Genocide

With the sycophantic aid of the world's media, Israeli political leaders constantly claim that there is nobody to talk to on the Palestinian side. As though the issue were a matter of negotiation - Israel illegally occupies Palestinian land, full stop. Until that ends, Israel is a rogue state, standing outside of international law on this and many other questions.

But even this fails to take note of the fact that the entire Israeli nation resides on land stolen from Palestinian Arabs. This has been sanctified by the UN and the world's major powers for the simple reason that Israel performs the useful function of regional watch dog for the dominant empire of the day - previously the British & French (see the Suez Crisis of 1956), later the Americans.

Nonetheless, the utter deceipt and racism of Israeli state politics deserves to be exposed over and over again, if only for the simple reason that each act of deceipt and violence is forgotten as soon as it is perpetrated and the long-suffering Palestinians who dare to raise their heads and demand, even plead, for justice, are condemned as extremists and liquidated with 1,000 lbs bombs. 

Palestinian leaders like Arafat and Abbas who are only too happy to take Israeli gold in return, are labelled as ineffectual or corrupted when they are unable to pacify Palestinian resistance on behalf of the Israelis and Americans - using American counter-insurgency training and even some American small arms (never enough to turn them on their Israeli masters, of course).
And so here is a small selection of choice quotes to demonstrate that Israeli is a vicious regime, hell-bent on genocide, rather than on negotiating even the most truncated, neutered and poverty-ridden Palestinian state.

Dov Weisglass, Prime Minister Sharon's advisor, on the Gaza withdrawal in 2004: "The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." And he goes on: "When you freeze [the peace] process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the [Palestinian] refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.
"Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.
"And all this with authority and permission. All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."

The very same Weisglass was quoted in relation to the Israeli state's intended response to the democratic election of Hamas in 2006 - an election that the Americans and Israel demanded. Here is how he described their intended response: "It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die." 

The Haaretz article notes that this quote emerged from a meeting of a team assembled to respond to the situation: "The team, headed by the prime minister's advisor Dov Weissglas and including the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, the director of the Shin Bet and senior generals and officials, convened for a discussion with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on ways to respond to the Hamas election victory. Everyone agreed on the need to impose an economic siege on the Palestinian Authority..."
Certainly the Israelis aren't the first to use food as a weapon against weaker opponents, in order to crush all possibility of resistance. The Nazis used the same tactic against Jewish ghettos in World War 2. As discussed on a Holocaust eduction website:
"It is one of the cruelest weapons war, because deaths caused by starvation are protracted, involve great suffering and anxiety, and take their toll also in disease long before death, and malnutrition causes vitamin-deficiency diseases and related problems, and later breaks down the immune system. In WWII, the Nazis purposely reduced the amount of food to Jewish Ghettos and Camps leaving even the working residents half-starved... The starvation diet killed many, especially the weak and elderly without lifting a gun, and left the rest of the populace of [Warsaw] and other ghettos too weak to provide much resistance."
This tactic was systematized, like everything the Germans did in relation to the Final Solution, to an industrial precision. Starvation proceeded according to something called "The Caloric Reduction Intake Schedule".
Of course, none of this is accidental or the result of the bad politics of this or that Israeli leader. It has been the strategy of Israel from the beginning to eliminate the Palestinians.

As David Ben-Gurion noted in 1938, ten years before Israel's existence: "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."

The means to achieve the goal was also established early on: the locals should be provoked and then crushed when they respond. It is the method of a vise - don't resist and be eliminated in the most brutal manner; resist and be eliminated in the most brutal manner.

As Israeli Commander Moshe Dayan wrote in 1955: “Israel must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no – it must – invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and revenge…”
And that is exactly what they have done, at every hint of a peace initiative, Israel has gone out of its way to "invent dangers" via the "method of provocation" in order to destroy such initiatives. As Marwan Bishara argued in The Nation of July 5, 2006:
"On July 31, 2001, Israel's assassination of the two leading Hamas militants in Nablus ended a nearly two-month Hamas cease-fire, leading to the terrible August 9 Hamas suicide bombing in a Jerusalem pizzeria. On July 22, 2002, an Israeli air attack on a crowded apartment block in Gaza City killed a senior Hamas leader, Salah Shehada, and fourteen civilians, nine of them children, hours before a widely reported unilateral cease-fire declaration. A suicide bombing followed on August 4. On June 10, 2003, Israel's attempted assassination of the senior Hamas political leader in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, which wounded him and killed four Palestinian civilians, led to a bus bombing in Jerusalem on June 11 that killed sixteen Israelis."
He could have added that Hamas offered a ten year truce to Israel at the beginning of 2004. Israel's response was to assassinate Hamas' leader Sheikh Yassin a few months later, followed by his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who made the truce offer, a few weeks after that.
For Israel the worst possible scenario is the establishment of a lasting peace. Peace would put an end to the expansion of Israel and expansion is precisely the life-blood of Israel. As former Prime Minister Menachem Begin put it in 1948:

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."

And as Benyamin Netanyahu, former and probably the next Israeli Prime Minister stated in 1989: "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."

Thus Israel has broken every peace initiative, every unilateral or bilateral ceasefire between it and the Palestinians - then blamed it on the Palestinians as an excuse for imposing yet further brutality.
The present assault is no different - Hamas agreed a ceasefire earlier this year and stuck to it, while Israel continued the inhuman and illegal blockade and used the distraction of the November 4 US presidential elections to kill several Hamas leaders and break the ceasefire.
What this makes clear is that the Palestinians have no "partner" with whom to make peace. Israel will only make peace with its neighbours and Palestinians will only win civil and democratic rights on their land, when Israel has been utterly defeated. That will require several things. First and foremost, forcing the US government to withdraw support. And that is only possible when it is clear that Israel's extremist policy is a threat to American interests in the Middle East and/or as a result of the pressure of a popular movement in the US.