| Al Jazeera, January 20, 2009 | |||||||||||||
Palestinians returning to their neighbourhoods have begun to unearth the true scale of destruction left by Israel’s 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip. Fragile ceasefires – declared separately by Israel and Palestinian fighters – continued to hold on Tuesday, as Israeli troops pulled back from some key points in Gaza towards the border. Israeli army radio quoted unnamed military officials as saying that troops would pull out of Gaza by the time Barack Obama, the US president-elect, takes office on Tuesday. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, is also set to survey the destruction in a trip to Gaza during the day. Estimates for the rebuilding of Gaza’s devastated infrastructure have been put at billions of dollars. Dire situation
John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, says hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency aid supplies will be needed for the people of Gaza. Although 100,000 people had running water restored in their homes as of Sunday, 400,000 were still without it, Holmes said. Electricity in Gaza is available for less than half the day and about 100,000 people have been displaced by the war. Despite the three-week Israeli onslaught that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and destroyed thousands of buildings, Hamas and other Palestinian factions claimed victory in the fighting. Israel had said the aim of its operations in Gaza was to cripple Hamas’s ability to launch rockets into the south of the country. But a masked man calling himself Abu Obeida and claiming to be a spokesman for Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, said the group’s rocket-launching capacity had not been diminished, and threatened to renew fighting if Israeli forces did not withdraw. “They [Israel] say they weakened Hamas. We assure you that what we have lost in this war is nothing compared to what we [still] have,” he said in a televised news conference on Monday. Abu Obeida vowed that Hamas would replenish its arsenal of rockets and other weapons, in defiance of any Israeli or international efforts to cut off smuggling routes. “Do whatever you want, bringing in and manufacturing the holy weapons is our mission, and we know how to acquire weapons,” he said. Disease fears
Meanwhile, scores of bodies have been discovered in the rubble of destroyed buildings since the fighting was halted. Abed Sharafi, an ambulance driver, said on Monday that he had helped pull out the bodies of 15 children and women from under their house. “They were so badly decomposed that we couldn’t distinguish boys from girls. Some had been there for 15 days,” he said. Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza City, said the World Health Organisation was warning of an outbreak of disease with bodies now several weeks old and sewage flowing over many areas because of the destruction to infrastructure. The deposed Hamas-led government in Gaza estimates that more than 5,000 buildings were completely destroyed and 20,000 damaged or partially destroyed in the fighting. |
Archive for the ‘imperialism’ Category
Gazans count cost of war
January 20, 2009
Israel’s deadly ceasefire
January 19, 2009reports that the number of Palestinian dead in Gaza will continue to rise despite Israel’s “ceasefire.”
Socialist Worker, January 19, 2009
The aftermath of Israel’s assault on Gaza (Sameh A. Habeeb)
ISRAEL DECLARED a unilateral ceasefire Sunday after a 23-day onslaught on Gaza that left more than 1,250 Palestinians dead and more than 4,000 wounded. Among the dead are at least 280 children and 95 women, according to estimates by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and there are 860 children and 488 women among the wounded.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert claimed that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) had waged an effective and successful campaign in Gaza.
“The conditions have been brought about that enable us to say that the aims of the operations have been reached,” said Olmert. He said Israel “will consider withdrawing completely from Gaza at a date that suits us,” on the condition that rockets are no longer fired from Gaza at southern Israel.
Olmert said the Hamas, the Islamist party that controls what exists of a government in Gaza, “has been dealt a very serious blow, both in terms of its military infrastructure and the infrastructure of its government. Many of its people have been killed. Its leaders are in hiding. The tunnels that armed them have been destroyed.
Twelve hours later, Hamas leaders declared their own ceasefire, but made full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the opening of Gaza’s border crossings a condition of a full end of hostilities.
“We stress our demand that Israel withdraw its forces within a week and then open the crossings to humanitarian aid and various types of merchandise,” read the statement from Hamas. Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum added, “A unilateral ceasefire does not mean ending the aggression and ending the siege…These constitute acts of war, so this won’t mean an end to resistance.”
As news of the ceasefire spread, Gazans who had fled the fighting returned to shocking scenes of destruction–overturned cars, torn-up streets, sewage running in the streets, leveled homes and still smoldering mosques and government buildings. Many bodies remain buried in homes flattened by Israeli tanks or strafed by air strikes.
In fact, the menacing sound of Israeli drones circling overhead, the churn of tank treads and the occasional crackle of gunfire were steady reminders that Israel’s “ceasefire” hadn’t ended the killing, and reports of Israeli attacks on civilians continued to pile up.
According to the BBC, “At least 1,600 people, displaced from their homes, were sheltering in a UN school in Gaza [Sunday] morning when it took a direct hit from an Israel shell. Two young brothers, aged five and seven, were killed.”
A press release issued by the Al Mezan Center confirmed similar acts of aggression throughout Gaza. “Shooting and shelling from artillery batteries, tanks and naval vessels have occurred in various areas throughout the day,” according to the release. “Israeli aircraft also launched raids on open areas. At 10:30 a.m. [Sunday], Israeli troops opened fire at civilians who were trying to reach their homes in Khuzaa village, east of Khan Younis. A man, 22-year-old Mahir Abu Irjila, was killed as a result. The victim and his family had evacuated their house and stayed in a UN shelter.”
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ISRAEL ANNOUNCED that it would continue to occupy positions in Gaza until it could be certain that no more rockets would be launched at towns in southern Israel, and warned that any such fire would be met with “a massive, disproportionate assault,” according to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper.
But the announcement of the “ceasefire” was enough to draw praise from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who was meeting with European leaders at the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. “This should be the first step leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza,” said the secretary general.
But the terms of what was agreed to at Sharm al-Sheikh betray the complicity of the international community in the barbarism inflicted on the residents of Gaza during the last three weeks.
Six European countries–Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Czech Republic–agreed to supply soldiers and technological assistance as part of efforts, in alliance with Egypt and the U.S., to stop Hamas from transporting weapons into Gaza. No officials from these countries uttered a word of criticism of Israel’s blatant disregard for civilian life and infrastructure.
Thus, there was no rebuttal to Olmert, who was also present, when he stated, “We did not want to hurt them or their children…They are the victims of Hamas.”
Olmert and other Israeli leaders have regularly returned to this justification–that Hamas had it within its power to stop Israel’s attack, but failed to do so–for unleashing the world’s fourth most powerful military against the residents of Gaza, who lack even basic necessities, such as adequate food, medical supplies and electricity.
Three years ago, Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces and settlers from Gaza, but remained in control of all traffic into and out of Gaza via land, sea and air–which is why many observers describe Gaza as the world’s largest prison colony, with 1.5 million residents eking out an appalling existence in squalid refugee camps.
If Israeli officials really believed that the civilian casualties were “victims of Hamas,” they wouldn’t have been so concerned with barring reporters and photographers to suppress reports of the carnage in Gaza from the military’s punishing assault.
Nevertheless, enough reports did leak out to spark massive protests–across the Middle East, and throughout Europe and the U.S. These protests were not only larger than previous demonstrations in support of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, but they were also accompanied, especially in the U.S., by a significant increase in polls showing opposition to Israel’s attack.
It will be up to activists in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world to seize on the enormous outpouring of sympathy for Israel’s victims in Gaza to build a sustained movement against the apartheid conditions facing Palestinians.
In the words of Haidar Eid, a Gaza resident who helped to spearhead a call for an international movement to sanction, boycott and divest from Israel, Israel’s attack on Gaza could be “the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when 69 Blacks were killed by the white racist regime of apartheid South Africa.” As he said in an interview with SocialistWorker.org last week:
This massacre gave rise to the [divestment] campaign against apartheid South Africa, which ultimately led to the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and his election as the first Black president of multicultural, multiracial, secular, democratic South Africa as we know it now.
Gaza could be the spark that could initiate a different ‘new Middle East’ than what Condoleezza Rice talked about in 2006. She meant a ‘new Middle East’ characterized by American and Israeli hegemony. What I’m saying now is that I can see the birth pangs of a new Middle East characterized by the end of despotic, dictatorial pro-American regimes.
Ralph Nader: Punishing the Palestinians
January 18, 2009Published on Saturday, January 17, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
In the long sixty-year tortured history of the Palestinian expulsion from their lands, Congress has maintained that it is always the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, and now Hamas who are to blame for all hostilities and their consequences with the Israeli government.
The latest illustration of this Washington puppet show, backed by the most modern weapons and billions of taxpayer dollars annually sent to Israel, was the grotesquely one-sided Resolutions whisked through the Senate and the House of Representatives.
While a massive bombing and invasion of Gaza was underway, the resolution blaming Hamas for all the civilian casualties and devastation-99% of it inflicted on Palestinians-zoomed through the Senate by voice vote and through the House by a vote of 390 to 5 with 22 legislators voting present.
There is more dissent against this destruction of Gaza among the Israeli people, the Knesset, the Israeli media, and Jewish-Americans than among the dittoheads on Capitol Hill.
The reasons for such near-unanimous support for Israeli actions-no matter how often they are condemned by peace advocates such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, United Nations resolutions, the World Court and leading human rights groups inside and outside of Israel, are numerous. The pro-Israeli government lobby, and the right-wing Christian evangelicals, lubricated by campaign money of many Political Action Committees (PACs) certainly are key.
There is also more than a little bigotry in Congress against Arabs and Muslims, reinforced by the mass media yahoos who set new records for biased reporting each time this conflict erupts.
The bias is clear. It is always the Palestinians’ fault. Right-wingers who would never view the U.S. government as perfect see the Israeli government as never doing anything wrong. Liberals who do not hesitate to criticize the U.S. military view all Israeli military attacks, invasions and civilian devastation as heroic manifestations of Israeli defense.
The inversion of history and the scope of amnesia know no limits. What about the fact that the Israeli government drove Palestinians from their lands in 1947-48 with tens of thousands pushed into the Gaza strip. No problem to Congress.
Then the fact that the Israeli government cruelly occupied, in violation of UN resolutions, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and only removed its soldiers and colonists from Gaza (1.5 million people in a tiny area twice the size of the District of Columbia) in 2005. To Congress, the Palestinians deserved it.
Then when Hamas was freely elected to run Gaza, the Israeli authorities cut off the tax revenues on imports that belonged to the Gaza government. This threw the Gazans into a fiscal crisis-they were unable to pay their civil servants and police.
In 2006, the Israelis added to their unrelieved control of air, water and land around the open-air prison by establishing a blockade. The natives became restless. Under international law, a blockade is an act of war. Primitive rockets, called by reporters “wildly inaccurate” were fired into Israel. During this same period, Israeli soldiers and artillery and missiles would go into Gaza at will and take far more lives and cause far more injuries than those incurred by those rockets. Civilians-especially children, the infirm and elderly-died or suffered week after week for lack of medicines, medical equipment, food, electricity, fuel and water which were embargoed by the Israelis.
Then the Israeli bombing followed by the invasion during the past three weeks with what prominent Israeli writer Gideon Levy called “a brutal and violent operation…far beyond what was needed for protecting the people in its south.” Mr. Levy observed what the president of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann called a war against “a helpless and defenseless imprisoned population.”
The horror of being trapped from fleeing the torrent of the most modern weapons of war from the land, air and seas is reflected in this passage from Amira Hass, writing in the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz:
“The earth shaking under your feet, clouds of choking smoke, explosions like a fireworks display, bombs bursting into all-consuming flames that cannot be extinguished with water, mushroom clouds of pinkish-red smoke, suffocating gas, harsh burns on the skin, extraordinary maimed live and dead bodies.”
Ms. Hass is pointing to the use of new anti-civilian weapons used on the Gazan people. So far there have been over 1100 fatalities, many thousands of injuries and the destruction of homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, pharmacies, granaries, farmer’s fields and many critical public facilities. The clearly marked UN headquarters and UN school were smashed, along with stored medicines and food supplies.
Why? The Congressional response: “Hamas terrorists” everywhere. Sure, defending their Palestinian families is called terrorism. The truth is there is no Hamas army, airforce and navy up against the fourth most powerful military in the world. As one Israeli gunner on an armored personnel carrier frankly said to The New York Times: “They are villagers with guns. They don’t even aim when they shoot.”
Injured Gazans are dying in damaged hospital corridors, bleeding to death because rescuers are not permitted to reach them or are endangered themselves. Thousands of units of blood donated by Jordanians are stopped by the Israeli blockade. Israel has kept the international press out of the Gazan killing fields.
What is going on in Gaza is what Bill Moyers called it earlier this month – “state terrorism.” Already about 400 children are known to have died. More will be added who are under the rubble.
Since 2002, more than 50 Arab and Muslim nations have had a standing offer, repeated often, that if Israel obeys several UN resolutions and withdraws to the 1967 borders leaving 22 percent of the original Palestine for an independent Palestinian state, they will open full diplomatic relations and there will be peace. Israel has declined to accept this offer.
None of these and many other aspects of this conflict matter to the Congress. Its members do not want to hear even from the Israeli peace movement, composed of retired generals, security chiefs, mayors, former government ministers, and members of the Knesset. In 60 years these savvy peace advocates have not been able to give one hour of testimony before a Congressional Committee.
Maybe members of Congress may wish to weigh the words of the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, years ago when he said:
“There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis Hitler Auschwitz but was that their [the Palestinian’s] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country.”
Doesn’t that observation invite some compassion for the Palestinian people and their right to be free of Israeli occupation, land and water grabs and blockades in the 22 percent left of Palestine?
Galloway: Widening the struggle
January 18, 2009GEORGE GALLOWAY argues that the time has come to step up the struggle to achieve justice for Palestinians.
As I write, the death toll in Gaza is approaching 1,000, nearly 400 of them confirmed as children. I dread to think what the figure will be by the time you read this.
What is happening in Palestine is murder on a mass scale, perpetrated by one of the most powerful states in the world with the backing of US, Britain and its allies. I say what is happening in Palestine for a significant reason – Gaza is part of Palestine.
No-one should fall for the subtle tricks in the mainstream media which has so badly let us down and mangled the truth. I can think of no better time for the Morning Star to expand in print and online.
The corporate media gives the impression that there is this strange place called Gaza full of people called “militants” and “ruled” by Hamas.
But this is an attack on Palestine – all of Palestine and every Palestinian. Do not let them demonise the Gaza Strip or split it politically from the West Bank. There have been no rockets fired from the West Bank, but Israel has still killed 25 Palestinians there in recent months.
The attack on Gaza has already called forth a huge feeling of solidarity in Britain and the world. It has united Muslim and non-Muslim in huge demonstrations and other events. Now, it has to become a mass movement of practical and political solidarity.
We must not allow the Muslim community to feel intimidated by the kinds of Islamophobic smears they’ve faced that claim that any among them who raises the plight of the Palestinians is somehow an “extremist” or supporter of terrorism.
Nor should we allow the public mood and incipient movement to be derailed by a concerted attempt to smear it as anti-semitic. Among the loudest voices calling for isolating Israel are those of Jews.
I have just left the House of Commons chamber, where Gerald Kaufman has made one of the greatest speeches that I’ve heard there. He said that his grandmother had been shot in her bed by the nazis. She had not died so that her death could be used to justify the atrocities in Gaza, he said.
Leaders of the Catholic church have called Gaza a gigantic “concentration camp.” The highest United Nations officials are calling for an investigation into the war crimes in blowing up schools, universities and callously inflicting suffering on civilians.
The Labour government’s response to the onslaught on Gaza has been a disgrace. For three days it refused to call for any cessation of hostilities. Now it calls for a ceasefire, but on Israel’s terms, which mean the annihilation of the legitimate Palestinian resistance.
Remember this – Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4 when it attacked Hamas, the government of the Palestinian authority which was elected by the Palestinian people in the only democratic vote in the Arab world.
These are basic arguments which must be popularised throughout the movement. Matters are at a turning point. In my estimation, the dynamic that was apparent within the Stop the War movement in 2002 has resurfaced.
We’re not yet on the vast scale of February 15 2003, but the movement is on an upswing. There are other differences too.
There is, in my view, a higher understanding of the nature of zionism and of imperialism. There is also a greater sense of strategic debate in the movement.
That is why I want to end this column with some thoughts about how we might go forward:
Public protests are important. They keep our movement visible and, believe me, the pictures reach Palestine.
Pressure must be brought to bear on every elected representative and everyone in public life in Britain to speak out firmly for the Palestinian people and for official action against Israel, which UN officials want investigated for war crimes.
No person of conscience bought South African goods during apartheid. Today, Israel, its produce and manufactured goods should also be shunned. The call to boycott Israel is growing and Jewish supporters of the Palestinians are among the most vocal. Where does your MP or councillor stand?
It is time to flood the people of Palestine with practical aid. I am pulling together other individuals and groups to organise a convoy from Britain to Gaza led by fire engines donated by the Fire Brigades Union. Your mosque, community group, trade union, church, etc can sponsor it or provide a lorry, two drivers, costs and fill it with things which the people of Gaza need.
Through these steps, we can build political support for Palestine here and get aid over there. And, whenever you are called upon to vote in elections in Britain, remember to ask those who want your support: “What did you do when the bombs fell on the people of Gaza?”
The call for an aid convoy from Britain to Gaza is meeting with huge enthusiasm – Stop the War, the British Muslim Initiative and many others are coming on board.
I hope that it can provide a political focus to spur on a vast aid effort and a movement of political solidarity.
In the 1930s, working-class people across Europe rallied to aid the people of republican Spain, who faced the bombing of towns and the massacre of civilians by the forces of jackbooted General Franco.
The cry then was “Aidez l’Espagne!” The call today should be: “Viva Palestina!”
George Galloway is Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow.
A war to crush the Palestinians
January 17, 2009argues that Israel’s rhetoric about Hamas “terrorism” is a pretext for an attempt to crush the Palestinian national movement.
Socialist Worker, January 16, 2009
TO U.S. politicians and mainstream media commentators, the justification for the massacre in Gaza is simple and unquestioned–that Israel is responding to Palestinian “terrorism” in the form of rocket attacks aimed at southern Israel.
“Israel has no choice but to take military action,” said former Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, in a phrase repeated by politicians across the political spectrum. For the Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared, “I think this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away.”
In U.S. politics, these two arguments–that Israel had no choice but to defend itself, and that it faces a terrorist assault–are sufficient to excuse even the most senseless killing of Palestinian civilians and wanton destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure by Israeli forces.
But like so much that passes for fact in the U.S. discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict, these arguments obscure all the essential dynamics of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people.
First, Hamas scrupulously observed a cease-fire from the summer of 2008 until Israel launched a raid November 4 that killed six Hamas members. The attack took place as the U.S. and international media focused its attention on the election of Barack Obama. Only after Israel broke this most recent cease-fire did Hamas militants fire rockets at Israel.
And as Palestinian activist and author Ali Abunimah has pointed out:
There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel’s attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has acceded to all of Israel’s demands, even assembling “security forces” to fight the resistance on Israel’s behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian or her property or livelihood from Israel’s relentless violent colonization.
Since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian rocket fire has killed 11 Israelis. During the same period, Israel killed at least 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, including 223 children.
And during the so-called truce that began last summer, Israel continued its suffocating siege of Gaza, imposing shortages of electricity, food and medical supplies that led to countless deaths, not to mention exacerbating the already inhuman levels of grinding poverty, unemployment and despair.
The inescapable conclusion is that Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza are the excuse for, not the cause of, the Israeli offensive that began on December 27.
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THIS BEGS an obvious question: What are the real reasons for Israel’s attack?
For one, Israel chose this moment with an exquisite sense of timing. According to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper, planning for the offensive began six months ago.
The attack was launched between the Christmas and New Year holidays when most Western governments are on hiatus. Further, the Bush administration–an ardent supporter of Israel’s aggression, no matter how bloody–could be expected to be quiet in its twilight while Barack Obama conveniently can conveniently hide behind the excuse that “there’s only one president at a time” (despite his high-profile involvement in setting economic policy in response to the unraveling economy).
At the most basic level, Israel hopes that the military defeat of Hamas will finally give it total and unchallenged control over the flow of goods into and out of Gaza, specifically by destroying the network of tunnels that connect Gaza to Egypt at the Rafah border crossing.
While it is true that these tunnels are used to provide Hamas with military equipment, what the corporate media fails to point out is that the tunnels now provide the vast majority of essential humanitarian supplies–goods that Israel has blocked at the border crossings it controls. As journalist Jonathan Cook wrote:
Israel believes the current invasion will have achieved nothing unless this time it regains absolute control of the Rafah border, undercutting Hamas’s claims to be running the Strip. The “mechanism” therefore requires that technical responsibility is lifted from Egyptian shoulders.
According to the Israeli plan, it will pass to the Americans, whose expertise will be called on to stop the tunneling and prevent Hamas from rebuilding its arsenal after the invasion comes to an end. Israel may additionally seek the involvement of international forces to diffuse the censure the Arab publics are likely to direct at Egypt as a result.
Israel also aims to further destroy Hamas’ institutional means to govern Gaza in order to weaken Hamas’ overall political strength and to create terms for a new cease-fire even more favorable to Israel. This is a longstanding goal of Israel’s political leadership, which it has pursued by a variety of means.
As Avi Shlaim, an Israeli professor of international relations at Oxford University, wrote:
In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognize the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organization.
America and the [European Union] shamelessly joined Israel in ostracizing and demonizing the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
Then, Israel turned to more aggressive measures, working with the CIA to deliver guns and money to stoke a Palestinian civil war that Israel hoped would end in the overthrow of Hamas rule by the now fully tamed Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas, the current PA president.
But the plan didn’t work out, according to David Rose, who unearthed the details of the operation in an April 2008 Vanity Fair article. He wrote:
[T]he secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.
Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that [Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott] Abrams [who was key to the implementation of the Gaza gambit] was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal under President Ronald Reagan.
There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the CIA’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.
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THE IRONY, of course, is that for decades Israel sought to undermine, divide and destroy the Palestinian national movement as embodied in the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israel abetted the growth of Hamas as a means to that end.
As Middle East commentator Stephen Zunes wrote:
Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist movements.
Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the antecedents of Hamas began to emerge through the establishment of schools, health care clinics, social service organizations and other entities that stressed an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, which up to that point had not been very common among the Palestinian population.
The hope was that if people spent more time praying in mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left-wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli occupation.
By the early 1990s, even Israel’s wink-and-nod at the growth of Hamas did little to persuade most Palestinians, who were not particularly religious, to abandon their commitment to the PLO, the historic representative of the Palestinian national movement.
It wasn’t until the 1993 “peace process,” by which Yasser Arafat and the PLO were transformed from resistance fighters into the willing accomplices of Israel’s drive to put the West Bank under Israeli hegemony while isolating Gaza, that Hamas began to overtake Fatah’s popularity.
“At the time of the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO in 1993, polls showed that Hamas had the support of only 15 percent of the Palestinian community,” writes Zunes. “Support for Hamas grew, however, as promises of a viable Palestinian state faded as Israel continued to expand its colonization drive on the West Bank without apparent U.S. objections, doubling the amount of settlers over the next dozen years.”
In addition to suppressing the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, Israel aims to accomplish a larger regional goal with the assault on Gaza–namely, to re-establish the deterrent effect of having the most powerful military force in the Middle East. Ever since its humiliating defeat by Hezbollah in the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006, Israel has been looking for an opportunity to demonstrate overwhelming power.
Thus, the widespread civilian casualties and destruction of Hamas’ political institutions are purposefully designed to send a message to Iran, Hezbollah and other regional foes that the price of opposing of Israel should not be underestimated.
“The Israeli army needs to address the problem created to its deterrence in 2006,” Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, told Agence France Presse. “The army has to change its image among its enemies that it is afraid to use ground forces…It does not necessarily need to be a large-scale invasion, maybe just special units or localized incursions, but the army needs boots on the ground.”
Finally, Israel’s assault on Gaza is the latest attempt to put into practice the Bush administration blueprint for domination of the Middle East by the U.S. and its junior partner Israel. According to Columbia University professor Joseph Massad:
The U.S. has seen this as an opportune moment to fully integrate Israel in the region, so much so that it signaled to its Gulf allies to make proposals for a new regional alliance that includes Israel in its midst. The Bahraini foreign minister suggested a few weeks ago that Israel join the Arab League. Many such proposals have already been made in the past few months welcoming the colonial settlement to the regional alliance against Iran.
Against this U.S.-backed Israeli drive to further colonial domination, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is legitimate and just–and protected under international law. No one should be fooled by U.S.-Israeli attempts to use the “war on terror” to excuse their imperial aims.
Galloway: We Are The Authors Of This Tragedy
January 17, 2009|
George Galloway’s powerful speech in the House of Commons debate on Gaza, Thu 15 Jan 2009 (5.30pm), highlighting the hypocrisy and brazen double-standards of Western foreign policy towards Israel policies, including assassinations and other war crimes.
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Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold: The Case of Israel
January 17, 2009The state of Israel proclaimed its independence at midnight on May 15, 1948. The United Nations had voted to establish two states in what had been Palestine under British rule. The city of Jerusalem was supposed to be an international zone under U.N. jurisdiction. The U.N. resolution had wide support, and specifically that of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Arab states all voted against it.
In the sixty years of its existence, the state of Israel has depended for its survival and expansion on an overall strategy that combined three elements: macho militarism, geopolitical alliances, and public relations. The macho militarism (what current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls the “iron fist”) was made possible by the nationalist fervor of Jewish Israelis, and eventually (although not initially) by the very strong support of Jewish communities elsewhere in the world.
Geopolitically, Israel first forged an alliance with the Soviet Union (which was brief but crucial), then with France (which lasted a longer time and allowed Israel to become a nuclear power), and finally (and most importantly) with the United States. These allies, who were also patrons, offered most importantly military support through the provision of weapons. But they also offered diplomatic/political support, and in the case of the United States considerable economic support.
The public relations was aimed at obtaining sympathetic support from a wide swath of world public opinion, based in the early years on a portrait of Israel as a pioneering David against a retrograde Goliath, and in the last forty years on guilt and compassion over the massive Nazi extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War.
All these elements of Israeli strategy worked well from 1948 to the 1980s. Indeed, they were increasingly more effective. But somewhere in the 1980s, the use of each of the three tactics began to be counterproductive. Israel has now entered into a phase of the precipitate decline of its strategy. It may be too late for Israel to pursue any alternative strategy, in which case it will have committed geopolitical suicide. Let us trace how the three elements in the strategy interacted, first during the successful upward swing, then during the slow decline of Israel’s power.
For the first twenty-five years of its existence, Israel engaged in four wars with Arab states. The first was the 1948-1949 war to establish the Jewish state. The Israeli declaration of an independent state was not matched by a Palestinian declaration to establish a state. Rather, a number of Arab governments declared war on Israel. Israel was initially in military difficulty. However, the Israeli military were far better trained than those of the Arab countries, with the exception of Transjordan. And, crucially, they obtained arms from Czechoslovakia, acting as the agent of the Soviet Union.
By the time of the truce in 1949, the discipline of the Israeli forces combined with the Czech arms enabled the Israelis to win considerable territory not included in the partition proposals of the United Nations, including west Jerusalem. The other areas were incorporated by the surrounding Arab states. A large number of Palestinian Arabs left or were forced to leave areas under the control of the Israelis and became refugees in neighboring Arab countries, where their descendants still largely live today. The land they had owned was taken by Jewish Israelis.
The Soviet Union soon dropped Israel. This was probably primarily because its leaders quickly became afraid of the impact of the creation of the state on the attitudes of Soviet Jewry, who seemed overly enthusiastic and hence potentially subversive from Stalin’s point of view. Israel in turn dropped any sympathy for the socialist camp in the Cold War, and made clear its fervent desire to be considered a full-fledged member of the Western world, politically and culturally.
France at this time was faced with national liberation movements in its three North African colonies, and saw in Israel a useful ally. This was especially true after the Algerians launched their war of independence in 1954. France began to help Israel arm itself. In particular, France, which was developing its own nuclear weapons (against U.S. wishes), helped Israel do the same. In 1956, Israel joined France and Great Britain in a war against Egypt. Unfortunately for Israel, this war was launched against U.S. opposition, and the United States forced all three powers to end it.
After Algeria became independent in 1962, France lost interest in the Israeli connection, which now interfered with its attempts to renew closer relations with the three now independent North African states. It was at this point that the United States and Israel turned to each other to forge close links. In 1967, war broke out again between Egypt and Israel, and other Arab states joined Egypt. In this so-called Six Day War, the United States for the first time gave military weapons to Israel.
The 1967 Israeli victory changed the basic situation in many respects. Israel had won the war handily, occupying all those parts of the British mandate of Palestine that it had occupied before, plus Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. Juridically, there was now a state of Israel plus Israel’s occupied territories. Israel began a policy of establishing
Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The Israeli victory transformed the attitude of world Jewry, which now overcame whatever reservations it had had about the creation of the state of Israel. They took great pride in its accomplishments and began to undertake major political campaigns in the United States and western Europe to secure political support for Israel. The image of a pioneering Israel with emphasis on the virtues of the kibbutz was abandoned in favor of an emphasis on the Holocaust as the basic justification for world support of Israel.
In 1973, the Arab states sought to redress the military situation in the so-called Yom Kippur war. This time again, Israel won the war, with U.S. arms support. The 1973 war marked the end of the central role of the Arab states. Israel could continue to try to get recognition from Arab states, and it did succeed eventually with both Egypt and Jordan, but it was now too late for this to be a way to secure Israel’s existence.
As of this point, there emerged a serious Palestinian Arab political movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was now the key opponent of Israel, the one with whom Israel needed to come to terms. For a long time, Israel refused to deal with the PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat, preferring the iron fist. And at first, it was militarily successful.
The limits of the iron fist policy were made evident by the first intifada, a spontaneous uprising of Palestinian Arabs inside the occupied territories, which began in 1987 and lasted six years. The basic achievement of the intifada was twofold. It forced the Israelis and the United States to talk to the PLO, a long process that led to the so-called Oslo Accords of 1993, which provided for the creation of the Palestinian Authority in part of the occupied territories.
The Oslo Accords in the long run were geopolitically less important than the impact of the intifada on world public opinion. For the first time, the David-Goliath image began to be inverted. For the first time, there began to be serious support in the Western world for the so-called two-state solution. For the first time, there began to be serious criticism of Israel’s iron fist and its practices vis-à-vis the Arab Palestinians. Had Israel been serious about a two-state solution based on the so-called Green Line – the line of division at the end of the 1948-1949 war – it probably would have achieved a settlement.
Israel however was always one step behind. When it could have negotiated with Nasser, it wouldn’t. When it could have negotiated with Arafat, it wouldn’t. When Arafat died and was succeeded by the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas, the more militant Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. Israel refused to talk to Hamas.
Now, Israel has invaded Gaza, seeking to destroy Hamas. If it succeeds, what organization will come next? If, as is more probable, it fails to destroy Hamas, is a two-state solution now possible? Both Palestinian and world public opinion is moving towards the one-state solution. And this is of course the end of the Zionist project.
The three-element strategy of Israel is decomposing. The iron fist no longer succeeds, much as it didn’t for George Bush in Iraq. Will the United States link remain firm? I doubt it. And will world public opinion continue to look sympathetically on Israel? It seems not. Can Israel now switch to an alternative strategy, of negotiating with the militant representatives of the Arab Palestinians, as an integral constituent of the Middle East, and not as an outpost of Europe? It seems quite late for that, quite possibly too late. Hence, the chronicle of a suicide foretold.
David Miliband: Bush’s War on Terror was misleading and mistaken
January 16, 2009The Times, UK, January 16, 2009
Speaking in Mumbai, David Miliband said that the idea of a war on terror gave a false notion “of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and the organisation of al-Qaeda”.
He suggested that the phrase had “inadvertently sustained al-Qaeda’s propaganda” and risked magnifying the threats faced. “The more we lump terrorist groups together, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common,” he added.
The speech, which was given at the Taj Mahal Palace, one of two hotels struck in November’s terrorist attack, ranked among the British Government’s harshest critiques of Mr Bush’s foreign policy, but came just five days before the 43rd President makes way for Barack Obama.
David Miliband should have chosen another venue – and another time – to take on President Bush 
Mr Miliband shrugged off suggestions that his comments would have been braver had they been delivered earlier in Mr Bush’s tenure. The key issue was one of semantic accuracy, he said. “Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.”
Democracies must respond to terrorism “by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it”, he added, citing Guantánamo Bay and endorsing Mr Obama’s pledge to close the controversial detention camp.
Mr Miliband said that the term War on Terror had some merit — for capturing the need to tackle terrorism urgently and with force. But it also invited “invidious comparisons” between organisations as diverse as the Tamil Tigers, who are fighting for an ethnic Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based faction that Indian and British officials believe was behind the Mumbai atrocities, which was founded to drive India out of Kashmir.
The phrase also suggested that terror had to be tackled primarily by military means, Mr Miliband said, but history showed that American and British forces “could not kill [their] way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife” in Iraq.
The term War on Terror was first used by President Bush in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.
Hillary Clinton coined a slogan this week when she peppered her remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with the term “smart power”. The New York Times said: “It means using all the levers of influence — diplomatic, economic, military, legal, political and cultural — to get what you want.”
— Kamal Shah, Pakistan’s Interior Secretary, said that 71 people had been arrested and 124 were under surveillance in a crackdown on groups allegedly linked to the Mumbai attacks. (AP)
Peace and Justice Post 
When Pharaoh embraces Goliath
January 18, 2009Mostafa Omar shows how Egypt’s tacit support for Israel’s war on Gaza has deepened the crisis in Egyptian society.
Socialist Worker, January 14, 2009
MILLIONS OF ordinary Arabs have poured into the streets of every Arab country in the past two weeks to protest the ongoing Israeli massacres against Palestinians in Gaza. Demonstrators not only condemned the U.S. for its typical unconditional support of Israel, but they also denounced Arab regimes that do nothing to help the Palestinians besides give empty speeches.
Protests in the Arab streets in solidarity with victims of Israel’s wars from Palestine to Lebanon are common reactions in the region. Yet the latest mobilizations have a new and volatile character compared to previous ones.
First, the demonstrations this time are much larger and angrier than anything in decades. They reflect not just the outrage that ordinary Arabs feel towards Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinians, but also the bitterness towards the arrogant attempts of the United States to conquer Iraq and Afghanistan.
Second, these demonstrations have an explosive character due to the acute economic crisis faced by Arab workers and peasants. This is especially true in Egypt and Jordan, which have implemented disastrous free market policies in the last three decades.
Al-Ahram Weekly carries English-language news updates and commentaries on the situation in Egypt.
One of the best left-wing writers on Egypt is Joel Beinin, a contributing editor to Middle East Report and Information Project. His article “The Militancy of Mahalla al-Kubra” provides essential background on the fight of textile workers.
Last year, the International Socialist Review published a special feature on the global food crisis, including Hossam El-Hamalawy’s “Revolt at Mahalla” on the eruption of class struggle in Egypt in connection with the food crisis, and Sharon Smith’s “The revolt over rising food prices.”
Norman Finkelstein’s Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is essential reading for picking apart the myths used to justify Israel’s apartheid. Between the Lines: Readings on Israel, the Palestinians and the U.S. “War on Terror,” by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad, documents the apartheid-like conditions that Palestinians live under today.
For background on Israel’s war and the Palestinian struggle for freedom, read The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays edited by Lance Selfa on the history of the occupation and Palestinian resistance.
Finally, while protesters in various Arab countries have denounced all the regimes that fail to take any meaningful action against Israel or its American sponsor, demonstrators have concentrated their wrath on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for his shameful role in enforcing the Israeli blockade on Gaza for the past year and a half.
Indeed, Mubarak has publicly stated that he will not open the Rafah border crossing to Palestinians searching for food and medicine until Mahmoud Abbas, the pro-Western president of the Palestinian Authority, is back in power in Gaza.
For months, Mubarak has stopped all but very limited numbers of aid caravans with food and medicine to Gazans from crossing into the Strip. And since the Palestinians broke down the border wall between Egypt and Gaza in January 2008 to enter Egypt to buy supplies of food and medicine, Mubarak has also increased the number of Egyptian police at the border with Gaza to prevent any more prison breaks.
To add insult to injury, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni used her meeting with Mubarak in Cairo December 24 to more or less announce that Israel would start bombing Gaza.
Another source of bitterness is the fact that Israel relies for much of its electricity on cheap Egyptian natural gas. In 2005, Mubarak signed a 15-year trade deal with Israel to supply it with 20 percent of its natural gas needs at a low, fixed price. In other words, anything Israel needs for its massacre that uses electricity is operating on the cheap, thanks to Mubarak.
Therefore, the anger that erupted across the Arab streets against Mubarak–derisively known as the Pharaoh–is totally justified.
In Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Lebanon, angry demonstrators tried to storm Egyptian embassies and consulates. In Aden, Yemen, protesters managed to actually take over the consulate for a short period and vandalized its contents. Protesters called Mubarak a coward and accused him of being an agent of Israel and Zionism. They carried a poster featuring the pictures of Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mubarak smiling, with the caption calling the trio the “Axis of Dirt.”
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A FEW days after the Israeli massacre in Gaza began, Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al Quds newspaper, told Al-Jazeera:
Indeed, it was one of the most insulting things Israel has done to Egyptians in a long time. But the response in Egypt to Israel’s actions–and to Mubarak’s role in strangling Gaza–has exceeded everyone’s expectation.
The Association of Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition group, along with different socialist and Nasserist groups, the Egyptian Movement for Democracy (Kifaya! or Enough!), writers, artists and most unions have all denounced Mubarak’s complicity with Israel.
But they’ve also been actively mobilizing an impressive number of protests in all major cities, towns and villages across the country. They are trying in many different ways to put pressure on Mubarak to stop fronting for Israel.
For example, students from the Muslim Brotherhood and left-wing organizations, along with university professors, are holding angry demonstrations and mass meetings in every major university around the country. On December 28, at one of many huge rallies that took place at Cairo University, students chanted against Israel and denounced the Egyptian president’s complicity with Israel. Ahmed Sayyid, a pharmacy major at Cairo University, told reporters:
In the provincial northern city of Damanhour, 15,000 women supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood protested and clashed with police who tried to stop them from marching to join the Doctors Union at a mass meeting to support Palestinians. And in the capital city of Cairo, the police had to shut down all streets leading to midtown on more than one occasion to stop the thousands of people who keep turning out for daily protests.
The Popular Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People is also trying to organize independent, grassroots aid caravans to travel to Rafah starting January 9 in an attempt to break the siege once and for all.
Egyptian artists also held a mass meeting in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance and to protest Israel’s massacres. The meeting issued a statement directed to all artists around the world. Part of it read:
Unions organizing millions of workers and professionals, such as lawyers, journalists, engineers and doctors–which have refused to recognize Israel from Day One of the 1979 peace treaty–have called on their members to rally in defense of Gaza. Thousands attended mass meetings and protests, either in their own union headquarters or on the streets all over the country. And on January 6, the General Union of Doctors held an emergency mass membership meeting to send physicians and medicine to Gaza.
Among the common demands of this opposition are that Mubarak opens the border crossing with Gaza, ends all exports of Egyptian natural gas to Israel, and severs all diplomatic and economic ties to Israel.
In the Egyptian Coptic Christian community, which makes up between 10 and 15 percent of the population, many Christians pressured their pro-government Pope Shenouda to tone down all celebrations for the Coptic New Year, which regularly falls on January 8.
The police stationed thousands of soldiers outside all major churches and cathedrals around the country to attempt to contain possible angry pro-Palestinian protests, which they feared would break out on a night when worshippers literally flood every church.
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IT’S TRUE that Egypt has fought different wars with Israel that took a huge human toll on the population for 30 years, and it’s also true that the question of Palestine played a key role in the dynamic of why and how these wars were fought.
But in fighting these wars, Egypt was motivated, first and foremost, by its desire to assert itself as the main political and military power in the Arab world, not solidarity with the Palestinians. This was the case with all the different regimes that ruled the country–from the Arab nationalist regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1952-1970) as well as the more pro-Western ones of Anwar Sadat (1970-1981) and Mubarak.
This time, though, Mubarak didn’t even make a pretense at a military response to Israeli aggression. In the first couple of days into the Israeli bombing campaign, Mubarak and Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Abu Al-Gheit blamed Hamas for “provoking” Israel–glossing over the fact that they knew better than anybody else that Israel was preparing such an assault six months ago.
But since the demonstrations against him began to spread in late December, Mubarak has had to tone down his open disdain for Hamas (which, by the way, was democratically elected). As the regime began to feel the heat from mass, non-stop protests, it shifted its rhetoric somewhat and began to criticize Israel. And, perhaps for the first time since he came to power in 1981, the Egyptian dictator has had to respond to his critics.
Mubarak unleashed his paid pundits in the government media to churn out article after article defending him as a “champion of Palestinians” who has done all he can to help them under the terms of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. For example, Mubarak’s apologists argue that according to the terms of that treaty, Egypt cannot unilaterally open any border crossing with Gaza if the Israelis say no.
Simultaneously, the same pundits have been pushing an Egyptian chauvinist line of argument to dampen public solidarity with Gaza. They claim, for example, that the Palestinians want to cross into Egypt so they can take food from the mouths of hungry Egyptians (which, by the way, are the same hungry people these hacks didn’t mind impoverishing as a result of Mubarak’s free-market policies).
The regime also tried to deflect popular anger towards Shiite Muslims, by denouncing Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah–the Lebanese Shia organization that gained popularity in Egypt and the Arab world in 2006 by militarily defeating Israel. Mubarak’s officials claimed that Nasrallah insulted all Egyptians when he argued that the Egyptian army generals aren’t worth a penny and called on Egyptians soldiers to defy their officers and open the border crossings to Gaza.
In reaction to Iranian demonstrations against the closing of the Rafah border crossing, the Egyptian foreign minister publicly accused Iran of wanting to spread its Shia ideology and control the Middle East in an another attempt to flare up anti-Shia sentiment.
The government’s propaganda campaign has been partly effective, at least among some conservative layers in the middle classes. But, the campaign has so far failed to make huge inroads among the vast majority of the population, and therefore has failed to slow down the protest movement.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
ONE REASON for the ineffectiveness of this pro-Mubarak campaign is that the regime had little credibility to begin with. The 80-year-old dictator has been running the country with an iron fist for 28 years and even plans to get his son appointed as the next president. So far, he has refused to cede to any of the protesters’ demands, including the mildest one of expelling the Israeli ambassador.
The other reason this campaign isn’t working is that Egyptian public opinion on the need to maintain any diplomatic or economic relations with Israel has shifted in the last 20 years.
Many people were in favor of the 1979 peace treaty and cooperation with the U.S., in the hope that it would usher into a period of prosperity. They now realize that it actually brought about more poverty and misery. These shifting sentiments are only compounded by the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims.
But while Mubarak is a close ally of Washington, his regime is anything but a helpless pawn. He runs the largest Arab country, with 75 million people, and heads the largest and most advanced army in the region–other than Israel, of course.
In reality, the Egyptian ruling class represented by Mubarak (and Anwar Sadat before him) willingly and consciously cooperates with both the United States and Israel. This class made that strategic decision in the mid-1970s because it concluded that its political and economic interests lay in joining the Pax Americana camp.
Thus on the domestic front, Egypt has followed the American neoliberal economic policies of privatization, deregulation, a rollback of land reform and attacks on workers’ living standards. On a regional level, Egypt has more or less supported the main outlines of American interests in the region, and even took part in the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991.
When it comes to the current Israeli offensive in Gaza, Mubarak’s regime actually has a material interest in some sort of an Israeli victory in Gaza, despite his more recent public statements to the contrary.
Mubarak, like Israel, would like to see a weakened Hamas. He has always feared that the existence of a strong and defiant Hamas (as well as a strong Hezbollah in Lebanon) could strengthen his own main foes at home, the Muslim Brotherhood.
But the regime is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Mubarak worries that a strong Hamas in Gaza which continues to fight Israel could strengthen the position of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has historic ties to Hamas.
More importantly, Mubarak fears that a Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, serves as a model to emulate for oppressed workers and peasants in Egypt suffering under his dictatorship. Mubarak is right about that. There is no question that the rise in class and social struggles in Egypt in recent years was inspired by the example of the Second Palestinian Intifada of 2000-2003.
This possibility of radical or revolutionary change in Egypt drives Mubarak more and more into the arms of the U.S. and Israel when it comes to practical considerations such as their common goal of isolating Hamas. But, on the other hand, the erupting volcano of public anger around him leaves him losing sleep and issuing angry, yet hollow, statements against Israel.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Mubarak regime is seriously shaken by the breadth and depth of the anger in the streets in a way that has never happened before.
But while the regime’s days are not by any means numbered, the earth it is standing on is beginning to crack, and could give way in the near future. The country has the largest working class in the region–one that began to flex its muscles in mass strikes and display its latent social powers in recent months with strikes and protests. As the Arab writer Atwan pointed out to Al-Jazeera: “Egypt is on the edge of transforming, and the regime there could be toppled as a result of this.”
The potential is definitely there to achieve such a much-needed democratic change in the region. Democracy in Egypt will be the New Year’s gift that Egyptians could finally deliver to every child in Palestine who grew up in poverty and terror, and to every Palestinian man and woman in and out of Palestine who taught us how to fight when they fought Israel and Zionism in the past 60 years.
The days and months to come will provide Egyptian pro-democracy activists and opponents of American and Israeli imperialism an exciting chance to (a) force the regime to lift the siege on Gaza, (b) grow deeper roots among workers, students and peasants, and (c) build organizations with a vision of an Arab world built on justice, equality and the use of its human and natural resources for a better life.
It’s our duty in the U.S. to do what we can to support that struggle.
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