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Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed

December 31, 2008

The US-backed attempt to bring Hamas to heel by overwhelming force is in fact more likely to boost the movement’s appeal

Israel’s decision to launch its devastating attack on Gaza on a Saturday was a “stroke of brilliance”, the country’s biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: “the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed”. The daily Ma’ariv agreed: “We left them in shock and awe”.

Of the ferocity of the assault on one of the most overcrowded and destitute corners of the earth, there is at least no question. In the bloodiest onslaught on blockaded Gaza since it was captured and occupied by Israel 41 years ago, at least 310 people were killed and more than a thousand reported injured in the first 48 hours alone.

As well as scores of ordinary police officers incinerated in a passing-out parade, at least 56 civilians were said by the UN to have died as Israel used American-supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters to attack a string of civilian targets it linked to Hamas, including a mosque, private homes and the Islamic university. Hamas military and political facilities were mostly deserted, while police stations in residential areas were teeming as they were pulverised.

As Israeli journalist Amos Harel wrote in Ha’aretz at the weekend, “little or no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians”, as in US operations in Iraq. Among those killed in the first wave of strikes were eight teenage students waiting for a bus and four girls from the same family in Jabaliya, aged one to 12 years old.

Anyone who doubts the impact of these atrocities among Arabs and Muslims worldwide should switch on the satellite television stations that are watched avidly across the Middle East and which – unlike their western counterparts – do not habitually sanitise the barbarity meted out in the name of multiple wars on terror.

Then, having seen a child dying in her parent’s arms live on TV, consider what sort of western response there would have been to an attack on Israel, or the US or Britain for that matter, which left more than 300 dead in a couple of days.

You can be certain it would be met with the most sweeping condemnation, that the US president-elect would do a great deal more than “monitor” the situation and the British prime minister go much further than simply call for “restraint” on both sides.

But that is in fact all they did do, though the British government has since joined the call for a ceasefire. There has, of course, been no western denunciation of the Israeli slaughter – such aerial destruction is, after all, routinely called in by the US and Britain in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead, Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza are held responsible for what has been visited upon them. How could any government not respond with overwhelming force to the constant firing of rockets into its territory, the Israelis demand, echoed by western governments and media.

But that is to turn reality on its head. Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip has been – and continues to be – illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Despite the withdrawal of troops and settlements three years ago, Israel maintains complete control of the territory by sea, air and land. And since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel has punished its 1.5 million people with an inhuman blockade of essential supplies, backed by the US and the European Union.

Like any occupied people, the Palestinians have the right to resist, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But there is no right of defence for an illegal occupation – there is an obligation to withdraw comprehensively. During the last seven years, 14 Israelis have been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, while more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel with some of the most advanced US-supplied armaments in the world. And while no rockets are fired from the West Bank, 45 Palestinians have died there at Israel’s hands this year alone. The issue is of course not just the vast disparity in weapons and power, but that one side is the occupier, the other the occupied.

Hamas is likewise blamed for last month’s breakdown of the six-month tahdi’a, or lull. But, in a weary reprise of past ceasefires, it was in fact sunk by Israel’s assassination of six Hamas fighters in Gaza on 5 November and its refusal to lift its siege of the embattled territory as expected under an Egyptian-brokered deal. The truth is that Israel and its western sponsors have set their face against an accommodation with the Palestinians’ democratic choice and have instead thrown their political weight, cash and arms behind a sustained attempt to overthrow it.

The complete failure of that approach has brought us to this week’s horrific pass. Israeli leaders believe they can bomb Hamas into submission with a “decisive blow” that will establish a “new security environment” – and boost their electoral fortunes in the process before Barack Obama comes to office.

But as with Israel’s disastrous assault on Lebanon two years ago – or its earlier siege of Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Beirut in 1982 – it is a strategy that cannot succeed. Even more than Hezbollah, Hamas’s appeal among Palestinians and beyond doesn’t derive from its puny infrastructure, or even its Islamist ideology, but its spirit of resistance to decades of injustice. So long as it remains standing in the face of this onslaught, its influence will only be strengthened. And if it is not with rockets, its retaliation is bound to take other forms, as Hamas’s leader Khalid Mish’al made clear at the weekend.

Meanwhile, the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has been further diminished by being seen as having colluded in the Israeli assault on his own people – as has the already rock-bottom credibility of the Egyptian regime. What is now taking place in the Palestinian territories is a futile crime in which the US and its allies are deeply complicit – and unless Obama is prepared to change course, it is likely to have bitter consequences that will touch us all.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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In the Arab Press, Multiple Targets For Scorn

December 30, 2008

The Lede, The New York Times, December 29, 2008

By Sharon Otterman

A review of Arabic and English-language Web sites from the Arab world on Monday shows that gory images of destruction from the air attacks in Gaza are dominating news reports, as you would expect. The term being used nearly universally by Arab media outlets to describe the Gaza attacks is “massacre,” according to Marc Lynch, a blogger and media analyst who writes Abu Aardvark.

But there is much more to the Arab media’s reaction to the news from Gaza than just the reflexive denunciations of Israel for mounting the attacks.

Considerable attention is being paid to comments by Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah. In a speech Sunday night, Mr. Nasrallah condemned Israel’s attack on Gaza in the harshest terms, but then pointed his finger at the governments of Egypt, Jordan and other Arab regimes that he said were conspiring with Israel against residents of Gaza.

“There is true and full collaboration between certain Arab regimes, especially those who have already signed peace deals with Israel, to crush any form of resistance,” he told thousands of Hezbollah supporters in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Mr. Nasrallah’s comments were the main story on the Arabic-language Web site of the satellite television channel Al Arabiya and the London-based newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, among others, early on Monday afternoon. (Al Arabiya’s English-language Web site also featured the comments, but gave them less prominence in English than in Arabic.)

The comments fed into Hezbollah’s ongoing narrative that it is the truest friend of the Palestinian cause, not the American-aligned governments of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, who have shown themselves once again to be unable to stop Israeli aggression.

Throughout the Arab world, in fact, the Gaza attacks are being received as a gift-wrapped package by opponents of the American-allied regimes, regardless of where the opponents fall on the political spectrum, said Steven Cook, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Al Dostor, one of the most outspoken opposition newspapers in Egypt, ran on its home page a photo-montage, with images of the bloodshed in Gaza placed on top of a picture taken in Cairo last week of the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abu Gheit, and his Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni. The central photo, which shows the two diplomats hand in hand, apparently was chosen to convey the idea that Israeli the attacks on Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that controls Gaza, were mounted with at least tacit Egyptian support, a charge the Egyptian regime has denied.

By contrast, the official state-run Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, after calling for an end to “the Israeli killing machine,” concentrated on reporting that the Egyptian government had allowed 17 aid trucks to pass through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza.

The official Jordanian press took a similar approach of looking for hopeful developments. Al Rai, for example, reported that in Cairo, Mr. Abul Gheit and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, met to discuss a plan for a Palestinian-Israeli cease-fire followed by an agreement for calm.

There is no love lost on Hamas in many Arab capitals, in large part because it is an ally of other Islamic opposition movements in the region, like the Muslim Brotherhood, that threaten the ruling regimes. But because the general Arab public is solidly behind the Palestinian cause, criticism of Hamas during a time of crisis is being kept to a minimum, even in state-run newspapers, according to Nathan Brown, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

While Hamas remains locked in a frequently bloody rivalry with Fatah, Mr. Abbas’s political party, which governs the West Bank, the Gaza air attacks have been treated as a time for solidarity in the Palestinian press. Al-Ayaam, the main Palestinian newspaper in Ramallah, devoted its coverage to details of the chaos in Gaza and news about a population in shock and crisis, rather than political recriminations.

Even so, though, there were signs of mounting frustration with Hamas among some Arab commentators — along with a sense of despair that after the dust settles, Israel and Palestine will be no closer to solving the region’s woes. Hassan Haidar, on the English-language Web site of Al-Hayat, wrote that while Israel had been looking for a pretext to attack Gaza, “Hamas’s decision to suspend the truce was offered to Israel on a silver plate, with the movement falling in the Israeli trap.”

And in the Daily Star, a Beirut-based English-language publication that includes a wider range of opinions than is usually seen in the Arab press, editorials blasted Israel’s “wanton disregard for innocent life,” but also said that the strife between Fatah and Hamas, once again, had been shown not to be in the interest of Palestinians.

It is no secret that the period of Hamas’ rule in Gaza since 2007 has been one of little or no accomplishment and of supremely unimaginative leadership. The Islamist movement has provided its enemy with a pretext to bring ruin on the very people whose rights a resistance group is supposed to defend. It is not just the rival Fatah faction that recognizes this: Even some long-time supporters of Hamas’ tougher line have now retreated to a more pragmatic middle ground from which the obvious conclusion is that flipping makeshift rockets at a regional superpower will never liberate occupied land, only expose the dispossessed to further hardship.

After saying that Israel seemed “poised to embark on a course of even greater folly,” the Star editorial continued:

The Israelis have been down this road before, and it has never worked. Sure, churning up Gaza and scattering Hamas’s forces would be easier than the failed attempt to accomplish something similar against Hizbollah here in Lebanon in 2006. It might even help some members of the Israeli military to regain a measure of the confidence lost in places like Aita al-Shaab and Maroun al-Ras. But once the Israelis have had their way with Gaza, what then? Will the citizens of Israel be any closer to being accepted by their neighbors? Will those Palestinians and other Arabs willing to negotiate a peace — not a surrender — have any more credibility with their respective publics?

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Bush, Obama, and the Gaza Blitz

December 30, 2008

by Patrick J. Buchanan | Antiwar.com, Dec 30, 2008


Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month cease-fire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza.

Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the war of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded, as the Israeli air force conducted over a hundred strikes – on graduation ceremonies for Hamas fighters, police stations, and storage sites for rockets.

About Israel’s right and duty to defend its border towns, there is no dispute. When Hamas permits Gaza to be used as a launch pad for rockets, it must expect retaliation. Nor can Hamas claim some right to dictate the limits of that retaliation.

Yet the wisdom of so savage a retribution for rockets that killed not one Israeli is open to question. And crass Israeli politics seems to be behind this premeditated and planned blitz.

With Likud’s hawkish “Bibi” Netanyahu ahead in the polls for the Feb. 10 election, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Labor’s candidate, had to show that he, too, could be ruthless with Hamas.

Kadima Party candidate and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has an even greater need than the highly decorated Barak to show toughness. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, departing in scandal, wants to exit in a blaze of glory, to blot out the memory of a botched war against Hezbollah that he launched in the summer of 2006.

However, while Israel’s politicians all seem to have a stake in these devastating strikes, Israel herself will pay the price.

Given the casualty toll, over 300 dead and 1,300 wounded as of this writing, Hamas will have to exact its pound of flesh. The Hamas wing that seeks renewed war with Israel will now shout into silence the wing working with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak on a new cease-fire.

The moderate Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, who has been talking to Israel, testifying to her good faith, has been made to appear the puppet and fool. A new Intifada spreading to the West Bank, with suicide attacks inside Israel, is now possible.

Moderate Arabs, who have recognized Israel or backed peace, will now be seen by the Arab street as appeasers impotent to stop the public suffering of the Palestinian people.

As for President Bush’s hopes of midwifing a peace that would create a Palestinian state, they are as dead as the Annapolis process he set in train. In advancing peace in the Middle East, Bush’s eight-year record is now a near-absolute failure.

For four years, Bush refused to talk to Yasser Arafat, though Bill Clinton had negotiated with him, as had four Israeli prime ministers, two of whom shared a Nobel Prize with Arafat. In his second term, Bush, after insisting Hamas be included in free elections in Palestine, refused to recognize Hamas when it won those elections.

Arafat was a terrorist and Hamas is a terrorist organization, declared Bush, and we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Yet Bush de-listed Libya as a state sponsor of terror and sent Condi Rice to chat up Col. Gadhafi, though Gadhafi still has on his hands the blood of scores of American school kids from the Lockerbie massacre of 1989 that Libya and Gadhafi engineered

For eight years, like the “dummy” in a hand of bridge, Bush has sat mute as his Israeli partner, Sharon or Olmert, played America’s cards as well as their own. The Bush response to Saturday’s carnage, as anticipated, was to blame Hamas for causing it and urge Israelis to be careful about civilian casualties as they go about their reprisals.

Whatever Israel decides, we support. For eight years that has been the most reliable guide to U.S. Middle East policy.

And Barack Obama? Forty-eight hours after the Israeli blitz began, he and his national security team remain silent.

Hopefully, Obama will bring with him a new Mideast policy, one made in the USA, for the USA. Hopefully, just as Israel has its private links to Syria through Turkey, to Hamas through Egypt, and to Hezbollah, Obama will establish independent U.S. channels to all three, and adopt a separate U.S. policy toward all three, as Israel does.

While the United States must support Israel’s right to defend her towns and to strike bases from which Israelis are being attacked, Obama should denounce the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, by Israel’s cutting off their electricity in the dead of winter and denying them the food and medicine many need to survive.

For us to remain silent in the face of this comports neither with our interests or our values. Israel’s policy of withholding from the weak and innocent of Gaza, women and children, the necessities of life, to punish the guilty who rule at the point of a gun, is a policy that Obama should declare the United States will no longer support with tax dollars.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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The War Against Palestine

December 30, 2008

By GEORGE SALZMAN and MANUEL GARCIA, Jr. | Counterpunch, Dec 29, 2008

The war against the Palestinians arises from the merging of the Zionist view of Jewish exceptionalism with the view in the United States of American exceptionalism, which have focused their common root ambitions for domination and possession as a hostility to Islam, and this is the leading crusade in the “clash of civilizations,” proclaimed by just-deceased Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, which is the war against the world’s poor and dark-skinned people, the war of conquest carried out to enforce a rule of worldwide apartheid by a culturally Euro-American, racially white, highly industrialized capitalist elite.

The Zionist view of Jewish exceptionalism is critically examined, and demolished, in the book Overcoming Zionism, by Joel Kovel. This mind-set boils down to ‘any victimization of Jews we Zionists can remember, historically, justifies all our aggression, persecution and even genocide of Palestinians; we are, and will always be, the exceptional victims of world history and so are forever blameless; to disagree is to be one with our historical persecutors.’ The Jewish religion is quite incidental to the actual intent of the exceptionalism; Zionism is a criminal conspiracy drawing participants through a Jewishness filter, in the same way the Mafia exploits Sicilian heritage to filter its recruitment and promotion.

The operation of Zionist exceptionalism in Palestine mirrors that of the white Christian exceptionalism Jews had suffered under for centuries, and which was described in the book The Destruction Of The European Jews, by Raul Hilberg. I (MG, Jr.) was made aware of the insights of the Kovel and Hildberg books by Professor Emeritus (of physics) George Salzman. The three stages of development of racial-religious labeled exceptionalism are: conversion, expulsion and extermination. Hilberg summarizes “the three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.”

The arc for European Jews between the years 400 and 1940 was first to be pressured to convert to Christianity or face employment discrimination, then from the 13th to the 16th century Jews resisting conversion were expelled from many countries, and finally the Nazis devised industrialized extermination. The arc for Palestinians seems to be compressed to a time scale measured in decades rather than centuries. Conversion was never an option, and many forms of exclusion were enforced from the first days of the State of Israel (which, couldn’t we see as just the earliest Zionist-occupied section of Palestine?). Wars of territorial conquest since 1967, and the continuing invasion of “unoccupied” territory by “settlers” and their protective cavalry, the IDF — or land rushes into Indian Reservations, as we knew them in the U.S. — bend the arc from exclusion to extermination. In the logic of Zionist exceptionalism, there is nowhere within the limits of their territorial vision where Palestinians have “a right to exist.” What other kind of mentality could inflict modern aerial bombardment of essentially unarmed, corralled masses of people? Our world remains at Guernica, the Stukas and Heinkels are now F-16s and Lavi jets.

If the world does not rise up in unison to halt this slaughter in Palestine, and the relentless and hypocritical land theft motivating it, who could then blame the descendants of the victims — for there will be children who survive to remember — if they are well satisfied with the collapse of our own society in the future, and in fact help in its destruction through some great catastrophe, which we may be too arrogant and self-assured to envision now just like the self-satisfied elites of the 1930s. Time and the pressure of increased impoundment always breach dams, and resolve unnatural imbalances by a leveling flood. Time and the unrelieved resentments of increasing world poverty will ultimately breach our separation walls of control and drown our luxuriant indifference under a leveling tsunami. This is not a biblical type of prediction, just a matter of logic. If we, in the nations with the power to discipline the Israeli Zionists — most especially the United States, do not act soon and consistently thereafter for self-evident justice, we will pump up oppositional energies to our national progress. If we continue to act like conquerors apart from the rest of humanity, whom we view in purely utilitarian terms — as slaves — we must inevitably drown under a Red Sea of our own making.

Mere appeals in internet publications can do little, but in our capitalist, hierarchical world, each person can act to a degree commensurate with their level of political and financial power. And, the best application of that agitation is to influence those above you to take action commensurate with their power. Yes, this is the opposite of doing what is good for your career by doing what is necessary to advance the careers of your bosses. I leave to you the delicacy of striking a balance between your particular career and your brotherly and sisterly duty to humanity; but I will irritate you as I can, to choose the more rebellious path, because ultimately career is a personal war against humanity and a defilement of self-respect, which is exchanged for lucre and an illusion of power. Rebel against exceptions to your sympathies. Rebel against indifference to suffering.

There are many, many injustices and tragedies underway in our world, which cry out for immediate attention, and no one can really rank them as to deserving more or less help. Nevertheless, many currents of history have been distilled into what we see today as the war against the Palestinians, and it is keenly observed throughout the world. For this reason, we could say that the fate of the Palestinians is the measure of the world’s conscience, and will mark our level of civilization in the pages of time.

Manuel Garcia, Jr. can be reached at mango@idiom.com.

George Salzman can be reached at george.salzman@umb.edu.

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Israelis Get Truth About Gaza Attack

December 30, 2008

Published on Monday, December 29, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

by Ira Chernus

If you get your news from the American mass media, you know that there’s a nice simple explanation for the massive Israeli attack on Gaza. That explanation comes straight from the Israeli government, via the White House: Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, is responsible for all the violence. “These people are nothing but thugs,” a White House spokesman said. “Israel is going to defend its people against terrorists like Hamas.” End of story. As usual, Israel is depicted as the innocent victim of an evil it did nothing to provoke.But if you read Israel’s most respected newspaper, Ha’aretz, you find out that things are rather more complicated. (All the quotes below come from Jewish journalists writing in recent editions of Ha’aretz.)

You know the reality of Gaza today: “The tremendous population density in the Gaza Strip does not allow a ‘surgical operation’ over an extended period that would minimize damage to civilian populations.” “There are many corpses and wounded, every moment another casualty is added to the list of the dead, and there is no more room in the morgue. . A mother whose three school-age children were killed, and are piled one on top of top of the other in the morgue, screams and then cries, screams again and then is silent.”

And you know that some Israelis are outraged: “Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom.”

The justification Israel offers is the increased firing of rockets from Gaza. But Israelis can read that Hamas is responding to Israeli provocation. “Six months ago Israel asked and received a cease-fire from Hamas. It unilaterally violated it.” “On November 4, an Israeli operation sparked a new round of dangerous, if controlled, violence,” “when it unnecessarily bombed a tunnel.”

About the same time, Israel cut off transport of food, medical supplies, and electricity to Gaza. “Food insecurity in Gaza currently runs at 56 percent and is deteriorating rapidly, 42 percent of the Strip’s population is unemployed and 76 percent is receiving humanitarian assistance (all UN figures).” “A million and a half human beings . live in the conditions of a giant jail.” “Why should Gazan citizens tolerate such a long and severe siege for so long?”

General Shmuel Zakai, former commander of Israel’s troops in Gaza, says: “We could have eased the siege over the Gaza Strip, in such a way that the Palestinians, Hamas, would understand that holding their fire served their interests. But when you create a tahadiyeh [cease-fire], and the economic pressure on the Strip continues, it’s obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahadiyeh, and that their way to achieve this, is resumed Qassam [rocket] fire. . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.”

Nevertheless, just a few days before the attack, “Palestinian sources said they do not believe Hamas plans to launch a massive rocket strike on Israel unless the IDF begins offensive operations in the Strip.” Israel claims it wants peace, yet it “did not exhaust the diplomatic processes before embarking on another dreadful campaign of killing and ruin.” And “no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.”

In fact military force is self-defeating, because “no Palestinian will consent to having his people and his homeland destroyed in this way.” “Hamas will not be weakened due to the Gaza war; to the contrary.” If predictions of a strengthened Hamas prove wrong, the other possibility is obvious: “A siege designed to depose Hamas rule . risks triggering a social collapse that would have devastating consequences for all concerned. . An Israeli military escalation would likely accelerate the splintering of Hamas’ leadership and the emergence of more radical alternatives.”

One way or another, more rockets are sure to fall on Israel. Of course that might be one goal of the attack. Israeli leaders may be trying to avoid dialogue. More intense fighting would let them claim they have no one to negotiate with, especially if Gaza breaks down in chaos. Israeli leaders may also have an eye on Palestinian elections coming up soon. They want to persuade the Palestinians to support the more conciliatory Fatah party by destroying Hamas, or at least showing what happens to its supporters.

But “working toward long-term goals that would completely change the landscape in the region, like toppling Hamas from power in Gaza, is liable to turn out to be a wild fantasy.” “Israel must understand that Hamas rule in Gaza is a fact, and it is with that government that we must reach a situation of calm. . We can’t impose regimes on the Palestinians.” The idea “that a military operation would suffice in toppling an entrenched regime and thus replace it with another one friendlier to us is no more than lunacy.”

Why would Israeli leaders pursue such a dangerous fantasy? When Ha’aretz journalists want to explain it, they (like all other Israeli journalists) focus most on politics — not Palestinian, but Israeli. Israel, too, will hold elections in just a few weeks. “Israelis are being treated to a predictable dose of political posturing and chest-thumping.”

The polls show the hawkish Likud party ahead, partly because “Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to topple the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip if elected prime minister. . Under his leadership, Israel would move from a policy of absorbing blows to a policy of being on the offensive.”

Perhaps that’s why the current (soon to retire) prime minister, Ehud Olmert, launched this week’s offensive, cheered on by his party’s candidate to replace him, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. She’s now talking tough, too. “‘The state of Israel, and a government under me, will make it a strategic objective to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza,’ Livni told members of her centrist Kadima party.” “We cannot allow Gaza to remain under Hamas control.” “Vice Premier Haim Ramon also said . that Hamas must be removed from power.”

“Ramon, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz and others harshly criticized Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s handling of the situation” — because Barak, a former prime minister, is also running to regain that post, trying to resurrect his once-powerful Labor party. “The beginning of the raid in Gaza bears the wily and deceptive fingerprint of Barak. . It may deliver him and his party from the humiliating defeat the polls are predicting.” “If Hamas is beaten and Israel receives some peace under favorable terms, Labor and Barak may gain force.”

Politicians of every party want to prove that they are “not a bunch of wimps.” So they’ve staked their future on the same goal: one way or another, topple the democratically-elected government of Gaza.

But Israel is also a democracy. The politicians are catering to public opinion: “This war was preceded by a frighteningly uniform public dialogue in which only one voice was heard — that which called for striking, destroying, starving and killing.” “The hysterical reaction by the public as a whole and politicians in particular stems mainly from the fact that the country is in an election period. And when elections are in the offing people speak from the gut rather than the brain. . They’re suddenly strutting their macho stuff.”

“Politicians and the public at large have been enthralled by a new prospect: that of a wide-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip. Such a prospect answers all their heart’s secret wishes. . The public’s imaginations are let loose as they chant a battle-cry.” “Speeches have a tendency to identify goals that are by nature unreachable: phrases like ‘destroying the Hamas government’ (which is actually likely to be strengthened).”

With so many Israelis pointing out how self-defeating this attack on Gaza is, why would a majority of Israeli voters still push their leaders to more military action?

One theory looks to an inflated self-image: “Israel is striking at the Palestinians to ‘teach them a lesson.’ That is a basic assumption that has accompanied the Zionist enterprise since its inception: We are the representatives of progress and enlightenment, sophisticated rationality and morality, while the Arabs are a primitive, violent rabble, ignorant children who must be educated and taught wisdom — via, of course, the carrot-and-stick method, just as the drover does with his donkey.”

But there’s an opposite theory: The failed war in Lebanon two years ago deflated Israelis’ self-image, and now they are out to inflate it again. “The pictures of blood and fire are designed to show Israelis, Arabs and the entire world that the neighborhood bully’s strength has yet to wane. When the bully is on a rampage, nobody can stop him.” “Israel goaded its enemies to provoke it because [the enemies] ceased believing that Israel would agree to pay the price of using force.”

Eventually, though, “after the politicians flex their muscles, the analysts blow smoke and the citizens of Israel have their ‘honor restored,’ a new exit from Gaza must be sought.” “Most dangerous of all is the cliche that there is no one to talk to. That has never been true. There are even ways to talk with Hamas.”

“Hamas would have — and still would — accept a bargain . [to] halt the fire in exchange for easing of the many ways in which Israeli policies have kept a choke hold on the economy of the Strip.” “Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, has said that his Palestinian militant group is willing to renew the recently ended truce in Gaza with Israel.”

“Hamas has clear conditions for its extension: The opening of the border crossings for goods and cessation of IDF attacks in Gaza, as outlined in the original agreement. Later, Hamas wants the cease-fire to be extended to the West Bank. Israel, for its part, is justifiably demanding a real calm in Gaza; that no Qassam or mortar shell be fired by either Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other group. Essentially, Israel is telling Hamas it is willing to recognize its control of Gaza on the condition that it assumes responsibility for the security of the territory, like Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon. It is likely that this will be the outcome of a wide-scale operation in the Gaza Strip.”

“In a short time, after the parade of corpses and wounded ends, we will arrive at a fresh cease-fire, as occurred after Lebanon, exactly like the one that could have been forged without this superfluous war.” “Why, then, not forgo the war and agree to these conditions now?”

Ira Chernus, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. Having written extensively on Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and George W. Bush, he is now writing a book tentatively titled “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Origins of the National Insecurity State.” He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.

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Blood and tears in the streets of Gaza

December 30, 2008

Eric Ruder reports on Israel’s latest escalation of its barbaric war on the Palestinian people.

Socialist Worker, December 29, 2008

Israeli air strikes have killed nearly 300 Palestinians in two days of bombing (Fady Adwan | propaimages)Israeli air strikes have killed nearly 300 Palestinians in two days of bombing (Fady Adwan | propaimages)

GAZA IS under attack by one of the most deadly military machines on the planet–with even worse to come as Israel masses troops for a threatened ground invasion.

Starting at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, Israel’s F-16 jet fighters and Apache helicopters, supplied by the U.S., unleashed a punishing assault on targets of every kind–police stations, mosques, hospitals, media outlets, community centers and buildings owned by the Hamas party.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world, so the “precision strikes” supposedly aimed at “Hamas militants” were bound to take a toll on the civilian population. By late Sunday night, the official death toll after 36 hours of killing stood at nearly 300.

Meanwhile, Israeli ground forces and tanks were stationed at the border, and the military announced it was calling up its reserves, an ominous sign that the scale of the atrocities could grow worse.

Israel’s all-out offensive caused fury across the Middle East. Thousands took to the streets to protest Israel’s assault and the silence of many Arab regimes as the slaughter of Palestinians was broadcast on television news stations. In several places, anger was directed at the Egyptian government for its unwillingness to open its border with Gaza to relieve the pressure from Israel’s crippling siege of the last 18 months.

What you can do

Emergency protests have already taken place in cities around the country, with more planned for the coming days–including a national day of action called for Tuesday, December 30. Contact local organizers for details where you live.

For updates on the current situation in Gaza, plus commentary and analysis on the background to the war, read the Electronic Intifada Web site. Electronic Intifada Executive Director Ali Abunimah’s “Gaza massacres must spur us to action” is a good starting point for further reading.

You can also find updated coverage on conditions in Gaza and the efforts of activists to stand up to the Israeli war at the Free Gaza Web site.

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.

In the U.S., antiwar coalitions, human rights groups and others organized emergency-response actions, drawing hundreds to demonstrations in cities across the U.S. More protests will take place this week; a national day of action has been called for Tuesday.

Israel’s attack began with simultaneous air raids on more than 30 targets. Within the first nine hours, the Israeli military reported it had dropped more than 100 tons of bombs. Not since the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel began its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, have Palestinians in Gaza been subjected to such an outburst of destruction.

In an interview, Dr. Haider Eid relayed the horror as he talked about conditions in Gaza:

I live in Gaza City itself, where most of the air strikes took place. The attacks came just as schoolchildren were returning home from school. It was absolutely horrible. The timing was chosen to cause a massacre.

I rushed to the Shifa hospital–along with ambulances, cars and trucks that were also streaming to the hospital with the wounded. I stood in front of the gate. I don’t like to see the mangled bodies, but this was especially horrible. Cars carried dismembered bodies, detached legs and arms and heads.

The part of this that I’m still trying to cope with are the bodies of the children. This is something you don’t wish on your worst enemies, to tell you the truth. The morgue at the hospital is the largest in Gaza City, but it ran out of space to keep the bodies.

As he talked, a thunderous noise drowned out Haider’s voice. “Oh my God! A huge explosion just took place as I’m speaking with you,” said Haider. “That was very close. Oh my God! Another one! I’m sorry. I must go.” Haider hung up to check on his relatives, and subsequent attempts to reach him have so far been unsuccessful.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

ISRAEL CLAIMED that it launched its offensive on Gaza to defend itself from Palestinian rocket attacks aimed at towns in southern Israel. Predictably, the U.S. backed up this assertion. “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel, and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The ceasefire Rice referred to began six months ago, but the terms of it were never honored by Israel, and in fact, it expired days before the assault began.

Under the truce, Palestinian militants agreed to end their rocket attacks against Israel, while Israel was supposed to lift its suffocating siege of Gaza, which has led to critical shortages of all manner of necessities, from flour to electricity to medical supplies.

But the Israeli government didn’t end the siege. The blockade is designed to punish the people of Gaza for the “crime” of voting Hamas into the majority in the Palestinian Legislative Assembly in January 2006 elections. Backed by the U.S., and with the collaboration of rival Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, Israel continued to hope that the population of Gaza would turn against Hamas.

Within Israel, only a tiny number of voices dissented from the claim–thoroughly dominant in the mainstream Israeli and U.S. media–that Israel was acting in self-defense against Hamas’ aggression. Days before the Israeli offensive began, Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner wrote:

We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, we block it out of our minds–which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might if we would recognize that Gaza is getting so much the worst of it.

The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them…

This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it.

There may be a way out of this war, and if Israel does not take it–if it does not accept Hamas’ offer of a ceasefire, which it should have offered Hamas from the beginning–then the principal blame for the war will lie with us. Our arrogance and blindness will get a lot of innocent people killed. And no one has a clue about when, or where, or how it will end.

This comment makes it obvious that the death toll from Israel’s air strikes only count for part of the casualties in the latest phase of the war. Those Palestinians who died as a consequence of Israel’s blockade–a clear violation of international laws prohibiting the use of collective punishment and attempts to physically destroy a people and their society–have to be included.

As Palestinian author and activist Ali Abunimah said in an interview:

The idea that this is about Israel’s “self-defense” is a very partial and one-sided claim. The reality is that Israel asked for a ceasefire with Hamas and got it, during which there were no rockets fired by the Palestinians.

During this so-called ceasefire, Israel continued to maintain a punishing blockade on Gaza, starving people, depriving them of food and medicine. Many people were dying in Gaza, not because of bombs, but because they couldn’t get cancer treatments, insulin and other basic medications. They weren’t even allowed to travel to get medical treatment.

Hundreds of Palestinians have died because of the Israeli blockade. Ehud Barak’s orders to prevent medicine from reaching Gaza were just as lethal and just as intended to kill as his orders to send bombers into Gaza.

Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians living in the West Bank further underscores the hypocrisy of Israel’s claim to be defending itself. As Abunimah points out:

There has never been a single rocket fired at Israel from the West Bank. And yet during the period of the so-called truce in the West Bank, Israel continued extrajudicial executions, continued to confiscate Palestinian land, continued to demolish Palestinians homes, continued to kidnap Palestinians and imprison them. Israeli settlers engaged in regular pogroms and rampages, attacking Palestinians and destroying their property.

What was the excuse for that? Israel never needed the excuse of rockets to continue its systematic violence against Palestinians.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

BECAUSE OF Israel’s debilitating siege, the residents of Gaza are particularly ill-equipped to deal with the physical, medical, humanitarian and psychological consequences of this new offensive.

The statistical measures of Gaza’s desperation are truly awful. Malnutrition in Gaza is comparable to the dire situation of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, affecting some 75 percent of the population–46 percent of children in Gaza suffer from acute anemia. The majority of children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and thousands of kids require hearing aids because of repeated exposure to the earsplitting sonic booms of low-altitude flyovers by Israeli fighter jets.

Blood supplies are running critically low. There are chronic shortages of electricity, drinking water, flour, bread and more. Unemployment is well over 50 percent. The economy is in total freefall.

This is all by design. According to the logic of Israeli officials, the pressure is necessary to force Gaza’s residents to turn against Hamas. Such measures have always failed in the past–on the contrary, they have led to ever more intense and desperate anger at Israel’s brutality.

But according to Abunimah, the latest offensive has also exposed a new development–the outright surrender of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah wing of the Palestinian national movement that he leads:

For a long time, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has been colluding with Israel and the U.S. against Hamas. Since the election in January 2006, the PA has been determined to overturn the election result and to maintain itself in power, and it has done that with guns provided by the U.S. and Israel.

Many Palestinians were not willing to confront this directly because it’s a very painful truth. But the situation in Gaza has pulled the mask off, and Palestinians everywhere are now openly pointing to Ramallah as having colluded directly with the Israelis–and indeed the comments of PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Cairo that Hamas is to blame for this have sickened and revolted Palestinians.

This has laid bare the reality that Abbas is working for the Israelis and is more loyal to them than to the Palestinian people that he claims to lead.

As for the U.S., it has long presented itself to the world as an “honest broker,” as Palestinians struggled to establish an independent state in their homeland.

Yet U.S. economic, military and diplomatic support has been the essential ingredient that allowed Israel to continue its occupation of Palestinian land and its immunity to diplomatic sanctions or international pressure to grant even the basic Palestinian right to the necessities of life.

For activists in the U.S., it’s our responsibility to expose the complicity of the U.S. in the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. This means building public demonstrations and protests, as well as ongoing campaigns to pressure the U.S. to end its support for Israel. And it means exposing the lie that Israel is acting in self-defense when it carries out massacres in Gaza.

“What can we fairly ask of Palestinians when 1.5 million people are blockaded, besieged, imprisoned in a giant ghetto, when they cannot eat due to lack of food while living under a so-called truce?” asks Abunimah. “Israel’s idea of a truce is that Palestinians have a right to remain silent while they starve to death.

“Palestinians also have a right to defend themselves. That self-defense may take many forms, but Israel has never respected Palestinians’ right to defend themselves, whether they do so through armed struggle or peaceful means. The Israeli response is always bombs and bullets. That’s the full picture that’s not being exposed anywhere.”

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Israel vows to continue war on Gaza

December 30, 2008
Al Jazeera, Dec 30, 2008

Hundreds of people have been killed and many wounded in four days of air raids [AFP]

Israel has warned that the onslaught in the Gaza Strip could last for “weeks” as the fourth consecutive day of aerial attacks targeted several Hamas government buildings.

Around 350 people have been killed, many of them civilians, and local hospitals have warned they are unable to cope with any more casualties.

Palestinian medical workers said at least 10 people had died in the latest raids on Tuesday, with security guards and civilians among those killed.

But Israel said there would be no let up until the threat of Palestinian rockets attacks from the Gaza Strip had been removed.

“There is no room for a ceasefire,” Meir Sheetrit, Israel’s interior minister, said.

“The government is determined to remove the threat of [rocket] fire on the south.

“Therefore the Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel.”

Four Israeli citizens have been killed by missiles fired from Palestinian positions since the offensive began on Saturday.

Military preparations

The Israeli army has been massing infantry and armoured forces along the border amid increasing fears that a ground invasion is planned.

In depth

Focus

 Arab street angry over Gaza attacks

Reaction: Raids take toll on Gaza

Gaza strikes a challenge for Obama

Videos

 Gaza pounded for third straight day

US backs Israeli air raids

Hospitals in Gaza struggle to cope

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Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, said the military “has made preparations for some long weeks of action”.

On Monday, areas of the border were declared “closed military zones” and thousands of reservists have been called up by the Israeli military.

Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza City, said that there was little the residents of the strip could do to prepare for any possible ground assault.”In a city that is so densely-populated, a ground offensive would mean urban warfare, street-to-street fighting … leaving many Palestinians in the crossfire,” he said.

“Unlike other conflict zones where there is the possibility to flee the war zone, Gaza itself has become the war zone. There is nowhere for the population to go, they are in the middle of all these attacks.”

Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, has added his voice to calls for an end to the violence.

Speaking at UN headquarters in New York on Monday, he said both sides should end the fighting and said regional powers should do more to help resolve the crisis.

“All this must stop,” Ban told a press conference.

“Both Israel and Hamas must halt their acts of violence and take all necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties. A ceasefire must be declared immediately. They must also curb their inflammatory rhetoric.”

Hamas blamed

Speaking to Al Jazeera, the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said the Israeli offensive was aimed at Hamas and not the Palestinian people, urging civilians to leave for safer places away from places close to Hamas infrastructure.

“We tried to avoid this. You know that Israel accepted the truce that was initiated by the Egyptians in order to create peace and quiet. We adopted the truce. What we got in return? We got in return daily attacks, we got in return smuggling of weapons to Gaza Strip with long-range [capabilities],” she said.

Support for Israel came from the US, with the White House saying Hamas must halt cross-border rocket fire.

“In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable ceasefire,” Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman said.

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SLAUGHTER IN GAZA

December 28, 2008

John Wight, Socialist Unity, Dec 27, 2008

Israel has unleashed hell on Gaza. At time of writing 200 men, women, and children are known to have been slaughtered in airstrikes using US supplied fighter aircraft. Over 300 are known to be injured, many of whom will undoubtedly die as a direct consequence of Israel’s ongoing siege, responsible for creating a dire shortage of basic medicines and leaving medical facilities in Gaza degraded and overwhelmed.

In the immediate aftermath of its latest attack on Gaza, the Israeli military issued a statement warning that this is only the beginning, that operations against Gaza will deepen, in a haunting reminder of the threat made earlier in the year by Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, who promised the Palestinians of Gaza a ‘shoah’ – or holocaust.

Surely now it is time to stop equivocating when it comes to this issue? Surely now the world must stand up and take action in response to what is the most sustained, barbaric, and brutal occupation in modern history, in a part of the world where crimes against humanity have been allowed to exist for too long under the guise of exceptionalism, victimhood, and democracy?

In response to Israel’s latest outrage, the usual round of supine statements calling for Hamas to stop rocket attacks against Israeli towns in resistance to the occupation of Palestinian land have been released from capitals throughout the West. And, yes, yet again the world is being regaled by claims from Israeli spokespeople and their supporters that an existential threat to Israel from Hamas and Palestinian terrorists lies at the root of the current crisis. It is a claim to the status of victim that has been repeated so often through the years of this perennial struggle it has assumed the status of received truth. It is a received truth which flies in the face of a history of ethnic cleansing and occupation.

As such, one of the most disgraceful aspects of this ongoing conflict is the way in which our mainstream media continues to present it as a struggle between two equal sides. In fact, on the contrary, wherever and whenever possible the media acquiesces in Israel’s role of victim, as a courageous little outpost of western civilisation in the midst of Arab hordes committed to its destruction.

Alarm bells should be set ringing when we hear such easy assertions being made by mainstream commentators and journalists. For we’ve been here before, haven’t we? In fact, the entire history of empire, colonialism, and imperialism is replete with oppressors attempting to portray themselves as victims and their victims as terrorists and savages that need to be either tamed, cleansed or subjugated; and, of course, always in the interests of security and stability.

Think British Empire, think Nazi occupation of Europe, think French and US occupation of Vietnam, think French occupation of Algeria, think British occupation of Ireland, think Israel’s occupation of Palestine – the same pattern emerges.

Among the aforementioned examples, the state of Israel has enjoyed something of an Indian summer in terms of its ability to continue to deny the Palestinians their national, civil, and human rights. This is largely due to the guilt which still pervades the upper reaches of European and US society over a European Holocaust in which the Palestinians played no part. This guilt has combined with strategic objectives – namely oil – to provide Israel with the economic aid which has enabled it to amass the fourth largest military in the world, a nuclear arsenal, and with it legitimacy for a state policy of ethnic cleansing.

That the Palestinians have managed to survive 60 years of occupation, expropriation, economic embargo, and state terror is testament to their courage and indomitability. But even a courageous people can only survive such brutality for so long without succumbing and being sent into the night, which is why now more than ever the campaign to boycott Israel must be stepped up in line with the call from Palestinian civil society.

A sobering thought to consider that 60 years ago 530 Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed, and that 750,000 men, women, and children were forcibly expelled by Zionist terrorist organisations like the Stern Gang and Irgun in the process of 78 percent of historic Palestine being expropriated. The extent of this crime against an entire people reflected the horror of the crime committed by the Nazis which preceded it. Those who sought sanctuary in another’s land did so in the name of the victims of that holocaust. But perpetrators of crimes against humanity can never claim to act on behalf of victims of crimes against humanity. It is indeed a cruel irony of history that the victims of the genocide carried out by the Nazis are wedded to the victims of Israel’s barbarism which followed through a bond of human suffering that transcends ties of religion, race, or ethnicity.

The continued siege of 1.5 million human being in Gaza is biblical both in its scale and cruelty. Aided and abetted in the carrying out of this crime against civilians by the Egyptian government and the EU, Israel’s excuse for continuing the siege is continuing rocket attacks from Gaza into Israeli towns adjacent, in particular the Israeli town of Sderot.

But here again we see the work of a generation of scholars in service to Israel and its interests in the rewriting of history. In the case of Sderot, a determined attempt has been made to suppress the fact that this is a town established on land where the Palestinian village of Najd once stood.

Najd’s inhabitants were forcibly expelled from their village on 13 May 1948 by the Negev Brigade of the then nascent Israeli army, before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies entered Palestine. Therefore, in accordance with UN Resolution 194, and also with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Section 2, the villagers of Najd have a right of return to their homes.

The village of Najd was destroyed and settled by Zionists in 1951. It has been known ever since as the Israeli town of Sderot.

The history of the origins of Sderot is one repeated hundreds of times all over what is now the state of Israel. Therefore, the question a world interested in justice should be asking the Israeli government is a simple one:

Do the Palestinians have the right to exist?

As we await the answer to this question from the Israeli government and its supporters, all people of conscience and consciousness must answer the plea for solidarity from the long suffering Palestinians of Gaza.

Their cause is the cause of humanity in our time.

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President Bush Winks at Israel’s Slaughter in Gaza, While Obama and Clinton Are Silent

December 28, 2008

By Matthew Rothschild, The progressive,  December 27, 2008

Israel recklessly bombed Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 205 Palestinians and wounding at least 350 more, according to Palestinian health officials.

This wholly disproportionate response to Hamas’s immoral but largely ineffective rocket attacks on Israel is guaranteed to further enflame the Middle East.

Not lost on anyone there will be the Bush Administration’s winking at Israel’s attacks.

White Houses spokesman Gordon Johndroe laid all the blame on Hamas.

“Hamas’s continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop,” Johndroe said.

Then even as he gave a perfunctory nod toward safeguarding civilians, he showed no displeasure with Israel going after Hamas: “The United States urges Israel to avoid civilian casualties as it targets Hamas in Gaza,” Johndroe said.

Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama and Secretary of State-to-be Hillary Clinton were shamefully silent in the first hours after the attack.

Bush’s reaction, and the non-reaction by Obama and Clinton, underscores the point that Hanan Ashrawi made on Saturday. “Israel has gotten used to not being held accountable and to being a country that is above the law,” said the Palestinian legislator and human rights activist. She called the bombings a “massacre.”

With Washington condoning Israel’s assault, the violence may only get worse.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said, “The operation will be deeper and expanded as much as necessary. . . . It won’t be short, and it won’t be easy.”

A Hamas spokesperson vowed revenge and said Hamas “will continue the resistance until the last drop of blood.”

This cycle of violence will get bloodier and bloodier unless and until Washington finally prevails on Israel to make a just settlement with the Palestinians.

Bush did not have the inclination to do so. Neither, it appears, does Obama.

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Britain and US refuse to demand end to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza

December 28, 2008

Nicola Smith

Britain and the United States were on a collision course with their European allies last night after refusing to call for an end to Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza.

The wave of attacks marked a violent end to President George W Bush’s sporadic Middle East peace efforts. The White House put the blame squarely on Hamas, which it considers a terrorist organisation, for provoking the Israeli blitz.

Britain echoed the call for “militants” to stop firing rockets into Israel while calling for “maximum restraint” to avoid casualties.

The response was in sharp contrast to demands by the European Union for an “immediate ceasefire” and criticism by France of the use of “disproportionate force”.

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“Hamas’s continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop,” said Gordon Johndroe, the White House spokesman, in Texas where Bush is spending the holidays at his Crawford ranch.

Britain declined to condemn Israel for the onslaught and called for an end to rocket attacks by militants.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, blamed Hamas for the raid. “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza,” she said.

Gordon Brown, the prime minister, said: “I am deeply concerned by continuing missile strikes from Gaza on Israel and by Israel’s response today.

“Peaceful means are the only way of reaching a lasting solution to the situation in Gaza. I call on Gazan militants to cease all rocket attacks on Israel immediately. These attacks are designed to cause random destruction and to undermine the prospects of peace talks led by President Abbas.”

Brown added: “I understand the Israeli government’s sense of obligation to its population. Israel needs to meet its humanitarian obligations, act in a way to further the long-term vision of a two-state solution and do everything in its power to avoid civilian casualties.”

The muted response of Britain and America was in sharp contrast to the statement issued on behalf of Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, who called for an immediate ceasefire and the renewal of the truce declared by Hamas leaders, which had expired on December 19.

“I call for an immediate cessation of military actions on both sides,” he said.

“The EU has repeatedly condemned rocket attacks against Israel. The current Israeli strikes are inflicting an unacceptable toll on Palestinian civilians and will only worsen the humanitarian crisis.”

The French presidency of the EU issued a statement on behalf of the 27-nation bloc, condemning both sides. “The EU condemns the Israeli bombardments as well as rocket attacks from Gaza. It demands that this stops immediately,” it said.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, also went further than Britain and America in condemning the use of “disproportionate” force.

In a statement from Paris he said that he “strongly condemns the irresponsible provocations which led to this situation as well as the disproportionate use of force”. The statement added that he “deplores the heavy civilian losses and expresses his condolence to the innocent victims and their families”.

The EU’s criticism of Israel’s actions was echoed by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, who said he was “deeply alarmed” and appealed for “an immediate halt to all violence”.

Israeli leaders have stepped up their rhetoric against Hamas in recent days, leaving no doubt about their intentions. Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli defence forces, said on Thursday: “We will need to use our full force to hit the terrorist infrastructure.”

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