Palestinians in Gaza City carry a victim of the Israeli assault to Al Shifa hospital (Thair al-Hassany | propaimages)
OUR LAST interview the day after Israel’s attack began was interrupted by bombing very nearby. Are you and your relatives safe?
YES. I’M sorry I had to cut the interview short. They started bombarding the ministerial compound behind the building where I live. I’ve lost all the windows in my flat.
It was horrible. Unbelievable. I can’t begin to describe the situation. I haven’t been able to sleep for five nights straight–tonight will be the sixth–because every single night, they have aerial strikes.
The Israelis are furious, because they don’t know what to do. They have no more targets to attack, and yet they haven’t been able to find a single leader of the resistance [the first reports of a senior Hamas leader killed by the bombings came the day after this interview took place]. But it’s easy to attack mosques and schools and hospitals and universities, and so this is what they’ve been doing.
The last bomb I heard was 15 minutes ago, about two kilometers from where I live. They attacked a currency exchange, which the Israelis accuse of money laundering and working for Hamas. It’s ridiculous.
The number of people who have died in the last five days is now more than 400, including 70 children and 18 women. They have also attacked 18 mosques. The number of injured is about 2,500. It’s crazy, it’s genocidal. They want to send us back to the dark ages, as they say.
Protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza have already taken place in cities around the country, with more planned for the coming days. Contact local organizers for details where you live.
For updates on the current situation, 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.
SO FAR, they still haven’t started ground operations, right?
NO INCURSIONS so far. Television news reports are now talking about Israel starting a land attack on Friday, January 2, but that’s also part of the psychological warfare–because they don’t generally announce their attack plans to maintain their strategic advantage.
They’ve carried out more than 700 air strikes so far. Crazy. As I am speaking to you right now, I can clearly hear the Apache helicopters. But because it’s too dark, I can’t see them. We have no electricity for the sixth day in my building.
WHAT DO the Israelis want at this point? You’ve said that they’re running out of targets. Do they want to kill or force the Hamas leadership into exile? Do they expect some other kind of surrender?
THE OBVIOUS objective that they’ve been talking about is “destroying the infrastructure of the terrorist organizations.” But they aren’t just referring to destroying Hamas, although that is their main goal. And in any case, they know that they can’t do that, because Hamas is not only the freedom fighters. It’s a very big organization, with social welfare aspects to it, as well as other elements.
They claim that Hamas has about 15,000 fighters. And then there are about 10,000 fighters belonging to the other resistance organizations–including, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is a Marxist organization.
The Israelis want to create a new reality on the ground–to weaken Hamas as a political organization and weaken other resistance movements opposed to the Oslo Accords in order to pave the way for the return of the pro-Oslo organizations and the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah.
I think this is their ultimate goal, and they know very well that they can’t achieve it. The fact that they haven’t been able to destroy the resistance movement for the fifth consecutive day actually means a victory for the resistance movement. I don’t think they’ll be able to succeed, even after 15 days.
This is a repeat of what happened to the Israeli military operation in Lebanon two years ago. Remember that the Israelis started with “shock-and-awe” bombing, like the U.S. did in Iraq, with aerial strikes against the Lebanese resistance movement, and Hezbollah in particular.
They weren’t able to accomplish anything. They weren’t able to destroy the infrastructure of Hezbollah. And when they started their ground attack, it was obvious that Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance movement, including the Communist Party of Lebanon, were actually victorious. This is what the Winograd report [from an Israeli commission charged with investigating the Lebanon war] concluded.
What we’re witnessing right now in Gaza is similar because the people of Gaza are supporting the resistance movement. The Israelis want to punish the people for voting for an anti-Oslo organization three years ago when they voted for Hamas.
I also think the Israelis are choosing the timing very carefully. One, they’re taking advantage of the grey area between George Bush leaving the White House and Barack Obama coming in. Also, it’s between Christmas and New Year’s, when most of the West is on holiday and celebrating, and not paying as much attention to international developments.
But notice that they’ve been postponing the ground invasion because the Israelis also have elections coming up in February. So Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are very reluctant to start the land invasion until the most damage possible is done from the air–in the hope that this will make victory on the ground more likely.
We were expecting the ground assault as early as the first or second day, but–oh gosh, another strike, so close. Maybe 500 meters to one kilometer away. Now another one. We rely on local radio stations to tell us exactly where the strikes are. I think these strikes are from Navy vessels, because I live near the beach. I’m sorry. I’ve lost my concentration.
The conclusion I wanted to end with is that Israeli leaders don’t want a second Winograd report. The first report concluded that the initial aerial strikes against Lebanon actually failed. This is what is happening right now. That’s why we’ve started hearing criticisms in the mainstream Israeli press, such as Ha’aretz and Yediot Aharonot newspapers, including from pilots saying that we’re killing so many civilians.
And remember, the last time I talked to you, I explained that the timing of the first strikes was at 11:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, when schoolchildren are returning home. So 80 children have been killed, and by the way, today, two sisters–seven and eight years old–died in the morning, and an hour ago, I heard their brother died from his injuries.
So Israel’s “strategy” is to kill as many civilians as possible to create a situation where civilians would rebel against Hamas and resistance movements. But like in Lebanon, this has had the opposite effect. The population supports the resistance–and not only the resistance of Hamas by the way.
Just like in Lebanon, it wasn’t only the resistance of Hezbollah, but also the Lebanese Communist Party that had support. And here, we have Hamas as one organization among 12 to 14 organizations, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
EARLIER, YOU mentioned that we’re in the grey area between the Bush and Obama administrations. What makes this so favorable for military action by Israel?
IDEOLOGICALLY, THE Bush administration sees the crushing of Palestinian resistance as part of the so-called war on terror. Notice that I say Palestinian resistance, and not the Islamic resistance of Hamas, because all resistance to imperial oppression is defined as “terrorism” by the Bush administration. The U.S. enables Israeli crimes in Palestine and Lebanon with its financial, military and moral support.
These are the same kinds of atrocities that the neocons in the U.S. have inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan, with their fighter planes and tanks firing all kinds of ordnance–both conventional and illegal, such as white phosphorous and cluster bombs–against civilians.
The Bush administration even blames Hamas. It has adopted the policy of “blaming the victim,” and this has been the ideological orientation of the Zionist state since its inception.
The Bush administration also has a close ideological partner in the right-wing government of Israel, so it’s easier for them to find that support from the Bush administration. Bush allowed Olmert and Livni to undermine the Annapolis meeting [in 2007 between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, hosted by U.S. officials in Maryland].
The Annapolis meeting itself was a fiasco, but Bush also allowed them to undermine it by focusing on Israeli “security” and marginalizing the whole issue of Palestine and Palestinian rights.
In fact, I read yesterday in Ha’aretz that Israeli officials began talking about this assault on Gaza as a plan six months ago. Ehud Barak asked his officers and generals to start planning for this attack. This is at the same time that they agreed to the truce with the resistance movement in Gaza.
After the Annapolis meeting, Olmert immediately authorized a massive building program of new Jewish-only housing units in East Jerusalem, which was a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the two-state solution [that was nominally under discussion at Annapolis].
The two-state solution has been the essence of the Bush doctrine in the Middle East, but I don’t think there is any possibility of the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, because Israel has taken irreversible steps in the West Bank to make such a state an impossibility.
The same complicit silence that we see right now from the Bush White House has also accompanied the drive to starve Gaza for the last two years–the shortages of food, fuel, medicine, electricity. Patients in need of dialysis and other kinds of medicine have been dying daily for the last two years.
Even a person as ignorant of Middle Eastern issues as George W. Bush must realize how cynical it is to talk about a two-state solution that has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, the looting and pillaging of Gaza, the construction of the apartheid wall, the annexation of more than 25 percent of West Bank land to the expanding Jewish settlements.
The Bush administration has been silent or has supported all of these measures. So the Israeli government wants to take advantage of Bush’s support.
It is also hesitant to embarrass Barack Obama at the beginning of his term, although I don’t believe Obama will be that different when it comes to Middle Eastern issues. Obama has already shown his complicity. When he visited Palestine during the presidential campaign, he spent only 45 minutes in Ramallah with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after which he refused to give a press conference.
Then Obama visited Sderot, the Israeli town that neighbors Gaza, and sympathized with the Sderot people, but uttered not a word of sympathy for the starving Palestinians of Gaza. And the first thing he did after being elected president was appoint Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who is known for his strong pro-Israel views, as his chief of staff.
So the signals from Obama are clear. But the Israelis don’t want to force his hand from the moment he takes office on January 20. That’s why the gray area is important to them.
The difference between what happened in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza today is that the people living in the south of Lebanon fled to Beirut–about half a million people, I think. The people of Gaza, however, cannot do that. The only exit here is the Rafah crossing, which is completely closed off by Egyptian authorities.
So the population of 1.5 million in Gaza are left in Gaza, supporting the resistance. And when I say resistance, I’m not only talking about military resistance. I’m talking about initiating a global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to put pressure on Israel. We, as civil society organizations, have called for his. I’m on the steering committee of the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. I am also on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Central Committee.
We call on all civil society organizations around the world–in the United States, in the Arab and Islamic world and so on–to initiate a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign modeled on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign against South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s.
After the Sharpeville Massacre committed by the racists of South Africa against Black people, the divestment movement got momentum, and that was the beginning of the end of apartheid.
I look at what is happening in Gaza today from a historical perspective, and I think this should be the beginning of the end of the apartheid state of Israel.
This is not an anti-Semitic argument, as critics often assert. I am calling for the establishment of a secular democratic state in the historic land of Palestine–a state for all of its citizens, regardless of religion, race or sect.
Also, I must say that I really appreciate all of your great work there in the U.S. To be working as dissidents and critical voices against the power of the mainstream media in the U.S. has really been impressive, and gives us support here.
Honestly, I talk about you all the time. Because what people know about America here are the Apache gunships and the F-16s, and what the American government does. I always tell people that there is another America that you represent, and that is the America we bank on.
THAT’S VERY kind of you to say, but it’s us who are humbled by your courage and conviction as the Israeli attack continues. Here, the media reports on the situation as if the fighting in Gaza is a battle between two equally matched contenders–instead of massive firepower against a population that has very little to defend itself with.
TO TALK about “two sides” is truly absurd. What you have is one side that is considered under international law as an occupying and colonizing power; one side that has F-16s and Apache helicopters; one side that has the third or fourth strongest army in the world, and of course, the strongest army in the Middle East; and one side that has more than 250 nuclear warheads.
On the other side, you have an occupied people–people fighting with stones, people fighting with crude, homemade rockets like firecrackers. It’s unfair to talk about two evenly matched sides because it absolves Israel of its war crimes that have been committed in Gaza.
It would seem mandatory for the International Court of Justice to investigate the crimes committed by Israeli generals and officers, and indict them for crimes against humanity.
How is it possible to talk about “two sides?” You don’t have two sides. Were there two equal sides when discussing we were apartheid and the African National Congress? Were there two sides when Hitler and the Nazis were committing horrendous crimes and killing more than 6 million innocent Jews?
The world said we would never allow that to happen again. The uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto–the Intifada of the Jewish prisoners in Poland in 1943–actually inspires us here in Gaza.
Gaza has been transformed into the largest concentration camp on the face of the earth. And you cannot equate the prisoner and the warden. I think in America people need to wake up to this reality.
If Hamas Did Not Exist
January 2, 2009Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN | Counterpunch, Jan 1, 2009
Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel’s will is at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated “calls” for a “ceasefire” on “both sides”; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine Arab States are going to stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered by the hour while the world’s bullying Superpower eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they say something a little to their disliking; then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.
The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do with “Terror”. It has nothing to do with the long-term “security” of the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It has nothing to do with some conjured-up “war” – a cynical and overused euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its resources are its own; that doesn’t want one of the Empire’s obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.
This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash’al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into the catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor has colored and will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world’s population. The primary symbols today are Islamic – the mosques, the Qur’an, the references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.
There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.
Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth. Worse yet you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.
Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the ‘wretched of the earth’ begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell impossible?
The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 1950s. It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted UN Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if it withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied.
It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the United Nations in 1974, when –alone with the United States—it voted against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had no intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or 1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that it might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread across occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of the global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly formed Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the more secular-nationalist factions.
Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at Oslo where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the world’s satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border of Jordan, expelling any ‘locals’ inhabiting that land. It speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security.
Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.
Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the ‘international community’? What will it take to see past the lies and indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.
The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d’etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?
The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.
Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at amadea311@earthlink.net
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Tags: destruction of Gaza, Hamas, hegemony, Israel, Israeli bobming of Gaza, Palestine, United Nations and Palestine, United States
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