"The water is no longer fit for human consumption, with analysis and international studies showing that just 10 percent of water in the Gaza Strip is usable... threatening the lives of Palestinians," Munzir Shiblak warned.

A total of 1,417 people were killed, 926 of them civilians in Gaza. Israel says 13 of its citizens, 10 of them soldiers, were killed in the 22 days.

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes [sic] in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, “if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves”.

Well, many of them are in agreement with the goal of weakening Hamas, very simply. I mean, in Egypt, this is a domestic security issue. Hamas is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is the main opposition movement. It couldn’t be simpler. The same is true in Jordan: the Muslim Brotherhood is the main—or it is actually the main opposition movement in Jordan. And so forth. So, for these regimes, keeping their chairs, keeping their thrones, keeping their money, their power, is the only thing that’s really important. Their people? They don’t care about their people.

In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
(...) In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
(...) Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. 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 recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

my apologies, in advance, for posting on this thread after the discussion has closed. i came across this note and the appended comments more-or-less randomly, and i know only a few of you. but what i've read has perturbed me enough to respond (briefly, i hope, and to only a few points). [i don't want to broach the zany contention that "war is socialism", and the associated claims--if you play games with definitions, you can of course "prove" anything]

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the question of terror and counter-terror.

emily argues that hamas has purposefully killed innocent civilians--these "thousands of innocent civilians killed in malls, restaurants, and night clubs"¹--whereas israel, presumably, is engaged only in precise, targeted, defensive and defensible killings. similarly, will repeats, as fact, the thesis that "hamas was targeting civilians and israel is not."

this is a tired argument--especially hackneyed in these days of occupations launched for liberation, and resistance branded, unequivocally, as terror. in the case of israel/palestine, this line of argument is particularly disingenuous. while it's of course true that hamas has carried out suicide bombings inside israel (a reprehensible tactic it stopped in 2004,² but has allegedly re-committed to in the aftermath of these barbarous bombings), the kind of distinction it seeks to establish between israeli and palestinian violence is simply inadmissable.

in the vain hope of keeping this brief, i want to make only two points: factual, and ethical

first, facts of violence:

CIVILIAN DEATHS

since the second intifada began, the statistics are as follows (from b'tselem)³:

• palestinians killed by israeli security forces: 4781 in OPT, 69 in israel

• (palestinian minors killed by israeli secruity forces: 952 in OPT, 3 in israel)

• israeli civilians killed by palestinians: 237 in OPT, 490 in israel

this is a pattern that has become awfully familiar to observers of today's war on terror. the civilized pursues the barbarian, screaming his devotion to “democracy, freedom, markets.” yet, when the dust settles, we wake to learn that, somehow, the civilized have conspired to demolish far more lives, economies, homes, cities than the barbarians—for an example closer to home, review the history of the US sieges of fallujah.⁴

as my man frantz fanon once put it (roughly), in reference to the crimes of european imperialism, the historical record relates an “avalanche of murders carried out by those who never stopped talking of man.” (matt mentioned the israeli invasion of lebanon in 2006, as well he should have: the numbers from that war were no less jarring—“more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.”)⁵

ROCKET ATTACKS

all this hoopla about rocket attacks is astonishingly orwellian. they are continuously invoked as the pretext for this and similarly depraved methods of punishing gaza. yet, from 2001-2008, primitive homemade qassams have killed 15 israelis. (yes, 15!).⁶ and from when the cease fire began in june 2008 until the day that these bombings started, not one israeli had died because of rockets launched from gaza.

THE OCCUPATION AND THE EMBARGO

much more significantly, the daily lot of the average gazan exposes the limits of the all-too-common reflex to fetishize, in an ethical sense, forms of overt “violence.” we need to remember that the 1.5 million-strong population of gaza has been subjected to a crippling, inhuman embargo for the past 18 months. is this not “violence” of a staggeringly immoral, “targeted” sort? (it goes without saying that it's a war crime: quite aside from the illegality of israel's retaining control over a territory it acquired in war, it clearly constitutes collective punishment)

some numbers, excerpted from this devastating account by sara roy:⁷

“According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005. (...) Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. “

palestinians, as abunimah wrote recently, have died “silent” deaths as a result of the embargo: “for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.“⁸

hamas was responding to the israelis' unwillingness to lift this blockade (which they quite rightly called a violation of the terms of the june agreement),⁹ when they elected not to renew this ceasefire.¹⁰ speaking in november, john ging, the head of the UN agency for palestinian refugees, had himself stated plainly that the “people of Gaza [had] not benefit[ed]” from the first five months of the truce.¹¹

second, ethics and analytics of violence:

at times, the people who have commented on this note have held fast to the aforementioned distinctions between the violence of the israeli state and the violence of the assorted palestinian groups (“israel doesn't target civilians deliberately, whereas the palestinian resistance does”). i want to suggest that this is a confused contention, both ethically and analytically.

ethically: it is misleading, at best, to make an ethical distinction between the kind of destruction that the israeli state is visiting upon the population of gaza, and a suicide bombing/rocket attack. the dropping of bombs in populated areas, in the knowledge that civilians will inevitably be killed, is no less reprehensible, morally, than blowing oneself up in a public, civilian place. the usual suggestion that there is no “intent” to kill in the former case masks a far more sinister willingness to sanction the deaths of innocents—as nir rosen writes, “when you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate.”¹² (see ex-bombardier howard zinn's letter to the NYT, which makes the same argument)¹³

indeed, this is embedded in the genealogy of air bombing, as a tactic—which, in mamdani's words, “originated as a method of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversaries,”¹⁴ precisely because it was obvious that the victims would, overwhelmingly, be the populace being bombarded. something similar is at work when emily cites golda meir's golden racist moment (arabs don't care about their babies!). ”it's okay for bombs to drop on these hordes, they don't really “feel,” anyway.” (incidentally, matt cites a UN estimate that 1/5 of those killed have been civilians; the palestine center for human rights, which has an extensive chronicle of where and what has been bombed and when on its website, reports instead that the “vast majority” are civilians).¹⁵

analytically: if there is a moral equivalence between palestinian suicide bombing and israeli aerial bombing, there remains a monumental analytical distinction between palestinian and israeli violence, in general. this is where i disagree with the nonviolent spirit of bobo, seth, and matt's agreement to criticize, unequivocally and equally, all manifestations of violence in this conflict. not only does this fall prey to the early fetishization of “overt” violence (after all, matt was moved to write this note only after these latest massacres—not four days ago at the height of the no less “violent” israeli embargo of gaza), but it also tempts us into committing an analytical fallacy: namely, the suggestion that this is a conflict between equals. i hope no one needs reminding that this remains a confrontation between a hyper-modern military juggernaut (wielded by a settler state) and, more or less, the indigenous population it occupies. any analysis of the violence must take these historical, sociological facts as its premise.

in fact, not much was said about this, perhaps because it's taboo in the US (even if uncontroversial most elsewhere) to suggest that the zionist project is colonial, in form and inspiration. (remember theodore herzl, in his 1896 “the jewish state”, speaking about settling in palestine: ”we should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”¹⁶) seth said something about remaining a believer in the “israeli state”. but if that means a commitment to the project of israel as a “jewish” national home, at the price of forever dispossessing the original inhabitants of that land, i have to ask why. how does someone committed to the ideal of non-violence endorse a project founded on such an awfully “violent” history (on the question of the origins as ethnic cleansing, no serious historians can disagree—ilan pappe makes this case, for example, as i'm sure you know).¹⁷

moreover, as ali abunimah's most recent book argues, wouldn't it be preferable, certainly ethically and perhaps even practically, to agitate for a single, multicultural state as an alternative to confessional politics?

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a few, very quick points, which i couldn't work into the narrative above:

(1) matt--you speak of your own unwillingness to comment on what's happening in this "war", given that you're sitting in american suburbia. this, as i interpret it, is part of a commitment to the democratic process. in other words, you see something impositional in your dictating your interpretations of the conflict to those in israel and occupied palestine.

i think, though, that this reluctance to meddle in “their” affairs can beget a much more concrete appraisal of current events. the israeli operation in gaza, after all, is only the latest, most deadly phase of an almost three year-old plot to topple the democratically-elected hamas government.

the plans for this particular assault were hatched before the six-month-old ceasefire even began (read, for example, this piece by chris floyd, who labels the official narrative a “deliberate and damnable lie”)¹⁸ it was clearly always in the works—and had little to do with hamas' alleged violations of the terms of the agreement. indeed, as i hope is clear, they were compelled into not renewing it by the intensification of the israeli stranglehold on gaza. (and how this, and/or the pithy rocket attacks, justifies the vaporization of a university,¹⁹ police cadets, homes, workshops, and mosques²⁰ is, i hope, beyond all of us).

we all remember the "civil war" of last summer: as per the "Dayton Plan," "jointly coordinated by US Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton and long-time Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan,"²¹ the hopelessly-compromised abbas and company were supposed to be returned to power. but hamas (itself partly an israeli creation, of course--can you say blowback?)²² seized control of the gaza strip, defying these designs.

how scandalous, no, that your own gov't would organize a covert operation in order to oust a democratically-elected government?

(2) matt wrote somewhere that “Palestine supported Hitler”. what is this even supposed to mean? i looked long and hard for evidence of this, but there's really very little (apart from hackneyed accounts of the mufti's affinity for hitler's “final solution”—never much more than the enemy of my enemy is my friend, i assure you.²³ and besides, how do the politics of an aristocratic colonial lackey implicate Palestine, in toto?)

(3) matt and seth keep speaking of their hope that this impasse will be resolved by the arrival of a palestinian gandhi. this argument is misguided. first, it seems to shift blame for the status quo on the failure of the Palestinians to produce a gandhi (i really do not understand this talk of the “ball being in their court”). second, it neglects the existing role of non-violent resistance in palestine²⁴, as well as the israeli state's thoroughgoing repression of it.²⁵ third, it is historically problematic as an analysis of the indian resistance to british rule—gandhi was of course prominent in the independence movement, reviving it in the aftermath of the first world war, but that hardly proves that he and his non-violence “won” independence for india (we still celebrate bhagat singh, don't forget). there are certainly lessons to learn from gandhi, his movement, and his philosophy, but this overly romantic rendering of the freedom struggle is popular largely because it's far more palatable to the powerful (same goes for the US and civil rights: MLK needed his malcom X. not to mention that african-americans in the US have hardly been emancipated!).²⁶

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ok, i think i'll leave it at that. there are a few more things i planned on pointing out, but this is clearly too long already.

in peace,

adaner

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CITATIONS

1the numbers emily suggests are inflated [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hamas_suicide_attacks]

2 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081230.GAZAHAMAS30/TPStory/International

3http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp

4http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520770

5http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0305.htm

6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qassam_rocket_attacks

7http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/roy_01_.html

8http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10055.shtml

9http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7462554.stm

10http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046923.html

11http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9992.shtml

12http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/29/gaza-hamas-israel

13http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Letters-t-1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin

14Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), page 7.

15http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2008/121-2008.html

16http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Jewish_State/The_Jewish_Question

17http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-nakba.html

18http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1666-shock-awe-and-lies-the-truth-behind-the-israeli-attack-on-gaza.html.

19http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Israel-continues-bombing-of-.4826836.jp

20http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=263604&version=1&template_id=37&parent_id=17

21http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9434.shtml

22http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10456.htm

23http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/362_mssr.htm

24http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7005.shtml

25http://inpursuitofjustice.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/another-child-shot-dead-at-wall-protest/

26http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=811&Itemid=34

Israel blames Hamas for primitive homemade rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli city of Sederot. In 2001-2008, these rockets killed about 15 Israelis and injured 433, and they have damaged property. In the same period, Gazan mortar attacks on Israel have killed 8 Israelis. Since the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, Israelis have killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly a thousand of them minors. Since fall of 2007, Israel has kept the 1.5 million Gazans under a blockade, interdicting food, fuel and medical supplies to one degree or another. Wreaking collective punishment on civilian populations such as hospital patients denied needed electricity is a crime of war.

The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
(...) According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005.
(...) Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.
(...) By April, according to the FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on chicken as a major source of protein.
(...) The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade. How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.

In the year since the Hamas takeover, 564 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza according to Btselem, an Israeli human rights agency, including 209 who "were not taking part in hostilities" at the time. Ninety-two deaths were of children. The Israeli military says more than 4,200 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza. Seven Israeli civilians and seven soldiers have been killed by militants in Gaza, all in 2008.

The poll, conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, suggested that Abbas would win 52 percent of the vote against 40 percent for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh if a presidential election were held in the Palestinian territories now. A survey by the same group in March showed Haniyeh leading Abbas by 47 percent to 46.

Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel Peace prize winner, has said he is shocked by conditions in the Gaza Strip after months of Israeli sanctions.

the war on gaza's children:
As a result of Israel's blockade on most imports and exports and other policies designed to punish the populace, about 70% of Gaza's workforce is now unemployed or without pay, according to the United Nations, and about 80% of its residents live in grinding poverty. About 1.2 million of them are now dependent for their day-to-day survival on food handouts from U.N. or international agencies, without which, as the World Food Program's Kirstie Campbell put it, "they are liable to starve."
(...) It is a violation of international law to collectively punish more than a million people for something they did not do. According to the Geneva Convention, to which it is a signatory, Israel actually has the obligation to ensure the well-being of the people on whom it has chosen to impose a military occupation for more than four decades.
(...) "The idea," said Dov Weisglass, an Israeli government advisor, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger."

palestine, a policy of desperate blindness:
The number of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories doubled from 1994 to 2000. As many Israelis have settled in the West Bank since the Oslo accords of 1993 as in the previous 25 years.
(...) There is a huge gap between what is said because we want to hear it (local withdrawals, easing of travel restrictions, removal of one checkpoint out of 20, a change of tone) and what is being done on the ground, which we don’t want to see (interlinking of settlements, construction of bridges and tunnels, encirclement of Palestinian towns, expropriation of land, destruction of houses). Some would describe that gap as duplicity, others as ambiguity. The gradual encroachment happens out of sight of the cameras, without causing a stir and without an explicit colonial diktat. Nobody makes a formal complaint, even supposing they can find out what’s going on – difficult if you haven’t grown up locally. Israeli maps and school textbooks refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria and, following the Knesset’s recent rejection of a proposal from a Labour education minister, obliteration of the 1967 green line is now a legal fait accompli.
(...) since it was possible to withdraw settlements from Gaza, it should be possible in the near future in the West Bank. That is to ignore the fact that the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from one place in Gaza was soon followed by the unpublicised installation of 20,000 settlers in another (the West Bank/Jerusalem). Gaza is not part of the promised land, whereas Judea and Samaria are its backbone. Sharon did not make any secret of the fact that withdrawal on the margins would be compensated by strengthening the Israeli presence elsewhere (438,000 settlers to date, including 192,910 in East Jerusalem);
(...) What is taking shape is not the Palestinian state announced and desired by all: it is an as yet unperceived Israeli territory enclosing three self-governing Palestinian enclaves.

finding lessons in gaza's bloodshed:
Gaza has exposed, like no other experience in modern history, the hypocrisy of the US government's democracy charade; if it was true democracy that the United States was seeking, it would have acknowledged the Palestinian people's collective will and fostered dialogue with their representatives, as opposed to starvation and blockade and covert operations to topple the government.

divide and rule, israeli-style
Whether intended or not, sanctions proved a very effective tool for destroying the internal bonds that held Iraqi society together. Destitution and hunger are powerful incentives to turn on one's neighbor as well as one's enemy. A society where resources -- food, medicines, water and electricity -- are in short supply is also a society where everyone looks out for himself. It is a society that, with a little prompting, can easily be made to tear itself apart.
(...) In place of Saddam, the Americans created a safe haven known as the Green Zone from which its occupation regime could loosely police the country and oversee the theft of Iraq's oil, while also sitting back and watching a sectarian civil war between the Sunni and Shia populations spiral out of control and decimate the Iraqi population.
(...) What did Washington hope to achieve? Pipes offers a clue: "When Sunni terrorists target Shiites and vice-versa, non-Muslims [that is, US occupation forces and their allies] are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one." In other words, enabling a civil war in Iraq was far preferable to allowing Iraqis to unite and mount an effective resistance to the US occupation. After all, Iraqi deaths -- at least 650,000 of them, according to the last realistic count -- are as good as worthless, while US soldiers' lives cost votes back home.\
(...) it [the civil war] eroded the solidarity of ordinary Iraqis, depleting their energies and making them less likely to join or support the resistance to the occupation. The insurgency has remained a terrible irritation to US forces but not the fatal blow it might have been were the Sunni and Shia to fight side by side. As a result, the theft of Iraq's resources has been made easier.
(...) And second, in the longer term, civil war is making inevitable a slow process of communal partition and ethnic cleansing. Four million Iraqis are reported to have been forced either to leave the country or flee their homes. Iraq is being broken up into small ethnic and religious fiefdoms that will be easier to manage and manipulate.
(...) Is this the model for Gaza now and the West Bank later?
(...) It is worth recalling that neither Israel nor the US pushed for an easing of the sanctions on the Palestinian Authority after the national unity government of Hamas and Fatah was formed earlier this year. In fact, the US and Israel could barely conceal their panic at the development. The moment the Mecca agreement was signed, reports of US efforts to train and arm Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas became a newspaper staple.
(...) By engineering the destruction of the unity government, Israel and the US have ensured that there is no danger of a new Palestinian consensus emerging, one that might have cornered Israel into peace talks. A unity government might have found a formula offering Israel:
- limited recognition inside the pre-1967 borders in return for recognition of a Palestinian state and the territorial integrity of the West Bank and Gaza;
- a long-term ceasefire in return for Israel ending its campaign of constant violence and violations of Palestinian sovereignty;
- and a commitment to honor past agreements in return for Israel's abiding by UN resolutions and accepting a just solution for the Palestinian refugees.
(...) Instead, Hamas' dismal authority over the prison camp called Gaza and Fatah's bastard governance of the ghettoes called the West Bank offer a model more satisfying for Israel and the US -- and one not unlike Iraq. A sort of sheriff's divide and rule in the Wild West.
(...) Just as in Iraq, Israel and the US have made sure that no Palestinian strongman arises to replace Yasser Arafat. Just as in Iraq, they are encouraging civil war as an alternative to resistance to occupation, as Palestine's resources -- land, not oil -- are stolen. Just as in Iraq, they are causing a permanent and irreversible partition, in this case between the West Bank and Gaza, to create more easily managed territorial ghettoes. And just as in Iraq, the likely reaction is an even greater extremism from the Palestinians that will undermine their cause in the eyes of the international community.
(...) The goal will be to increase the strains between Hamas and Fatah to breaking point in the West Bank, but ensure that Fatah wins the confrontation there. Fatah is already militarily stronger and with generous patronage from Israel and the US -- including arms and training, and possibly the return of the Badr Brigade currently holed up in Jordan -- it should be able to rout Hamas. The difference in status between Gaza and the West Bank that has been long desired by Israel will be complete.
(...) The Palestinian people have already been carved up into a multitude of constituencies. There are the Palestinians under occupation, those living as second-class citizens of Israel, those allowed to remain "residents" of Jerusalem, and those dispersed to camps across the Middle East. Even within these groups, there are a host of sub-identities: refugees and non-refugees; refugees included as citizens in their host state and those excluded; occupied Palestinians living under the control of the Palestinian Authority and those under Israel's military government; and so on.
(...) Gaza can now be written off by the international community as a basket case. The Israeli media is currently awash with patronizing commentary from the political and security establishments about how to help avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including the possibility of air drops of aid over the Gaza "security fence" -- as though Gaza were Pakistan after an earthquake. From past experience, and the current menacing sounds from Israel's new Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, those food packages will quickly turn into bombs if Gaza does not keep quiet.
(...) at their meeting last week Olmert and Bush revived talk of Palestinian statehood. According to Olmert, Bush "wants to realize, while he is in office, the dream of creating a Palestinian state." Both are keen to make quick progress, a sure sign of mischief in the making. Certainly, they know they are now under no pressure to create the single viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once promised by President Bush. An embattled Abbas will not be calling for the inclusion of Gaza in his ghetto-fiefdom.
(...) Third, the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may be used to inject new life into Olmert's shopworn convergence plan -- if he can dress it up in new clothes. Convergence, which required a very limited withdrawal from those areas of the West Bank heavily populated with Palestinians while Israel annexed most of its illegal colonies and kept the Jordan Valley, was officially ditched last summer after Israel's humiliation by Hizballah. Why seek to revive convergence? Because it is the key to Israel securing the expanded Jewish fortress state that is its only sure protection from the rapid demographic growth of the Palestinians, soon to outnumber Jews in the Holy Land, and Israel's fears that it may then be compared to apartheid South Africa.
(...) If the occupation continues unchanged, Israel's security establishment has long been warning, the Palestinians will eventually wake up to the only practical response: to dissolve the Palestinian Authority, Israel's clever ruse to make the Palestinian leadership responsible for suppressing Palestinian resistance to the occupation, thereby forcing Israel to pick up the bill for the occupation rather than Europe. The next stage would be an anti-apartheid struggle for one state in historic Palestine.
(...) Convergence requires no loss of Israel's control over Palestinian lives, ensured through the all but finished grid of walls, settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints, only a repackaging of their occupation as statehood.
(...) In other words, Israel looks as if it is dusting off yet another blueprint for how to manage the Palestinians and their irritating obsession with sovereignty. Last time, under Oslo, the Palestinians were put in charge of policing the occupation on Israel's behalf. This time, as the Palestinians are sealed into their separate prisons masquerading as a state, Israel may believe that it can find a new jailer for the Palestinians -- the Arab world.

abunimah on gaza/west bank:
The militias that Hamas took on and defeated in recent weeks were particularly hated in Gaza because they had abducted, tortured and killed many Hamas members and were widely seen as thoroughly corrupt. It so happens that these militias received arms and funding from the United States and had vowed to take on and defeat Hamas in a violent showdown, overturning the result of the election.
(...) And just like apartheid South Africans, who cited "black on black" violence, some Israelis assert that intra-Palestinian fighting proves that Palestinians are incapable of democracy. They hope that all the heat will be off Israel as it entrenches Bantustan-like separation and discrimination against non-Jews under its rule.

what hamas wantsTHE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.
(...) From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.
(...) Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people.
(...) Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side's true intentions.

engage with hamas: we earned our support
The Palestinian National Authority apparently joins the list of elected governments targeted or toppled over the past century by interventionism: nations that had the courage to take American rhetoric at face value and elect whomever they would. No doubt some in Washington persist in the fiction that the United States is following a "road map" to democracy for Palestinians, just as others believe the Iraq war has been a sincere exercise in nation-building. Neoconservative strategists have miscalculated, however, and Hamas is stronger than ever.
(...) Some critics raise the red flag of "al-Qaeda" and say that Hamas and parliament are a stalking horse for Salafi jihadists. I defy them to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas's military structure has struck against any force outside the theater of the occupation. The struggle has always been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and nationalism -- Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one's creed?
(...) Likewise, those who demean resistance to the occupation as little more than a proxy for Iran, Syria or Hezbollah are ignorant of history. The long-suffering Palestinians have gratefully accepted assistance from neighbors both near and far, Arab and Western, Muslim or otherwise. Slighting the generosity of those who sympathize with the Palestinians is hypocritical given America's billions of annual aid dollars for Israel, money that has only purchased tragedy.
(...) Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals -- the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a unified front against the occupation.
(...) Allow the Palestinian people to chart their own course, free from the influence of those who seek little more than to perpetuate the status quo. The alternative is unacceptable.

selected quotes from the puppet master and co.:

“No one wants to abandon the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Gaza Strip to the mercies of a terrorist organization,” a White House spokesman, Scott Stanzel, said in Washington.

“We are waiting, watching the situation very closely,” she [Israeli foreign minister] added. “But on the other hand we are going to keep this strategy of dialogue with the moderates and to send some hope for those who support their vision.”

The split between Hamas and Fatah in the government, Regev said, "may open options for us to work with moderate Palestinians."

(...) Some officials hinted that Israel might unfreeze tax revenues worth hundreds of millions of dollars that it has withheld from the Palestinians.(...) "What we have witnessed is a fascist, military coup. Hamas cannot control the Palestinian people with their machine guns. They may have taken a few government buildings but Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation still has the people in Gaza," he [Ziad Abu Ein, a Fatah leader in Ramallah] said. "In a few days there will be a new uprising in Gaza when people discover the truth of Hamas. There will be a big fight."
(...) Salam Fayyad - an economist, MP and former finance minister - is well known in western financial circles following an eight-year stint at the World Bank and six years as the International Monetary Fund's representative to the Palestinian Authority. Born near Tulkarm in the West Bank in 1952, he was educated in Lebanon and Texas, and spent 20 years in the US. He returned to Palestine in 2002 as finance minister, working hard to stamp out official corruption. After Hamas won elections in 2006, he rejected overtures to be prime minister. He returned to the finance ministry this year as part of a Saudi-brokered deal to establish the ill-fated national unity government. He is married with three children.

(...) Barring some dramatic reversal after the latest fighting - such as the improbable survival of the Hamas-Fatah coalition government - 1.4 million Palestinians in what is now being dubbed "Hamastan" will not only be physically cut off from their compatriots in the West Bank but will also be ruled by a movement that advocates armed resistance and is boycotted by Israel and the international community.
(...) "This situation isn't good for Israel. It's actually dreadful," said the veteran Yediot Aharonot analyst Roni Shaked. "The Palestinians are destroying their future with their own hands."

(...) The United States had quietly encouraged Mr. Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian government and dismiss Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, steps that Mr. Abbas announced Thursday, administration officials said. Before the announcement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned Mr. Abbas to reiterate American support for the move, they said.
(...) “President Abbas has exercised his lawful authority as the president of the Palestinian Authority, as the leader of the Palestinian people,” Ms. Rice said.
(...) “Nobody wants to abandon the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Gaza Strip to the mercies of a terrorist organization,” said the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack. “We’re certainly not going to participate in extinguishing the hopes of a whole swath of the Palestinian population to live in a Palestinian state.”

fisk on "palestine":
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
(...) No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?
(...) And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
(...) Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people
(...) All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province). We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal. We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror". Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like our coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
(...) If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
(...) So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.