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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Genocide in Gaza, Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank
By Ilan Pappe
01/18/07 "<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6374.shtml>Electronic
Intifada" On this stage, not so long ago, I claimed that Israel is
conducting genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. I hesitated a lot before
using this very charged term and yet decided to adopt it. Indeed, the
responses I received, including from some leading human rights activists,
indicated a certain unease over the usage of such a term. I was inclined to
rethink the term for a while, but came back to employing it today with even
stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe what the
Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.
On 28 December 2006, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem
published its annual report about the Israeli atrocities in the occupied
territories. Israeli forces killed this last year six hundred and sixty
citizens. The number of Palestinians killed by Israel last year tripled in
comparison to the previous year (around two hundred). According to
B'Tselem, the Israelis killed one hundred and forty one children in the
last year. Most of the dead are from the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli
forces demolished almost 300 houses and slew entire families. This means
that since 2000, Israeli forces killed almost four thousand Palestinians,
half of them children; more than twenty thousand were wounded.
B'Tselem is a conservative organization, and the numbers may be higher. But
the point is not just about the escalating intentional killing, it is about
the trend and the strategy. As 2007 commences, Israeli policymakers are
facing two very different realities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In
the former, they are closer than ever to finishing the construction of
their eastern border. Their internal ideological debate is over and their
master plan for annexing half of the West Bank is being implemented at an
ever-growing speed. The last phase was delayed due to the promises made by
Israel, under the Road Map, not to build new settlements. Israel found two
ways of circumventing this alleged prohibition. First, it defined a third
of the West Bank as Greater Jerusalem, which allowed it to build within
this new annexed area towns and community centers. Secondly, it expanded
old settlements to such proportions so that there was no need to build new
ones. This trend was given an additional push in 2006 (hundreds of caravans
were installed to mark the border of the expansions, the planning schemes
for the new towns and neighborhoods were finalized and the apartheid bypass
roads and highway system completed). In all, the settlements, the army
bases, the roads and the wall will allow Israel to annex almost half of the
West Bank by 2010. Within these territories there will be a considerable
number of Palestinians, against whom the Israeli authorities will continue
to implement slow and creeping transfer policies -- too boring as a subject
for the western media to bother with and too elusive for human rights
organizations to make a general point about them. There is no rush; as far
as the Israelis are concerned, they have the upper hand there: the daily
abusive and dehumanizing mixed mechanisms of army and bureaucracy is as
effective as ever in contributing its own share to the dispossession process.
The strategic thinking of Ariel Sharon that this policy is far better than
the one offered by the blunt 'transferists' or ethnic cleansers, such as
Avigdor Liberman's advocacy, is accepted by everyone in the government,
from Labor to Kadima. The petit crimes of state terrorism are also
effective as they enable liberal Zionists around the world to softly
condemn Israel and yet categorize any genuine criticism on Israel's
criminal policies as anti-Semitism.
On the other hand, there is no clear Israeli strategy as yet for the Gaza
Strip; but there is a daily experiment with one. Gaza, in the eyes of the
Israelis, is a very different geo-political entity from that of the West
Bank. Hamas controls Gaza, while Abu Mazen seems to run the fragmented West
Bank with Israeli and American blessing. There is no chunk of land in Gaza
that Israel covets and there is no hinterland, like Jordan, to which the
Palestinians of Gaza can be expelled. Ethnic cleansing is ineffective here.
The earlier strategy in Gaza was ghettoizing the Palestinians there, but
this is not working. The ghettoized community continues to express its will
for life by firing primitive missiles into Israel. Ghettoizing or
quarantining unwanted communities, even if they were regarded as sub-human
or dangerous, never worked in history as a solution. The Jews know it best
from their own history. The next stages against such communities in the
past were even more horrific and barbaric. It is difficult to tell what the
future holds for the Gaza population, ghettoized, quarantined, unwanted and
demonized. Will it be a repeat of the ominous historical examples or is a
better fate still possible?
Creating the prison and throwing the key to the sea, as UN Special Reporter
John Dugard has put it, was an option the Palestinians in Gaza reacted
against with force as soon as September 2005. They were determined to show
at the very least that they were still part of the West Bank and Palestine.
In that month, they launched the first significant, in number and not
quality, barrage of missiles into the Western Negev. The shelling was a
response to an Israeli campaign of mass arrests of Hamas and Islamic Jihad
activists in the Tul Karem area. The Israelis responded with operation
'First Rain'. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the nature of that
operation. It was inspired by the punitive measures inflicted first by
colonialist powers, and then by dictatorships, against rebellious
imprisoned or banished communities. A frightening show of the oppressor's
power to intimidate preceded all kind of collective and brutal punishments,
ending with a large number of dead and wounded among the victims. In 'First
Rain', supersonic flights were flown over Gaza to terrorize the entire
population, succeeded by the heavy bombardment of vast areas from the sea,
sky and land. The logic, the Israeli army explained, was to create pressure
so as to weaken the Gaza community's support for the rocket launchers. As
was expected, by the Israelis as well, the operation only increased the
support for the rocket launchers and gave impetus to their next attempt.
The real purpose of that particular operation was experimental. The Israeli
generals wished to know how such operations would be received at home, in
the region and in the world. And it seems that instantly the answer was
'very well'; namely, no one took an interest in the scores of dead and
hundreds of wounded Palestinians left behind after the 'First Rain' subsided.
The bar set continually higher: Palestinians pass by a pool of blood after
the Israeli shelling of a residential area in Beit Hanoun in the northern
of Gaza Strip in which at least 18 people were killed, 8 November 2006.
(MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)
And hence since 'First Rain' and until June 2006, all the following
operations were similarly modeled. The difference was in their escalation:
more firepower, more causalities and more collateral damage and, as to be
expected, more Qassam missiles in response. Accompanying measures in 2006
were more sinister means of ensuring the full imprisonment of the people of
Gaza through boycott and blockade, with which the EU is still shamefully
collaborating.
The capture of Gilad Shalit in June 2006 was irrelevant in the general
scheme of things, but nonetheless provided an opportunity for the Israelis
to escalate even more the components of the tactical and allegedly punitive
missions. After all, there was still no strategy that followed the tactical
decision of Ariel Sharon to take out 8,000 settlers whose presence
complicated 'punitive' missions and whose eviction made him almost a
candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, the 'punitive' actions
continue and become themselves a strategy.
The Israeli army loves drama and therefore also escalated the language.
'First Rain' was replaced by 'Summer Rains', a general name that was given
to the 'punitive' operations since June 2006 (in a country where there is
no rain in the summer, the only precipitation that one can expect are
showers of F-16 bombs and artillery shells hitting people of Gaza).
'Summer Rains' brought a novel component: the land invasion into parts of
the Gaza Strip. This enabled the army to kill citizens even more
effectively and to present it as a result of heavy fighting within dense
populated areas, an inevitable result of the circumstances and not of
Israeli policies. With the close of summer came operation 'Autumn Clouds'
which was even more efficient: on 1 November 2006, in less than 48 hours,
the Israelis killed seventy civilians; by the end of that month, with
additional mini operations accompanying it, almost two hundred were killed,
half of them children and women. As one can see from the dates, some of the
activity was parallel to the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, making it easier
to complete the operations without much external attention, let alone
criticism.
From 'First Rain' to 'Autumn Clouds' one can see escalation in every
parameter. The first is the disappearance of the distinction between
civilian and non-civilian targets: the senseless killing has turned the
population at large to the main target for the army's operation. The second
one is the escalation in the means: employment of every possible killing
machines the Israeli army possesses. Thirdly, the escalation is conspicuous
in the number of casualties: with each operation, and each future
operation, a much larger number of people are likely to be killed and
wounded. Finally, and most importantly, the operations become a strategy --
the way Israel intends to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip.
A creeping transfer in the West Bank and a measured genocidal policy in the
Gaza Strip are the two strategies Israel employs today. From an electoral
point of view, the one in Gaza is problematic as it does not reap any
tangible results; the West Bank under Abu Mazen is yielding to Israeli
pressure and there is no significant force that arrests the Israeli
strategy of annexation and dispossession. But Gaza continues to fire back.
On the one hand, this would enable the Israeli army to initiate more
massive genocidal operations in the future. But there is also the great
danger, on the other, that as happened in 1948, the army would demand a
more drastic and systematic 'punitive' and collateral action against the
besieged people of the Gaza Strip.
A source of satisfaction for Israel: Palestinians inspect a burnt vehicle
belonging to Colonel Mohammad Ghareeb, the deputy chief of preventive
security in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The vehicle
was burnt during factional clashes between Fatah and Hamas.
(MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)
Ironically, the Israeli killing machine has rested lately. Even relatively
large number of Qassam missiles, including one or two quite deadly ones,
did not stir the army to action. Though the army's spokesmen say it shows
'restraint', it never did in the past and is not likely to do so in the
future. The army rests, as its generals are content with the internal
killing that rages on in Gaza and does the job for them. They watch with
satisfaction the emerging civil war in Gaza, which Israel foments and
encourages. From Israel's point of view it does not really mater how Gaza
would eventually be demographically downsized, be it by internal or Israeli
slaying. The responsibility of ending the internal fighting lies of course
with the Palestinian groups themselves, but the American and Israeli
interference, the continued imprisonment, the starvation and strangulation
of Gaza are all factors that make such an internal peace process very
difficult. But it will take place soon and then with the first early sign
that it subsided, the Israeli 'Summer Rains' will fall down again on the
people of Gaza, wreaking havoc and death.
And one should never tire of stating the inevitable political conclusions
from this dismal reality of the year we left behind and in the face of the
one that awaits us. There is still no other way of stopping Israel than
besides boycott, divestment and sanctions. We should all support it
clearly, openly, unconditionally, regardless of what the gurus of our world
tell us about the efficiency or raison d'etre of such actions. The UN would
not intervene in Gaza as it does in Africa; the Nobel peace laureates would
not enlist to its defense as they do for causes in Southeast Asia. The
numbers of people killed there are not staggering as far as other
calamities are concerned, and it is not a new story -- it is dangerously
old and troubling. The only soft point of this killing machine is its
oxygen lines to 'western' civilization and public opinion. It is still
possible to puncture them and make it at least more difficult for the
Israelis to implement their future strategy of eliminating the Palestinian
people either by cleansing them in the West Bank or genociding them in the
Gaza Strip.
Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of
political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian
Studies in Haifa. His books include, among others,
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1850438196/theelectronic-20>The
Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992),
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415169488/theelectronic-20>The
Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern
Palestine (Cambridge 2003),
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415214092/theelectronic-20>The
Modern Middle East (London and New York 2005) and his latest,
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1851684670/theelectronic-20>Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
source:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6374.shtml
===
-muslim voice-
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