http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/736009.html
Gideon Levy : Who started? Haaretz Mon., July 10, 2006 "We left Gaza and they are firing Qassams" - there is no more precise a formulation of the prevailing view about the current round of the conflict. "They started," will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam fell on the school in Ashkelon, causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza. Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but "they started." They are also "breaking the rules" laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that's an "escalation of the conflict," and when we bomb a university and a school, it's perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That's why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel's winning moral argument to justify every injustice. So, who really did start? And have we "left Gaza?" Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like "partition" and "an end to the occupation," did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to their bitter fate. Now, less than a year after the disengagement, it is going back, with violence and force. What could otherwise have been expected? That Israel would unilaterally withdraw, brutally and outrageously ignoring the Palestinians and their needs, and that they would silently bear their bitter fate and would not continue to fight for their liberty, livelihood and dignity? We promised a safe passage to the West Bank and didn't keep the promise. We promised to free prisoners and didn't keep the promise. We supported democratic elections and then boycotted the legally elected leadership, confiscating funds that belong to it, and declaring war on it. We could have withdrawn from Gaza through negotiations and coordination, while strengthening the existing Palestinian leadership, but we refused to do so. And now, we complain about "a lack of leadership?" We did everything we could to undermine their society and leadership, making sure as much as possible that the disengagement would not be a new chapter in our relationship with the neighboring nation, and now we are amazed by the violence and hatred that we sowed with our own hands. What would have happened if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege that it imposed on Gaza? Would it open the border to Palestinian laborers? Free prisoners? Meet with the elected leadership and conduct negotiations? Encourage investment in Gaza? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda - here and around the world. Israel would continue with the convergence, which is solely meant to serve its goals, ignoring their needs. Nobody would have given any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they did not behave violently. That is a very bitter truth, but the first 20 years of the occupation passed quietly and we did not lift a finger to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise. With our own hands, we are now once again pushing the Palestinians into using the petty arms they have; and in response, we employ nearly the entire enormous arsenal at our disposal, and continue to complain that "they started." We started. We started with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it, a real and complete ending. We started with the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture. After Oslo, too, there were those who claimed that "we left the territories," in a similar mixture of blindness and lies. Gaza is in serious trouble, ruled by death, horror and daily difficulties, far from the eyes and hearts of Israelis. We are only shown the Qassams. We only see the Qassams. The West Bank is still under the boot of occupation, the settlements are flourishing, and every limply extended hand for an agreement, including that of Ismail Haniyeh, is immediately rejected. And after all this, if someone still has second thoughts, the winning answer is promptly delivered: "They started." They started and justice is on our side, while the fact is that they did not start and justice is not with us. *** http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=16884 Midle East Online July 3, 2006 Olmert and Peretz have Failed the Test of Power By Patrick Seale By using vastly disproportionate force against Gaza, Israel has once again demonstrated its contempt for international law and its cruel indifference to human suffering. America's blind support may give Israel immunity in the short term, but the longer term, consequences of such irresponsible behaviour can only be dire. Arab and Muslim loathing for the Jewish state - and for its American ally - will inevitably be cranked up still further, with everything this implies for the security of Israelis and Americans everywhere. There will always be Palestinians and others who will seek revenge, in one form or another, including a resort to terrorism. Political pressures on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, even from the spineless Europeans, will steadily increase. Alarmed at American inaction, Britain and France are already working quietly on a project to define their own parameters for resolving the conflict. They will not endorse the unilateral annexations Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has in mind. When he travels abroad, Israel's chief of staff Dan Halutz may find that he has joined the list of Israeli generals wanted for war crimes. Even more serious, because more insidious and less easily quantifiable, is that Israel's wanton violence, such as the world has witnessed in recent months - the pitiless siege of a captive population, the shelling and killing of innocent civilians, the collective punishments, the boycott of a democratically-elected government - squanders the "moral capital" of the Holocaust on which Israel has lived for so long, leading inevitably not only to anti-Zionism but also to virulent anti-Semitism. Two Israeli crimes, in particular, qualify as state terrorism - the destruction last week of Gaza's $150m power station, which has deprived 750,000 Palestinians of electricity in the scorching summer heat, and the kidnapping on the West Bank of 64 members of the political wing of Hamas, including eight cabinet ministers and 22 members of the Palestinian legislature. Referring to the democratically-elected Hamas government, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer declared, "No one has immunity. This is not a government. It is a murderous organization." This judgement might more accurately describe Israel's own government. Why have Olmert and Amir Peretz, his hapless defence minister, gone down this road to nowhere? Some observers have suggested that they may want to show that they are as good at killing Arabs as their predecessors because, unlike previous Israeli leaders, they lack any significant military experience. But this can be only part of the story. It would seem that there are two broad reasons for Israel's destructive rampage in Gaza (which includes not just the current air, land and sea operations, but also the heavy shelling and air strikes of recent weeks.) Neither reason has much to do with the young Franco-Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, captured a few days ago during a daring cross-border operation by Palestinian guerrillas against an Israeli military post in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and a number of armoured vehicles damaged. Shalit's captors offered to exchange him for the 400 children and 200 women - out of some 9,000 Palestinians - held in Israeli jails, but Olmert has refused any such negotiation. A first reason for Israel's assault is military. Israel has been desperate to put an end to the home-made Qassam rockets launched from northern Gaza at the Israeli town of Sderot, which lies a kilometre from the Gaza strip in the north-west Negev desert. Sderot is Peretz's home town. These rockets have so far not killed anyone but they are a very considerable irritant. The city's municipality is up in arms at the state's inability to offer adequate protection. In response to the rockets, Israeli shelling and air strikes have in recent months killed some 50 Palestinians, including several children, and wounded over 200. But beyond the rockets themselves is the wider issue of Israel's deterrent capability. Nothing inflames Israel more than any dent in this capability. It wants the freedom to hit its neighbours, while denying them the ability to hit back. Mutual deterrence is ruled out with cries of indignation. Israel's security is sacrosanct, even - and particularly - at the cost of the insecurity of everyone else. This past week the United States has, as usual, repeated its mantra that "Israel has the right to defend itself." The implicit corollary is that no one else has such a right. Israel's second reason for striking at Gaza is political. It is seeking to destroy the Hamas government by all possible means - including physical liquidation - because it knows that Hamas' terms for a settlement would be stiffer than it could possibly accept. It abhors the recent Hamas-Fatah accord, which implicitly recognises Israel, because it threatens to produce a Palestinian partner ready to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. Israel has no intention of ever returning to those borders. It is no accident that its latest assault followed immediately on the Palestinian accord. Israel will do everything to avoid a negotiation. Hence, it deliberately inflicts inhumane hardships on the Palestinians in order to radicalise them and drive the moderates from the scene. Moderates, who are prepared to talk, are Israel's real enemies. ___ Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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