Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Here we go again. Israel is going to “root out Palestinian terror” – which it has been claiming to do, unsuccessfully, for 64 years – while Hamas, the latest in “Palestine’s” morbid militias, announces that Israel has “opened the gates of hell” by murdering its military leader, Ahmed al-Jabari.
Hezbollah several
times announced that Israel had “opened the gates of hell” for attacking
Lebanon. Yasser Arafat, who was a super-terrorist, then a super-statesman –
after capitulating on the White House lawn – and then became a super-terrorist
again when he realized he’d been conned by Camp David; he, too waffled on about
the “gates of hell” in 1982.
And we journos are
writing like performing bears, repeating all the clichés we’ve used for the
past 40 years. The killing of Mr Jabari was a “targeted attack”, it was a
“surgical air strike” – like the Israeli “surgical air strikes” which killed
almost 17,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982, the 1,200 Lebanese, most of them
civilians, in 2006, or the 1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians, in Gaza
in 2008-9, or the pregnant woman and the baby who were killed by the “surgical
air strikes” in Gaza last week – and the 11 civilians killed in one Gaza house
yesterday. At least Hamas, with their Godzilla rockets, don’t claim anything
“surgical” about them. They are meant to murder Israelis – any Israelis, man
woman or child.
As, in truth, are the
Israeli attacks on Gaza. But don’t say that or you’ll be an anti-Semitic Nazi;
almost as evil, wicked, unspeakable, devilish and murderous as the Hamas
movement with which – again, please don’t mention this – Israel happily
negotiated in the Eighties when they encouraged this bunch of mobsters to take
power in Gaza and thus decapitate the exiled super-terrorist Arafat. The new
exchange rate in Gaza for Palestinian and Israeli deaths has reached 16:1. It
will rise, of course. The exchange rate in 2008-9 was 100:1.
Mr Jabari was the “No
1 shadowy leader” of Hamas, according to the Associated Press. But how on earth
can he be shadowy when we know his date of birth, family details, his years of
imprisonment by Israel during which he changed allegiance from Fatah to Hamas?
So while I’m on it, those years of Israeli imprisonment didn’t exactly convert
Mr Jabari to pacifism, did they? Well, no tears then; he was a man who lived by
the sword and died by the sword, a fate which, of course, will not afflict
Israel’s warriors of the air as they kill civilians in Gaza.
Washington supports
Israel’s “right to defend itself” then claims a spurious neutrality – as if
Israel’s bombs on Gaza didn’t come from the United States as assuredly as the
Fajr-5 rockets come from Iran. But is there nothing to stop this nonsense, this
garbage war? Hundreds of rockets fall on Israel. True. Thousands of acres of
land are stolen from Arabs by Israel –for Jews and Jews only – on the West
Bank. There isn’t even enough land left there now for a Palestinian state. The problem, oddly, is that Israel’s actions
in the West Bank and its siege of Gaza are bringing closer the very event which
Israeli trumpets it fears every day: that Israel faces destruction.
In the battle of
rockets – not least Iran’s Fajr-5s and Hezbollah’s drones – a new warpath is
being trodden by both sides. It’s no longer about Israeli tanks crossing the
Lebanese border or the Gaza border. It’s about rockets and hi-tech drones and
computer attacks – or “cyber-terrorism”, of course, if committed by Muslims –
and the human dross ripped apart by the wayside will be even less relevant than
it has been over the past three days.
If Benjamin Netanyahu
believes that the arrival of the first Iranian Fajr rockets necessitates the
Israeli big bang on Iran, and then Iran fires back – and perhaps at the
Americans, too– and brings in Hezbollah – and Obama gets swallowed up in another
Western-Muslim war, what happens then? Well, Israel will ask for a ceasefire,
as it routinely does in wars against Hezbollah. It will plead yet again for the
undying support of the West in its struggle against world evil, Iran included.
And why not praise the
killing of Mr Jabari? Please forget that the Israelis negotiated via the German
secret service with Mr Jabari himself, less than 12 months ago. You can’t
negotiate with “terrorists”, right? Israel calls this latest bloodbath
Operation Pillar of Defense. Pillar of Hypocrisy, more like. © 2012 Independent/UK [Abridged]
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent http://www.commondreams.org/robert-fisk
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