The murder of Palestinians and Israelis is just a prelude to the next
Gaza war
Robert
Fisk
Independent/UK
22 November 2012
Netanyahu’s campaign
for the January elections began the moment he ordered the assassination of
Ahmed al-Jabari. He's improved Hamas's election chances too. So what was it all
for? The 11-month old Palestinian baby killed with its entire family by
an Israeli pilot, the 150-odd Palestinian dead – two thirds of them civilians –
the six Israeli dead, 1,500 air raids on Gaza, 1,500 rockets on Israel. What
fearful symmetry! But was all this done – and let us forget the billions of
dollars of weapons spent by Israel – for a ceasefire? Not a peace treaty, not even
a treaty, just a truce. Before the next Gaza war.
Cynics abound in Israel, and not without reason. “End of a
military operation, beginning of an election campaign,” ran a headline in The
Jerusalem Post yesterday – albeit in a newspaper that has given its usual
support to war in Gaza.
But surely Netanyahu’s campaign for the January elections
began the moment he ordered the assassin-ation of Ahmed al-Jabari, the Hamas leader, just over
a week ago. Indeed, the bombing of Gaza moved seamlessly into the Netanyahu
election project: if Israelis want security, they know who to vote for. Or do
they? It was evident after the ceasefire began on Wednesday night that Mr
Netanyahu was worried.
“I
know that there are citizens who expect an even harsher military action…” he
began, but “Israel’s challenges” had become more complicated down the years.
“Under these conditions, we need to steer the ship of state responsibly and
with wisdom.” An interesting choice of words, but Churchillian it was not.
For
years now, Mr Netanyahu has been pressing ahead with Jewish colonies on West
Bank land stolen from Arabs, effectively denying any future Palestinian
statehood – and steering his own “ship of state” into a future tempest. If the
Palestinians can have no state, Israel will have no peace, and Hamas rockets
will in time look like an inconvenience in comparison to what is to come.
Netanyahu has certainly improved Hamas’s election chances,
and more or less doomed the political future of Mahmoud Abbas – Israel’s and
America’s chosen Palestinian “interlocuteur valable” – who has frittered his
time away in his Ramallah palace, growing ever more irrelevant with each Israeli air raid.
Scrabbling
for non-state recognition at the UN – if he still intends to go ahead with this
plan – doesn’t equal Hamas’s new popularity, nor the importance which we now
have to attach to Mohamed Morsi of Egypt. The statesmen of Egypt, Turkey and
the Gulf – if statesmen they can ever be called – travelled to Gaza to give
their moral support to Palestinians, not to Ramallah.
Oddly,
the self-delusional policies which Israel has often fed upon – in its second
Lebanon war in 1982, for example – returned this month. In Washington, the
Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, has been arguing that the Gaza war began in
1948, “the day Arab forces moved to destroy the newly declared state of
Israel.” But this is untrue.
The
Gaza war began when Israel drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in that
same year, many tens of thousands of them herded into the refugee camps of –
yes, Gaza. It is their children and grandchildren who have been firing rockets
into Israel – in some cases on to the very lands which their families once
owned.
But
Michael Oren follows up with some strange “history”. He seems to believe that
the Arabs of 1948 were “inflamed by religious extremism”, and that the 1956
Suez crisis – plotted in advance by Israel, Britain and France after Nasser
nationalised the canal – was an Arab attempt to destroy Israel.
Yesterday, Ophir Falk of the International
Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Herzliya managed to write
that the Israeli military had “constrained itself to targeting combatants and
their facilities, whereas Hamas primarily and premeditatedly targets civilians
and their homes”. But if Israeli pilots only targeted combatants, how come
two-thirds of the 140 Palestinian dead were non-combatant men, women and
children? Are Israeli pilots that ill-trained?
“
But now, I suppose, for the election.
But now, I suppose, for the election.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-was-it-all-for-the-murder-of-palestinians-and-israelis-is-just-a-prelude-to-the-next-gaza-war-8344077.html
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