(Wikileaks confirms that Israel maintains Gaza's 1.8 million inhabitants as in a prison camp. )
Israel's attack on Gaza resulted from the recent amalgamation of Palestinian leadership which threatened to restart the peace process and prevent further land grabs. Netanyahu decided it was time to "mow the law" - cut back Hamas power - except "the grass" consists of non-combatant Palestinian civilians. 1800 civilians have been killed and 9400 injured so far.
Israel mows the lawn
by Mouin Rabbani
(Excerpt by henrymakow.com)
Israel received another blow on 2 June, when a new Palestinian Authority government was inaugurated, following the April reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas endorsed the new government even though it was given no cabinet posts and the government's composition and political programme were virtually indistinguishable from its predecessor's.
With barely a protest from the Islamists, Abbas repeatedly and loudly proclaimed that the government accepted the Middle East Quartet's demands: that it recognize Israel, renounce violence and adhere to past agreements. He also announced that Palestinian security forces in the West Bank would continue their security collaboration with Israel.
When both Washington and Brussels signaled their intention to co-operate with the new government, alarm bells went off in Israel. Its usual assertions that Palestinian negotiators spoke only for themselves - and would therefore prove incapable of implementing any agreement - had begun to look shaky: the Palestinian leadership could now claim not only to represent both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also to have co-opted Hamas into supporting a negotiated two-state settlement, if not the Oslo framework as a whole. There might soon be increased international pressure on Israel to negotiate seriously with Abbas. The formaldehyde was beginning to evaporate.
At this point Netanyahu seized on the 12 June disappearance of three young Israelis in the West Bank like a drowning man thrown a lifebelt. Despite clear evidence presented to him by the Israeli security forces that the three teenagers were already dead, and no evidence to date that Hamas was involved, he held Hamas directly responsible and launched a 'hostage rescue operation' throughout the West Bank.
It was really an organized military rampage. It included the killing of at least six Palestinians, none of whom was accused of involvement in the disappearances; mass arrests, including the arrest of Hamas parliamentarians and the re-arrest of detainees released in 2011; the demolition of a number of houses and the looting of others; and a variety of other depredations of the kind Israel's finest have honed to perfection during decades of occupation. Netanyahu whipped up a demagogic firestorm against the Palestinians, and the subsequent abduction and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem cannot and should not be separated from this incitement.
For his part, Abbas failed to stand up to the Israeli operation and ordered his security forces to continue to co-operate with Israel against Hamas. The reconciliation agreement was being put under serious pressure. On the night of 6 July, an Israeli air raid resulted in the death of seven Hamas militants. Hamas responded with sustained missile attacks deep into Israel, escalating further as Israel launched its full-scale onslaught.
HAMAS ON THE ROPES
For the past year Hamas had been in a precarious position: it had lost its headquarters in Damascus and preferential status in Iran as a result of its refusal to give open support to the Syrian regime, and faced unprecedented levels of hostility from Egypt's new military ruler. The underground tunnel economy between Egypt and Gaza had been systematically dismantled by the Egyptians, and for the first time since seizing control of the territory in 2007 it was no longer able regularly to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of government employees.
The reconciliation agreement with Fatah was its way of bartering its political programme in exchange for its own survival: in return for conceding the political arena to Abbas, Hamas would retain control of the Gaza Strip indefinitely, have its public sector placed on the PA payroll and see the border crossing with Egypt reopened.
In the event, the quid pro quo Hamas hoped for was not permitted to materialize and, according to Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group, 'life in Gaza became worse': 'The current escalation,' he wrote, 'is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement.' To put it differently, those within Hamas who saw the crisis as an opportunity to put an end to Weissglass's regime gained the upper hand. So far, they appear to have the majority of the population with them, because they seem to prefer death by F-16 to death by formaldehyde.
Among all the sanctimonious howls - this time including a lily-livered Cameron's - about Israel's right to self-defence, and in the face of the categorical rejection of the Palestinians' equivalent right, the fundamental point that this is an illegitimate attack is often lost.
As the lawyer Noura Erakat has cogently argued, 'Israel does not have the right to self-defence in international law against occupied Palestinian territory.' Its argument that it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip has been dismissed by Lisa Hajjar of the University of California as a self-generated 'licence to kill'.
Once again, Israel is 'mowing the lawn' with impunity, targeting civilian non-combatants and civilian infrastructure. Given its continual insistence that it uses the most precise weapons available and chooses its targets carefully, it is impossible to conclude that the targeting is not deliberate. According to UN agencies, more than three-quarters of the more than 260 Palestinians killed so far have been civilians, and more than a quarter of them children.
Most were targeted in their own homes: they cannot be described as collateral damage under any definition of the term. Of course Palestinian militants have also been recklessly targeting Israeli population centres, though their attacks have resulted in just a single death: a man handing out sweets to the soldiers pulverising the Gaza Strip. Human Rights Watch has criticized both sides but, true to form, has accused only the Palestinians of war crimes.
Notes:
In 2004, a year before Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Dov Weissglass, éminence grise to Ariel Sharon, explained the initiative's purpose to an interviewer from Haaretz:
The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process ... And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with ... a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress ... The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.
In 2006 Weissglass was just as frank about Israel's policy towards Gaza's 1.8 million inhabitants: 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.' He was not speaking metaphorically: it later emerged that the Israeli defense ministry had conducted detailed research on how to translate his vision into reality, and arrived at a figure of 2279 calories per person per day - some 8 per cent less than a previous calculation because the research team had originally neglected to account for 'culture and experience' in determining nutritional 'red lines'.
The screws were turned tighter during the 2000-5 uprising, and in 2007 the Gaza Strip was effectively sealed shut. All exports were banned, and just 131 truckloads of foodstuffs and other essential products were permitted entry per day. Israel also strictly controlled which products could and could not be imported. Prohibited items have included A4 paper, chocolate, coriander, crayons, jam, pasta, shampoo, shoes and wheelchairs.
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