Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak told the Knesset on Feb. 11 that the Israeli military was preparing a large-scale operation against Gaza. Other Israeli officials have made even more militaristic statements.
In blatant disregard for international law banning collective punishment against civilians, Vice Premier Haim Ramon
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Given the history of Israeli atrocities, such statements cannot simply be taken as empty threats. Throughout its existence, Israel has shown the capacity to inflict unimaginable suffering on the Palestinian people.
The bellicose Israeli statements are framed as a response to rockets fired from Gaza. In the United States, the corporate media account of the situation gives the false impression that Israel is a victim of Palestinian violence, forced to defend itself through various “security” measures. A brief look at the casualty statistics lays bare the utter falsehood of this narrative.
In all of the past six years, twelve Israelis have been killed from Palestinian rocket attacks. But in the past year alone, frequent Israeli raids have killed 373 Palestinians, many of them civilians. The number of Palestinian children the Israelis have killed alone far exceeds Israeli deaths. (Reuters, Dec. 31, 2007)
Rocket attacks are not the cause of the current crisis. As Khaled Meshaal, the political leader of the Hamas movement, stated: “The siege was before and after the firing of rockets. We stopped firing rockets many times, but the siege had not come to an end.”
Israel’s current siege of Gaza started in June 2007, when the Hamas-led government took control of the Gaza strip from forces loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader with whom the United States and Israel prefer to work.
The blockade, which victimizes the Palestinian civilian population, is a crime against humanity in clear violation of Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. The aim has been to deprive the Gazan people of food, medicine, fuel and other supplies. Predictably, this has caused numerous deaths and miserable living conditions for the people of Gaza.
Israel’s offer to Hamas is that it must unconditionally cease all acts of resistance against Israel. Only then would Israel lift the blockade against Gaza while continuing to occupy and attack Palestine.
This is similar to what Israel brings to the table in the so-called peace process promoted by the United States. Palestinians must completely halt all acts of resistance against their occupiers. In return, Israel will decide which chunks of the West Bank and Gaza it is willing to return to Palestine—while maintaining complete control of Palestinian land, air and sea borders.
Existence and resistance
Through its siege of Gaza, Israel is pursuing its stated objective of bringing down the elected Hamas government by imposing extreme hardship on the population. On Feb. 11, Vice Premier Haim Ramon said: “I believe a combination of steps against Hamas in Gaza will bring an end to the Hamas regime in Gaza. … It will take a few months, maybe it will take a year.”
But this “combination of steps,” assassinations and the starving of the population, has not generated the desired results. On Jan. 23, Palestinians destroyed part of the border barrier between Gaza and Egypt. Over the following two weeks, approximately half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people crossed over to Egypt to buy food and other supplies denied to them by the blockade. This collective act of defiance dealt a serious blow to Israeli attempts at breaking the Palestinians’ spirit of resistance.
U.S. strategy in the Middle East has been to prop up Israel so that it can be used as a tool in repressing movements for independence in the region. Of course, the United States has many other client states. But due to its colonial nature and the fact that its very survival is dependent on U.S. support, Israel is the one state that is not in danger of being overthrown by its population—unlike the regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and others.
Despite its history of terrorism, occupation, apartheid and military aggression, Israel has failed to resolve its fundamental problem. The formation of the state of Israel and its subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 drove millions of Palestinians from their homes and turned them into refugees.
Israel can annex the lands that it has occupied and achieve a purely Jewish state—or at least a state with a guaranteed Jewish majority—only if it finds a way to remove millions more Palestinians to complete a successful “ethnic cleansing” campaign.
The intractable problem for Israel is that Palestinians continue to resist six decades of occupation. No matter how unbearable Israel makes life for Palestinians, they refuse to leave their homeland. This has been the major obstacle to the realization of the racist dream of a “greater Israel” with few Palestinians living in it.
Through their continued struggle, a struggle against occupation and a struggle for survival under Israel’s brutal rule, Palestinians continue to be an example of determination and resistance that inspires all of those fighting against imperialism around the world.
