Iraq War Entering Year Six: Multiple Crises Rising In Middle East--Phyllis Bennis

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16828

And Congress continued to add fuel to the fire by supplying Israel with more weapons, in contravention of the U.S. Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts. This year, U.S. taxpayers will provide Israel with $2.55 billion in arms shipments, a 9% increase over actual spending in 2007. This is the first installment of a ten-year U.S. commitment to increase arms shipments to Israel by 25%. Of the $30 billion total, Israel will spend 25% on its own arms manufacturers, with the remaining 75% going mostly to U.S. war profiteers such as Motorola, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and others. And in the face of the most murderous assault on Gaza in 40 years of occupation, Congress responded with a 404-1 vote to support Israel and condemn Palestinian rocket attacks on civilians; the 130 or so dead Palestinian civilians apparently did not exist. (Ron Paul voted no; Congressmembers McDermott, Moran, Capuano and Abercrombie voted "present")

The current escalation of violence demonstrates the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire, including an end to Palestinian rocket-fire against civilian targets and in which Israel ends all of its military attacks (including bombings by plane, helicopter and drone; rocket attacks, naval attacks on Gaza fishermen, tank and foot soldier incursions), deliberate murders known as "targeted assassinations," house and building demolitions, and ends the siege of Gaza. After leaving the region, Condoleezza Rice backed Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas and asked Egypt to negotiate with Israel and Hamas for "a mechanism to calm down the situation in Gaza Strip." She still would not use the term "ceasefire" because of its implication of legitimacy or recognition of Hamas.

In the dire political situation facing Palestinians living under occupation and apartheid, the choices are mostly limited to forms of violent resistance, forms of nonviolent and popular resistance, or surrender. A real ceasefire might reopen the second Palestinian option for resistance: widespread nonviolent mass mobilization. That option was the strategic choice of the first Palestinian intifada or uprising (1987-1993). It has continued, though less centrally, within the second intifada, and was most recently seen last month in Gaza, in the extraordinary Hamas-enabled involvement of half or more of the entire population who collectively reclaimed their human right to move and travel and find basic necessities of life, long denied by the Israeli military, through the breached Gaza-Egypt border wall at Rafah last month.

And since there is still no serious government or inter-governmental strategy to end the Israeli occupation and reverse its apartheid policies, the role of the international civil society movements remains ever more important. In the U.S. and internationally the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign is gaining new traction and winning new influence as a means of exerting collective, non-violent economic pressure on Israel.