Gaza: It's Terrorism, it's Slaughter -- (Think It's About the Rockets?)

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://palestinethinktank.com/2008/12/31/gaza-its-terrorism-its-slaughter-crime-can-be-reported/

This was the so-called liberated Gaza. The biggest prison in the world, an entire population (1.5 million) completely locked up. And more than any other prison, one full of innocent people.

When the unilateral “withdrawal” took place in 2005, an unbiased look at the circumstances would have let one understand at once that it wasn’t about a gust of hope but rather the base for a situation that would only get worse. It would be sufficient to go and read again the interview to Haaretz delivered on October 6^th 2004 by Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s right hand man, when he stated that the so-called Gaza disengagement plan (which also contemplated building the wall in the West Bank) was nothing but a diversion meant to supply Israel with “the amount of formaldehyde necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians”.

One month later, the father of the homeland and President of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat died. All the defects of the top brass of Al Fatah’s secular leadership, until then kept together by Arafat’s charisma, were laid bare. These leaders had been embezzling shamelessly and building Palladian-style villas in the midst of the Occupied Territories’ misery while lacking concrete results to offer as achievements of their negotiation, continuously overwhelmed by the Israeli government’s iron fist and melancholically heading for the label of collaborationist with the occupier.

On the other hand, the prestige of the “Islamic Resistance Movement” was growing amongst the population. Its Arabic acronym, “Hamas”, means “zeal, enthusiasm”. Hamas’ leaders used to live with frugality while putting together a network of material solidarity in the middle of all that havoc, a sort of residual yet infinitely more reliable welfare than the disaster the PNA was sinking into.

It’s under these circumstances that Hamas, in January 2006, won the Palestinian elections by 76 seats out of 132, against only 43 seats gained by Al Fatah. A genuine and electorally clean victory, but also a variable regarded as being unacceptable by the calculations of the affected powers. An example of double-standard democracy.

Again Dov Weisglass, in his role of coordinator of a governmental team which included also the army high-ranks and which was entrusted with implementing anti-Hamas operations, commented in this way immediately after the elections about starting an economic clampdown on the PNA: “it’s like putting them on diet: The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die.” The audience, among which there was Tzipi Livni, burst out laughing (see Gideon Levy’s “As the Hamas team laughs”, Haaretz February 19^th 2006).

After all, Weissglass is witty. In the famous 2004 interview with Haaretz he made clear very well how much formaldehyde was needed to “embalm” the chances of a peace agreement: “we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate… The certificate will be revoked only when Palestine becomes like Finland.” Sort of putting off until doomsday, should someone still dare cherish the two-State solution.

The Palestinians from the big prison didn’t turn into Finns. They underwent their “diet” thoroughly, day by day. In spite of a faltering truce, the clampdown got more intense, even less trucks loaded with aid were let in and nothing got out of the camp of concentrated despair.