As Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote in January, "Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948."Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=51758&s2=14
Feb 13, 2009
"When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." -- Israeli Army Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan, 1983
"Before [the Palestinians'] very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived. . . We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home." -- Famous Israeli Army Commander Moshe Dayan
Israel's official excuses for extinguishing over 1,300 Palestinian lives -- half of them civilian and one-third of them children -- are oft repeated by its apologists: Hamas' rocket fire made the invasion unavoidable, and its tactics made civilian casualties inevitable.
Do these positions dovetail with -- or decapitate -- history? Are they logical? Are they moral? Or are they smokescreens, designed to disguise troublesome facts about both Israel's strategy and its very origins?
The Reality behind the Rockets
Israel's first argument about Hamas' rockets fails on several levels.
It neatly -- and falsely -- posits Hamas as the attacker and Israel as the defender. The only problem with this pleasant fiction is that Israel has been expelling, occupying, and imprisoning Palestinians long before Hamas even came into existence.
As Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote in January, "Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948."
But how did it "lose" its homeland? After unearthing their country's declassified archives, honest Israeli scholars have pointed to an Israeli campaign of rape, murder, and ethnic cleansing that entered full swing in 1947. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said to a colleague shortly after Israel's expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, "They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"
Why indeed? For one country to rain down rockets on another is an unprovoked crime. But for a people without a country to fire rockets on those who forcibly took their country -- and who then corralled them into camps, have isolated them from the world, and regularly slaughter them with weapons far deadlier than unguided projectiles -- is a rather different matter.
Just as we would not begin a 10-minute tape of a batterer abusing his wife at the nine-minute mark where she may have struck back, we cannot skip through decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, occupation, and bombardment and finger Hamas rocket fire as the starting point.
Quite apart from historical considerations, the invasion cannot be justified by rocket fire because scarcely any rockets were being fired before Israel's own escalation. According to the Israeli military, in the ceasefire months of July, August, September, and October, the numbers of rockets fired from Gaza were one, eight, one, and two, respectively. Even those few rockets were likely fired by smaller militant groups not under Hamas' control. In short, Hamas abided by the truce -- a fact Israel recognized during those months. On November 5th, Israel itself broke the truce by launching a military operation that killed six Hamas gunmen.
On the moral level, too, the terror Israel unleashed on the Palestinian population is indefensible. A total of 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets from November 2001 to June 2008, according to a pro-Israel website. During the Gaza "war," a total of three Israeli civilians were killed by rockets. If Israel's recent rapid-fire slaughter of 600 civilians is "justified" by rockets that caused the death of a small number of Israeli civilians, then -- applying Israel's own logic -- is Hamas not now more "justified" in continuing to launch those rockets than ever before?
How can the Israeli establishment claim the moral high ground if it borrows from the Hamas formula but ups its application of the deadly dosage one hundredfold?
No comments:
Post a Comment