[News] Real Reasons for Israel's Invasion of Gaza
Anti-Imperialist News
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Thu Jul 6 12:42:48 EDT 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/
July 6, 2006
The Real Reasons for Israel's Invasion of Gaza
An Experiment in Human Despair
By JONATHAN COOK
One needed only to watch the interview on British television this
week with Israel's ambassador to the UK to realise that the Israeli
army's tightening of the siege on Gaza, its invasion of the northern
parts of the Strip today, and the looming humanitarian crisis across
the territory, have nothing to do with the recent capture of an
Israeli soldier -- or even the feeble home-made Qassam rockets fired,
usually ineffectually, into Israel by Palestinian militants.
Under questioning from presenter Jon Snow of Channel Four news on the
reasons behind Israel's bombing of Gaza's only power station --
thereby cutting off electricity to more than half of the Strip's 1.3
million inhabitants for many months ahead, as well as threatening the
water supply -- Zvi Ravner denied this action amounted to collective
punishment of the civilian population.
Rather, he claimed, the electricity station had to be disabled to
prevent the soldier's captors from having the light needed to smuggle
him out of Gaza at night. It was left to a bemused Jon Snow to point
out that smugglers usually prefer to do their work in the dark and
that Israel's actions were more likely to assist his captors than
disadvantage them.
The Alice Through the Looking Glass quality of Israeli disinformation
over the combined siege and invasion of Gaza -- and its widespread
and credulous repetition by the Western media -- is successfully
distracting attention from Israel's real goals in this one-sided war
of attrition.
The current destruction of Gaza's civilian and administrative
infrastructure is reminiscent of the Israeli army's cruel rampages
through the streets of West Bank cities in the repeated invasions of
2002 and 2003, and the Jewish settlers' malicious attacks on
Palestinian farmers trying to collect their olive harvests.
The relative absence of these horror stories today is simply a
reflection of the terrible success of the wall Israel has built
across Palestinian farmland and around Palestinian population centres
in the West Bank. Settlers no longer need to plunder the olive
harvest when the fruit is being left to rot on the trees because
farmers can no longer reach their groves.
In the case of the West Bank invasions, Israeli tanks rolled easily
into Palestinian cities that had already been isolated and crippled
by the <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745325556/counterpunchmaga>
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stranglehold of checkpoints and roadblocks all over the territority.
Israeli heavy armour knocked down electricity pylons as though they
were playing a game of ten-pin bowling, snipers shot up the water
tanks on people's roofs, soldiers defecated into office photocopiers
and the army sought out Palestinian ministries so that their
confidential records and documents could be destroyed or stolen.
Notably, only in the warren of alleys in the overcrowded refugee
camps of Jenin and Nablus did the army find the going far tougher and
suffer relatively high casualties.
Which may explain the military caution that has been exercised by
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in regard to the ground invasion of Gaza.
The tiny Strip, besieged on its land borders by the Israeli army
behind an electronic fence and on the seafront by the Israeli navy,
is one giant, overcrowded refugee camp. The past week has seen Gaza
"softened up" with airstrikes on its infrastructure and government
ministries. Today, land forces began wreaking more death and
destruction -- fourteen killed at the time of writing -- in "mopping
up" exercises in the pattern established earlier in the West Bank.
Three long-standing motives are discernible in Israel's current
menacing of Gaza.
First, Israel is determined to continue its campaign of impairing the
Palestinian Authority's ability to govern. This has nothing to do
with the recent election of Hamas to run the Palestinian Authority.
Israel's official policy of unilateralism -- ignoring the wishes of
the Palestinian people -- began long before, when Yasser Arafat was
in charge. It has continued through the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas,
a leader who is about as close to a quisling as Israel is likely to find.
Hamas's electoral success has merely supplied Israel with the pretext
it needs for launching its invasion and the grounds for demanding
international support as it chokes the life out of Gaza. Israel
doubtless hopes that at the end of this process it will be left with
Abbas, a figurehead president backed into a corner and ready to put
his name to whatever agreement Israel imposes.
Second, the attack on Gaza -- as ever -- is partly a distraction from
the real battle. It was widely recognised that Ariel Sharon's dogged
pursuit of his Gaza disengagement policy last year was designed to
free his hand for the annexation of large chunks of a greater prize,
the West Bank, and for securing the biggest prize of all, East
Jerusalem. Nothing has changed on this front.
As Israel keeps all eyes directed towards the suffering in Gaza, it
is starting to make significant moves in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is preparing for the much-delayed evacuation of a handful of
illegal West Bank hilltop settlements -- known in Israel as
"outposts" -- demanded as the first stage of the implementation of
the almost-forgotten US-sponsored peace process called the Road Map.
These outposts are tiny, often just a few caravans. It will be much
to Israel's advantage if the world fails to examine too closely the
miserly act of evacuating these places, which doubtless will later be
presented both as Israel having made a huge sacrifice for peace and
as having satisfied its side of the Road Map's conditions.
The loss of these outposts and a few larger settlements will pave the
way for international acceptance of Olmert's convergence plan, his
unilaterally imposed expansion of Israel's borders at the expense of
a viable Palestinian state.
Equally significant are the overlooked manoeuvres Israel is
undertaking in East Jerusalem as it beats a warpath towards Gaza.
Last week Israel stripped four Hamas MPs of their right to live in
East Jerusalem, effectively expelling them to the West Bank. It also
showed that it could lock up them and dozens of other democratically
elected Palestinian representatives with barely a peep from the
international community.
In yet another dose of Alice in Wonderland, Israel's policy of making
hostages of these MPs was referred to as "arrests" by the Western
media. Few bothered to report that the MPs are being deprived of even
their most basic rights, such as meeting with their lawyers.
As the four Jerusalem MPs' lawyers have argued, it is a nonsense that
Israel allowed these Hamas politicians to stand in the recent
elections and now, after their victory, it calls their membership of
the party "support for terrorism". It is also a disturbing sign of
how easily Israel will be able to begin ethnically cleansing East
Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants using the flimsiest of excuses.
And third, and perhaps most significantly of all, Israel is using the
siege and invasion of Gaza as a laboratory for testing policies it
also intends to apply to the West Bank after convergence. Gazans are
the guinea pigs on which Olmert can try out the "extreme action" he
has been boasting of.
The destruction of Gaza's power plant and loss of electricity to some
700,000 people; the consequent scarcity of water, build-up of sewage
that cannot be disposed of, and inevitable spread of disease; the
shortages of fuel and threats to the running of vital services such
as hospitals; the sonic booms of Israeli aircraft that terrify Gaza's
children and unpredictable air strikes that terrify everyone; the
inability of Palestinian officials to run bombed ministries and
provide services; the constant threat of invasion by massed Israeli
troops on the "border"; and the breakdown of law and order as Fatah
and Hamas gunmen are encouraged to turn on each other. All these
factors are designed to one end: the slow demand by Palestinians,
civilians and militants alike, to clear out of the hell-hole of Gaza.
The traffic through the tunnels that once served Gaza's smugglers
will change directions: where once cigarettes and arms came into
Gaza, the likelihood is that soon it will be people passing through
those underground passages to leave Gaza and seek a life outside.
If this experiment in human despair works in the small Gaza Strip,
its lessons can be applied to much bigger effect in the West Bank
ghettoes left behind after convergence. This is how ethnic cleansing
looks when it is designed not by butchers in uniforms but by
technocrats in suits.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
He is the author of the forthcoming
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745325556/counterpunchmaga>Blood
and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State"
published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the
University of Michigan Press. His website is
<http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net
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