[News] Israel's "next logical step"

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Israel's "next logical step"
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9290.shtml


Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 11 February 2008

[]

Israeli border police take position during a protest against the 
Israeli wall in the West Bank village of al-Khader, 8 February 2008. 
(Luay Sababa/<http://maanimages.com>MaanImages)

"The next logical step" for the Israeli government "will have to be a 
decision whether to target the top political leadership" of Hamas. So 
said an Israeli official quoted in The Jerusalem Post. Tzahi Hanegbi, 
a senior member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party and 
chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, echoed 
the call, arguing that "There's no difference between those who wear 
a suicide suit and a diplomat's suit." Following a cabinet meeting on 
10 February, Israel's Interior Minister Shimon Sheetrit specifically 
called for the execution of Ismail Haniyeh, the 
democratically-elected Hamas prime minister, and added that for good 
measure "We must take a neighborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map."

Last September, Yossi Alpher, the co-founder of the European 
Union-funded publication Bitterlemons, wrote an article advocating 
"decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and 'civilian.'" 
Alpher, a former special adviser to Israel's defense minister Ehud 
Barak when the latter was prime minister, worried that Israel would 
"pay a price in terms of international condemnation," for "targeting 
legally elected Hamas officials who won a fair election," but that 
overall it would be well worth it.

Executing democratically-elected leaders may require more chutzpah 
than even Israel has shown, but the possibility and its disastrous 
consequences have to be taken seriously given Israel's track record. 
Israel executed Hamas' elderly, quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound 
co-founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, followed shortly afterwards 
by the execution his successor as the movement's leader, Dr. Abdel 
Aziz Rantisi.

Aside from the United States, Israel is the only country where the 
murder of foreign leaders is openly debated as a policy option.

Israeli official propaganda presents all its recent actions as 
defensive and necessary to stop the rockets fired by Palestinian 
fighters in Gaza. But if Israel's goal was to achieve calm and a 
cessation of violence, the first logical step would not be to 
contemplate new atrocities, but to respond positively to Hamas' 
repeated ceasefire proposals.

When it was elected in January 2006, Hamas had observed a unilateral 
ceasefire for more than a year. After the election, Hamas' leaders 
offered a long-term total truce, tentatively following the political 
path of other militant groups including the Irish Republican Army 
(IRA), whose 1994 ceasefire paved the way for the peace agreement in 
Northern Ireland. (In December, US President George W. Bush received 
Martin McGuinness, former second in command of the IRA, and now 
Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, at the White House.)

Last December, Haaretz reported that Hamas had secured the agreement 
of all factions to end rocket fire on Israel, provided Israel 
reciprocated. Hamas was also engaged in indirect negotiations for the 
release of Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for an Israeli 
prisoner of war held in Gaza.

Olmert rejected the December ceasefire offer. "The State of Israel," 
he said, "has no interest in negotiating with entities that do not 
recognize the Quartet demands." In other words there could be no 
ceasefire until Hamas unilaterally accepted all of Israel's demands 
before negotiations could even begin.

The problem was not that Israeli officials did not believe Hamas 
could deliver. Barak was reported to be in favor of considering a 
hudna -- a renewed truce, and a "senior Israeli security official" 
told Haaretz that "There's no doubt that Hamas is capable of forcing 
a let-up on Islamic Jihad and the other small factions in the Strip 
... It won't be a 100 percent decrease, but even 98 percent would be 
a big change." ("Olmert rejects Hamas cease-fire offer," Haaretz, 25 
December 2007).

If even Israel believed that Hamas could reliably enforce a truce, 
why does it refuse to accept one? Why has it refused to engage with 
Hamas, as American and British policy-makers did with the IRA?

For Israel the potential that Hamas could turn to politics presents a 
threat, not an opportunity. Israel has no interest in facing 
Palestinian leaders who are at once committed to basic Palestinian 
rights, capable of delivering, and enjoy popular legitimacy and support.

So instead of engaging with Hamas, the US and Israel announced a 
complete boycott which was intended to turn the Palestinian 
population against the movement.

At the same time, the peace process show relaunched in Annapolis last 
November, followed by the international donors meeting in Paris where 
pledges of cash were showered on the Palestinian Authority to elevate 
the unelected, Israeli-backed Ramallah "government" of Mahmoud Abbas 
and Salam Fayyad in the eyes of Palestinians. With this renewed 
patronage and prestige, Abbas and company were to be pushed to sign a 
deal giving up Palestinian refugee rights and agreeing to a 
Palestinian Bantustan under permanent Israeli domination.

Of course much more than Hamas stands in the way of the fulfillment 
of this Israeli fantasy. The Palestinian people would unite against 
such a deal. But Hamas is the most visible and well-organized obstacle.

Rather than breaking under pressure, Hamas has made some impressive 
tactical gains, even as Gaza's agony increases. Even the dubious 
opinion polls that come out of EU-funded non-governmental 
organizations showed Hamas enjoying an upsurge of support after the 
breach of the Gaza-Egypt border. But with Israel and its backers 
steadfast in refusing to grant Hamas a political role, not even in 
operating the border crossings, the movement has no way to translate 
these tactical victories into strategic gains. Except for one: in the 
arena of world public opinion.

Israel and Egypt, the two countries most responsible for the blockade 
of Gaza, were deeply embarrassed by the popular surge that 
temporarily broke the siege. No recent event has done as much to 
bring attention to the plight of Palestinians and expose Israel's 
crimes to international scrutiny. But one such action is not enough; 
already, Israel and Egypt with support from the quisling regime in 
Ramallah, the EU and the US are trying to reimpose the blockade. (In 
a repulsive echo of Yitzhak Rabin's infamous order to Israeli 
soldiers during the first Intifada to break the bones of 
Palestinians, Egypt's foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit promised to 
do the same to Palestinians if they continued to enter Egypt.)

Some Hamas leaders appear to understand the necessity and indeed the 
risks of mass, nonviolent resistance. "The next time there is a 
crisis in the Gaza Strip, Israel will have to face half a million 
Palestinians who will march toward Erez [crossing with Israel]," said 
Ahmed Yousef, a senior advisor to Ismail Haniyeh. "This is not an 
imaginary scenario and many Palestinians would be prepared to 
sacrifice their lives." Properly planned, repeated mass actions of 
this kind could galvanize public opinion in Arab and European 
countries and even North America forcing some governments to abandon 
the pro-Israel consensus.

But here is where the great danger lies: with its escalation in Gaza 
and refusal to accept a ceasefire, Israel may be trying to provoke 
more rocket attacks and force Hamas into abandoning its political 
strategy altogether to provide the needed pretext to "decapitate" the 
organization. Unfortunately, there are signs that Hamas is jumping 
into the trap.

Some Hamas political leaders appeared to have been taken by surprise 
when the movement's military wing took credit for a suicide attack 
inside Israel for the first time since 2004. The attack in the 
Israeli town of Dimona on 6 February killed an elderly woman as well 
as the bomber. As a consequence of Israel's and the "international 
community's" rejection of all of Hamas' political initiatives, those 
within the organization advocating a resumption of full-scale armed 
struggle may be gaining the upper hand.

If they make such a tragic miscalculation, Israeli leaders may 
breathe a sigh of relief. After all, Israel is much more comfortable 
with rockets falling on Sderot, than it would be with hundreds of 
thousands of Palestinian civilians marching on the checkpoints in 
Gaza or the West Bank.

The next logical step is for all Palestinian leaders still loyal to 
their people's cause to work together to mobilize the population, not 
to gain factional advantage, but to expose Israeli apartheid to a 
sustained and irresistible surge of people power.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml>One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan 
Books, 2006).




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