Saturday, January 03, 2009
Israel's Hanukkah Massacre: An Explanation & A Prediction
A friend asked me recently why I thought Israel was carrying out it's Hanukkah Massacre in Gaza with such ferocity. I replied that I thought that it was a desperate response to Israel's failure to break the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, especially after the Fatah collaborators in Gaza failed in their attempted coup there in 2007.The preferred but failed tool was the Israeli "truce," which Israel, not Hamas, broke. It is aptly described by Ali Abunimah:
Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.They want to break Hamas but the international sanctions and "truce" failed to accomplish that purpose and, so, the Jewish state attacked. I'll make a prediction now: If the Israelis succeed in seriously damaging Hamas then look for them to ferry armed Fatah collaborators from the West Bank into Gaza to "mop-up"--read kill, torture, and imprison Hamas supporters--and to run Gaza for Jews.
As John Ging, the head of operations of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), told The Electronic Intifada in November: "there was five months of a ceasefire in the last couple of months, where the people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence. We in fact at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food."
That is an Israeli truce. Any response to Israeli attacks -- whether peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in Bilin and Nilin in the West Bank is met with bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel's attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has acceded to all of Israel's demands, even assembling "security forces" to fight the resistance on Israel's behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian or her property or livelihood from Israel's relentless violent colonization.
Victory to the Palestinian People
Victory to Hamas
Labels: Hamas, Israel, resistance, War, Zionism
