If Gaza Falls . . .; by Sara Roy
I
srael's siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel's siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
Read more:
Published December 23, 2008 by London Review of Books
*
As Roy suggests in her first sentence, the mechanism driving the Hamas rocket attacks is clear. To insure that rockets keep coming from Hamas, Israel provokes them by murdering Palestinian activists and civilians. And if one Israeli attack isn’t sufficient, the Israeli attacks just keep coming. When the Hamas rockets finally fall the Israelis have an excuse to close the borders. (I noticed on Link TV that one such rocket displayed by an Israeli official had Hebrew markings.)
Roy’s article also suggests an answer to how the Palestinians obtain at least some of their rockets -- by means of the tunnels to Egypt, the last and unofficial lifeline the Israelis allow and which the Israelis could cut off at any time.
Israel can’t abide Hamas because Hamas has still retained its nationalism, and won’t bow to many of Israel’s demands. That’s why Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PNA, gets an easier ride: because like Arafat before him, he’s a collaborationist. As they did for decades with Arafat, Israel permits or encourages his corruption in return for following their orders.
In a quibble, we could take issue with Roy’s suggestion that Israel’s purpose is to foist Gaza on Egypt. Hardly. Although a Gaza free of Palestinians which they could take over for themselves may be slightly over the horizon, the Israeli leadership requires the continued immiseration of Gaza and the continuation of the rocket attacks for domestic political reasons. While the rockets fall, Palestinian rockets continue to unify and strengthen the Israeli Jewish community behind the dominant and ever increasingly right wing leadership. The rocket attacks push aside domestic demands for reform. All the air is sucked out of any other positive agenda.
If Israel wanted an end to the Hamas rockets, all they’d have to do is suspend their attacks on Palestine. An agreement could be worked out in less than 24 hours. So we have a clear example of manufactured “terrorism.”
The same manufactured terror is largely true with regard to the Bush-Cheney “war on terror” especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. For the most part, all the high profile terror attacks starting from the Clinton years, and the fall of the Soviet Union when such attacks had to be manufactured as a substitute to sustain Cold War ideology and U.S. military and intelligence budgets, were the product of Western and Israeli intelligence services. The terror events of 9/11 sit at the pinnacle of such false flag attacks.
The point is there’s no threat to Israel or to the West outside of those they create in order to sustain their military pathology.
One thing that will change with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis when Obama takes over is that Elliot Abrams, the most vicious of the vicious will no longer be in charge of U.S. Middle East policy. But the pressures on Obama will be intense not to take steps to relieve the current genocidal level of starvation and immiseration in Gaza. Any attempt at amelioration by an Obama administration will likely be attacked by the usual Lobby suspects, doubtless with Dershowitz in the lead as giving in to Hamas terror.
Thinking of the Rick Warren debacle (see just below for blogger Left I’s economical screed on the subject), with about 25 days left before inauguration, is it too early to conclude that Obama is constitutionally unable to show any moral courage or leadership? But to realize how scary it’s going to be after Jan 20 all you have to do is say one word: Afghanistan. Everybody knows: current Obama plans for Afghanistan = a failed Obama presidency.
Afghanistan is going to be a failure in part because Obama and his team don’t want to know and are shielding themselves from the knowledge that the U.S. is funding the Taliban to kill NATO soldiers, civilians, Indian engineers, road-builders, schoolteachers, schoolgirls and more through the Pakistani ISI. It’s one of those anomalies that we know and simultaneously don’t know. For example, in a November 25, 2008 interview for NPR's popular Fresh Air program, Terry Gross asked Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid point blank: Isn’t the U.S. funding the Pakistani ISI? It was interesting to hear Rashid try to squirm out of that one.
It can’t be squirmed out of. The U.S. controls not only the major operations of the ISI like the funding and the care and upkeep of the Taliban, and chooses ISI leaders, and directs much of Pakistani policy, but the U.S. also undoubtedly controls also their false flag operations like the Mumbai terror attacks (see Michel Chossudovsky, "India's 9/11. Who was Behind the Mumbai Attacks? Washington is Fostering Political Divisions between India and Pakistan" 2008-11-29, http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11217 )
We know and we don’t want to know. And as we have learned over the decades this is just as true of the Left, as it is the Right.
Why should we expect any better from Obama?
PS. In a bibliographical note, the phrase “Manufactured Terrorism” is the title of a breakthrough article by Gerard Holmgren explaining what really happened on 9/11/01. (See “Manufactured Terrorism – The Truth About Sept 11," (2004, revised 2006).
Holmgren’s title apparently echoes Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s important Manufactured Consent (1988).
Ronald
***
Blogger Left I on the News on the Rick Warren affair wrote:
12.17 08
Will Rick Warren wake up the liberals?
With every appointment of a war-loving Hillary Clinton/Robert Gates/James Jones or a nuclear power-loving Steven Chu or a Monsanto-loving Tom Vilsack and on and on, liberals keep telling themselves that it's ok, it's just that old "Team of Rivals" thing, and that Barack Obama the supposed antiwar liberal is really the one calling the shots and the others will just be implementing his vision.
And what will they say to the announcement that anti-abortion homophobe Rick Warren will be delivering the invocation at Obama's inauguration? True, it is just "symbolism." One large symbolic slap in the face of every supporter of women's rights and LGBT rights who supported Obama in this election.
No comments:
Post a Comment