Gaza seize-fire [I]
History is about to repeat itself—and then it will become geography. The decision of the government of Ariel Sharon to withdraw from Gaza in October 2002 was meant to achieve three objectives. First, it portrayed a bloodthirsty warmonger as a peacemaker. Second, it allowed him to claim the forced withdrawal a victory, which in addition relieved Israel of the burden of an occupation that was proving too costly. Third, it helped cover up Sharon’s stepped-up annexation of the West Bank to make way for more Zionist settlements. And Sharon knew Israel could always go back to Gaza any time it wanted. And back it went.
An Israeli ceasefire in Gaza is merely an opportunity to seize—and fire following a cessation of hostilities. Now, with almost 2,000 Palestinians dead and several thousand injured, Zionist troops have hinted at beating a retreat; but this retreat, like the others before it, is merely a tactic of war.
When it left Beirut in 1978, for instance, it was only a matter of time before it returned, which it did in 1982; and as it blasted its way back on October 16, 1983, it attacked an Ashura procession in Nabatiya and directly helped in the creation of Hizbullah. And when the Israeli Defence Force was forced to flee South Lebanon in 2000, the plan to return was already in place; and the IDF came in 2006 for the coup de grace—its own.
Today, there is too much at stake for a permanent cessation of hostilities. There is the small issue of Condoleezza Rice’s impossible redrawing of the map of a New Middle East to finish; there is Israel’s relentless expansionism towards David Ben-Gurion’s natural borders for Israel at the Jordan and Litani rivers; and there are the countless treasures below the Dead Sea to mine. And suddenly, there is the Gaza gas which is so abundant that, if exploited, the Strip will become as rich and affluent as Kuwait.
But even without the gas reserves, this murderous assault on Gaza will not have been untypical of Zionist terror in Palestine from the Mandate period to the current era of Netanyahu hubris: the overkill has in fact been ably presaged by Deir Yassin in 1948, Qibya in 1953, Beirut, and especially, Sabra and Shatilla, in 1982, Qana in 1996, Sheba Farms in 2000, Jenin in 2002 and Beirut again in 2006, among others. And the central figure in all these tragedies had been Ariel Sharon—in the earlier, his tutors, in the latter, his students.
It has always been driven by the fact of US desire for domination in the Middle East, Israel’s hunger for territory and water or the mineral resources of Palestine. For these, they are ready to commit any crime. Writing in CounterPunch on November 27, 2006, Kathleen and Bill Christison painted a graphic, sad and moving picture of the reality of life in Gaza: “Children shot to death sitting in school classrooms here, families murdered while tilling their land there; agricultural land stripped and burned here, farmers cut off from their land there; little girls riddled with bullets here, infants beheaded by shell fire there; a little massacre here, a little starvation there; expulsion here, denial of entry and families torn apart there; dispossession is the name of the game. With no functioning economy, dwindling food supplies, medical supply shortages, no way to move from one area to another, no access to a capital city, no easy access to education or medical care, no civil service salaries, the people will die, the nation will die without a single gas chamber. Or so the Israelis hope.”
The Neturei Karta, the Guardian of the City [of Jerusalem] a community of pious orthodox Jews, who do not recognise the Zionist state, described Israel as a secular anticipation of the religious Messiah, and is a state “conceived in atheism, based on materialism, nurtured by anti-Semitism, led by Marxism, ruled by chauvinism, and trusting in militarism”.
As noted by Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, “Operation Protective Edge is the war of a colonial state dedicated to expanding its theft of Palestine’s natural resources … incarcerating and bombing its people in the world’s biggest open air prison, while growing rich at their expense. What they seek in Gaza is merely access to Palestine’s underground riches ... Behind the operation, behind the mass Israeli and US propaganda attempting to justify the massacre, and behind the death of every child in Gaza is a conflict rarely discussed—an imperialist conflict and a contradiction that rests on Israel’s ambitions to appropriate and profit from Gaza’s natural gas resources.”
Quoting in detail a former Israeli chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon back in 2007 when, in answer to comments on Gaza’s gas riches, he laid bare Israel’s true motives. “Proceeds of a Palestinian gas sale to Israel would likely not trickle down to help an impoverished Palestinian public,” he said. “Rather, based on Israel’s past experience, the proceeds will likely serve to fund further terror attacks against Israel ... A gas transaction with the Palestinian Authority will, by definition, involve Hamas. Hamas will either benefit from the royalties or it will sabotage the project and launch attacks against Fatah, the gas installations, Israel – or all three ... It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.”
In other words, since Hamas is unlikely to agree to deal with Israel; or, if it does, it will become rich enough to procure arms, then it must go. And with Arab kings hailing Israel as better than Hamas and paying for their liquidation, and with the United States reiterating Israel’s so-called right to self-defence, there is in fact nothing to stop Israel, except perhaps the cost it has begun taking. Israel is also not inapprehensive of the possibility of Hizbullah joining the war.
With the United States guaranteeing its existence and underwriting its war expenditure, it is in fact America that is fighting the Muslims of Hamas. According to Tom Marcellus of the Institute for Historical Review, ‘In 1970 about 1% of the total U.S. foreign aid budget wound up in Israel’s pocket. In 1971 Israel knocked on Congress’s door for 7.4% and it was verily opened unto them. In 1974 “the only democracy in a sea of Arab tyranny” wanted 28% of our foreign aid budget and got it – a figure that jumped to nearly 35% in 1976. These figures do not even include America’s indirect subsidies such as tax-free Israeli bond sales here, tax-exempt donations and bribe money to Egypt. The figure will probably top $10 billion in fiscal 1984 – but no George F. Will or Geraldo Rivera will dare highlight these facts in juxtaposition to the growing financial crunch said to be besetting our own economy.’
By the time Marcellus was writing this, Israel had received a total of $251 billion, and, more importantly, it enjoyed American diplomatic and military cover as American mother-hen dilutes, disregards or vetoes countless UN resolutions on behalf of Israel, and as the Zionist state itself ignores, violates or defies what watered-down versions of hundreds of UN resolutions the world body is finally able to pass. And according to the Congressional Research Service, within the past few decades American hand-out to Israel has been of the order of $3 billion annually ‘under an agreement signed by the Bush administration to transfer $30 billion to Israel over ten years, starting in 2009’; and since the beginning of 2013, for example, Israel has received from the United States over $8.5 million every single day.
But the cost of Israel to the US and the world is much more than all that. We must add the $1.6 billion bribe money that the US gives Egypt and Jordan annually to keep out of the war against Israel. Pamela Olson, a scholar and veteran researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis, said many experts believe, the US would not have invaded Iraq without intense and sustained pressure from Washington insiders who advocate actively on behalf of Israel, and this adds yet another dimension of staggering cost to the equation: “hundreds of billions of dollars, 4,000-plus U.S. and allied fatalities, untold tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and many thousands of other US, allied, and Iraqi casualties,” according to retired US foreign service officer Shirl McArthur. “Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes put the cost of the Iraq War at over $3 trillion, and incalculably more if you take into account the opportunity costs of the resources spent on this unproductive war.”
And if the Muslim World, against which all this is being perpetrated, holds the United States responsible for Israeli crimes, like the current one in Gaza, another American president may wonder ‘why they hate us.’
Correction—
My attention has been drawn to the fact that the quotation ‘An event has occurred upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent,’ with which I opened the column Impossibility of Silence on 25/7/2014 was uttered by Edmund Burke and not by George Orwell, as I erroneously stated, which in fact would be the second time I would commit the same mistake, the first being on 24/1/2014 in Sharon: A Truebute. The errors are regretted.