The Guardian: The United Nations' most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza... Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for 'credible, independent and transparent' investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law, and singled out an incident this week in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, where up to 30 Palestinians in one house were killed by Israeli shelling. Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident 'appears to have all the elements of war crimes.'
Saturday, January 10, 2009
'Dogs were eating them'
Video, The Guardian: Rafah Razed
'Every 30 minutes, our house is shaken by explosions': The Rafah diary of Fida Qishta
The Guardian: One of the most compelling accounts of the Zeitoun killings comes from Meysa Samouni, 19. She told the Israeli human rights group B'Teselem that she and 13 others from her family were ordered at gunpoint out of their home at 9am on Sunday morning by Israeli soldiers who eventually took them to join others in a concrete warehouse. Around 70 neighbours and relatives were in the building, without food or drink.
At around 6am on Monday, she said, four of the men left to bring other relatives to the shelter. 'The moment they left the house, a missile or shell hit them,' she said. One was killed instantly, the others were injured.
'My husband went over to them to help and then a shell or missile was fired on to the roof of the warehouse,' she said. She believed from the size of the strike that it was a bomb dropped by a fighter jet.
'When the missile struck, I lay down with my daughter under me. Everything filled up with smoke and dust and I heard screams and crying.' She said 20 to 30 people were killed -- among them her husband, Tawfiq, 21, and both her husband's parents, Rashed, 41, and Rabab, 38. Another 20 were injured, some severely. A piece of shrapnel had sliced off the thumb and two fingers from the left hand of her nine-month-old daughter, Jumana.
Eventually, after two of the men with her were detained and blindfolded by soldiers, she and her daughter made it to hospital. 'As far as I know, the dead and wounded who were under the ruins are still there,' she said.
Nafaz Samouni, 42, estimated there were around 50 people in the house. 'When the shelling started more than half of the people in the house were killed,' he said from al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, where we was recovering from leg wounds. 'Some were decapitated. My cousin and his son died in front of me.' His son Ahmad, 12, was shot in the arm and the chest -- doctors said the bullet hit his heart. The boy was due to be transferred to hospital in Egypt.
But Nafaz Samouni could not leave the house until medics from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived on Wednesday afternoon, when Israel for the first time paused its fighting for over three hours to allow in desperately needed aid. 'We spent four days without food. We had just a kerosene lamp and very little water.' he said. 'As we left we saw dead bodies around us. Dogs were eating them.'
Image: Members of the Samouni family at the burial of their relatives
Friday, January 9, 2009
Boycott Israel
Boycott, Divest, SanctionNaomi Klein, in The Nation:
It's time. Long past time.
The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on 'people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.' The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -- BDS for short -- was born.
Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for 'the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions' and draws a clear parallel with the apartheid struggle. 'The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves... This international backing must stop.'
Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent: Israel is moving toward a decision to occupy the whole Gaza Strip. The message yesterday from Jerusalem was that it is impossible to end Operation Cast Lead without an achievement, and if in the next two days there is no satisfactory diplomatic solution, Israel will have to broaden the operation... Israel is in a bind. If it pulls out now from Gaza, it will appear to have cut and run at the first sign of trouble battling Hamas. And if it goes on to a full occupation of the Strip, it may pay a heavy economic and political price without achieving its political goals.
Bombed bread and white phosphorus
Gaza blogger In Gaza: Across Fakoura street from the school, about 15 metres down a drive, a gaping hole in the Deeb house revealed what had been happening when it was hit by a shell. Rounds of bread dough lay where they'd been rolled out to bake. Amal Deeb was in her thirties, a surviving family member told us. When the missile struck, it killed her and 9 others in the extended-family house, including 2 boys and 3 girls. Another 4 were injured, one having both legs amputated.
The Times [UK]: Photographic evidence has emerged that proves that Israel has been using controversial white phosphorus shells during its offensive in Gaza, despite official denials by the Israel Defence Forces. There is also evidence that the rounds have injured Palestinian civilians, causing severe burns. The use of white phosphorus against civilians is prohibited under international law. The Times has identified stockpiles of shells... clearly marked with the designation M825A1, an American-made WP munition... Muhammed Azayzeh, 28, an emergency medical technician in the city, said: 'The burns are very unusual. They don't look like burns we have normally seen. They are third-level burns that we can't seem to control.'
Emergency workers said they rescued 100 more trapped survivors Thursday and found between 40 and 50 corpses in a devastated residential block south of Gaza City that the Israeli military had kept off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross for four days. 'There are still people under demolished houses -- we are sure of it,' said Khaled Abuzaid, an ambulance driver for the Red Cross who treated survivors at the site Wednesday and Thursday. 'But without water or electricity, we are sure they will die.'... Abuzaid said rescue workers found 16 bodies Wednesday in a large room of a house in Zaytoun: seven women, six children and three men, all members of the al-Samuni family. Most had sustained trauma injuries from shelling, but many had gunshot wounds as well, he said. Four children, weak but alive, were found lying under blankets, nestled next to their dead mothers.
Financial Times: Gaza's children, who make up more than half of the 1.5m inhabitants of the impoverished territory, were shell-shocked, relief workers warned. 'They are terrified -- the bombing is around the clock and there is no rest at all,' said Sajy Elmughanni, a co-ordinator for the United Nations Children's Fund. 'This could impact on the children for months or years afterwards.'... Parents say children have lost their appetites, cling to them, wet beds and have recurring nightmares. They also suffer from the cold, especially at night, as most windows are kept open to avoid them shattering during bombardments. There is little escape from the sounds of war... Even before the Israeli attacks began, some 50,000 children were suffering from malnutrition in Gaza, amid the crippling blockade of the territory.
Image source: In Gaza
'The war isn't over, but Israel has lost'
The lessons of Gaza
Andrew J. Bacevich, The Boston Globe: Israel's return to Gaza constitutes a tacit admission of strategic failure now stretching back four decades.
Israel's weeklong turning point
Gideon Lichfield, The Economist's Jerusalem correspondent: When the question the world is asking is not 'Who's right?' but 'What works?' the consistent impression Israel leaves is that it kills people because, at best, it simply doesn't have any better ideas; and at worst, because some Israeli leader is trying to get the upper hand on one of his or her rivals.'
Jeet Heer, National Post: Why are young Jews so harsh in their criticism of Israel? The only honest answer is Israel's terrible human rights record. The wanton slaughter in Gaza is merely the latest in a long litany of Israeli atrocities, all of which help the Jewish state win some short-term victories while making long-term peace impossible.
The Georgia Straight: 'As Jews, this is the moment for us to take a just stand, to think back to our own history and to remember that "never again" means never again for anyone,': Mia Amir, a member of Jews for a Just Peace. 'I believe it is important for Palestinian organizers that Jews are present in this work because our presence helps challenge the idea that criticism of and opposition to Israel is anti-Semitic, which it absolutely isn't.'
We feel that it is important to speak out as Jewish youth in Canada and to denounce what Israel is doing in our name... Even though there have been approximately 100 Palestinian deaths for every Israeli killed by rocket fire, we recognize that Israeli Apartheid also leads to Israeli casualties. The blame for these deaths lies with Israel -- if there were no occupation and no apartheid policies, there would be no rocket fire.
Juan Cole, Informed Comment: The Israelis are both an army and a settler movement... When threatened by an indigenous population trying to expel it, settler colonialism is vicious... The lives of the indigenous population are viewed as worthless before the interests of the colonists. Settler colonialism is unstable in the contemporary world because of the facilities subject populations have for mobilization and resistance. Conflict between colonizer and colonized has only ended in one of three ways: 1) The expulsion of the colonists, as in Algeria; 2) the integration of the colonists into a nation that includes the indigenous population, as happened in South Africa; or 3) the expulsion of the indigenous population as with the Trail of Tears in the nineteenth-century United States.
Tony Karon: Repeating behaviors that have produced catastrophic failures and expecting a different result is insane; and when a person's psychotic behavior puts himself and those around him in immediate physical danger, the responsibility of those who claim to be his friends is to restrain him... The alternative to war, ignored by Israel but patently obvious, is simple: It will have to negotiate with Hamas...
Israel, quite simply, is not a normal society. It is a country without fixed legal borders... 80% of today's Gazans are refugee families, who were driven out of homes and off land they owned inside what is now Israel in 1948, and forbidden by one of the founding laws of the State of Israel from ever returning. Is it any surprise then that the basic default position of Palestinian politics has always been to refrain from 'recognizing' Israel in the sense of simply abandoning their own claims to homes and land stolen from them by Israel's very creation...
What would Ehud Barak do if it had been his father or grandfather who'd been forced off a farm in Ashkelon and now found himself in the hellhole of Gaza? You already know his answer. And that answer will remain the same (even if Barak would never dream of admitting it any longer) as long as justice and dignity is denied to the community that gave rise to Hamas... If the madness is to be stopped, Israel and the Palestinians will have to be told where their borders are, as part of an internationally enforced, fair settlement that gives the parties no choice.
Incoming administration will abandon Bush's isolation of Islamist group to initiate low-level diplomacy.
Image: Eric Gaillard/Reuters
Thursday, January 8, 2009
'We are angels of death'
You are terrorists, we are virtuous
Yitzhak Laor, in the
London Review of Books:
Israelis have assimilated the logic and the language of the IDF -- and in the process, they have lost their memories. Is there a better way to understand why we have never learned from history?... The majority of Israelis identify with the army and the army reciprocates by consolidating our identity, especially when it is -- or we are -- waging war...
Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect... They shoot. They abduct. They use F-16s against refugee camps, tanks against shacks and huts. For years they have operated in this way against gangs and groups of armed youths and children, and they call it a war, a 'just war,' vital for our existence...
Military thinking has become our only thinking... The Arabs must be crippled, socially and economically, and smashed militarily, and of course they must then appear to us in the degraded state to which we've reduced them... Israelis long ago ceased to be distressed by images of sobbing women in white scarves, searching for the remains of their homes in the rubble left by our soldiers...
The truth behind this is that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this involved scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies... We have the right to abduct. You don't. We have the right to arrest. You don't. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don't. We can ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death...
The people we kill and maim and ruin cannot vote here. If we let our memories slacken now, the machine-memory will reassert control and write history for us... And suddenly we will not be able to explain what we know, even to our own children.
David Ben-Gurion, first and third Prime Minister of Israel: If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?
War of Choice
How Israel Manufactured the Gaza Escalation
Steve Niva, Foreign Policy in Focus: Israel has a long history of deliberately using violence and other provocative measures to trigger reactions in order to create a pretext for military action, and to portray its opponents as aggressors and Israel as the victim... The actual targets of its assault on Gaza after December 27, which included police stations, mosques, universities, and Hamas government institutions, clearly reveal that Israel's primary goals go far beyond providing immediate security for its citizens...
First, many senior Israeli political and military leaders strongly opposed the June 19 ceasefire with Hamas, and looked for opportunities to reestablish Israel's fabled 'deterrent capability' of instilling fear into its enemies... A second factor was pressure surrounding the impending elections set to take place in early February... Third, Hamas repeatedly said it wouldn't recognize Mahmud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority after his term runs out on January 9... And finally, Israel was pressed to take action now due to its sense of the American political timeline...
It's important to consider Israeli military historian Zeev Maoz's contention that Israel's history of manufacturing wars through 'strategic escalation' and using overwhelming force to achieve 'deterrence' has never been successful. In fact, it's the primary cause of Israel's insecurity because it deepens hatred and a desire for revenge rather than fear...
As the vastly more powerful actor holding nearly all the cards in this conflict, the war in Gaza was ultimately Israel's choice. And for all this bloodshed and violence, Israel must be held accountable...
The most promising prospect for holding Israel accountable is through an increasing use of universal jurisdiction for prosecuting war crimes, along with the growing transnational movement calling for sanctions on Israel until it ends its violations of international law... A transnational network that focuses on Israeli violations of international law, rather than the state itself, could become a counterweight that forces policymakers in the United States, Europe, and Israel to reconsider their political and moral complicity in the current war, in favor of taking real steps towards peace and security in the region for all peoples.
'Why are the Israelis doing this to us?'
Israel waiting until Obama's inauguration to let reporters into Gaza, when 'viewers simply won't care.'
One Israeli official told MSNBC correspondent Richard Engel that Israel doesn't want reporters in Gaza documenting the humanitarian situation or revealing military tactics. Israel is trying to 'manage the image' of the war, Engel reported. 'This official told me he expects this operation, while negotiations are taking place, will last several more days. And that after that, reporters would eventually be allowed in. But at that stage, Israel is assuming the United States will mostly be focused on all of the coverage around the inauguration, and that viewers simply won't care at that point.'
CBC: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) will suspend aid shipments until the safety of its staff can be guaranteed, according to director John Ging. 'These firings on our convoys are coming from the Israeli military themselves, with whom we have co-ordinated our movement, and that is what is absolutely unacceptable.'... 'We just have to now call a hold until we can be assured that we can conduct our humanitarian operations here with a reasonable [sense of] security. 'We are devastated because we're here with people who are in phenomenal need of our assistance.'
AP: The International Red Cross accused Israel on Thursday of 'unacceptable' delays in letting rescue worker reach three Gaza City homes hit by shelling where they eventually found 15 dead and 18 wounded, including young children too weak to stand. The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross said the Israeli army refused rescuers permission to reach the site in the Zaytun neighbourhood for four days. Ambulances couldn't get to the neighbourhood because the Israeli army had erected large earthen barriers that blocked access.
NYT: Gaza Children Found With Mothers' Corpses ... ICRC: 'Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israeli Defense Forces nearly as well as two tanks.'... 'The Israeli military must have been aware of this situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.'
Washington Post: The Geneva Conventions provide that parties to a conflict 'at all times' should 'without delay' take 'all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.' The conventions also say that wounded 'shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care.' The Red Cross said it was able to remove only three of the bodies and had received reports of other casualties in the neighborhood. The agency said that it was trying to return to the site but that negotiations with the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage were ongoing.
The Guardian: Reem Al Ghussain, an English teacher at Al-Azhar University in Gaza: Today I walked for half an hour to find bread, and then I queued for five hours. All I could buy was enough for one day. My children didn't want me to go -- they were worried I would die. They are scared. Whenever they hear any sudden sound they think it's a bomb. They don't sleep, and as a result I don't sleep. Sometimes they don't want to eat. I say don't worry, the bombing is far away, but they know it's a big lie because the house shakes. They haven't been outside in 10 days and now they're fighting each other. My children ask me, if they are killed what will happen to them. I say, 'Don't worry, nothing will happen to you.' They ask me: 'Why are the Israelis doing this to us?' My child in fifth grade asks me: 'What did we do to them?' I tell them that they want to take our land and they want all Palestinians to die. They ask me: 'Why is the world watching without doing anything?' I don't have answers for them. If Israel thinks that our suffering from this siege will make us hate Hamas, they are wrong.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Brian Eno: Stealing Gaza
In Counterpunch: It's a tragedy that the Israelis -- a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression -- are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked, 'Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians.' By creating a Middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians -- with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers -- and themselves -- with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world -- the sacrifice all credibility.
The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.
Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly... and surprise, surprise -- they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?
Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfil to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an accommodation.
And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.
Brian Eno is a musician and music producer.
'We need to be forced to negotiate'
Video: BBC interviews former Israeli air force captain:
... If he continues not to talk about the horrible crimes happening in my country now I don't see any change coming to the world...
I risked my life for many years as a captain and leader of operations in the Israeli air force... I know from a very close distance the pain of the Israeli people as well as the Palestinian people. So no one can call me or the thousands of members of the anti-occupation movement in Israel that we are traitors. On the contrary, we are patriots. We want our people to continue to exist, and we see our leaders' actions as a self-destruction policy that puts in great danger the future of all of us...
As a former rescue pilot in the Israeli air force this is the most important rescue mission I can take upon myself to save the people here... And we all know that the situation in the Middle East affects the whole world... This kind of conflict can escalate to a world war...
We have to put massive pressure on the Israeli government for a cease fire right now. Right now we need a cease fire, we need to be forced to speak and negotiate with Hamas. We have no other legitimate action...
Don't forget we have the Arab Initiative. For many years by now the Arab Initiative says 'We offer complete peace and normalization if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders.' My government ignores this request.
Maps: Canada's Afghan Dead
Where they came from.
Majority, especially in Quebec, want troops out before scheduled departure in 2011, poll finds. 'What's interesting is that it (the scheduled departure) is still two years away and the number of Canadians who want this to be over before 2011 is very high,' said Mario Canseco, vice-president of Angus Reid Strategies.
Breaking news: Massacre at Zeitoun
Gaza medics describe horror of strike which killed 70
The Telegraph: Mohammed Shaheen, a volunteer with Palestinian Red Crescent, was in the first convoy of ambulances to reach the site of the blast in Zeitoun since it was first occupied then shelled by the Israeli Army. His testimony confirmed accounts from survivors of the extended al Samouni clan who said they feared between 60 and 70 family members had been killed...
...'We found fifteen people still alive but injured so we took them in the ambulance. I could see an Israeli army bulldozer knocking down houses nearby but we ran out of time and the Israeli soldiers started shooting at us. We had to leave about eight injured people behind'...
Concerns had been growing that Zeitoun had witnessed massive civilian casualties after surviving members of the Samouni clan reached Gaza City three days ago. They said that after the Israeli army first took the town on Saturday night soldiers had ordered about 100 members of the clan to gather in a single house owned by Wael Samouni around dawn on Sunday. At 6:35am on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled with appalling loss of civilian life.
A handful of survivors, some wounded, others carrying dead or dying infants, made it on foot to Gaza's main north-south road before they were given lifts to the hospital. Three small children were buried in Gaza City that afternoon...
Convoys of ambulances twice headed to the area to look for wounded but they were driven back by Israeli shooting. During today's three hour lull in offensive operations by Israel, the ICRC led the rescue convoy... According to Mr. Shaheen, the death toll was as high as described by the survivors.
Israel 'has become a rogue state'
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
The Guardian: Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions. Excerpts:
...Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by 'an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders.' I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansion. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been on of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times...
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity...
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies...
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with 'an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders.' A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practices terrorism -- the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it.
Israel, the US, and the Arab peace plan
Israeli politicians should examine their own support
for enemies of peace
The Daily Star, Lebanon: And how have Israeli officials treated the people who both violate international law and disdain Israel's own rules for the illegal colonization project? Well, by working furiously to expand their presence on occupied land: At no period since 1967 have the settlements multiplied so quickly and been subsidized so generously as they have since the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. A concerted effort has been made by successive Israeli governments to create a constituency -- now 500,000 strong -- that would fight peace to the bitter end, and it has succeeded. At least Hamas has a historical grievance; the settlers have nothing but a selective interpretation of scripture and the largess of Israel and its primary sponsor, the United States.
Gareth Porter, Asia Times: Until mid-2007, there was a serious political obstacle to a massive conventional war by Israel against Hamas in Gaza: the fact that Hamas had won free and fair elections for the Palestinian parliament and was still the leading faction in a fully legitimate government. But the George W. Bush administration helped Israel eliminate that obstacle, by deliberately provoking Hamas to seize power. That plan was aimed at getting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the democratically elected Hamas government...
Alvaro de Soto, then UN special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, wrote in his confidential End of Mission Report that the US 'clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas...' He recalled that the 'US envoy' to a February 2, 2007 meeting of the Quartet in Washington had twice declared, 'How much I like this violence,' because 'it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.' That US envoy was Rice...
The Bush administration had not only accomplished its goal of eliminating a Hamas-dominated government; it has also set up a new argument that could later be used to justify an all-out Israeli offensive in Gaza: that Hamas had mounted an 'illegal coup' in Gaza. That was the term that Rice used on January 2 in justifying the Israeli operations.
Der Spiegel Interview with Boutros Boutros-Ghali: The current decision-makers in Israel, who ordered this attack on Gaza, haven't thought about the future. That was a mistake of momentous consequence. The growing imbalance between Jews and Arabs in the area controlled by Israel is of decisive importance for the near future of the Jewish state. Already today, you can see that the Zionist idea of having a purely Jewish state is not going to work out... Emigration from Israel is already on the rise... But Israel's current leadership appears to be solely motivated by a concern for election tactics. Given the scale of the damage that has already been done, that is irresponsible...
Not much has changed in the United States since my term as secretary-general of the United Nations. The American public is not particularly interested in the Arab world, and the pressure exerted by the Jewish lobby is as strong as ever. However, it is unfortunately the case that Israel only responds to pressure if it is coming out of Washington... Events in Gaza have set us all back by years... To hope that the Europeans might play an effective role is just wishful thinking.
Working together, the Arabs put a good peace plan on the table that envisioned recognizing Israeli sovereignty within the pre-1967 borders in return for an independent Palestinian state within these borders. Israel made the mistake of ignoring this offer.
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