Posts Tagged ‘NATHAN THRALL’
Road to Premptive Wars Paved by the West: Israel striking Gaza concentration camp
Posted on: March 1, 2017
This story is included with an NYT Opinion subscription.JERUSALEM —
As Israel bombarded the people in Gaza with extensive airstrikes and followed up with a ground operation in the Gaza Strip and Hamas reacted by launching rockets at Israeli cities, the most immediate cause of this latest war has been ignored: Israel and much of the international community placed a prohibitive set of obstacles in the way of the Palestinian “national consensus” government that was formed in early June.
That government was created largely because of Hamas’s desperation and isolation. The group’s alliance with Syria and Iran was in shambles. Its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt became a liability after a July 2013 coup replaced an ally, President Mohamed Morsi, with a bitter adversary, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Hamas’s coffers dried up as General Sisi closed the tunnels that had brought to Gaza the goods and tax revenues on which it depended.
He is a father, and he just lost his son.
Seeing a region swept by popular protests against leaders who couldn’t provide for their citizens’ basic needs, Hamas opted to give up official control of Gaza rather than risk being overthrown.
Despite having won the last elections in 2006, Hamas decided to transfer formal authority to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.
That decision led to a reconciliation agreement between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization, on terms set almost entirely by the P.L.O. chairman and Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal:
1. the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and
2. the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt that bar most Gazans’ passage to the outside world.
Yet, in many ways, the reconciliation government could have served Israel’s interests:
1. It offered Hamas’s political adversaries a foothold in Gaza;
2. it was formed without a single Hamas member;
3. it retained the same Ramallah-based prime minister, deputy prime ministers, finance minister and foreign minister; and, most important,
4. it pledged to comply with the 3 conditions for (Western colonial powers) aid long demanded by America and its European allies: nonviolence, adherence to past agreements and recognition of Israel.
Israel strongly opposed American recognition of the new government and sought to isolate it internationally, seeing any small step toward Palestinian unity as a threat.
Israel’s security establishment objects to the strengthening of West Bank-Gaza ties, lest Hamas raise its head in the West Bank. And Israelis who oppose a two-state solution understand that a unified Palestinian leadership is a prerequisite for any lasting peace.
Still, despite its opposition to the reconciliation agreement, Israel continued to transfer the tax revenues it collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf, and to work closely with the new government, especially on security cooperation. (Not a correct statement)
But the key issues of paying Gaza’s civil servants and opening the border with Egypt were left to fester.
The new government’s ostensible supporters, especially the United States and Europe, could have pushed Egypt to ease border restrictions, thereby demonstrating to Gazans that Hamas rule had been the cause of their isolation and impoverishment. But they did not.
Instead, after Hamas transferred authority to a government of pro-Western technocrats, life in Gaza became worse.
Gaza is a concentration camp.
Gaza is a concentration camp.
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), have some scathing, painful things to say about what Israel is doing to Gazans:
[A senior official with the] humanitarian charity has described his organisation’s work among the 1.8 million besieged Palestinian refugees as akin to being “in an open-air prison to patch up prisoners in between their torture sessions”.
Jonathan Whittall, head of humanitarian analysis at MSF, who worked in Libya during the 2011 war, in Bahrain during the uprising of the same year, in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Sudan and Darfur, has bluntly asked his colleagues:
“At what point does MSF’s repeated medical action in an unacceptable situation [like Gaza] become complicity with aggression and oppression?”
…
“An entire population is trapped in what is essentially an open-air prison,” Mr Whittall writes. “They can’t leave and only the most limited supplies – essential for basic survival – are allowed to enter. The population of the prison have elected representatives and organised social services.
“Some of the prisoners have organised into armed groups and resist their indefinite detention by firing rockets over the prison wall. However, the prison guards are the ones who have the capacity to launch large-scale and highly destructive attacks on the open-air prison.”
The current escalation in Gaza is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the April 2014 Palestinian reconciliation agreement. The road out of the crisis is a reversal of that policy.
Adonis Diaries 