Israel's War Of Frustration

By Adel Safty, Special to Gulf News
Published: January 25, 2009, 23:25
Courtesy Of Gulf News

The Israeli assault on the Palestinians pitted one of the most powerful armies in the world against a political movement with a crude military organisation. Yet, Israeli leaders have discovered that wiping out Hamas is not an easy task if only because Hamas's significance lies in what it symbolises - the resistance to occupation and dispossession.

Israeli leaders have already admitted after 23 days of punishing assault that they had not been able to wipe out Hamas. The assault was not a war against an army; it was a war of punishment and frustration against a people; punishment for the Palestinians for democratically electing Hamas in 2006, and frustration that repeatedly inflicting punishment has not subdued the Palestinians.

Consider the massive use of force against a vastly inferior enemy, and the killing of innocent civilians which the Israeli leaders claim is not deliberate but which they ought to have known would be the inevitable result of their massive violence. This comes on top of a siege which amounts to a campaign of starvation and the imprisonment of 1.5 million people.

Richard Falk, UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories, called for protective action for the Palestinians against "the persisting and wide-ranging violations of the fundamental human right to life".

Christopher Gunness, a spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, told the Public Radio programme Democracy Now that the situation in Gaza was "absolutely horrifying. The people of Gaza are terrorised. They're traumatised. And they are trapped".

Then there is the number of people killed from both sides, reflecting the gross inequality of the confrontation and attesting to its punishing nature: More than 1,300 Palestinians, many of whom are civilians, compared to 13 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

The ferocity of the assault on Gaza was compounded by its inhumanity. Amnesty International, citing "indisputable evidence" by its fact-finding team that visited Gaza, reported on January 19 that "the Israeli army used white phosphorus in densely populated civilian residential areas of Gaza City. The scale of punishment and destruction inflicted on the people of Gaza was captured by two Israeli writers (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff) who concluded that: "Gaza has been hurled back into the 1940s."

Punishment as the goal of the Gaza assault was openly admitted by Israeli officials who were reported by the New York Times as saying that "an offensive that caused average people to suffer put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways."

Historically, the encounter of Zionism with the Palestinians was written in blood. It could not have been otherwise given the Zionist goal of colonising Palestine; for the Palestinians could not have been expected to submissively acquiesce to the loss of their country.

Zionists leaders knew it, but considered violently displacing Palestinians from their country to make way for the European Jews the 'lesser of the two evils'.

Theodore Hertz, the father of political Zionism, candidly stated that for Zionism to succeed in Palestine "might takes precedence over right". Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the extreme right wing Zionist leaders whose disciples formed the Likud party, recognised that: "Zionism is a colonising adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force." Therein lies the principle contradiction that obstructs the search for peace: Continuing the occupation and the dispossession of the Palestinians while proclaiming a desire for peace.

Israeli leaders could have stopped all rockets from Gaza by ending the occupation, or even by ending the siege of Gaza. But the issue is not really about rockets from Gaza; the real issue is more fundamental: it is about whether the Zionist project of using force to displace and dispossess the Palestinians is compatible with peace.

Are Israeli leaders ready to declare the end of the colonising project and be satisfied with 78 per cent of Palestine? Judging by the continued expansion of Israeli colonies, notwithstanding the obligation to freeze all activities as stipulated in the roadmap, Israel's leaders are not ready yet to end the colonial nature of Zionism. Peace with the Palestinians would bring colonisation to an end; a state of belligerency serves as a cover for its continuation.

The absence of real Israeli interest in a just and lasting peace with the Palestinians has been candidly admitted by Dov Weissglass, a senior aide to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Weissglass told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the goal of the withdrawal from Gaza was "the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and [occupied] Jerusalem." This whole package of the roadmap "has been removed from our agenda indefinitely."

The punishing assault on Gaza is also an expression of the frustration of Israeli leaders whose consistent use of force has failed to completely subjugate the Palestinians. But the Palestinians refuse to be defeated. The irony is that in launching a massive punishing war against Hamas, the Israelis may be legitimising Hamas, at the expense of Fatah, as the symbol of that refusal to be defeated.

Adel Safty's new book, Might Over Right: How the Zionist Took Over Palestine, is endorsed by Noam Chomsky, and published by Garnet, England. 2009.