War on Gaza

The cynical Israeli invasion of Gaza

War on Gaza
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Gaza

What more can you say than what the cartoon (found at Permanent Revolution) already expresses? The idea that Israel’s aerial attacks against and subsequent invasion of Gaza are a response to Hamas terrorism doesn’t pass the laugh test. We know this attack has been planned for a long time, we’ve seen the preparations, we know it fits the Israeli strategy of ratching up the pressure on Gaza. We’ve seen it all before, back in 2006, when the Israeli army did the same in their first attempt to topple Hamas. That ended with a Fatah driven coup against the democratically elected Hamas governement which saw Hamas ousted from power in the West Bank but the opposite happening in Gaza. With Fatah now powerless or unwilling to take on Hamas again, Israel now has to effect regime change on its own. Hence the ground invasion.

table showing a huge drop in attacks during the ceasefire

The reason we cannot take Israel at its word about why they moved from economic strangulation and “surgical strikes” to a fullblown airwar and invasion is shown in the graph above, taken from official Israeli sources. What do you see? That during the ceasefire agreed to between Hamas and Israel in June last year, attacks from Gaza decreased dramatically, only picking up again after Israel started attacking in force. There’s a lot of manufactured outrage spread by Zionist apologists about these attacks, but what they forget to mention is that during the ceasefire Israel did not lift its blockade, nor stopped its policy of extrajudicial assasinations, with 22 Palestinians having been killed by Israeli forces during the truce. The number of Israelis killed? Zero.

Everything about this invasion is cynical and calculated, from the way its being justified to the date it was implemented, two days after Christmas, when all the lights have gone off in the world’s government buildings anyway. It’s been so cynical I haven’t really been able to write about it so far, as it has just made me too depressed and outraged. Fortunately, there’s Lenin’s Tomb, which has done splendid work reporting on the invasion and its background.

Breaking the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza

War on Gaza
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Activists manage to break through the Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast:

GAZA, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Two boats carrying activists challenging an Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip reached the shore of the Hamas-controlled territory on Saturday.

The 44 “Free Gaza” activists from 17 nations, who had set out on Friday from Cyprus in two wooden boats, were met by thousands of Palestinians who cheered along the shoreline at their arrival.

“Today is a special day, we hope it’s the beginning. We have opened the path and we hope there will be more travellers,” said Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist, after the ship anchored off shore.

Israel may have “withdrawn” from Gaza back in 2005, but took care to keep its control of Gaza’s borders; all its borders, not just the ones with Israel. The usual excuse is terrorism, but the reality is the slow economic strangulation of Gaza as part of a deliberate strategy to starve the territory into submission. Even the sea is off-limit for the people of Gaza, with Israeli warships firing on any fishing ship getting too far out of the coast. What the activists attempted to do is draw attention to this strangulation, but also to actually break the blockade. Just having another press stunt is not enough, but fortunately it seems the presence of the activists has enabled some fishermen to actually fish:

A statement by the group said the activists boarded Palestinian fishing boats on Monday and travelled with local fishermen eight miles (13 km) off shore, passing a 6-mile limit they said was generally enforced by the Israeli military.

The Gaza fishermen said that Israeli ships normally fire at them in deep waters and they had not travelled that far from shore in more than five years.

“We hope we will be able to go that far every day because it is our right, and it should not be a one-time event because of the presence of the foreigners,” said 27-year-old fisherman Fawzi al-Hessi.

The Palestinians themselves than are realistic about the chances of Israel allowing this situation to continue once the cameras have gone… To properly break the stranglehold the Israelis have on Gaza, not to mention the West Bank, there needs to be constant pressure from Europe and America and our governments need to stop supporting Israel.