FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Who could believe that anything worthwhile might be found in an article that begins like this:

It looked like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not only did it look like it. For a moment, the Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.

It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet …

The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair.

No, this was not found on a pro-Hamas website, but was written by an Israeli, Uri Avnery. He continues:

The reason given for the starving and freezing of one and a half million human beings, crowded into a territory of 365 square kilometers, is the continued shooting at the town of Sderot and the adjoining villages.

That is a well-chosen reason. It unites the primitive and poor parts of the Israeli public. It blunts the criticism of the UN and the governments throughout the world, who might otherwise have spoken out against a collective punishment that is, undoubtedly, a war crime under international law.

I have to admit that it makes me angry to read about the ‘primitive and poor’ parts of the Israeli public who think, after all, that a sovereign nation should not be forced to absorb thousands of rocket hits, some deaths, many injuries, and lots of trauma without doing whatever is possible to stop it. Especially since the ‘starving and freezing’ is partly faked, and partly the result of Hamas’ actions like confiscating hospital fuel for military purposes. Avnery has a simple solution:

Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.

A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the “targeted” assassinations and the blockade.

Why doesn’t our government jump at this proposal?

The obvious answer is that like previous cease-fires, Israel expects that Hamas will stop some of their activities, off-load others to groups that they ‘don’t control’ like Islamic Jihad, and use the respite to continue with less visible ones like making rockets, stockpiling ammunition and explosives, tunneling under the Gaza/Israel border, and — now that the Egyptian border is breached — preparing terrorist attacks inside Israel which they will either deny or find a reason to justify when the time comes.

And there’s another answer, which is that maybe the time for a truce is not when we are finally starting to hurt Hamas with targeted killings and incursions. And also, possibly suggested by the primitive and poor part of my brain, there is the idea that Hamas should be made to pay for what it’s done.

But Avnery thinks he understands the true, hidden motives of Olmert and Barak for refusing this generous offer:

Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.

Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext – much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.

Possibly I could agree that the government needs to do more to stop the attacks on Sderot, but…a pretext! Avnery is displaying his ability, found so often on the extreme left, to think the absolute worst about the motives of his own people and the best about their enemies.

But we are almost getting to the point where he says something true, so we had to plow through this. Here is part of it:

And then something happened that none of them foresaw, in spite of the fact that it was the most foreseeable event on earth.

The breakthrough into Egypt, which Avnery claims was due to the ‘pressure cooker’ of the blockade, was carefully prepared for by Hamas over a period of months. The propaganda buildup, the daily cutting and weakening of the fence, and finally the ‘explosion’, presented by the media and hailed by Avnery as an eruption of oppressed humanity, were all parts of another Paliwood production.

But it was forseeable. Not, as Avnery suggests, because the Gazans were too miserable to be contained, but because Hamas was working on the fence for months.

And it raises the question, “what were Olmert and Barak thinking?”, because the consequences of this event are not good:

1. Israel’s long, relatively porous border with Egypt is now exposed to Hamas terrorists from Gaza.
2. An operation to finish off Hamas in Gaza, already difficult, is now 10 times harder.
3. Mubarak’s regime, long threatened by radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood — of which Hamas is an offshoot — now has something else to worry about.
4. The need to protect both the border with Israel and Egypt’s own interior threatens the demilitarization of the Sinai.
5. The possibility exists that Hamas will actually occupy part of the Sinai, meaning that Israeli action against it would constitute a violation of Egyptian sovereignty.

Regarding Mubarak’s position, here is what Avnery writes, almost correctly:

Even before [the breakthrough], Mubarak was in an impossible situation. Hundreds of millions of Arabs, a billion Muslims, saw how the Israeli army had closed the Gaza strip off on three sides: the North, the East and the sea. The fourth side of the blockade was provided by the Egyptian army.

The Egyptian president, who claims the leadership of the entire Arab world, was seen as a collaborator with an inhuman operation conducted by a cruel enemy in order to gain the favor (and the money) of the Americans. His internal enemies, the Muslim Brothers, exploited the situation to debase him in the eyes of his own people.

It is doubtful if Mubarak could have persisted in this position. But the Palestinian masses [no, Hamas — ed.] relieved him of the need to make a decision. They decided for him. They broke out like a tsunami wave. Now he has to decide whether to succumb to the Israeli demand to re-impose the blockade on his Arab brothers.

In the final analysis, this may be more important for what happens to Egypt than for the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.

Technorati Tags: Hamas, Gaza, Israel, Uri Avnery

In all the excitement about the Israeli ‘blockade’ of Gaza, replete with candle-lit Hamas meetings, and the total evaporation of the border between Egypt and Gaza, here are a few news items that you may have missed:

Item:

A border police officer was killed and another female officer was wounded Thursday night in a shooting attack near the entrance to the Shuafat refugee camp in northern Jerusalem…

The Battalions of Struggle and Return, a previously anonymous offshoot of Fatah’s Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack, Israel Radio reported.

Item:

In another simultaneous incident, two terrorists were killed after they infiltrated the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva in Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem.

The terrorists, armed with knives and a pistol, infiltrated the kibbutz – in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc – and snuck into a building used by the high school, run by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz.

They entered a classroom where tutors were holding a meeting, and stabbed two of them. The wounded suffered non-threatening injuries, one to the head and the other to the shoulder, and were evacuated to Hadassah Hosptial in Jerusalem. — Jerusalem Post

Item:

Palestinians opened fire Tuesday morning at farmers working in a field near Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha in southern Israel. There were no reports of injuries. An IDF force fired back at the shooters, and the farmers stopped their work and were removed from the field.

[Carlos Chavez,] an Ecuadorian volunteer was murdered by a Palestinian sniper in the same area last week.

Item:

[On Tuesday,] seven Qassam rockets and one mortar shells landed in Israel since the morning hours.

Two barrages were fired shortly before 8 am, as Sderot’s children were making their way to school.

Nine Qassam rockets and 13 mortar shells were fired at the western Negev communities on Monday afternoon. — YNet

Recently, there have been as many as 50 rockets fired in one day, and since the Gaza disengagement the total is close to 4200.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, terrorism

It’s become conventional wisdom that the path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a new partition agreement. Israel will leave some or all of the territory conquered in 1967, with or without land swaps; Jerusalem will in some way be divided so that part of it can be the capital of Israel and part of Palestine; the refugees will go somewhere; and a peaceful state of Palestine will be created with or without territorial contiguity. It’s just a matter of working out the details and preventing the ‘extremists’ from wrecking it.

Virtually every ‘moderate’ voice in the world, starting with the Bush Administration — even some Arab states — officially supports some kind of Oslo-like solution along these lines. Only outlaws like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas, and Hezbollah oppose it. Public opinion in the West is massively in favor.

Yet it can’t possibly be implemented, at least not for a generation, and anybody who has paid attention to the actions and words of the Palestinian leadership, particularly since the signing of the Oslo accord and its failure, should be able to see this.

Former Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya’alon spoke this week at the Herzliya Conference in Israel, and his words should be required reading for everyone concerned, particularly the diplomats in the US State Department and Foreign Offices around the world.

Some of Ya’alon’s points:

In the [Oslo] accord Israel recognized the right of the Palestinian people to have self determination and recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. The Palestinians, on the other side, did not recognize Zionism as a national Jewish movement and did not recognize the rights of the Jews to a national Jewish country, an independent Jewish state. The Palestinians delayed Israel’s efforts to insist on the Palestinian recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

Indeed, in spite of massive pressure from President Clinton, the PLO covenant which defined Israel as illegitimate and called for its ‘liberation by armed struggle’ was never changed. And today’s ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayed refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

This lack of recognition shows that the Palestinians are striving for the disappearance of Israel as an independent Jewish state, or in other words: the Palestinians’ goal is not an Israeli state within the 1967 borders (Gaza, Judea and Samaria) but a Palestinian state on Israel’s ruins. It is important to remember that the Palestinian unification did not come after the six day war, but with the foundation of Zionism. In my opinion, Arafat started a war in September 2000 to escape from the “two state solution” and the de-facto recognition of Israel as an independent Jewish state.

In addition we can see a pattern in Arafat’s war of terror that is very similar to the reaction of Palestinians in previous attempts to divide the land: in 1937 the [Peel] Committee and the “Arab Rebellion”; in 1947 the UN partition plan and the War of Independence afterwards…

…since the beginning of Zionism there was no Palestinian leadership that was willing to acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to an independent Jewish state. In addition, since the beginning of Zionism there was no Palestinian leadership that was willing to accept a Jewish state within the 1967 borders as a final agreement. Under these circumstances there is no way to establish a secure situation with a “two state solution”.

But is it possible that Abbas and Fayed are different? In a word, no. Barry Rubin discusses this in detail in the previous post, “The shadow falling on Israel-Palestinian peace“, but some of the symptoms are 1) their inability to compromise on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state or on a right of return, 2) their inability to confront Hamas or even the terrorists in their own Fatah organization, and 3) their continued tolerance of the campaign of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement coming from every media and educational outlet in the Palestinian Authority.

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I’ve written on several occasions that Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah can’t be expected to make a peace agreement acceptable to Israel or to deliver on one if it were signed. Today Barry Rubin explains exactly why this is true.

Fatah’s Politics Make Peace Impolitic

By Barry Rubin

T.S. Elliot wrote memorably in “The Hollow Men”: Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow

In the case of the peace process and all the great ideas for fixing everything in Arab-Israel relations, the Shadow has been Palestinian leaders’ unwillingness–and now also inability–to make a compromise agreement ending the conflict.

Close examination of the movement’s ideology, organization, and structure shows why this is true. Exactly forty years ago, in 1968, Yasir Arafat and Fatah took over. That same year he laid down two principles dominating the movement ever since.

First, in July 1968, he changed the PLO Charter from emphasizing the group was no longer a follower of Arab states but both independent and the struggle’s leader. But at the same time he stated, “We are an extension of the hundred million Arabs.”

It proved hard to have it both ways, though Arafat usually managed the tension adequately. Today, the Arab world’s real support for Fatah–and for the Palestinians generally–is minimal, though many in the West still don’t notice that. Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas recently said, “Our Arab relations are at their best. We do not have any problems with any Arab country.”

Well, not exactly. The remaining backing does not include financial aid (the West pays the bills), direct military involvement, or strenuous diplomatic effort. Instead, it mostly revolves around demanding that the United States solve the problem while the regimes focus on their own real priorities.

Second, back in 1968, Arafat mandated the goal as total victory bringing Israel’s disappearance. Thus, armed struggle was the main tactic intended to “maintain an atmosphere of strain and anxiety that will force the Zionists to realize that it is impossible for them to live in Israel.” Since then, Israel has prospered, the Palestinians have suffered, and Hamas has seized that slogan. But it also remains a central plank for Fatah.

Abbas puts the main emphasis on diplomacy today. But most of his colleagues and constituents are still focused on glorifying violence and insisting on ultimate, total victory. What he can do, or even say, is quite limited.

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