Gaza

Hoe kun je de situatie in Israel nu beoordelen als de informatievoorziening zo slecht is? Waar ik me altijd enorm aan erger is dat er geen verschil wordt gemaakt tussen mensen die in israel wonen, kolonisten en militairen. Alsof het geen verschil maakt of een bus israelische schoolkinderen wordt opgeblazen of een militaire post in bezet gebied.

Ook nu weer wordt er niet duidelijk gezegd dat de aanleiding van de laatste inval door Israel bestaat uit een aanval op een militair doel:

As for whether it was a terrorist attack or a guerilla operation, an important distinction in international law at least, just a few weeks ago, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, whose father was operations chief for the Etzel underground, which killed dozens if not hundreds of innocent people (including Arabs and British — and Jews) during the British Mandate in Palestine before Israeli independence, admitted to an American TV network interviewer that attacks on soldiers are not terrorism. And while it is true that the seven or eight Palestinian gunmen who tunneled 800 meters over the past two months did cross the border into sovereign Israeli territory even as the Palestinian political arena seemed on the verge of approving a plan to end all attacks inside the Green Line, Israel routinely crosses the border into Gaza by air and occasional ground and armored troops, for their own operations.

Tegelijkertijd is het al zo normaal dat Israël palestijnen doodt en alle noodzakelijke voorzieningen platbombardeert dat er ook nu nauwelijks reactie komt op het feit dat Israel wegen, bruggen en electriciteitscentrales vernietigd om de bevolking onder druk te zetten. De electriciteit is nu in 65% van de gaza strook uitgevallen. Electriciteit die bijvoorbeeld nodig is om water te pompen…

Waar ligt het verschil tussen onder druk zetten en bevolking straffen? Is dat niet alleen een onderscheid om te voorkomen dat je toegeeft oorlogsmisdaden te begaan?

“Our aim is not to mete out punishment but rather to apply pressure so that the abducted soldier will be freed. We want to create a new equation – freeing the abducted soldier in return for lessening the pressure on the Palestinians,” the prime minister said Tuesday.

The idea is to carry out a gradually stepped-up campaign, sources said, so as to make the diplomatic pressure on Hamas more effective.

Dat klinkt in mijn oren toch echt als collectief straffen tot de gijzelaar wordt vrijgelaten.

En dat terwijl Hamas net de eerste stappen naar het erkennen van de staat Israel had gezet. Iedere keer als de Palestijnse regering zich een stukje verder ontwikkeld richting vredesproces en zelfstandigheid moet de Isrealische regering militanten doden of andere provocerende acties ondernemen lijkt wel. Ik moet dan ook gelijk denken aan dit artikel van vorig jaar, waarin Dov Weinglass het politieke streven van Israel duidelijk maakt:

From your point of view, then, your major achievement is to have frozen the political process legitimately?

“That is exactly what happened. You know, the term `political process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The political process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The political process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.”

So you have carried out the maneuver of the century? And all of it with authority and permission?

“When you say `maneuver,’ it doesn’t sound nice. It sounds like you said one thing and something else came out. But that’s the whole point. After all, what have I been shouting for the past year? That I found a device, in cooperation with the management of the world, to ensure that there will be no stopwatch here. That there will be no timetable to implement the settlers’ nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance is 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 Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?”

I return to my previous question: In return for ceding Gaza, you obtained status quo in Judea and Samaria?

“You keep insisting on the wrong definition. The right definition is that we created a status quo vis-a-vis the Palestinians. There was a very difficult package of commitments that Israel was expected to accept. That package is called a political process. It included elements we will never agree to accept and elements we cannot accept at this time. But we succeeded in taking that package and sending it beyond the hills of time. With the proper management we succeeded in removing the issue of the political process from the agenda. And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. That certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens – when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom.”