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It clearly has been becoming more and more difficult politically for the
Israeli government to maintain its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
International pressures seem now to have led to a truce between Hamas
and Israel. It was brokered by Egypt and was scheduled on June 18 to go
into effect almost immediately. It calls simply for an end to Israeli
offensive operations in Gaza in return for an end to the firing of
rockets into Israel.
The agreement is between Hamas and Israel, but the smaller groups have
reportedly agreed to observe it. Israel has also pledged to wind down
the economic blockade of Gaza. Until now only the most basic medicines
and foodstuffs have been allowed to enter the territory.
However, similar agreements in the past have proved ephemeral. And
Israel says that it is still preparing for military action if this
truce should fail.
"What they are calling a 'calm' is fragile and likely to be
short-lived," an obviously sceptical Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
said just ahead of the planned start of the truce on June 18. He said
Israel would "go forward in implementing this calm" but that
its military was readying its response should Palestinian rocket
attacks continue.
Only days earlier, Israel was threatening a full-scale invasion of
Gaza, apparently after having been given an OK by Washington.
If the truce holds, it should considerably reduce the human cost of the
confrontation between Israel and Hamas. A UN report published this
month states that power cuts and fuel shortages have meant that more
than half of Gaza's population has access to water only every other
day, while a quarter receive it only every four days.
Such a reduction of tensions is clearly in the interests of both the
Israeli people and the Palestinians. But in the past, all such
agreements have run up against the underlying Zionist determination to
break the Palestinian people or drive it out. It is far from clear
where there has been any substantial shift in the Israeli attitude.
The denunciation of the hardships inflicted on the Palestinian people
of the area by South Africa Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate and
much respected defender of human rights, was a powerful call to
worldwide protests.
At the send of May, Bishop Tutu said: "The entire situation is
abominable. I believe the ordinary Israeli citizens would not support
this blockade if they knew what it really meant to ordinary people like
themselves. ... My message to the international community is that our
silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us
all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in
Burma" (from the British Independent, May 30).
In its article on Tutu's statement, The Independent noted:
"Yesterday, less than 24 hours after the Archbishop's visit to
Beit Hanoun, 60 Palestinians were arrested during a pre-dawn raid by
the Israeli military on the northern Gaza town. Palestinian witnesses
said that residents had been summoned to a local square before dozens
were taken away for questioning, and that armed military bulldozers had
destroyed some farmland in the area."
The Israeli authorities were also embarrassed by condemnation of their
refusal to allow six Gazan students to enter Israel to apply for U.S.
visas so that they could accept the Fulbright scholarships that they
had been offered. It was a decision as cruel as it was senseless. The
Zionist rulers were forced, in the face of world public opinion, to
back down.
However, even as world condemnation of Israel's siege of Gaza was
growing, the Zionist rulers spoke about a massive military invasion of
the small, densely populated area. The June 6 issue of the liberal
Zionist daily Haaretz reported: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told
reporters on his plane bound for Israel on Thursday just prior to
departure [from the United States] that 'it would appear we are very
close to a decisive crossroads in Gaza,' intimating that a major
military operation is in the offing."
This report also indicated that Olmert got a green light from
Washington for such an operation. Immediately after the remark quoted
above, he said: "The people of Israel have reason to be pleased
with the results of the visit to the U.S. in relation to all sensitive
security matters concerning the future of the state."
Olmert went on to say: "The way it looks now, we are closer to a
military operation in Gaza than we are to any other type of
[diplomatic] arrangement."
The Zionist military has been steadily killing Palestinians in the Gaza
Strip in almost daily strikes, which continued right up until the June
18 truce took effect. It has created an atmosphere of terror that,
along with the hardships of the economic siege imposed on Gaza,
obviously shocked Desmond Tutu.
But a large-scale military invasion would inflict deaths and suffering
that would dwarf the human cost of many months of the Israeli siege,
and could even lead to a regional war. It is a measure of the
ruthlessness of the Zionist rulers that they can threaten such an
action in the face of the growing international condemnation of the
ruin they have inflicted on the people of Gaza.
The excuse of the Zionists for their slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza
is the firing of mostly small and crude missiles from Gaza across the
Israeli border. These are the actions of desperate people who see no
other way to strike back at their oppressors. They are certainly
counterproductive, but the Israeli response has been out of all
reasonable proportion, as even conservative international observers
have recognized.
The ruthlessness of the Zionist rulers seems
now finally to have forced the Palestinian organizations to try to
reconcile their differences and join a common front against their
oppressors. Up until now, the basic dividing line has been between
Hamas, which is pledged to fighting Israel, and Fatah and the
Palestinian Authority it controls, which has pinned their hopes on
negotiating with the Zionist state.
Le Monde reported June 5: "In a speech Wednesday [June 4] in
Ramallah, on the West Bank, Abbas [president of the Palestinian
Authority] launched an unexpected appeal for dialogue with Hamas. He
offered a dialogue on the basis of the Yemeni initiative accepted in
March by the two parties but which remained a dead letter because of
differences of interpretation.
"The main point of disagreement was Abbas' demand for a return to
the situation that prevailed before Hamas ousted Fatah from power in
the Gaza Strip in June 2007. In his speech [June 4 in Ramallah] Abbas
did not pose that condition, and avoided characterizing Hamas' forceful
action as a 'putsch' as he has habitually done. He spoke only of
‘divisions.’"
Hamas accepted Abbas' extended hand. The same article in Le Monde
reported: "Hamas has accepted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas'
offer of dialogue, the head of the Islamic government in Gaza, Ismail
Haniyeh, announced June 5. Haniyeh said that the dialogue would be held
on the basis of aiming to a return to the situation that prevailed
before Hamas' seizure of power in Gaza and on the principle of "no
vanquished, no victor."
Le Monde commented: "Abbas' appeal came at
a moment when the peace negotiations with Israel, to which Hamas is
hostile, have become bogged down, making it more and more improbable
that a peace agreement will be concluded before the end of 2008, as had
been agreed. ‘There is no doubt that President Abbas' appeal is linked
to the failure of the negotiations and the fact that he realizes that
national unity is essential to stand up to Israel,' said Abu Zuhri,
spokesman of Hamas."
Despite the new truce, the Israeli government's continuing threats of a
massive military invasion of Gaza look like an all-or-nothing gamble
that could set the region alight. It is increasingly urgent for
international public opinion to condemn these threats and force the
Israeli rulers to back off from an incendiary confrontation.
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