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The
military wing of Hamas, the majority
party in the Palestinian territories, announced at the beginning of
the fourth week of April that it was ending its truce with Israel.
It resumed taking responsibility for firing home-made Qassam rockets from Gaza
into the nearby areas incorporated into the Zionist state.
In
fact, the firing of Qassams never stopped
during the truce, but they were claimed generally by Islamic Jihad,
a smaller purely military group. Members of other groups may have
been involved, since Palestinian
militants, particularly in the besieged Gaza Strip, are desperate
to strike in any way they can against their Zionist oppressors and
in none of the Palestinian organizations are the rank-and-file
militants very well controlled by the political leadership.
Actually,
the Israeli repressive forces never observed a truce with the
Palestinian fighting organizations. They kept on carrying out
strikes against them, allegedly aimed at taking out leaders
responsible for attacks on Israel.
In
the April 26 issue of the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz,
Amir Hass commented: "On the
Saturday and Sunday before the Palestinians ‘broke the cease-fire,’
Israeli Defense Forces soldiers killed nine Palestinians. Among
them was a 17-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and a policeman who
was on the roof of his house and was not involved in any ‘battle.’"
One
of the nine killed was a Gaza
municipal employee with no military involvement. He was killed in Israel’s
favorite target in the Gaza Strip, the town of Beit Hanun,
when his car was hit by an Israeli missile. The Israeli Defense
Force has made Gaza
into a shooting gallery under the pretext of going after the
missile launchers.
The
Qassams are essentially a means of
expressing desperation and a determination to fight. Although they
create an atmosphere of insecurity in the parts of Israel
near Gaza
and have occasionally caused harm to individuals and property,
their military importance is null.
Amir Hass, evidently a critic of Zionist repression,
argued that by their tactic of an on-again, off-again truce, that Palestinian
organizations played into the hands of the Zionist rulers:
"Talking for and against the cease-fire fits in with the
distorted picture of reality that Israel has been constructing
since September 2000, of two symmetric, fighting sides—in which the
Palestinians are the aggressors and Israel, attacked, defends
itself and retaliates."
He
commented quite forthrightly: "But even if none of the nine
had been killed, there would have been no cease-fire on Saturday
and Sunday, just as there was no cease-fire last week and in the
weeks before that. Because the military occupation, even when it
does not kill, is Israeli fire, which has not ceased for 40
years—regardless of the Palestinians' reactions or lack thereof.
"Israeli
fire includes the Civil Administration's every refusal of a permit
to build a Palestinian house, every person who is denied passage
from Gaza to the West Bank, every shekel of tax money that is not
transferred to the Palestinians, every roadblock in the West Bank,
every dunam of land stolen since June
1967, and every settlement—old or new, big or small, within the
Israeli consensus or not. Neither the Qassams
nor any negotiations process has managed to stop this Israeli fire."
Hamas leaders, as well as those of other Palestinian
organizations, have argued that the blind firing of Qassams is legitimate resistance to the Zionist
occupation. In view of the Zionist state’s merciless squeeze on the
Palestinian people, that cannot be denied.
The
effectiveness of such harassment, however, is another question.
There the ledger is heavily against the Palestinians. For the
occasional ordinary Israeli or the occasional chicken coop hit by a
Qassam, dozens of Palestinians have been
killed by the Israeli army. For example, on April 27, four members
of the Hamas military organization were
killed by Israeli soldiers as they tried to plant bombs near the
fence that divides Gaza from Israel.
The
Palestinian resistance obviously needs to find more effective
methods, more political methods that can unify the oppressed
population and mobilize sympathy in the Arab world and among
defenders of human rights around the world. But conversely, all
defenders of human rights and a rational coexistence among the
world’s peoples need to increase their efforts to defend the
Palestinians in order to reduce the pressure on them to resort to
such costly acts of desperation.
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