NOVANEWS
Dear friends and family,
Instead of having some good news today, I have to say that things are getting worse in Gaza. Resistance in the West Bank is growing–resistance to what is happening in Gaza and resistance to the Israeli military occupation. I read a very interesting article today that says the leadership at a crossroads similar to when they had to decide whether or not to leave Beirut just before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Today the decision is whether to stay with negotiations and the status quo that has not brought them any closer to a just peace or whether to listen to the street–those resisting in Gaza and West Bank. Things can hardly get worse. All Palestinians, especially those in Gaza are paying a very high price. The death toll in Gaza passed 1,000 today as teams fanned out in the Strip during the 12-hour cease-fire to uncover bodies under the rubble resulting from the Israeli shelling this past week.
First thing this morning while having breakfast, I saw a one-day old baby in a half-functioning incubator hanging on for dear life in a hospital in Gaza. The TV network called her “the baby without a name and without a mother”. She was born C-Section after her mother had been killed and apparently the father was no where and presumed dead too.
After breakfast I went to Salahidin St (the main street of East Jerusalem) to change some money. There was a terrible smell wherever I went–a smell like that of rotting animals. I went to a friend’s store and he told me that on Thursday night after Iftar (breaking of the fast at sundown during Ramadan) people come to walk on the streets just to be outside and do some shopping. The stores are opened again after Iftar. While people were out, the Israeli army sprayed “skunk water” on the sidewalks and on the streets of East Jerusalem, including on and into the shops. The smell was so bad people could not stand it. On Friday (yesterday) the shopkeepers got together and tried as best they could to wash the streets and sidewalks with water and disinfectant, but could not remove the smell. It was horrible, even today.
I will leave you with a short paragraph I received from an Israeli peace activist:
For all of us who do not remember, on September 29, 1967, about 3 months after the Six Day War, Haaretz daily published the following op-ed: “Our right to defend ourselves from annihilation does not give us the right to oppress others. Foreign occupation results in foreign rule, foreign rule results in resistance, resistance results in suppression, suppression results in terrorism and counter-terrorism. Victims of terrorism are usually innocents. Holding on to the Territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. Let us get out of the Occupied Territories now!”
Below are many articles from the Israeli magazine called “Occupation Magazine”. You can choose to read all of them, some of them, or none of them. [The articles from the OM that Kathy refers to and which are not below were sent yesterday. D]
Please distribute this e-mail widely.
Kathy
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8 The Guardian Monday, July 28, 2014
As the Gaza crisis deepens, boycotts can raise the price of Israel’s impunity
If governments refuse to act on Gaza, we must emulate the methods that isolated South Africa during apartheid
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/28/gaza-crisis-boycotts-israel-impunity-apartheid
Rafeef Ziadah
A woman walks on debris in Gaza. ‘The attack on Gaza is not a war between two equal sides. It is an onslaught by a powerful military state, armed and supported by the west, against an impoverished, besieged and displaced people.’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
I started my life under Israeli siege and bombardment. Even as a child I remember wondering, while the smell of artillery shells filled the Beirut air in 1982 and we ran for our lives: “why is the world allowing this to happen?” On the face of Gaza’s children today I see another generation born to the same trauma, and to the same question. How can this be allowed to happen?
Gaza has been under Israeli siege for seven years. Fishermen are shot when they go out to sea. Trade is blocked. Travel is nearly impossible. Water is contaminated. Hospital supplies are lacking. The economy is kept in controlled collapse, just short of catastrophe. Israel is rationing everything that enters Gaza, from calories to world literature.
After 21 days of bombing, Israel still refuses a comprehensive ceasefire that meets the minimal, unified demand of all Palestinians – to let people lead normal lives. This is not a war, let alone one of self-defence, but a punitive expedition aimed at maintaining the siege and illegal military occupation. Civilians, hospitals and residential blocks bear the brunt of the attack because the only “military” aim of onslaught is to cower Palestinians into complete submission.
In July 2004, the international court of justice ruled that Israel’s wall and the associated regime in the occupied West Bank of settlements, land confiscation, segregated roads and movement restrictions is illegal under international law, and that governments have a legal duty to act. However, 10 years on, the international community still averts its gaze, failing to lift a finger to hold Israel to account. EU foreign ministers, even after they heard news of the massacre of Shuja’iya, demanded the disarmament only of Gaza. Yet it is Israel’s hi-tech arsenal, funded by US aid, generous EU research grants and the flourishing multibillion arms trade, that rains down horror on civilians.
Lip-service aside, western governments support the siege of Gaza, the building of settlements and therefore Israel’s periodic massacres. The impunity granted to Israel is completely at odds with the democratic will of the people, as the current international outpouring of solidarity with Gaza shows.
If governments refuse to act, then the vast international support that Israel enjoys must be tackled by international grassroots civil society, using the methods that isolated South Africa during apartheid.
Since its launch by Palestinian civil society in 2005, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has won support from trade unions, political parties and grassroots movements, and from vast numbers of people all over the world expressing their ethical commitment by boycotting all Israeli products, not just those from the occupied territories. As a result, BDS pressure is now starting to have significant impacts.
Artists including Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Massive Attack and Faithless have refused to perform in Israel in response to calls for a cultural boycott. Public intellectuals such as Stephen Hawking, Alice Walker and Judith Butler have taken a similar stance. A major step was taken recently by a group of Nobel laureates and other public figures who published a letter in the Guardian calling on governments to immediately “implement a comprehensive and legally binding military embargo on Israel”.
Now the UK security firm G4S looks set to scale back its involvement in the Israeli prison system that holds Palestinian children without trial, following an international campaign that saw US churches and the Bill Gates Foundation divest from the company. John Lewis recently became the latest European retailer to stop trading with the Israeli firm SodaStream, whose share price has halved in a year. Leaders of Israel’s settler movement have bemoaned the fact that consumer boycotts mean they can no longer export to Europe. Israeli ministers describe BDS as a “strategic threat” to the status quo, and even the US now warns that Israel faces international isolation.
The attack on Gaza is not a war between two equal sides. It is an onslaught by a powerful military state, armed and supported by the west, against an impoverished, besieged and displaced people. The talk of governments is cheap. As long as talk is all there is, the life of our children remains even cheaper. We must step up our boycott, divestment and sanctions, campaigning internationally to end Israel’s impunity.
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9 France24 Friday, July 25, 2014
French lawyer files complaint against Israel at ICC
http://www.france24.com/en/20140725-israel-icc-war-crimes-gaza-complaint-filed/
Jack Guez, AFP
A French lawyer said on Friday that he had filed a complaint on behalf of the Palestinian justice minister at the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing Israel’s military of having carried out “war crimes” in the Gaza Strip.
More than 800 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, launched on July 8 in response to Hamas militants firing rockets into the Jewish state.
The complaint targets “war crimes committed by the Israeli army in June and July 2014 in Palestine” in the context of the operation known as Protective Edge, Gilles Devers told reporters.
“Israel, the occupying power, is carrying out a military operation which in principle and form violates the basis of international law,” he said. “Every day new crimes are committed and over 80 percent of the victims are civilians. Children, women, hospitals, UN schools… the Israeli soldiers respect nothing.
“This is a military attack against the Palestinian population.”
The Israeli offensive has left more than 5,200 Palestinians injured, according to emergency services in Gaza, and 33 Israeli soldiers and two civilians have died, too.
The Palestinian Authority, which has non-member observer state status at the United Nations, has not yet signed up to the Hague-based ICC, due to what Devers said were “political” quarrels over the Palestinians’ status.
But according to Devers, the complaint is still valid.
The UN Human Rights Council is launching a probe into Israel’s offensive in Gaza, with rights chief Navi Pillay saying the Jewish state’s military actions could amount to war crimes.
(AFP)
Date created : 2014-07-25
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10 New York Times Sunday, July 27, 2014
An Israel Without Illusions
David Grossman: Stop the Grindstone of Israeli-Palestinian Violence
By DAVID GROSSMAN
This story is included with an NYT Opinion subscription.
JERUSALEM — Israelis and Palestinians are imprisoned in what seems increasingly like a hermetically sealed bubble. Over the years, inside this bubble, each side has evolved sophisticated justifications for every act it commits.
Israel can rightly claim that no country in the world would abstain from responding to incessant attacks like those of Hamas, or to the threat posed by the tunnels dug from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Hamas, conversely, justifies its attacks on Israel by arguing that the Palestinians are still under occupation and that residents of Gaza are withering away under the blockade enforced by Israel.
Inside the bubble, who can fault Israelis for expecting their government to do everything it can to save children on the Nahal Oz kibbutz, or any of the other communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip, from a Hamas unit that might emerge from a hole in the ground? And what is the response to Gazans who say that the tunnels and rockets are their only remaining weapons against a powerful Israel? In this cruel and desperate bubble, both sides are right. They both obey the law of the bubble — the law of violence and war, revenge and hatred.
But the big question, as war rages on, is not about the horrors occurring every day inside the bubble, but rather it is this: How on earth can it be that we have been suffocating together inside this bubble for over a century? This question, for me, is the crux of the latest bloody cycle.
Since I cannot ask Hamas, nor do I purport to understand its way of thinking, I ask the leaders of my own country, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessors: How could you have wasted the years since the last conflict without initiating dialogue, without even making the slightest gesture toward dialogue with Hamas, without attempting to change our explosive reality? Why, for these past few years, has Israel avoided judicious negotiations with the moderate and more conversable sectors of the Palestinian people — an act that could also have served to pressure Hamas? Why have you ignored, for 12 years, the Arab League initiative that could have enlisted moderate Arab states with the power to impose, perhaps, a compromise on Hamas? In other words: Why is it that Israeli governments have been incapable, for decades, of thinking outside the bubble?
And yet the current round between Israel and Gaza is somehow different. Beyond the pugnacity of a few politicians fanning the flames of war, behind the great show of “unity” — in part authentic, mostly manipulative — something about this war is managing, I think, to direct many Israelis’ attention toward the mechanism that lies at the foundation of the vain and deadly repetitive “situation.” Many Israelis who have refused to acknowledge the state of affairs are now looking into the futile cycle of violence, revenge and counter-revenge, and they are seeing our reflection: a clear, unadorned image of Israel as a brilliantly creative, inventive, audacious state that for over a century has been circling the grindstone of a conflict that could have been resolved years ago.
If we put aside for a moment the rationales we use to buttress ourselves against simple human compassion toward the multitude of Palestinians whose lives have been shattered in this war, perhaps we will be able to see them, too, as they trudge around the grindstone right beside us, in tandem, in endless blind circles, in numbing despair.
I do not know what the Palestinians, including Gazans, really think at this moment. But I do have a sense that Israel is growing up. Sadly, painfully, gnashing its teeth, but nonetheless maturing — or, rather, being forced to. Despite the belligerent declarations of hotheaded politicians and pundits, beyond the violent onslaught of right-wing thugs against anyone whose opinion differs from theirs, the main artery of the Israeli public is gaining sobriety.
The left is increasingly aware of the potent hatred against Israel — a hatred that arises not just from the occupation — and of the Islamic fundamentalist volcano that threatens the country. It also recognizes the fragility of any agreement that might be reached here. More people on the left understand now that the right wing’s fears are not mere paranoia, that they address a real and crucial threat.
I would hope that on the right, too, there is now greater recognition — even if it is accompanied by anger and frustration — of the limits of force; of the fact that even a powerful country like ours cannot simply act as it wishes; and that in the age we live in there are no unequivocal victories, only an illusory “image of victory” through which we can easily see the truth: that in war there are only losers. There is no military solution to the real anguish of the Palestinian people, and as long as the suffocation felt in Gaza is not alleviated, we in Israel will not be able to breathe freely either.
Israelis have known this for decades, and for decades we have refused to truly comprehend it. But perhaps this time we understand a little better; perhaps we have caught a glimpse of the reality of our lives from a slightly different angle. It is a painful understanding, and a threatening one, certainly, but it is an understanding that could be the start of a shift. It might bring home for Israelis how critical and urgent peace with the Palestinians is, and how it can also be a basis for peace with the other Arab states. It may portray peace — such a disparaged concept here these days — as the best option, and the most secure one, available to Israel.
Will a similar comprehension emerge on the other side, in Hamas? I have no way of knowing. But the Palestinian majority, represented by Mahmoud Abbas, has already decided in favor of negotiation and against terrorism. Will the government of Israel, after this bloody war, after losing so many young and beloved people, continue to avoid at least trying this option? Will it continue to ignore Mr. Abbas as an essential component to any resolution? Will it keep dismissing the possibility that an agreement with West Bank Palestinians might gradually lead to an improved relationship with the 1.8 million residents of Gaza?
Here in Israel, as soon as the war is over, we must begin the process of creating a new partnership, an internal alliance that will alter the array of narrow interest groups that controls us. An alliance of those who comprehend the fatal risk of continuing to circle the grindstone; those who understand that our borderlines no longer separate Jews from Arabs, but people who long to live in peace from those who feed, ideologically and emotionally, on continued violence.
Continue reading the main story
I believe that Israel still contains a critical mass of people, both left-wing and right-wing, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs, who are capable of uniting — with sobriety, with no illusions — around a few points of agreement to resolve the conflict with our neighbors.
There are many who still “remember the future” (an odd phrase, but an accurate one in this context) — the future they want for Israel, and for Palestine. There are still — but who knows for how much longer — people in Israel who understand that if we sink into apathy again we will be leaving the arena to those who would drag us fervently into the next war, igniting every possible locus of conflict in Israeli society as they go.
If we do not do this, we will all — Israelis and Palestinians, blindfolded, our heads bowed in stupor, collaborating with hopelessness — continue to turn the grindstone of this conflict, which crushes and erodes our lives, our hopes and our humanity.
David Grossman is the author, most recently, of “Falling Out of Time.” His other books include “To the End of the Land,” “Death as a Way of Life” and “The Yellow Wind.” This essay was translated by Jessica Cohen from the Hebrew.
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11 Palestine Chronicle Friday, July 25, 2014
Israel’s Genocide in Gaza will Achieve No Goal
What Israel is sowing today, it will surely harvest tomorrow. (Safa.os/Flicker)
What Israel is sowing today, it will surely harvest tomorrow. (Safa.os/Flicker)
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/israels-genocide-in-gaza-will-achieve-no-goal/#.U9Z8dIkcTMM
By Ahmed Meiloud
For over two weeks, the Gaza strip (already besieged for the past 7 years) has been subjected to continuous bombardment from air and sea. This is the third war to be waged on the strip in the span of 5 years and it is more than likely going to be the deadliest. Approximately 800 Gazans, mostly children and women, have already been murdered.
In the past 10 days, the Israelis have added their ground force to the fire power, using heavy caliber artillery and tanks to shell the densely populated strip, compounding the suffering of the population and increasing the scope and space of its ongoing massacre.
For those living in Gaza, language cannot depict the scale of the tragedy. Many families have lost all or most of their members. As one health official in Gaza said, “Entire families have been wiped out of the civil record.” This doesn’t seem to be the result of simple failure to observe the principle of “disproportionality,” but rather an evident disregard for life. Nowhere seems to be sacred or safe in the face of an onslaught, where residential areas are considered legitimate targets. Mosques, hospitals, ambulances, medical teams, UN run schools and children playing soccer on the beach have all been targeted.
The images look barbaric enough for anyone viewing, not experiencing them. But for the Palestinians, this is not the first time they find themselves before this ordeal. For the past 60 years, Israel has been slaughtering Palestinians wholesale with impunity. Ordering or participating in killing, displacing and dispossessing Palestinians are amongst the few things that any successful Israeli politician would have done at one point of his/her public career. As a nation, Israel was created by that very process of decimation, dispossessing, and displacement of Palestinians.
Gaza is a living testimony of that process. Most of its residents, who have been starved for the past 7 years and now bombed, are families who were originally forced in 1948 and 1967 to flee their hometowns and villages, which were subsequently annexed by Israel.
Contrary to the image of an Israeli victim of Arab terrorism, which many Western politicians allege, what is indeed taking place is the reverse. The suffering of the Palestinians as a result of the terror of the Israeli state is immeasurable. Beyond death and dispossession, generations of Palestinian children have been forced to endure unbearable psychological scars, as they were made refugees time and again.
Despite this, it is the Palestinians who are seen to be responsible for the war by much of Western media and the official rhetoric emerging from most Western capitals. In the face of the enormity of the Palestinian suffering, Western leaders (such as US Secretary of State John Kerry, UK Foreign Minister, Philip Hammond) have chosen to blame the victim and side with the oppressor.
In siding with the oppressor, these leaders invoke Israel’s right to self-defense. However, the facts on the ground don’t support this claim. A close look at the figures of the dead and the injured suggests the exact opposite. Israel is committing genocide, not engaging in self-defense.
In the past 17 days of the one-sided onslaught, there are over 780 Palestinians who were killed in targeting residential areas in Gaza. Over 4,000 have also been injured. The figure of internally displaced Palestinians has surpassed 120,000. The figures on the Israeli side are lower. Only dozens were killed and injured. The difference in both cases is not just in the asymmetry of the death toll. The nature of those killed is also indicative of the kind of conflict we are witnessing and the level of deception in the comments and communiqué issued in Western capitals about it.
Of the Israeli fatalities, 94% are military personnel (30 out of the 32 are soldiers). Most of those injured are soldiers as well. The ratio of combatant to civilian death on the Palestinian side is starkly different. According to the UN and the health services in Gaza, over 80% of those killed in Israeli raids and continuous shelling are civilians and one third are children. The UK Telegraph has recently published the names of 132 of these children. Today this number has risen to 181 according to UNICEF.
The genocidal nature of this onslaught is also clear from the circumstances of death as well. All the Palestinians killed, so far, were killed inside Palestinian borders, within residential areas and often as they stayed in their homes. In contrast, all Israeli fatalities (except two, the total number of those died as a result of rockets fired from Gaza) were engaged in combat.
Given the asymmetry of death, of the ratio of civilians to militants, and given the Israeli unchallenged dominance of air and sea space, it is genocide or ethnic cleansing that is more befitting descriptor of what Israel is doing in Gaza. Western leaders’ argument that Israel is defending itself is simply not supported by facts. It is morally reprehensible and inexcusable.
The Israelis claim that they are trying to neutralize the rocketry of the Palestinian resistance, which target Israeli towns. This claim is further strengthened by a corollary claim that Hamas, which runs the strip, is a terrorist organization. Western and Israeli leaders allege that it targets civilians. Today, the UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, speaking in Cairo, repeated the same claim and blamed Hamas for starting this round of conflict. But these claims are neither true, nor do they justify the savagery of the current onslaught on Gaza, where civilians, women and children, not rocket launchers are bearing the brunt of the assault.
The insinuation that Hamas has started this round of conflict is a lie. The current round started after three Israeli teenage settlers (one at least of whom was a soldier) were kidnapped and later found murdered. Although the event took place in the West Bank, and although no Palestinian group claimed responsibility, Israeli government immediately pointed fingers at Hamas. Hamas has denied involvement, knowledge of the teenagers’ kidnaping or who did it until it became news. Some press reports have pointed out that Israel deliberately misled its public and knew of the of the victims’ deaths and whereabouts days before it made that information public. A recent report in one German channel suggests that the Israeli government simply used the event as a pretext to attack Gaza. Despite its knowledge of the teenagers’ death, the Israeli government continued to raid and arrest Palestinian activists under the pretext that it was conducting a search for the abducted.
In the process, Israel arrested hundreds of Palestinians and killed a dozen. Many of the arrested were prisoners who were originally freed as a part of a prisoners’ swap with Hamas in 2011. This was not only a breach of the terms of the prisoners’ exchange but a clear provocation to involve Hamas. To add more fuel to the fire, Israeli settlers kidnapped and burned a Palestinian boy alive. It is within these circumstances that the resistance groups in Gaza began firing missiles toward Israeli cities in retaliation to the collective punishment, mass arrests and killing of Palestinian activists.
Beyond the immediate context, Israel deliberately breached the 2012 ceasefire brokered by Egypt, which mandated Israel to lift the siege on Gaza. Israel did the opposite. It tightened the siege. Since the fall of Morsi, Egypt joined Israelis in the effort to isolate Gaza, closing its borders, making the already unbearable situation catastrophic.
It is now the position of the Palestinian groups that Israel must first cease its onslaught on Gaza and honor its earlier agreements. Quieting the missiles in Gaza, without lifting the siege, will only mean more suffering to the crowded strip. Israel’s choice to violate its agreements and to focus its military campaign on residential areas is what defines the current conflict and manufactures the tragedy. The solution therefore lies in integrating Gaza through trade with the rest of the world.
The notion advanced in an article published today on the Foreign Policy’s website that Israel is compelled to pursue “an eye for a tooth” policy to establish deterrence is not only a disingenuous attempt to make palatable the cowardly mass killing of civilians. It is misguided in essence as well. Israel has exhausted all violent means to force Palestinians to submission and has so far earned neither rest nor reverence. Deterrence has always been an Israeli policy objective and has always failed. Despite its disproportionality, and Western praise of its efficient military establishment, Israel is not safer today than the time when it pursued deterrence against Palestinians armed mostly with stones. Rather than being a constructive course that would contribute to a peaceful future, Israeli attempts to bomb Palestinians to submission is only going to create further risks for its future generations and diminish the prospect for any peace. It is relatively cheaper for the Israelis to withdraw from the Occupied Territories in 1967 and to stop besieging Gaza from sea, air and ground.
Despite the factual errors about the 2006 war on Lebanon in FP’s article, the allusion to a parallel with Gaza is a stretch. Unlike Hezbollah in Lebanon, who kidnapped soldiers to trade for its prisoners in Israel, an objective it successfully achieved, the Palestinian Resistance is driven by a much bigger and, for that matter, a more just cause. Resistance against occupation is enshrined in all laws and highly regarded by all cultures (including the West whose moral superiority the FP’s article praises), and it is not going to stop regardless of what the outcome of the current killing spree in Gaza is. Israel’s deterrence has been eroding and whatever moral claims it had is also vanishing into thin air with every child blown to bits and pieces by its artillery or bombers. That trend will continue.
The Palestinians do not stand alone and the Israeli brutality will only rekindle the anti-Israeli sentiment in the region. The fact that many of the neighbors are either busy in their own civil wars or are shackled by despots is not a guarantee of a stable future. The region is going through a radical change, and within a decade, Israel will be fully surrounded by actors who are not fettered by fear of loss either of lives or infrastructure. Nor would these societies of warriors be shackled by the international conventions, which the Israelis and the Western governments backing them make mockery of at the moment, feeling that military superiority makes them beyond reproach.
What Israel is sowing today, it will surely harvest tomorrow, and no amount of pontification from Western missionary professors, driven by a contradictory mission to on the hand justify mass murder and on the other hand flaunt the supremacy of Western war ethics, will be of much use to them.
– Ahmed Meiloud is a PhD student at the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. His research interests include studying the various movements of political Islam across the Arab World, with special focus on the works of the thinkers, jurists and public intellectuals who shape the moderate strands of Islamism. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
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12 Haaretz Monday, July 28, 2014
Israel should consider Hamas’ cease-fire offer more seriously
Could Hamas be offering Israel the best interim agreement ever offered by an Arab administration?
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.607604
By Nicolas Pelham
Before dismissing Hamas’ offer for a cease-fire, Israel might pause for a moment to ask whether it is looking a gift-horse in the mouth and then slaughtering it. Unlike Hamas’s previous terms for a ten-year hudna, or truce, the movement is not demanding an Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem, or indeed any settlement, or one inch of territory. It is not pinning an armistice on the return of one refugee. It simply asks for normal relations: The opportunity to trade and move across cease-fire lines.
On the face of it, this looks the best offer Israel ever had: The prospect of an Arab administration offering Israel an interim normalization of ties without first concluding a final status agreement would be a breakthrough at any time. And it’s coming from the region’s seminal Islamist movement at a time when a regional Jihadi advance could offer Israel a protective bulwark more strategic than anything Iron Dome has to offer.
A sensible response might have been to test how serious Hamas really is. Would its commanders negotiate a limitation of forces agreement for the 10-year period and commit to remain, like other revolutionary movements achieving statehood, in their barracks? In return for Israel’s acceptance of Palestinian access and movement out of Gaza, would Hamas reciprocate by guaranteeing the safety of Israelis travelling to and trading with Gaza? Would its immigration authorities accept Israeli travel documents? If unfettered Israeli access is too much to stomach for all – could Israel experiment with those who are supposed to work in conflicts like journalists and physicians, and then in six-month increments including construction workers and engineers, and ultimately tourists curious to visit Gaza’s quirky hotels? If Israel provides passage for Muslim pilgrims to al-Aqsa, would they safeguard the passage of Jews to the shrine of Yisrael Najarah, Gaza’s 17th century chief rabbi and author of Sabbath zemirot?
The temptation would be to assume that the Qassam Brigades would simply use the interim to rebuild their fortifications. But at least some of Hamas’s leaders have long spoken of a hudna less as a timeout for rearmament than an opportunity to strive for a transformation of relations. De facto statehood has many advantages for Hamas as well as Israel’s leading coalition partner, Likud, whose charter upholds Jewish sovereignty over all the Land of Israel and precludes a Palestinian state. And while government-to-government agreements are essential for a cessation of conflict, they argue like many on Israel’s right, only people-to-people relations can end the conflict. Might kibbutzniks who have spent the past decade ducking mortar shells along Gaza’s border again dine in its fish restaurants? Might those religious Jews who claim such a longing for Gaza’s Jewish shrines find a way of returning to pray rather than prey in a tank?
The answers could ripple far beyond Gaza’s 350 square kilometers. By returning to the strategy of Gaza First, the international community first adopted after Israel’s 2005 engagement, Gaza could offer a model for normalizing relations which might halt the downward spiral to ever greater Arab and Israeli delegitimization and demonization of each other? Might normalization on the Gaza model serve as a step onwards towards, rather than a precondition of, a final settlement, in the West Bank and Israel, and even further afield in Lebanon and North Africa?
But while there is much to talk about, there are perilously few channels for doing so. If the current round of fighting is in part the result of a series of misunderstandings over their last cease-fire agreement, Israel is paying the price for refusing contacts with Gaza’s authorities and cajoling its allies into following suit. The recourse to war was hardly Hamas’s first choice for lifting Gaza’s blockade. It has tried repeated cease-fire agreements with Israel, the formalizing of border trade to replace the tunnel economy with Egypt, and the handover of the reins of government to the Palestinian Authority, in the hope that the outside world might deal with them instead. Nothing worked. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi instead began tightening the screws. Only when Israel and Gaza began fighting again did the world seem to listen.
A better way might have been for the belligerents to thrash out the issues themselves. If Benjamin Netanyahu and Ismail Haniya cannot bring themselves to sit at the same table at Erez, they should instruct their senior generals and, with the support of President Mahmoud Abbas, conclude an armistice agreement and open bridges arrangements. Israel has done it after previous wars with similarly intractably Arab foes.
But of course the death of 1000 Palestinians and 45 Israelis is too few to induce a sea-change. Buoyed by their regional allies, Israel’s leaders will soon recover from their shock. The Turkish-Qatar camp and the Egyptian-led anti-Islamist alliance will continue to treat Gaza as their political football, squabbling over whether the Brotherhood’s last experiment in government lives or dies. For a want of better leaders, Israel and Hamas will continue to serve as proxies for their great regional game and reject America’s offer of a middle path. At the end of the day, it takes more courage to make peace than war.
Nicolas Pelham is a correspondent for The Economist based in Jerusalem. He has been based in Cairo, Rabat and Baghdad and is the author of A New Muslim Order (2008) and co-author of A History of the Middle East (2010).
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13 Interview w Gideon Levy followed by one of Nathan Thrall on Democracy Now: The interview with Levy begins at about 1/3 of the video. Levy returns briefly after Thrall, whose remarks are definitely also important.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/22/israeli_writer_gideon_levy_if_netanyahu
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13. Haaretz Monday, July 28, 2014
Israel’s other war, now on a street near you
Netanyahu must speak out against the increasing number of violent assaults on Arabs and leftist who express opposition to the war.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.607516
Haaretz Editorial
An internal war over the rule of democracy and law is underway now in Israel. That war is drowned out by the roar of the cannons and the pictures of soldiers’ funerals and of the destruction in Gaza. Its harshest and most frightening manifestations are violent assaults by extreme right-wing activists, mainly on Arabs but also on leftists and people who express opposition to the war.
On Friday, about a month after the abduction and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shoafat, two young Palestinians from Beit Hanina were beaten and seriously injured. According to their testimony and that of passersby, they were attacked by a group of Jews only because they were Arab.
“A man came from the direction of [the Jerusalem neighborhood] Neveh Ya’akov,” one of the victims, Samer Mahfouz, told Haaretz. “He said ‘give me a cigarette.’ I told him I don’t have any, and he heard I’m Arab and went away, coming back with his friends, maybe 12 people. They had sticks and iron bars and they hit us over the head,” he said.
The incident shows that the murder of Abu Khdeir was not a lone horrific incident, but part of a wave of violence that is becoming the norm.
Verbal violence has long taken over the social networks, with pages dedicated to preaching the murder of Arabs, marking and punishing “traitors” and organizations calling for action against them. That verbal violence is now pouring into the street with terrifying speed, translating into events like those in Shoafat and Beit Hanina, where gangs decide to “take the law into their own hands” and punish those “who are disloyal to the State of Israel.” The only crime of the victims is that they are Arab.
These criminals are not “taking the law into their own hands,” they are trampling it underfoot, turning Israel into a violent country where bloodshed is allowed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right wing for more than two decades now, must speak out. The prime minister must stop the moral and legal decline in Israeli society, which endangers it no less than external threats.
Netanyahu must state loud and clear that violence committed by extreme right-wing factions will not be permitted. He must denounce assaults on Arabs and leftists and call for calm in a charged public atmosphere that could cost more lives.
Netanyahu’s many tasks – the war, diplomatic talks, pledging security for Israelis – must not be an excuse for silence. If he does not speak out, he will not be able to wash his hands of the next tragedy that might happen.