In response to the article
"Voices missing from Gaza debate"
by Israel's Ambassador to Australia,
HE Yuval Rotem
published in The
Sydney Morning Herald
on 4 February 2008
http://www.smh.com.au/news/
opinion/voices-missing-from
-gaza-debate/2008/02
/03/1201973735204.html
by Sonja Karkar
Israel's ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem
has had his say on Gaza. Now,
the Palestinians need a hearing in this newspaper
if Mr Rotem really wants a fair
debate.
The same principle of mutuality applies to
negotiations for peace. Without it, there can be
no forward movement. In other words, both
sides must keep their promises.
So far, Israel's demands ignore the fact that
Hamas has repeatedly observed
unilateral ceasefires. These periods without
rocket fire from Gaza were never reciprocated by Israel.
In the last two years, Israel has killed over
800 Palestinians, and last year alone, Israel's
attacks killed 141 children.
Thousands more have been severely maimed and
incapacitated during Israel's raids and aerial bombardments.
Most are civilians.
Israel justifies these attacks because Palestinian
rocket fire from Gaza has killed 11 Israelis living
in the adjacent town of Sderot in four years.
There is no doubt that the town's neighbourhoo
closest to Gaza is vulnerable and that the Israelis
living there are fearful of these indiscriminate rocket attacks. Equally, the Palestinians in Gaza are fearful of Israel's bombardments.
But this is not an equal fight. Gaza is illegally
occupied by Israel, despite Israel claiming that it
no longer occupies the territory. However,
if total military control of 1.5 million people
is not occupation, then it can only be something much
worse. On the pretext of wanting to oust the
democratically-elected Hamas government,
Israel subjected the Gazans to the
most punitive sanctions for two years,
only to intensify these measures in a
recent siege that has reduced the people to
a state of desperation, as seen
by the mass breakout and human flood
pouring into Egypt to obtain food, fuel
and medicines.
The homemade rockets are a consequence
of 40 years of Israel's US-backed
policies and practices intended to
ghettoize Gaza and further fragment any
future Palestinian state, though the
true picture now emerging, is much more
sinister.
The Palestinians are historically the victims in
this conflict and have a legal right to resist
– a right that Israel invokes readily enough when it
claims self-defence against the rockets from Gaza.
Not by any measure do
those rockets pose an existential threat to
Israel itself, nor do they
warrant the human devastation Israel's
vastly superior military arsenal
inflicts – not morally nor in law.
Just as those living in Sderot are civilians and
are understandably terrified, so too are most
of the Palestinians living in Gaza. While the
rockets barely reach Sderot, Israel's F-16 fighter
planes, helicopter gunships, naval warships,
tanks, bulldozers and sophisticated military
hardware explode with deadly precision in
Gaza's overcrowded heartland.
The difference is that the people directly
affected in Sderot can be
evacuated, but the Palestinians have nowhere
to go except to scurry about
like rats in a cage. In truth, neither population
should have to suffer
what could be easily resolved in a mutual
ceasefire so that proper negotiations can proceed.
The problem is that Israel has not kept its promises.
Not only has Israel's relentless aggression undermined
negotiations, but so have Israel's
deliberate breaches of agreements, conditions,
resolutions and international law.
In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem,
Israel continues to build illegal Israeli-only
housing estates - known as settlements - deep inside
Palestinian territory, as well as an illegal
Separation Wall/Fence that is
supposed to protect Israeli settlers from the
"terrorists". These so-called
"terrorists" are simply Palestinians who
deeply resent their land being
taken from them, who are outraged when
their houses and farmlands are
deliberately destroyed, and who are
unjustly deprived of their most basic
water needs while settlers fill their pools
and sprinkle their lawns. It is
no wonder that Israelis live in a state of paranoia,
fearful of retribution.
Yet, Israel's expansionist settler program shows
no signs of ceasing.
Both the settlements, and in recent times the Wall,
have so drastically
reduced what has remained of Palestine,
that no viable, contiguous
Palestinian state is possible at all. Israel's
intentions are clear and
publicly stated: it wants all of Palestine
for its long-held goal of an
exclusively Jewish state. To achieve
that though, Israel must rid itself of
the Palestinians - the 1.5 million who live as
second-class citizens of
Israel and the 4.5 million living under
occupation. That means finding a
solution to rid Israel of almost 6 million
Palestinians suffering various
degrees of discrimination, apartheid and
oppression. What is more, it
totally negates the right of return for
another 4 million Palestinian
refugees forced to make their homes in camps or
elsewhere in the diaspora.
A world conditioned to genocide of systematic
wholesale slaughter and mass
graves finds it difficult to accept genocide in
slow motion. However, this
is precisely the existential threat faced by
the Palestinians. Maps from
the UN Partition of 1947 to the present day
tell the shocking story more
dramatically than any words.
However, the immense human suffering of
Palestinian dispossession, displacement,
transfer, exile, occupation,
collective punishment and mass imprisonment
is constantly drowned out by
Israel's claims to unending victimhood
built on the legacy of the holocaust
– a different time, different place, different
people, and different
narrative.
Mr Rotem's article is a duplicitous portrayal
of facts on the ground and the
actual record of developments that has
led to the current situation. Israel
does not act "only in self-defence".
The first significant rocket barrage
launched out of Gaza came in response to
Israel's mass rounding up and
arrest of Palestinians in 2005.
It was a deliberately planned provocation
that allowed Israel to respond with a deadly
operation called "First Rain"
to gauge international reaction to a new
strategy of dealing with an
unwanted human problem.
There was no public outcry over the killings,
maimings and destruction of
Palestinian society, so Israel escalated its
operations, and inevitably, the
distinction between "civilian" and
"non-civilian" targets became blurred.
It allowed Israel to implement its latest punishing
siege of extreme deprivation and controlled
mass starvation of the entire population evoking
only the most feeble of protests from
the international community.
To suggest that it was Hamas which withheld
the electricity from the people
and that it diverted this electricity to
weapon-producing factories is
mendacious in the extreme.
Israel has openly claimed that its suffocating
siege of Gaza was necessary to force the Palestinians into overthrowing the Hamas government.
That ploy in itself is absurd: recent polls have shown
that whatever prior dissatisfaction some
Palestinians felt against Hamas for
challenging the legitimacy of the provisional
Fatah government in the West
Bank, they are now more firmly behind
Hamas than before. And naturally,
their anger is directed towards Israel.
It was no secret that Israel armed Fatah's
security forces to create chaos
in Gaza with the intention of
Hamas, and when that failed,
Israel began its boycotts and siege.
The last thing that Israel wanted was
for Hamas to be involved in the Annapolis peace
talks because Hamas would
have demanded from Israel painful concessions
on Palestinian rights in
exchange for an indefinite truce – a situation
that Israel has so far
managed to avoid in 14 years of talks.
The Annapolis conference, which went
ahead without Hamas, has not come up
with a single positive outcome for the
beleaguered Palestinians, except what
Mr Rotem calls "a first discussion in
a series of many", and on the record of past
failures, these talks will
continue in similar vein until there is no
Palestine left to negotiate.
Israel has to do much more than
"engage in negotiations to seek a peaceful
settlement in the future". It has to stop
the illegal settlement
building, it has to stop increasing the
restrictions on movement within the
occupied Palestinian territories and it
needs to agree to a mutual
ceasefire. Furthermore, Israel must
engage with Hamas. As long as it
refuses to show good faith in its pursuit of peace,
talks and debates will
remain mere empty rhetoric while
Palestinian suffering will continue
unchecked. And, if the media persists in
publishing articles seeking to
justify Israel's nefarious position without
providing a fair and proper
balance to Israel's narrative,
the Palestinians may well ask at what point
will they be given a voice in this debate?
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