Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai's
much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a
"shoah" -- the Hebrew word for the Holocaust --
was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole
about the army's plans for an imminent full-scale
invasion of the Strip.
More significantly, however, his comment offers a
disturbing indication of the Israeli army's longer-term
strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Vilnai, a former general, was interviewed by Army
Radio as Israel was in the midst of unleashing a series
of air and ground strikes on populated areas of Gaza
that killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of
whom were civilians and 25 of whom were children,
according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
The interview also took place in the wake of a
rocket fired from Gaza that killed a student in
Sderot and other rockets that hit the centre of
the southern city of Ashkelon. Vilnai stated:
"The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach
a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring
upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all
our might to defend ourselves."
His comment, picked up by the Reuters wire service,
was soon making headlines around the world. Presumably
uncomfortable with a senior public figure in Israel
comparing his government's policies to the Nazi plan
to exterminate European Jewry, many news services
referred to Vilnai's clearly articulated threat as a
"warning," as though he was prophesying a cataclysmic
natural event over which he and the Israeli army
had no control.
Nonetheless, officials understood the damage that
the translation from Hebrew of Vilnai's remark could
do to Israel's image abroad. And sure enough,
Palestinian leaders were soon exploiting the
comparison, with both the Palestinian president,
Mahmoud Abbas, and the exiled Hamas leader,
Khaled Meshaal, stating that a "holocaust"
was unfolding in Gaza.
Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was
launching a large "hasbara" (propaganda) campaign
through its diplomats, as the Jerusalem Post reported.
In a related move, a spokesman for Vilnai explained
that the word "shoah" also meant "disaster"; this, rather
than a holocaust, was what the minister had been
referring to. Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.
However, no one in Israel was fooled. "Shoah" --
which literally means "burnt offering" -- was long
ago reserved for the Holocaust, much as the Arabic
word "nakba" (or "catastrophe") is nowadays used
only to refer to the Palestinians' dispossession by
Israel in 1948. Certainly, the Israeli media in English
translated Vilnai's use of "shoah" as "holocaust."
But this is not the first time that Vilnai has
expressed extreme views about Gaza's future.
Last summer he began quietly preparing a plan on
behalf of his boss, the Defense Minister Ehud Barak,
to declare Gaza a "hostile entity" and dramatically
reduce the essential services supplied by Israel --
as long-time occupier -- to its inhabitants, including
electricity and fuel. The cuts were finally implemented
late last year after the Israeli courts gave their blessing.
Vilnai and Barak, both former military men like so many
other Israeli politicians, have been "selling" this policy -
- of choking off basic services to Gaza -- to Western public opinion ever since.
Under international law, Israel as the occupying power
has an obligation to guarantee the welfare of the civilian
population in Gaza, a fact forgotten when the media
reported Israel's decision to declare Gaza a hostile entity.
The pair have therefore claimed tendentiously that the
humanitarian needs of Gazans are still being safeguarded
by the limited supplies being allowed through and that
therefore the measures do not constitute collective
punishment.
Last October, after a meeting of defense officials, Vilnai
said of Gaza: "Because this is an entity that is hostile to
us, there is no reason for us to supply them with
electricity beyond the minimum required to prevent
a crisis."
Three months later Vilnai went further, arguing that
Israel should cut off "all responsibility" for Gaza, though,
in line with the advice of Israel's attorney general, he has
been careful not to suggest that this would punish
ordinary Gazans excessively.
Instead he said disengagement should be taken to
its logical conclusion:
"We want to stop supplying electricity to them, stop
supplying them with water and medicine, so that it
would come from another place."
He suggested that Egypt might be forced to take
over responsibility.
Vilnai's various comments are a reflection of the new
thinking inside the defense and political establishments
about where next to move Israel's conflict with the
Palestinians.
After the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in
1967, a consensus in the Israeli military quickly emerged
in favor of maintaining control through a colonial policy of
divide and rule, by factionalizing the Palestinians and then
keeping them feuding.
As long as the Palestinians were too divided to resist
the occupation effectively, Israel could carry on with
its settlement program and "creeping annexation" of
the occupied territories, as the Defence Minister of the
time, Moshe Dayan, called it.
Israel experimented with various methods of undermining
the secular Palestinian nationalism of the PLO, which
threatened to galvanize a general resistance to the occupation.
In particular Israel established local anti-PLO militias known
as the Village Leagues and later backed the Islamic
fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, which
would morph into Hamas.
Rivalry between Hamas and the PLO, controlled by Fatah,
has been the backdrop to Palestinian politics in the occupied
territories ever since, and has moved centre stage since
Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Growing
antagonism fuelled by Israel and the US, as an article
in Vanity Fair confirmed this week, culminated in the
physical separation of a Fatah-run West Bank from a
Hamas-ruled Gaza last summer.
The leaderships of Fatah and Hamas are now divided not
only geographically but also by their diametrically opposed
strategies for dealing with Israel's occupation.
Fatah's control of the West Bank is being shored up by
Israel because its leaders, including President Mahmoud
Abbas, have made it clear that they are prepared to
cooperate with an interminable peace process that will
give Israel the time it needs to annex yet more of the
territory.
Hamas, on the other hand, is under no illusions about the
peace process, having seen the Jewish settlers leave but
Israel's military control and its economic siege only tighten
from arm's length.
In charge of an open-air prison, Hamas has refused to
surrender to Israeli diktats and has proven invulnerable to
Israeli and US machinations to topple it. Instead it has
begun advancing the only two feasible forms of resistance
available: rocket attacks over the fence surrounding Gaza,
and popular mass action.
And this is where the concerns of Vilnai and others emanate
from. Both forms of resistance, if Hamas remains in charge
of Gaza and improves its level of organization and the clarity
of its vision, could over the long term unravel Israel's plans to
annex the occupied territories -- once their Palestinian
inhabitants have been removed.
First, Hamas' development of more sophisticated and
longer-range rockets threatens to move Hamas' resistance
to a much larger canvas than the backwater of the small
development town of Sderot. The rockets that landed last
week in Ashkelon, one of the country's largest cities, could
be the harbingers of political change in Israel.
Hizbullah proved in the 2006 Lebanon war that Israeli
domestic opinion quickly crumbled in the face of sustained
rocket attacks. Hamas hopes to achieve the same outcome.
After the strikes on Ashkelon, the Israeli media was filled
with reports of angry mobs taking to the city's streets and
burning tires in protest at their government's failure to
protect them. That is their initial response. But in Sderot,
where the attacks have been going on for years, the mayor,
Eli Moyal, recently called for talks with Hamas. A poll
published in the Haaretz daily showed that 64 per cent of
Israelis now agree with him. That figure may increase
further if the rocket threat grows.
The fear among Israel's leaders is that "creeping annexation"
of the occupied territories cannot be achieved if the Israeli
public starts demanding that Hamas be brought to the
negotiating table.
Second, Hamas' mobilization last month of Gazans to
break through the wall at Rafah and pour into Egypt has
demonstrated to Israel's politician-generals like Barak and
Vilnai that the Islamic movement has the potential, as yet
unrealized, to launch a focused mass peaceful protest against
the military siege of Gaza.
Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem,
noted that this scenario "frightens the army more than a
violent conflict with armed Palestinians." Israel fears that
the sight of unarmed women and children being executed
for the crime of trying to free themselves from the prison
Israel has built for them may give the lie to the idea that
the disengagement ended the occupation.
When several thousand Palestinians held a demonstration
a fortnight ago in which they created a human chain along
part of Gaza's fence with Israel, the Israeli army could
hardly contain its panic. Heavy artillery batteries were
brought to the perimeter and snipers were ordered to
shoot protesters' legs if they approached the fence.
As Amira Hass, Haaretz's veteran reporter in the occupied
territories, observed, Israel has so far managed to terrorize
most ordinary Gazans into a paralyzed inactivity on this
front. In the main Palestinians have refused to take the
"suicidal" course of directly challenging their imprisonment
by Israel, even peacefully: "The Palestinians do not need
warnings or reports to know the Israeli soldiers shoot the
unarmed as well, and they also kill women and children."
But that may change as the siege brings ever greater misery to Gaza.
As a result, Israel's immediate priorities are: to provoke
Hamas regularly into violence to deflect it from the path
of organizing mass peaceful protest; to weaken the Hamas
leadership through regular executions; and to ensure that
an effective defense against the rockets is developed,
including technology like Barak's pet project, Iron Dome,
to shield the country from attacks.
In line with these policies, Israel broke the latest period
of "relative calm" in Gaza by initiating the executions of
five Hamas members last Wednesday. Predictably,
Hamas responded by firing into Israel a barrage of rockets
that killed the student in Sderot, in turn justifying the
bloodbath in Gaza.
But a longer-term strategy is also required and is
being devised by Vilnai and others. Aware both that
the Gaza prison is tiny and its resources scarce and that
the Palestinian population is growing at a rapid rate,
Israel needs a more permanent solution. It must find a
way to stop the growing threat posed by Hamas' organized
resistance and the social explosion that will come sooner
or later from the Strip's overcrowding and inhuman conditions.
Vilnai's remark hints at that solution, as do a series of
comments from cabinet ministers over the past few
weeks proposing war crimes to stop the rockets.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has said that
Gazans cannot be allowed "to live normal lives"; Internal
Security Minister, Avi Dichter, believes Israel should take
action "irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians"; and the
Interior Minister, Meir Sheetrit, suggests the Israeli army
should "decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it"
after each attack.
This week Barak revealed that his officials were
working on the last idea, finding a way to make it
lawful for the army to direct artillery fire and air strikes
at civilian neighborhoods of Gaza in response to rocket
fire. They are already doing this covertly, of course, but
now they want their hands freed by making it official
policy, sanctioned by the international community.
At the same time Vilnai proposed a related idea, of
declaring areas of Gaza "combat zones" in which the
army would have free rein and from which residents
would have little choice but to flee. In practice, this
would allow Israel to expel civilians from wide areas
of the Strip, herding them into ever smaller spaces,
as has been happening in the West Bank for some time.
All these measures -- from the intensification of the
siege to prevent electricity, fuel and medicines from
reaching Gaza to the concentration of the population
into even more confined spaces, as well as new ways
of stepping up the violence inflicted on the Strip --
are thinly veiled excuses for targeting and punishing
the civilian population. They necessarily preclude
negotiation and dialogue with Gaza's political leaders.
Until now, it had appeared, Israel's plan was eventually
to persuade Egypt to take over the policing of Gaza, a
return to its status before the 1967 war. The view was
that Cairo would be even more ruthless in cracking down
on the Islamic militants than Israel. But increasingly
Vilnai and Barak look set on a different course.
Their ultimate goal appears to be related to Vilnai's
"shoah" comment: Gaza's depopulation, with the Strip
squeezed on three sides until the pressure forces
Palestinians to break out again into Egypt. This time,
it may be assumed, there will be no chance of return.
Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest book,
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and
the Plan to Remake the Middle East, is published by
Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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