Patrick Seale on Gaza Strip horrors

Greetings all

As usual, a concise and informative analysis by
Patrick Seale, one of the very few commentators on the
Middle East who is a true expert.
Gary


By Patrick Seale

ISRAEL killed 116 Palestinians in Gaza last week in an
orgy of air strikes and ground incursions, turning the
besieged and starved Strip into an unbearable inferno.
Hundreds more Palestinians were wounded. At least half
the dead and wounded were civilians, including many
young children.

So great was the catastrophe that Egypt, under
pressure from an enraged public opinion, opened the
Rafah crossing into Sinai and sent 27 ambulances to
shuttle scores of badly wounded Palestinians to
hospital in Al Arish.

What is to be done? The international community has
expressed its usual alarm and outrage at Israel's
appalling behavior - with protests coming from the UN
Secretary General and the Pope among many others,
while Saudi Arabia has compared Israel's actions to
Nazi war crimes. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
remains defiant. No one, he declared, can teach Israel
morality.

Israel's dilemma is acute. Its generals and civilian
hawks huff and puff, threatening to destroy both Gaza
and Hamas once and for all, yet they know full well
that reoccupying the Strip would entrap the IDF in a
costly and probably unwinnable guerrilla war - as in
the 2006 war against Hizballah in Lebanon -- and might
not even manage to put an end to the home-made
Qassams.

The obvious alternative would be for Israel to sit
down and talk. Hamas's oft-repeated offer of a
long-term mutual ceasefire remains on the table. But
Israel utterly rejects any such course. Olmert and his
generals have evidently not yet learned the
Churchillian adage that 'jaw jaw is better than war
war.

'Israel's way out of its dilemma has been to carry out
limited ground incursions , accompanied by heavy air
strikes -- to surge into Gaza with tanks and planes,
terrorize the population, smash major locations, kill
as many people as possible, seize suspects and then
withdraw. This was the pattern of last week's
operation.

This latest attack was exceptional only in its unusual
scope and ferocity. Air strikes against Gaza by F16
and Apache helicopters are a daily occurrence. Israeli
drones are constantly in the air over the Strip.

Palestinians continue to be killed regularly, adding
more victims to the nearly 900 Palestinians Israel has
massacred since Hamas won the democratic elections for
the Palestinian Legislative Council in January 2006.

In contrast, only a dozen Israelis have died in the
past six years - including one student last month --
as a result of Palestinian attacks from Gaza. The
Qassam rockets have undoubtedly made life extremely
disagreeable in Sderot, Ashkelon and other Israeli
towns within range of Gaza's rockets, and many
inhabitants have been treated for shock. But their
suffering, regrettable as it is, bears no relation to
the mass killings and huge destruction Israel has
inflicted on Gaza -- and continues to inflict.

Even the United States has gone so far as to
'encourage Israel to exercise caution,' although it
has, as usual, blocked a draft Security Council
resolution condemning Israel for killing
civilians,Britain's former Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
now the chief representative of the Quartet (UN, US,
EU and Russia), has always been careful not to ruffle
feathers in either Israel or the United States. But
last week's bloody events persuaded him to issue
statement, which one might describe as almost
balanced.

The death of the Israeli in Sderot, he said, was
'utterly to be condemned', but he also deplored as '
absolutely tragic' the death of Palestinian civilians,
adding that everything possible should be done 'to
avoid the loss of innocent Palestinian life.'In other
words, Israel was free to continue its attacks 'in
self defence', but should be careful about inflicting
excessive collateral damage.

Understandably enough, Blair's attention is clearly
more focused on his job as an advisor to J P Morgan,
the US investment bank - which is reported to be
paying him up to $5m a year -- and on his lectures at
$150,000 a time, than on the festering problems of
Gaza. As the Quartet's chief envoy, he has so far
been less than useless.

But Blair may now have a chance to redeem himself.
Reliable sources report that, encouraged by his
statement, Hamas sent Blair a message last week urging
him to press Israel to accept a mutual ceasefire.
These sources report that this important message was
cleared with Khaled Mishal, the Hamas political
supremo in Damascus, before being conveyed to Blair's
office by a high-level intermediary.

A novel feature of the offer is that this time Hamas
is proposing a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza
alone, with no mention of the West Bank. Previous
Hamas offers always stated that attacks on Israel
would cease if Israel, in turn, stopped all its raids,
armed incursions, 'targeted assassinations' and so
forth in both Gaza and the West Bank. Why is Israel so
adamantly opposed to talking to Hamas?

The answers are numerous. First of all, talking to
Hamas would confer recognition on the Islamic
resistance movement, whereas Israel has moved heaven
and earth to get the US and even the divided and
timorous EU to declare Hamas a 'terrorist
organization'.

Secondly, if Israel were to accept a ceasefire, this
would amount to creating a situation of mutual
deterrence with Hamas, which Israel adamantly refuses.
It wants its enemies to surrender, while it retains
the freedom to kill at will. 'We will be the ones who
create the equations, and not Hamas,' Olmert declares.
Thirdly, Israel knows that, looking beyond the
ceasefire, Hamas would insist on far stiffer peace
terms than those of the very weak Palestinian
Authority and its hapless president, Mahmud Abbas.
Abbas has renounced all forms of resistance. He has
embraced George W Bush's hollow Annapolis 'peace
process' and has put himself entirely in Israel's
hands.

But he has failed to persuade Olmert to dismantle a
single illegal outpost, or a single West Bank
checkpoint, let alone halt the steadily expanding
settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and in the large
Israeli blocks, intended to sever the city from its
Arab hinterland.

Fourthly, the Sephardic movement Shas has already put
Olmert on notice that it will quit the coalition and
bring down his government if he so much as discusses
with the Palestinians core issues such as Jerusalem,
borders and refugees. In Israel's present climate of
hysteria, Olmert would probably not survive any sort
of deal with Hamas.Finally, even though bashing Gaza
alarms the world and risks triggering suicide bombings
and other revenge attacks -- and even the possibility
of a third intifada - aborting the peace process suits
Israel well enough.

Far from considering any withdrawal to the 1967
borders - which is the main Arab condition for peace
-Israel seems determined on the contrary to
consolidate its control over the whole of historic
Palestine, by means of increased settlement activity,
military closed zones and the sheer coercion of a
captive population.

The question is whether such a cruel policy is
sustainable in the long term. How much better would it
be for Israel to have a peaceful and prosperous
Palestine on its borders, serving as its key to peace
with the entire Arab world? In the meantime, Hamas is
still waiting for an answer to its message from Tony
Blair.

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