Author: Helena

On Dec. 31, the US Military Sealift Command published a solicitation for bids from shipping companies to ship two boats, each containing 168 TEU’s (twenty-foot equivalent container units) of ammunition, from Greece to Israel.
(HT: Danger Room.)
That’s a considerable amount of ammunition. Its type was not stated.
If the international community is serious about a ceasefire this must involve credible efforts to impose an arms embargo on both sides until the ceasefire is concluded.
US arms shipments to Israel are sent (free of cost to Israel) for the express purpose of “self defense.” There is no way Israel’s current war against Gaza could be described as self-defense without a truly Orwellian effort to bend the meaning of the term completely out of any logic or acceptability.

President Bush has been trying to delay calls for a Gaza ceasefire as long as possible, but today there were more signs that other international actors were trying to push the conflict-termination diplomacy ahead with or without him. This on a day when at least 40 double-refugees* in Gaza were killed, and tens more wounded, when an Israeli tank fired on a UN-run school in Gaza, and when president-elect Obama made his first semi-substantive comments on the continuing Gaza-Israeli crisis.
Obama expressed deep concern about civilian deaths in both Gaza and Israel. On the politics of conflict-termination, he said,

“After Jan. 20 I’m going to have plenty to say about the issue, and I am not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign, that starting at the beginning of our administration, we are going to be engaged effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East…That’s something I am committed to.”

“Resolve the conflict in the Middle East” is a good and encouraging goal in this context. It implies aiming for something considerably deeper, more far-reaching, and more durable than merely a ceasefire!
Of course, as I’ve noted before, a ceasefire in the immediate round of fighting between Israel and Gaza can, if it is well planned and well implemented, be used as a constructive segue into a broader effort speedily to secure an overall Palestinian-Israeli (and hopefully also pan-Arab-Israeli) peace.
That this might be what’s on Obama’s schedule is possibly indicated by the still unconfirmed reports– here from Jim Lobe— that the chief envoy Obama will name on Arab-Israeli (but not Iranian) issues will be Richard Haass.** Richard was, in an earlier incarnation, the author of the dreadful “ripeness” theory in Arab-Israeli diplomacy– an approach that turned out merely to excuse the endless prolongation of the search for peace and thus to allow Israel additional years and decades in which to pursue its settlement-construction program. However, sometime in the late 1980s he disavowed that idea. He was the first head of the State Department’s influential policy planning unit in the first George W. Bush administration, but resigned early on, quite possibly because he disagreed with the decision to invade Iraq. He is a cautious realist in the Brent SCowcroft mold, and therefore far from the worst choice Obama might make for Arab-Israeli envoy.
Of course, we should also recall that during the election campaign, another thing Obama said was that he completely understood Israel’s desire to hit back at Gaza in response to the rockets that fell on southern Israel. But it’s interesting that that was not the statement from the campaign that he chose to recall today.
… Meanwhile, Sarkozy has been in Syria and Egypt, and Rice has been working the UN crowd in New York. Unclear if the thrust of her intervention there is to explore or to block possibilities for a speedy ceasefire. But Sarkozy’s intense involvement– which is mirrored in some but by no means all other European capitals– calls to mind the role that Jacques Chirac played in 1996 in activating the diplomacy that ended the Israeli assault on Lebanon of that year.
There are many intriguing similarities between these two situations:

1. Both wars were launched by Israeli governments facing imminent general elections and were clearly conducted in the context of enhancing their electoral chances. (Note to Olmert/Livni/Barak: It actually backfired for Shimon Peres that year.)
2. In both cases, the war was launched after the breakdown of a shaky previous ceasefire between Israel and a locally rooted, Iranian-allied organization that had been labeled and quarantined by western powers as “terrorist.”
3. In both cases, Israel killed hugely disproportionate numbers of Arab civilians in the country targeted, including in incidents of mega-lethality. (Today’s casualties on a UN-run school call to mind the massacre at Qana in April 1996, when Israel killed 106 civilians who had sought refuge in a UN base in south Lebanon.)

So the way things turned out at the end of the 1996 Israel-Lebanon war was very interesting. The hostilities were brought to an end through the conclusion of a formal international agreement to which the governments of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, the US, and France were all party, with the governments of Lebanon and Syria informally undertaking to ensure that Lebanon’s Hizbullah was on board it and would observe it.
During the negotiations then, those two governments acted as the channel to include Hizbullah in the negotiation. The governments of Israel, the US, and France refused point-blank to negotiate directly with Hizbullah, but recognized that they needed to ensure Hizbullah’s agreement to the ceasefire if it was to succeed. (The western powers had an exactly similar approach to Hizbullah during the negotiations that ended Israel’s 2006 assault against Lebanon.)
So what made the 1996 ceasefire between (in effect) Israel and Hizbullah much more durable and effective than the one that had preceded it in 1993 were that it was a formal international agreement, with its terms clearly written down and understood by all parties– plus it had an international verification mechanism, in the form of a five-power monitoring committee– that, yes, included Syria along with the other four negotiating governments– that was able over the years that followed to investigate any charges from any side about infractions of others. The 1996 ceasefire was a notable diplomatic achievement for Hizbullah.
… Fascinating if that might be where we’re headed in Palestine, now.
(More later.)
—
* “Double-refugees” because, since the school was in the Jabaliya refugee camp it is most likely these poor individuals were among the 80% of Gaza’s population who are, or are descended from, Palestinians who fled or were forced out of what is now Israel, back in 1948.
** Much less encouraging than the reports about R. Haass were those that Dennis Ross would be named the Obama administration’s special envoy on Iranian affairs. Ross has been a visible hawk on Iran for a long time now.

I’ve just read the executive summary of the Crisis Groups latest paper on the Israel-Gaza war. There are some good things in it but I’m quite disappointed at how tame it is. Not least because the CG acts as a sort of unified “Policy Planning Staff” for most of the West European governments. So if this is the advice the EU governments and countries like Australia and Canada are getting, then I think it’s far too incremental and wimpy. Crucially, it makes no mention of linking attainment of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas organically to a determined new international push to secure a final-status peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Here are the CG’s main policy prescriptions:

To protect civilians, limit political damage (regional polarisation and radicalisation, further discrediting of any “moderates” or “peace process”) and avoid a further catastrophe (massive loss of life in urban warfare in Gaza, a Hamas rocket hit on a vital Israeli installation), third parties should pressure both sides to immediately halt military action. In short, what is required is a Lebanon-type diplomatic outcome but without the Lebanon-type prolonged timetable.
To be sustainable, cessation of hostilities must be directly followed by steps addressing both sides’ core concerns:
1. An indefinite ceasefire pursuant to which:
   * Hamas would halt all rocket launches, keep armed militants at 500 metres from Israel’s border and make other armed organisations comply; and
   * Israel would halt all military attacks on and withdraw all troops from Gaza;
2. Real efforts to end arms smuggling into Gaza, led by Egypt in coordination with regional and international actors;
3. Dispatch of a multinational monitoring presence to verify adherence to the ceasefire, serve as liaison between the two sides and defuse potential crises; countries like France, Turkey and Qatar, as well as organisations such as the UN, could play an important part in this; and
4. Opening of Gaza’s crossings with Israel and Egypt, together with:
   * return of an EU presence at the Rafah crossing and its extension to Gaza’s crossings with Israel; and
   * coordination between Hamas authorities and the (Ramallah-based) PA at the crossings.

But, as noted above, this prescription makes no mention whatsoever of the urgent need to re-start the negotiations for a final Israeli-Palestinian peace, on a completely new basis.
Why should Hamas, or Israel, or any other party be happy with a return to a slightly improved version of the status-quo-ante if the big issues of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinian remain unresolved and there is no big hope held out for an imminent future in which a clear basis has been laid out and agreed upon for a speedy resolution of all the outstanding claims between the two peoples?
If the present horrendous crisis is not enough to force a jump-restarting of international efforts to secure a final-status peace, then I can’t imagine what kind of a crisis this would require! But meanwhile, why should we assume that a continuation of the interminable peace-processing efforts of the past 15 years would bring an outcome, two or five or ten years down the pike that would be any different from today’s?
I’m also a little uncertain about the timing of what the CG is advocating. They say there should be a cessation of hostilities that is “followed by … an indefinitie ceasefire pursuant to which … Hamas would halt all rocket launches, etc., and ….Israel would halt all military attacks on and withdraw all troops from Gaza.”
But wouldn’t the cessation of hostilities itself directly mandate the halting of all hostilities and (hopefully) the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, rather than these ceasefire steps “following” a cessation of hostilities?
I think their wording could be a lot clearer on those issues.
I note that the CG is not calling for the disarming of Hamas, but only for limitations on its deployment of “armed militants.” And it’s calling for the dispatch of a multinational presence to monitor the ceasefire. Both of these are realistic steps that could be expected make the ceasefire more politically palatable to Hamas than the status-quo-ante. But by the same token we could expect them to be strongly resisted by Israel, which would presumably strongly prefer to see the ceasefire agreement mandate the disarming of Hamas, and which has steadfastly maintained its opposition to any new international truce-monitoring presence in the OPTs for 41 years now.
So even these fairly cautious steps advocated by the Crisis Group would be politically hard to attain. Given that that’s the case, why not go whole hog and actually “use” this crisis to take some bold new steps toward the attainment of a final Israel-Palestinian peace? After all, if the “international community” is going to have to confront and rile this present belligerent government of Israel quite a bit even to get a workable ceasefire, why not rile them just a bitmore and go for the final peace?
Any kind of a ceasefire is going to necessarily include some steps that the citizens of both countries find hared to stomach or unsatisfactory. But least if there is also a meaningful new effort to secure a final peace, Israelis and Palestinians can all look forward to an imminent future in which the armed conflict is definitively past, the terms of future coexistence have been laid down, and people can start to rebuild their lives on a longterm basis and plan for a productive future. Yes it will involve “painful comproimises” (to use Ariel Sharon’s term.) But there will be better future in sight.
This conflict is not more intractable than that between France and Germany, or that between Whites and Blacks in South Africa. For many decades, people thought those other conflicts could “never” be resolved. But they were. This one can be, too.

It is a revealing measure of the paucity or non-existence of Israel’s actual, on-the-ground intelligence network inside Gaza today (as in Lebanon in 2006) that the IDF’s psy-ops department feels obliged to launch thousands of leaflets and undertake frantic robo-calling and robo-texting in order to beg anyone– anyone at all!– in Gaza to become an informer.
Yesterday, Electronic Intifada spoofed into the IDF’s “Report-a-Terrorist’ hot-line system and had a hilarious conversation with the Israeli Shin Bet officer who answered the call. (HT: Laila al-H.)
Read (or listen to) the whole thing. The way the Shin Bet manipulator guy responded once he figured he’d been spoofed (took him a while… ) is pretty revealing. Basically, he let loose with a stream of Zionist hate-propaganda to the effect that there never was a Palestinian nation, etc etc.
So here are the ways to contact the hotline: By phone: +972-2-583-9749. By email: helpgaza2008@gmail.com. I’m sure they have operators are standing by to help.

Read Dion Nissenbaum on the “lawn-chair war” being waged (or, more precisely, ogled) by residents of the Israeli town of Sderot:

They gather every morning on the southern Israeli hilltop as the pairs of Apache helicopters on attack runs swoop over the Mediterranean coast and air strikes send charcoal clouds curling over the Gaza Strip skyline.
They don’t seem to be bothered by the occasional Qassam rockets and mortar rounds that explode in the surrounding fields.
They have come to watch the war.
They come from Sderot, the southern Israeli town hardest hit years of persistent Palestinian rocket attacks that are the casus belli for the Israeli military campaign to destabilize Hamas.
The journalists have come too.

Also, look at the second photo in the photo gallery on this WaPo page (also published in the print edition.) The caption reads: “Israeli children in the southern town of Sderot collect fragments of a Palestinian Qassam rocket that landed outside their neighbor’s house. ”
Now, I assume that Israeli parents are no less concerned for the wellbeing of their children than Palestinian parents or any other parents. So I conclude that these kids’ parents thought the risk involved in their kids going outdoors to do this was very low. (And the kids don’t seem to be collecting their fragments in any kind of rushed or scared manner. More, they are just sauntering along a street-lamp street.)
Street lamps? Children sauntering in the street? Residents sitting on lawn-chairs watching the crump of artillery shells a mile or two away?
Does this sound like a war?
And just a couple of miles away, Palestinians are living through hell on earth. There are many excellent, first-person accounts available on the web. Including this from Dr. Said Abdel-Wahad yesterday:

Husain al-Aiedy is a Palestinian (58 years of age) lives to the east of Gaza city. He has been living in the same place for more than 25 years. His house is located in the middle of green fields. He is an UNRWA employess. He is now in one room with 20 others of his family, and families of two of his brothers. They are packed in one small room without electricity, water, food or telephone! just nothing around him except a battlefiled. Last night at 10:30 p.m. Mr Al-Aiedy was caught in the middle of the fight and a shell landed in his house to injure five of his family! He has been appealing to have an ambulance to evacuate the injured but in vain. All appeals to send him an ambulance to evacuate the injured and if possible, the rest of the family, have failed so far! At a circle of more than one and half kilomteres the Israeli army is in total control, thus no one can reach Mr Al-Aiedy except the Israelis! This situation needs an urgent humanitarian action by human rights organizations from anywhere!

This is not a war, it’s a bloodbath. Certainly, under the definitions in international humanitarian law, a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
International humanitarian law places on any military commander a positive duty to use force only with both discrimination (that is, discriminating between military persons and facilities and those that are non-combatant; and minimizing to the maximum degree possible any harm to the latter) and proportionality (that is, the nature of the attack must be proportionate to its military aim.)
Israel’s military is observing none of these restrictions.
The number of deaths in Gaza from bloodbath that started December 27 is now rising ever higher into the 500’s, and there have been thousands of serious injuries.
Proportional to the population of the US, 500 dead in Gaza translates into 100,000 dead in the US. That, in just ten days. (How would Americans feel?)
UN workers say that at least a quarter of the Palestinian deaths have been of civilians. In the past couple of days, the proportion of civilian deaths seems to have risen considerably.
In Israel, there have been five confirmed deaths, four of them civilians. (Updated, 3 p.m. 1/5/09.)
No wonder it’s lawn-chair time in Sderot! A time for kids to roam the street “collecting rocket fragments” as a hobby or a curiosity.
Please not that in making the above observations I am not calling for any increase in the number of Israeli casualties. I am calling for an immediate end to all casualties. I am calling for an immediate and ruable ceasefire that I hope will segue directly into a definitive international effort to define and implement a final-status peace between these two peoples, who have suffered for too long.
But meanwhile, no-one can credibly claim that the present fighting is a defensive “war of no choice” for Israel that has been forced upon it. On the contrary, it was not.
We can recall that back in February, when there was an earlier round of escalation between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Israel’s deputy defense minister threatened to unleash “a new Shoah” (Holocaust) in Gaza if Hamas should continue firing and upgrading its rockets.
Israel never followed through completely on that threat at that time, and in June its government reached a six-month ceasefire deal with Hamas. There were infractions of that ceasefire from both sides (including, by Israel, a number of major ground incursions, artillery attacks and, most importantly, a complete failure on commitments to lift the siege of Gaza.) But it did provide a welcome measure of relative calm to both peoples. When its six-month term expired, Hamas decided not to renew it because of Israel’s non-compliance with the six-monther.
So now, is Israel following through on Vailnai’s threatened Shoah?
In international law, a finding of genocide requires a finding of mass killings plus a finding of “genocidal intent.” I don’t think, in the present circumstances– Vilani’s threats notwithstanding– that such intent could be proven.
However, genocide is not necessarily always the worst of international crimes (despite what many western liberals seem to believe.) “Crimes against humanity” can have lethal and society-destruction effects that are just as grave as those from genocides, even in cases where genocidal intent cannot be proven. As, for example, in the many mass killings that have been plaguing Congo or the Central African Republic in recent years. And as in Gaza, today.
End the killing! Let Palestinians live a life of lawn-chairs and confidence in their future!

Israel’s leaders have given contradictory signals about how they want the current war to end. Some say they want to force Hamas to bend to their will. Some have said they want to break the organization completely. But now that Israel has sent ground forces deep into Gaza it is clearer than ever before that it will be unable to bring about either of these outcomes.
At the end of the day, to extricate itself from the uber-quagmire that Gaza represents, both physically in itself and politically throughout the region and the world, Israel will still have to engage in a negotiation with Hamas. Here’s why.
1. Hamas’s leaders have shown that they cannot be “broken” to the extent that they will bow to Israel’s will. Israel may be able to kill or capture most or all of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza– and it is possible, though unlikely, that some of those men may break under torture and give an appearance of bowing to Israel’s will. But Hamas’s overall leadership structure remains outside Gaza Through an intentional decision of Hamas in the 1990s, the overall leadership was vested in leaders not subject to any direct Israeli pressure. Hamas’s overall leader, Khaled Meshaal, lives and works in Damascus. Beyond him, Hamas has an extensive network of leaders distributed throughout the Arab states and further afield. (And contrary to US-Israeli hasbara attempts, Hamas has supportive relations with a number of Gulf Arab states.)
2. But Hamas’s structures inside Gaza are steely and resilient, too. They have been honed through 20 years of confrontation with Israel, in the course of which Israel has assassinated more than 100 Hamas leaders, including the highest layers of its leaders in Gaza. Also, for 38 years ending in 2005, the IDF had direct control over all of Gaza, which it exercised using very repressive means, including very intrusive house searches, mass arrests, torture and other means of intimidation, and extensive systems of movement controls. But Hamas in Gaza (which, ironically, had in an earlier era been incubated by the Israeli occupation forces as an alternative to the secular nationalists of the PLO) overcame all those measures taken against it prior to 2005, regenerating capable new layers of leadership to replace those annihilated by Israel. As I’ve noted previously, each new generation of leadership emerged steelier than the last one.
3. Many Israelis close to the government have suggested that Abu Mazen’s US-trained Fateh forces could be brought into Gaza from the West Bank and help Israel both to police Gaza and to impose a political endgame on a defeated Hamas. That is impossible, for two reasons. First, Hamas is not about to be defeated– so if Fateh forces do come into Gaza, it will be through a negotiated agreement between the two Palestinian movements, not through the imposition of Israeli-Fateh force on Hamas. Second, the Fateh forces are already coming under considerable pressure in the West Bank, where opinion has shifted sharply in favor of Hamas since Israel began this war December 27. The rising tide of criticism that Abu Mazen faces in his comfortable Ramallah home-base will not allow him to enter Gaza as an Israeli proxy. If he did, he might lose Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank to Hamas. Today, Abu Mazen has made clear that he won’t accept a role as Israeli cat’s-paw in Gaza.
4. Might Israel seek to impose a solution on Hamas by bringing in Arab or international forces to replace the IDF as it withdraws? This, too, is a quite illusory goal. No country is going to send forces into Gaza to replace (or even more, supplement) the IDF presence there unless it has credible guarantees that this deployment will not expose it to Hamas’s opposition both within Gaza and possibly far beyond. Every country recognizes that the desperate situation of the population in Gaza means that any security system that is imposed on them will be harshly resisted. Also, no country is going to deploy forces there without guarantees that Gaza can simultaneously be opened back up to the world economy. No country wants to openly collaborate with Israel in maintaining the siege on Gaza’s people.
5. Israelis and its backers in Washington and elsewhere also need to understand the region-wide and global implications of any prolongation of the infantry (and air and naval) actions against Gaza’s people. The longer this war goes on, the higher the regional stakes rise. At some point– in Gaza as in Lebanon in 2006– Israel’s leaders themselves will start crying out for a way out. So will the United States, which has its own very extensive interests in the region and whose forces are noticeably more over-stretched than they were in 2006. The terms on which Israel is able to extricate itself from the mess it has created in Gaza will become more unfavorable for it with every day the war continues. Better for Israel to nail down the exit/end-game now, rather than wait any more days. (So they may hope to kill another two dozen Hamas leaders if they can just carry on fighting– possibly including the elected Prime Minister and Foreign Minister? It would change nothing, see #2 above. But killing Haniyeh or Zahhar would certainly have broad political/security consequences throughout the region.)
6. All the above proves that the only way for Israel to minimize the damage it ends up suffering from the present, very ill-chosen war of choice is by winning the agreement of the Hamas leadership to the terms of a negotiated ceasefire for Gaza. Hamas leader Meshaal, who has been calling for a renewed ceasefire throughout the war, has clearly laid out the movement’s terms for it. It must be, he said, a ceasefire that is reciprocally binding on both parties (as the previous six-month ceasefire was.) But this time, unlike in the previous ceasefire, Israel must be obligated to follow through on the commitment to lift the siege of Gaza.
7. There are many channels through which this indirect negotiation can take place. The mediation effort of Turkish prime minister Rejep Teyip Erdogan may be the most effective. The UN Security Council could play a role in the negotiation (if the US weren’t blocking this). But it will certainly need to play a role in helping orchestrate and perhaps monitor the implementation of the ceasefire.
8. Since the world is now in a crisis over Gaza, the leaders of the P-5 nations at the security Council should all seriously consider the benefits of “using” this crisis as a springboard directly into an authoritative, international peace conference at which the terms of final peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and Syria, and Israel and Lebanon are finally hammered out. The peoples of the region and the security of the world have suffered far too much already from the endless ineffectuality of the efforts the US has made over the past 15 years to exercize complete control over the peacemaking. It is the failure of those efforts that have brought us where we are.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time following the Gaza tragedy on Twitter today. If you’re a member, my name there is helenacobban (strange, but true.) Twitter has this good aggregating facility, so to find everything that anyone there has tagged as “#gaza” go here.
If you’re a Twitter member and you want your contribs on Gaza to show up in the aggregator, just insert “#gaza” into the message.
From the #gaza channel there I learned from Laila el-Haddad that she and her dad are both scheduled to be on CNN at 10 p.m. and 10:30 tonight, EST. Her dad, Dr. Mousa el-Haddad, is a retired pediatrician born and raised in Gaza, now back living there. (Laila’s in the US right now.)
Also from her “tweets” there I got a link to this excellent article by veteran Gaza psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj, which conveys just a little what it’s like to be living in Gaza City right now.
I guess Twitter is one of the places where the new Israeli hasbara effort is trying to have an impact. So far, it seems to be incredibly heavy-handed. English Al-Jazeera is also using Twitter very helpfully– check it out here.
The Egyptian leftists seem to be using something called Jaiku as much as Twitter, but I simply can’t follow too many of these new things all at one time.
If any of you has other good resources to share on the continuing #Gaza crisis, please post them there.

The ground war has begun. Pray for the peoples of Gaza and Israel, especially the hardest hit and most vulnerable among them.
Work for a ceasefire now!

Yesterday, the Israeli air force dropped a large (and most likely US-supplied) bomb on the apartment-building home of Nizar Rayyan, one of the top five leaders of Hamas in Gaza, killing him and 15 family members, including children, and wounding numerous neighbors. The Hamas website reported the killing, and gave a brief eulogy for Rayyan, here.
The “strategy” of the Israeli government, if it can even be called that, now seems to have shifted from “taming” Hamas to decapitating or even completely dismantling Hamas. As I noted here last Monday, a dismantling/decapitating war, which was then being advocated by Ehud Barak, implies a very different approach to both operations and diplomacy than a “taming” war.
Today, Israel attacked the homes of other Hamas leaders. Many of the heavily populated areas of Gaza City, Rafah, and Jabaliya now look, from the photos, very similar to Beirut’s southern “Dahiyeh” suburbs after the US-supplied Israeli warplanes started blasting into it in July 2006. But at least the residents of the Dahiyeh had places elsewhere in Beirut and Lebanon that they were able to flee to (and they found that Lebanese of all stripes including previous critics of Hzibullah, were very eager to help give them emergency shelter and emergency aid.)
Now, where can the residents of blasted areas inside Gaza flee to? And remember: the winters can get very cold in that corner of the Mediterranean.
And yet… this is what AP is reporting today: Hamas resilient despite Israeli onslaught.
Reporters Ibrahim Barzak and Karin Laub write this:

Israel is methodically targeting the Hamas domain, bombing government offices, security compounds, commanders, and even Hamas-linked clinics, mosques and money changers. Yet Gaza’s Islamic rulers show no sign of buckling under the aerial onslaught.
Israel says Hamas still has thousands of rockets. Hamas TV and radio remain on the air, broadcasting morale-boosting battle reports. Hamas’ political and military leaders communicate from hiding places by walkie-talkie. Police patrol streets to prevent price gouging and looting.
“Israel has destroyed the buildings, but Hamas is still here,” Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas spokesman, said Thursday, the sixth day of the bombing campaign. “There is no anxiety over the existence of Hamas — even if they destroy all of Gaza — because we are among the people.”

The rest of that informative article is also worth reading. Including this:

The initial round of Israeli bombing wiped out key police installations, and Hamas officials say 185 members of the group’s security forces are among the nearly 400 dead. Hamas security men have slipped into civilian clothes to avoid being targeted, but still patrol the streets. Hamas’ Al Aqsa TV and radio have broadcast a toll-free number for residents to make criminal complaints.
Policemen direct traffic and run checkpoints near bombed-out government buildings to prevent scavenging. They tour gas stations, bakeries and groceries to make sure owners don’t take advantage of growing shortages to hike prices.
On Tuesday, two Hamas plainclothes police officers drove up to a small gas station in Gaza City and learned from customers that the price for diesel fuel had tripled. They approached the owner who swiftly lowered the price.
Hamas inspectors with scales visit bakers, making sure that the government-fixed price for bread — 55 pitas for 7 shekels, about $2 — is being honored.

I note there is a key difference between the situation of Hamas under Israel’s assault in Gaza today and the PLO when it came under a very similar Israeli assault in Lebanon, in 1982. On that earlier occasion, the Palestinians received considerable help from a portion of Lebanon’s population. But as the assault– and particularly the seven-week siege of West Beirut– dragged on, many of the PLO’s Lebanese allies became very depressed because of the continued battering their city was taking. (In Lebanon, too, there was always a large chunk of the populace that hated the Palestinians and was working very actively indeed to support Israel’s attacks against them.)
Finally, after eight weeks of that war, Lebanese PM Shafiq Wazzan, who had been a long-time, if never very enthusiastic, supporter of the PLO presence in Lebanon, persuaded Yasser Arafat to negotiate a ceasefire that saved some of his forces but sent them sailing off to some very distant Arab countries. (Sharon’s massacres of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila ensued.)
This time, by contrast, Gaza’s defenders are fighting to defend a small portion of their own country. Adding to their current determination are these other facts about them:

(1) The status quo ante they had to live in prior to this war was itself quite unacceptable– as were, too, the lengthy preceding years of direct Israeli occupation. So the Gazawis don’t even have as much “stake” as, for example, Hizbullah’s people did in 2006, in seeing a ceasefire that would give them a return to the status-quo-ante;
(2) Though Gaza is a part of Palestine, some 80% of its people are refugees from other parts of Palestine. So though many Gazans do have a deep concern for the physical infrastructure of the Strip, still, many of them also harbor very long-held and deep claims against Israel, including very large property claims, along with a correspondingly deep sense of resentment that these claims have never been seriously addressed in the many rounds of alleged “peace diplomacy” that have occurred over recent decades.

But all these socioeconomic facts about Gaza’s population would count for nothing if Hamas and its antecedent movements had not also been working hard for the past 25-30 years to organize their supporters in such a way as to build and rebuild the resilience of their constituency.
In the west, too many people think that Hamas is “only” the “terrorist organization” that it’s designated to be by the US State Department. They imagine it is made up of wild-eyed, implacable Islamist radicals who have much more in common with the Afghan Taliban than with any movement that is considered “civilized” in the west.
Not so. Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, always placed a lot of emphasis on the need for education, self-restraint, and the need to rebuild the social fabric of Palestinian constituencies torn apart by years of Israeli attacks, occupation (including the heinous divide-and-rule tactics of the Shin Bet), and physical and social dispersal. Gaza Islamic University (badly bombed by Israel earlier this week) was just one of an entire network of educational and social-welfare institutions with which Hamas sought to rebuild Gazan society. Those institutions preceded the creation of Hamas as an armed political movement, which happened in 1987; and they have continued to operate alongside Hamas ever since. (You can read a lot more about Hamas’s history here or here.)
Another indicator of the resilience of Hamas is that the movement has suffered numerous rounds of extremely serious decapitating attacks in the past 15 years– including the assassinations of Ahmed Yassin and numerous other top leaders in 2004– but still, its systems for educating successive generations of youth and for cultivating leadership skills in a broad array of skill-sets, not just the military, means that those leaders were replaced by others of considerable experience. Those assassinations never resulted in the breaking up of the movement. Indeed, the leaders who have survived– and their followers– now have an even flintier sense of dedication to their nationalist/Islamist cause because of the fires they’ve lived through and the colleagues and former mentors whom they’ve lost.
As of now, this intriguing article from Radio Netherlands tells us a bit about how Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his colleagues in the top leadership have been surviving Israel’s attacks: Literally, by going underground. I had kind of suspected as much.
… In related news, the “international community” is still showing that it is marked by a devastating vacuum of power at the leadership level. None of the non-US powers seem to have the will (or perhaps the inclination?) to try to force the desperately needed immediate and binding ceasefire resolution through the Security Council. Or at least, to force the US to cast a veto against this ceasefire, which would clarify Washington’s role in world affairs considerably right now. The EU has just turned the presidency over from France to the Czech Republic, whose leaders are still in fairly deep kowtow mode to Washington. And neither the Chinese nor the Russians seem eager to confront Washington at this time.
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe today stressed that any decision on whether to launch an infantry invasion of Gaza would be “Israel’s” to make. Condi Rice said that though the administration does favor a ceasefire, the administration is working to attain one “that would not allow a re-establishment of the status quo ante where Hamas can continue to launch rockets out of Gaza… It is obvious that that ceasefire should take place as soon as possible, but we need a ceasefire that is durable and sustainable.”
Right. No-one wants a return to the status-quo-ante. The big remaining question though, is in which direction will it end getting tipped? That is precisely what the two sides are fighting about.
… And at the Arab/regional level, both Egypt and Jordan had to deploy riot police today to beat back crowds of pro-Gaza demonstrators that gathered after Friday prayers. Both these increasingly repressive states receive considerable backing–including for their police forces– from the US, and both have peace treaties with Israel. In Amman, the crowd was reported as 60,000 strong. There were other anti-Israeli demonstrations in other Muslim countries. In the West Bank, pro-Hamas protesters were beaten back by (US-trained) Fateh police units.
Two useful sources for learning about what’s happening in Egypt are the blog of the leftist activist Arabawy, part of a network that’s making some excellent use of the new media (including Jaiku), and the website of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Ceasefire now! And link that directly to a speedy UN effort to define and implement a durable and fair final peace between these two deeply troubled peoples.