Category: Palestine 2006

Danny Rubinstein of HaAretz has an interesting article in Thursday’s paper, in which he writes that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is facing a tough new challenge from other veteran leaders in (primarily) the exile wing of Fateh.
These internal insurgents are reportedly– and not surprisingly– being led by long-time Fateh/PLO veteran Farouq Qaddumi (Abul-Lutf), who lives mainly in Damascus.
Rubinstein writes that the big Fateh bosses had been preparing for a meeting of their movement’s 15-person Central Committee, due to be held this week in Amman. But,

Abbas did not get the support he expected from his colleagues on the committee. The situation was so bad that the gathering was canceled – though officially, it was merely postponed for a week…
Thus Abbas now finds himself embroiled in infighting and tension not only with Hamas, but also inside his own movement. And those who are supposed to back him up – the United States, the Quartet, the Arab states and Israel – consider him to be a weak leader who makes a lot of mistakes.
Under any other circumstances, Abbas would have resigned his post. But now, his aides maintain, this possibility does not exist, since it would mean relinquishing all power in the Palestinian Authority to Hamas. His associates say that as a leader with a sense of national responsibility, he cannot quit…
This is about a lot more than protocol. It is about a bitter struggle for power: Kaddoumi and two other members of the central committee, Ahmed Ghnayem and Mohammad Jihad, are veteran opponents of the peace process and the Oslo Accords, and refuse to come to the territories.
Abbas had asked Kaddoumi and his two colleagues to return, at least to the Gaza Strip, which Israel evacuated. However, they have refused, arguing that the Israeli occupation of Gaza is still not over.
Moreover, Abbas was informed that Kaddoumi had visited Damascus and met there with Meshal about how to include Hamas in the PLO and what positions Hamas leaders would receive in the Palestinian national leadership.
Both Kaddoumi and Meshal believe that the Palestinian leadership should not be based in the territories, since there, it is at Israel’s mercy. Abbas and his supporters maintain that the leadership in the territories enjoys more freedom of action than has been granted to Palestinian politicians by the Syrian regime in Damascus.
One serious problem for Abbas is that veteran members of the Fatah Central Committee do not fully support him. Some clashed with him during the period when there was friction between him and Arafat; others have personal gripes against him.
In an effort to counter this problem, Abbas developed ties with younger members, such as Mohammad Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, and he is pressing to add 21 younger members to the central committee, whose 15 current members are in their seventies and refuse to allow any changes.
This mess is having a negative effect on Abbas’ ability to deal with both the Hamas government in Gaza and the Hamas leadership in Damascus. Despite backing from Jordan and Egypt, Abbas has been unable to convince Hamas even to accept the Arab peace initiative, which calls for recognition of Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines. The question now is whether Abbas has the strength to announce the dissolution of the Hamas government, thereby risking the possibility of civil war.

Ah, Abul-Lutf. A very vain and silly man. But certainly, someone who by the end of the of the 1990s was able to capture the zeitgeist of that large portion of Fateh supporters forced to live for many decades now in exile outside the homeland– people who had been warily prepared to give the “Oslo” process a chance to succeed but to whom Oslo never offered anything. Period.
It strikes me that Abu Mazen was simply showing his political naviety yet again if he put any hope into the chance that the exile wing of Fateh might back him up in his present power struggle against Hamas. Aleksandr Kerensky, anyone?

Uri Avnery, the Grand Old Man of the Israeli peace movement, wrote a classic essay recently, which I accessed through the “Occupation Magazine” link. (Y’all can always check out Occupation Magazine on the right sidebar here.) It’s titled The Great Experiment. And what, you may ask is that?
Let him explain:

IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?
That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.
The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there…

So, how’s it been going? Here is his conclusion:

How can a population that is hit by hunger, lacking medicaments and equipment for its primitive hospitals and exposed to attacks on land, from sea and from the air, hold out? Will it break? Will it go down on its knees and beg for mercy? Or will it find inhuman strength and stand the test?
In short: What and how much is needed to get a population to surrender?
All the scientists taking part in the experiment – Ehud Olmert and Condoleezza Rice, Amir Peretz and Angela Merkel, Dan Halutz and George Bush, not to mention Nobel Peace Price laureate Shimon Peres – are bent over the microscopes and waiting for an answer, which undoubtedly will be an important contribution to political science.
I hope the Nobel Committee is watching.

When I was in Israel back in March, I noted here that the Weekend Haaretz had had an interesting little article about some of the fine, originally Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem.
Recently, I heard from George Bisharat, who teaches at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He told me it was his grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, who had built and owned one of those homes– indeed, the one that some time after Israel’s takeover of W. Jerusalem in 1948 became the home of PM Golda “there are no such people as Palestinians” Meir.
George wrote me that some years ago he had published an article about the home, and he gave me permission to republish it here. But before I introduce that text, I want to catch up with the portion of that JWN post in March where I’d noted that in and after the 1948 fighting there was almost complete ethnic cleansing of both halves of Jerusalem– what became the Israeli-controlled Western half and what became (at that point) the Jordanian-controlled Eastern half… In March, I did not have to hand the numbers of people thus “cleansed”. Now I do. According to Michael Dumper’s 1997 book The Politics of Jerisalem since 1967 (Colubia U.P.), approximately 60,000 Palestinian residents fled or were expelled from West Jerusalem and the surrounding villages that year, while around 2,000 Jewish residents fled or were expelled from East Jerusalem.(Dumper, p.65)
After Israel conquered East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, it not only regained control of the properties from which Jews had left in 1948, but also seized considerable additional properties into which it started implanting large numbers of settlers– quite illegally. Those settlers now number more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem, a number that is seldom counted at all in the US media which tend to focus solely on the 230,000-plus settlers implanted into areas of the West Bank that are not in the (unilaterally expanded) boundaries of East Jerusalem.
And were descendants of the 60,000 Palestinians who left West Jerusalem in 1948 given any reciprocal right to return to the homes they had fled there? Ha-ha-ha. Reciprocity? You gotta be kidding!
Anyway, withour further ado, back to Geroge’s piece:
RITE OF RETURN TO A PALESTINIAN HOME
by George Bisharat, 2004
On May 15, the 56th anniversary of the Palestinian “Nakba” (Catastrophe), when one people gained a homeland and another lost theirs, I was thinking of a home in Jerusalem.
It was the residence occupied by Golda Meir — author of the famous quip that “the Palestinian people did not exist” — when she was Israel’s foreign minister. It was also the family home built in 1926 by my grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, “Papa” to all of us.
I went to visit our home for the first time in 1977. Although he was a Christian, Papa named the home “Villa Harun ar-Rashid,” in honor of the Muslim Abbasid Caliph renowned for his eloquence, passion for learning, and generosity. Painted tiles with this name were inset above the second floor balcony and over a side entrance.
EXPLOITS IN THE ORCHARD
When Papa first built the home in what became known as the Talbiyya quarter of Jerusalem, few other residences existed nearby. As I grew up, my father regaled me with tales of his boyhood exploits in the surrounding fields and orchards. Two of my uncles were born while the family lived there; one uncle succumbed to pneumonia in Villa Harun ar-Rashid. The young boys went to school up the road at the Catholic-run Terra Sancta College. My uncle Emile told me of a wager he made with his younger brother, George (for whom I am named), that he could not stand on a swing on the front porch and swing with no hands – – with predictable, but fortunately mild, consequences…

Continue reading “A Palestinian villa in West Jerusalem”

It must take a certain dogged kind of chutzpah to be Condi Rice. I mean, there she has been for the past eight months doing everything she could to undermine the Hamas government in Palestine, including quite evidently condoning the Israelis’ continued use of quite disproportionate levels of lethal violence there, and their maintenance of the savage blocade around Gaza… But today, there was Condi in Egypt calling “bravely” for an end to the current intra-Palestinian violence:

“Innocent Palestinians are caught in this violence,” Ms Rice said.

Well yes, Ms. Rice. But 15 times as many innocent Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the past eight months— and when did you ever speak out about that? Or when did you ever threaten to make any portion of the US’s extremely generous aid to Israel conditional on Israel ending its policy of killing and tight economic strangulation of the Palestinians?
Some figures from B’tselem: The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces in the OPTs since February 1, 2006: 431. Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the OPTs and inside Israel since February 1: 20. (Aggregated from 1 + 2 + 3 + 4)
This past summer, it also took a special kind of chutzpah for Rice to profess her strong support for the government and people of Lebanon at a time when she was actively conniving with Israel in every possible way to enable the continuation of the IDF’sbrutal assault against the country and its people– and when Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora was tearfully begging the whole world to help put in place a speedy ceasefire.
Well, once again now, “heckuva job, Condi”, eh?
Matters do currently seem fairly precarious inside the OPTs. Ten people have died in Fatah-Hamas clashes there in the past couple of days. (That, at a time when Israel has also continued its attacks against Gaza. All completely tragic.) And now the out-of-control Al Aqsa brigades are reportedly threatening to kill three top Hamas leaders. Luckily Abu Mazen and Ismail Haniyeh have both called for an end to the violence. But you really have to wonder who is arming and funding the Aqsa Brigades these days…
However, the pollsters from the (currently pro-Fateh) Jerusalem Media and Communication Center were able to get out and about in the days between Spetmber 19 and 22, when they conducted a poll of Palestinian opinion.
Many of the answers there are very interesting. If you go down to the bottom, Q. 28, “Which Palestinian faction do you trust the most?” you see the answers were neck-and-neck: Fateh– 30.7% and Hamas–29.7%. Hamas has certainly lost some support since the elections in late January, when they won 44% of the popular vote. However, things don’t look too great for Fateh in the event of new elections, either… And especially if people vote on the basis of personalities. In response to Q. 27, “Which Palestinian Personality do you trust the most?”, Haniyeh came top with 18.9%, followed by Abu Mazen with 14.5%. (Both those questions were “open” in structure. For Q. 27, 1.2% of respondents even said Yasser Arafat!)
But given the comprehensive nature and the viciousness of the pressure that Israel and the US have maintained on the Palestinians since January, it is notable that so many Palestinians there are still prepared to stick up for Hamas.
Does the “international community” intend to carry on punishing the Palestinians until they can force the whole people to their knees and “win” a return of Fateh to power? I certainly hope not. The “punishment” the Palestinian people have already suffered has already been quite unconscionable.
Here’s my best suggestion for a way out of the current impaase: The UN Security Council should organize a final, authoritative, and comprehansive Arab-Israeli peace conference, like Madrid in 1991 but under specifically UN auspices and to be held on the basis of international law and the existing UN resolutions… And then, all the Security Council members together should structure the incentives they offer to the Middle Eastern parties in such a way as to secure their good-faith participation in this negotiation.
And then, let us the world see who would come to this conference. On what possible grounds could anyone who professes to uphold international legitimacy object to such a plan?

So Pres. Mahmoud Abbas and PM Ismail Haniyeh have finally agreed on the terms for an intra-Palestinian political deal and the formation of a national unity government. About time!
Back in February/March, when I was in Palestine, the Americans and Israelis were doing evrything they could to prevent non-Hamas people from responding positively to the entreaties of the Hamas people that they join such a government. I myself was witness to the sending of a strong threat of “the very worst consequences” by parties inside Israel to one Palestinian pol who had been invited to join a coalition government with a strong Hamas presence.
Well, times have changed (a little.) Maybe there is now hope for some real progress towards self-determination and national indepndence for the Palestinians? I am not holding my breath on this,… But still, if there is some hope for sovereignty, self-rule, and a bit of real relief for even a portion of the Palestinians right now, that’s better than what they currently have.
The news reports say that the new coalition will be based on “the prisoners’ document” issued earlier this year. Here’s what I wrote about that in May.

Here is the weekly summary that the Palestinian Center for Human Rights produced for the period 17-23 August, 2006, cataloguing major rights abuses inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli Occupation Forces in (and around) Gaza and the West Bank.
During the week, as PCHR reports, 30 Palestinians, including 3 children, a mentally disabled young man and a woman, were killed by IOF. The 30 included two who died during the week from wounds previously inflicted by the IOF.
The report added:

the number of Palestinians killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip since 25 June 2006 has increased to 217, including 46 children and 12 women. In addition, 755 others, mostly civilians, including 203 children, 28 women, 4 paramedics and 6 journalists, have been wounded.

Figures available from the “Statistics” page on B’tselem’s website (click through the links in that first table there, and look down the right sidebar on the pages that up) tell us that from January1 through July 31, 2006, a total of 15 Israeli civilians and 3 Israeli security forces personnel were killed by Palestinians… while the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the OPTs and in Israel in the same period was 346.
And then, yes, there was Laura Blumenfeld’s spine-chilling article in the WaPo (and elsewhere) August 28, in which she told us how much the Israeli securocrats “agonized” over every single decision they “had” to make regarding the “targeted killings” of Palestinian suspects.
Including this, about former IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon:

Almost every day, Yaalon had to decide who would live or die. “Who is a ‘ticking bomb’? Can we arrest him? Who is a priority — this guy first, or this guy first?” Yaalon recalled. Once a week, military intelligence and Shin Bet proposed new names. At first, the list was limited to bombers themselves, but several years later it expanded to those who manufacture bombs and those who plan attacks.
“I called it ‘cutting weeds.’ I knew their names by heart,” Yaalon said. How many did he kill? “Oh, hundreds, hundreds. I knew them. I had all the details with their pictures, maps, intelligence, on the table… ”

We learn from B’tslem, that from January to the end of July this year, 16 Palestinians were the targets of Israeli assassination sqauds, whereas 31 Palestinians, total, were killed during these operations.
Maybe Yaalon could spend some of his time at the (AIPAC-affiliated) Washington Institute for Near East Policy reading the testimonies of former apartheid enforcers like Jeffery Benzien. Now there’s an (a-)moral community he could be a part of, where he might find people who would understand his “wrenching dilemmas”.
Of course, no word in Blumenfeld’s article about the people being targeted for assassination being given the benefit of anything like “due process under the law”….
Anyway, friends, because this is such a crucial and tragic subject, please keep the discussion here courteous and constructive.

July was the most lethal month for the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza since the terrible month of April 2002.
The MSM in the US seems to have almost completely stopped reporting on the horrors inside Gaza. Which doesn’t mean they’re not happening…
In July, according to this report from B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories,

the Israeli military killed 163 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 78 of whom (48 percent) were not taking part in the hostilities when they were killed. Thirty-six of the fatalities were minors, and 20 were women. [Meanwhile,] In the West Bank , 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in July.

U.N. humanitarian-affairs monitors in Palestine and Israel gave this perspective on August 3:

We are concerned that with international attention focusing on Lebanon, the tragedy in Gaza is being forgotten. We estimate that since 28 June, 175 Palestinians have been killed, including approximately 40 children and eight women, and over 620 injured in the Gaza Strip. One IDF soldier has been killed and 25 Israelis have been injured, including 11 Israelis injured by homemade rockets fired from the Gaza Strip. Palestinians have fired on average between 8-9 homemade rockets per day towards Israel (319 in total) and the Israeli military has fired on average 200-250 artillery shells per day into the Gaza Strip and conducted at least 220 aerial bombings. [Can you say ‘disproportionate’– here as in Lebanon?]
…The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that the targeting of Gaza’s vital infrastructures, particularly the destruction of the only domestic power plant, has triggered a chain reaction of lack of power, scarcity of fuel for generators and water shortage, thus causing a serious threat to people’s health and harming the functioning of the entire health system. Provisional measures to avert the crisis are being set up by the local institutions and the international community… Of further concern is the lack of access to health care in Egypt and Jordan due to Rafah border total and prolonged closure. WHO continues monitoring the situation to identify early warning signs of crisis in the health system and health status of the Palestinian people.
…According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) some 838,000 Palestinian children living in Gaza are bearing the brunt of disproportionate shelling and attacks. Shortages and closures make it virtually impossible to deliver quality care, while simultaneously fueling the conditions for outbreaks of communicable disease, which hits children hardest. Of the approximately 40 Palestinian children killed in Gaza in since 28 June, almost a quarter were under 10 years old. Since the beginning of 2006, 69 children have died due to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, including one Israeli child.

Some heart-wrenching reporting on the fate of Gaza’s children comes from UNRWA public-affairs reporters Adnan Abu Hasna and Chareen Fahmi:

“I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!” screams six-year-old Mustafa, adamantly refusing his father’s mentioning to return to their apartment in the towers of the Abraj Anada area, northern Gaza Strip. He doesn’t talk except for those words. Like most children in the Gaza Strip, he has witnessed things children should never have to see. Fresh in this child’s mind are visions of a Palestinian man lying on the ground near Mustafa’s home, his leg severed by a shell. Asia Kabeer, an UNRWA psychologist working with Mustafa and other children says that “all the scenes are stuck in his memory and he can’t forget them”. She adds that fear prevents Mustafa from playing alone; he spends every hour of the day beside his family and in fear that they will leave him alone. Mustafa, his 6 siblings and their father Yehya fled the Beit Hanoun area for Jabalia Preparatory A Girls’ School, one of the four UNRWA schools where over 1,500 displaced people from 270 families have taken refuge.
Enter nine-year-old Palestine refugee Ayesha, quite confident and talkative. But her talk in this makeshift shelter in a school is not of dolls or future plans. Another young witness to horror, she explains “I am afraid all the time because it was the first time in my life that I saw people hit by shells. I can’t forget the screaming of one of them. I am afraid that the shelling may come to where we are in the school”. She has mixed feelings about returning home: “I really want to go back but at the school I feel more secure despite having lost everything—my room, dolls and toys”.

And along with this recent report, BTtselem presents some solid-looking documentation about a mid-July incident in which the IOF used six Palestinian civilians, including two minors, as “human shields” in an operation inside the Gaza Strip. Here’s the summary:

B’Tselem’s initial investigation indicates that, during an incursion by Israeli forces into Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 17 July 2006, soldiers seized control of two buildings in the town and used residents as human shield.
After seizing control of the buildings, the soldiers held six residents, two of them minors, on the staircases of the two buildings, at the entrance to rooms in which the soldiers positioned themselves, for some twelve hours. During this time, there were intense exchanges of gunfire between the soldiers and armed Palestinians. The soldiers also demanded that one of the occupants walk in front of them during a search of all the apartments in one of the buildings, after which they released her.
International humanitarian law forbids using civilians as human shields by placing them next to soldiers or next to military facilities, with the intention of gaining immunity from attack, or by forcing the civilians to carry out dangerous military assignments…

The conditions in which Gaza’s people have been forced to live for the past few months are inhumane and should shock the conscience of the world. This, after their orderly holding of two democratic elections since January 2005…
I saw President Bush briefly on the television this evening. He looked flustered, defensive, and very unsure of himself. But he kept repeating that what he was trying to do in the Middle East was “bring democracy to the region.” What a sad, sad man. It is really quite scary the degree to which that sad man and the Prime Minister of Israel– both of whom command armies of unimaginable destructive capability– seem both to be so ignorant and so out of control as they address the current challenges in the Middle East.

PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, whose people continue to bear the brunt of Israel’s legnthy assault on their communities, has now spoken clearly and directly to the US public and the US policy elite in an op-ed in today’s WaPo.
He writes:

We thought our pride in conducting the fairest elections in the Arab world might resonate with the United States and its citizens. Instead, our new government was met from the very beginning by acts of explicit, declared sabotage by the White House. Now this aggression continues against 3.9 million civilians living in the world’s largest prison camps…

But here is the crucial political hub of his message:

there is a remedy, and while it is not easy it is consistent with our long-held beliefs. Palestinian priorities include recognition of the core dispute over the land of historical Palestine and the rights of all its people; resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks, assassinations and military expansion. Contrary to popular depictions of the crisis in the American media, the dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank; it is a wider national conflict that can be resolved only by addressing the full dimensions of Palestinian national rights in an integrated manner. This means statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law. Meaningful negotiations with a non-expansionist, law-abiding Israel can proceed only after this tremendous labor has begun.

This statement tells us a lot about where Hamas’s traditionally unified and disciplined leadership currently is regarding the big political-diplomatic questions of the day.
I note the following:

(1) The statement is very similar to, but a bit more explicit than, what Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar told me back in March.
(2) Haniyeh, in particular, spells out that the PA government leaders are ready to negotiate with “a non-expansionist, law-abiding Israel”– and once the process of winning “statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law” has begun, though not necessarily waiting until after that process is complete.
(3) Governmental bodies do not typically say they are ready for negotiations with governments of other states that they are committed to destroying. Haniyeh’s expression of readiness to negotiate with Israel should certainly be welcomed.
(4) He does seem clearly to be favoring a two-state outcome rather than a single binational state.
(5) The formula he uses for how he sees the 1948 refugee problem being solved is interesting and should be probed further. What precisely does he mean by “fairly” and “on the basis of international legitimacy and established law”? How might the fears of many Jewish Israelis about being demographically swamped by returning Palestinian refugees even within 1948 Israel, be allayed?

Anyway, in a sense, Haniyeh is quite right to say clearly that what is needed in order to win the definitive end to the Israel-Palestine conflict is to address the legacies of the 1948 war and its associated ethnic cleansing, as well as the 1967 war and its subsequent lengthy military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The 1948 dimensions– especially the refugee issue– were always given short shrift in the US-brokered peace “process” that followed from the 1993 Oslo Accord. Most members of the US policy elite always hated being reminded that the five million or so Palestinian refugees from 1948 had any remaining claim on Israel and just wanted them either to get resettled elsewhere, quickly, or otherwise simply to “disappear.”
Some 80 percent of Gaza’s people are refugees, as are some 30 percent of the Palestinian West Bankers. In addition, all residents of the occupied territories have large numbers of members of their own immediate families who are forced by the restrictions sustained by Israel over the past 39 years to live in exile outside their homeland. The dream of previous US policymakers that somehow the publics of the West Bank and Gaza could simply be persuaded to forget about the refugee issue was never more than a dream.
Now, the people of Gaza and the West Bank are taking a terrible battering from the Israeli military. But they are doing this in the name of national goals that they deeply, deeply believe in– and like the defenders of Stalingrad 65 years ago or of West Beirut in June 1982, at this point they show no signs of bowing to their assailants’ demands.
In August 1982, in Beirut, after ten weeks of extremely fierce air, sea, and land assaults, Yasser Arafat’s PLO did finally agree to undertake a negotiated exit from the city. (That decision was made in large part because they understood all along that it was not their city… so once the people of West Beirut asked them to leave, they did so.)
Gaza is different. Gaza is Palestinian. Where would the Palestinian defenders of Gaza go?
Also, Israel’s (relative, but by no means total) defeat of the PLO forces in Beirut in 1982 ushered in a new period of intensive self-organizing among the Palerstinians inside the occupied territories… which led to the outbreak of the first intifada– and also– to the birth of Hamas– just five years later.
If Hamas is defeated in Gaza today, what more radical force will be incubating among the defeated Palestinians over the five years to come?
It is high time the U.N. Security Council definitively took up the challenge of brokering a final Palestinian-Israel peace. The US’s long jealously guarded domination of the diplomacy has had disastrous consequences. Haniyeh’s statement offers a position that should be quite acceptable as a Palestinian opening position.
These definitive, final-status talks should be opened without delay, before more people get killed and before the situation in Palestine, Israel, and the whole region becomes geometrically worse.

Haaretz’s Gideon Levy has an important piece in today’s paper that takes on and refutes the “But the Palestinians started it!” argument so frequently made by Israelis– and, I would say, made even more vociferously and uncritically by many non-Israeli Zionists in the west– in an attempt to “justify” Israel’s use of massive and escalatory force to inflict huge damage and suffering on the Palestinian communities of Gaza and the West Bank.
Levy writes:

Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but “they started.”
They are also “breaking the rules” laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that’s an “escalation of the conflict,” and when we bomb a university and a school, it’s perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That’s why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel’s winning moral argument to justify every injustice.
So, who really did start? And have we “left Gaza?”
Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like “partition” and “an end to the occupation,” did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces’ departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to their bitter fate. Now, less than a year after the disengagement, it is going back, with violence and force.
…If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda – here and around the world. Israel would continue with the convergence, which is solely meant to serve its goals, ignoring their needs. Nobody would have given any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they did not behave violently. That is a very bitter truth, but the first 20 years of the occupation passed quietly and we did not lift a finger to end it.
Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise. With our own hands, we are now once again pushing the Palestinians into using the petty arms they have; and in response, we employ nearly the entire enormous arsenal at our disposal, and continue to complain that “they started.”
We started. We started with the occupation, and we are duty-bound to end it, a real and complete ending. We started with the violence. There is no violence worse than the violence of the occupier, using force on an entire nation, so the question about who fired first is therefore an evasion meant to distort the picture. After Oslo, too, there were those who claimed that “we left the territories,” in a similar mixture of blindness and lies.
Gaza is in serious trouble, ruled by death, horror and daily difficulties, far from the eyes and hearts of Israelis. We are only shown the Qassams. We only see the Qassams. The West Bank is still under the boot of occupation, the settlements are flourishing, and every limply extended hand for an agreement, including that of Ismail Haniyeh, is immediately rejected. And after all this, if someone still has second thoughts, the winning answer is promptly delivered: “They started.” They started and justice is on our side, while the fact is that they did not start and justice is not with us.

I’m still on a very slow dial-up line here (in France.). So it’s hard to find and then present here on JWN as much as I would want of the really great commentary, discussion, and criticism of the Gaza escalation that’s been going on in the Israeli media.
However, recently, Adam Keller and Beate Silverschmidt of Gush Shalom (the “Peace Bloc”) sent out a useful compilation of interesting-looking press articles that definitiely looks worth following up on more.
I had the pleasure of meeting Keller (once again) when I was in Israel recently. He, Silverschmidt, Uri Avnery, and all their colleagues there in Gush Shalom have been a beacon of humanity, conscience, and compassion within the Jewish Israeli community for a very long time now.