January 16 , 2009
Israel Unleashes Hell in Gaza - Why?
Four weeks back, on December 27 to be exact, Israel started air attacks, often over 60 a day, on the Gaza enclave on the Mediterranean coast to pound out of existence the hold of the leadership and activists of Hamas in that Palestinian strip. The hell thus unleashed has already taken a toll of some 900 Palestinians including a large number of children and women. It hardly convinces any one that the havoc was invited by the homemade, crude rockets fired on Israeli territory by Hamas activists in Gaza. The rockets have killed less than a score of persons so far.
A glaring irony of the situation is that the very people who should be sensitive to the suffering of others are perpetrating the atrocities. No wonder it is being referred to as Israel’s holocaust in Gaza, a death camp by the sea.
Ironically enough also, the sole super power, the most prominent upholder of human rights has elected to abstain from voting for a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire to halt further massacres. The UN human rights Chief, Navi Pillay, called it an “egregious violation of human rights”. One is reminded of the saying of a Russian poet, Yevtushenko: “When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie”. President Bush had referred to US-Israel relation as “unique”. That explains the unique conduct of the rulers of a truly decent people.
Israel has declared that it would not halt the operations in Gaza till its objectives have been achieved, irrespective of any ‘obligatory resolution ‘ of the UN, any other grouping, or massive protests in capitals of the world. It wants destroy the hold of Hamas on the Palestinians, and in particular its manifesto to put an end to the state of Israel. The politburo of Hamas was forced to take refuge in Damascus. In the West Bank, the Authority is headed by the Al-Fatah leaders, Mahmud Abbas, arch opponent of Hamas and a protégé of both the US and Israel.
Hamas had achieved a landslide victory in the Palestinian elections held on January 25, 2006. A radical Islamist party, an offshoot of the Ikhwanul Muslameen (Islamic Brotherhood) of Egypt, Hamas moved from the wings to center stage by capturing 74 seats with Fatah, the party in power, trailing far behind with 45 seats only.
This was upsetting not only for the leadership of Al-Fatah but for the Middle East watchers and sympathizers of Israel in Western capitals. While Al-Fatah accepted the defeat and its cabinet resigned, the US leadership started pressuring Hamas to renounce its manifesto to destroy Israel and adopt, instead, a stance of rapprochement with Israel. Israel withheld the payment of tens of millions of dollars it had collected in tax and customs revenue on behalf of Palestinian Authority. The US and Europeans donors also threatened to hold back their aid totaling over a billion dollars a year, expecting monetary desperation to bring political expediency.
Pro-Israel thinkers and lobbyists in the US started advocating that before any democratic elections are arranged in any country of the Middle East, radical Islam must be defeated and eliminated. Hence the on-going onslaught in Gaza. Only a month before the Palestinian elections of January 2006, the Egyptian electorate had come out strongly for the Ikhwanul Muslameen. In Iraq, the post-Saddam vote found support for a pro- Iranian Islamis6t as Prime Minister. In Lebanon, the voters celebrated the withdrawal of Syrian troops by voting Hezbollah into the government. Similarly, radical elements had thrived in elections in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
Muslim societies have drifted into radicalism owing to their utter frustration with their autocratic rulers who seek foreign crutches and suppress local dissent ruthlessly. The people of Palestine who voted for Hamas, for instance, were a thoroughly frustrated lot. Their territory was and still is in shambles and is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. There is hardly any law and order. It is, to quote the Newsweek published on Feb.6, a few days after the elections, “a vast slum festering with crime and corruption”. People’s means of livelihood are restricted and they are checked and harassed at border posts of they want to go to Israel for work. Thousands of Palestinians are in Israeli jails. Al-Fatah leaders were incompetent, thoroughly self-serving and corrupt. The Palestinians had become totally disillusioned and disgusted with their cowardice and inability to make any headway in the so-called peace process.
A forefront supporter of Israel, Daniel Pipes, has called Hamas win “democracy’s bitter fruit”. He is the Director of the Middle East Forum, and a blatant advocates of the use of force to serve US and Israeli interests in the Middle East. Hamas, he maintains, should be “isolated and rejected at every turn, thereby encouraging Palestinians to see the error of their ways”.
In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines, the systematic destruction of infrastructures and killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, go far beyond encouraging Palestinians to see the error of their ways, They fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention.
A week after the invasion of Gaza, the President of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack as a “monstrosity”. That is not the end of the matter. For, according to a plan prepared by the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, the aim is to destroy all Palestinian leadership and authority and create such horrible conditions of life that the Palestinians leave their hearth and home and seek refuge in neighboring Arab lands.
The US emerged as the sole super power of the world mainly because of the society’s high moral values. Jimmy Carter has rightfully lamented in his book “Palestine –Peace Not Apartheid” the erosion of these high values in recent years, yielding place to the language and arrogance of power. That is what has created distortions in the pursuit of the nation’s policies abroad. That is what has caused the counter-productive outcomes of elections in the Muslim world. People have voted for the extremists, not because they themselves honestly believe in extremism, but because the secular elements were suspected of being the stooges of foreign powers. Their ostentatious life styles reflected their ill-gotten wealth.
In the context of Israeli actions over decades, the Gaza genocide is typical of a state that is totally indifferent to international law and which sees military slaughter as the only way to solve political problems.
What is happening in Gaza is actually a ruthless and brutal rampage of murder and terror waged by the fourth strongest army of the world against a blockaded, beleaguered and starved people who want to survive and be free, very much like the Jews did under the Nazi occupation of Europe.
A Holocaust doesn’t become less obnoxious when perpetrated by Jews!
arifhussaini@hotmail.com
