Israel’s war on Gaza: The hypocrisy of the West

Israel undertakes this defence by attacking Gaza with F16 jets, drones, artillery, naval guns and 500lb bombs supplied – and replenished – by the United States. For good measure he demanded the immediate and unconditional release of the Israeli soldier captured by the Gaza militants. (The soldier was later reported by Israel’s media to have […]

Israel undertakes this defence by attacking Gaza with F16 jets, drones, artillery, naval guns and 500lb bombs supplied – and replenished – by the United States. For good measure he demanded the immediate and unconditional release of the Israeli soldier captured by the Gaza militants. (The soldier was later reported by Israel’s media to have been actually killed in a fight). Brushed aside as a non-matter is the fate of 461 Palestinians seized by Israel in the wake of the abduction and killing of three Israeli youths on the West Bank in June. They are still under Israeli detention, with no country making a case for their release. The 1,867 deaths so far in Gaza don’t matter either, except as issues of humanitarian concern.
Then there was the Secretary of State John Kerry the other day proclaiming that he was second to none in his support for Israel in his 29 years in the U S Senate. It is clear that fealty to Israel is the first article in the code of conduct for American politicians.
The current bout of Israeli aggression against the Palestinians in Gaza has its genesis in the abduction and killing of three Israeli youths on the West Bank. Straightway, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu declared the Gaza militant group Hamas guilty of the act and proceeded to arrest and detain its members on the West Bank. From there it was but a short step to launching military operations against Gaza. Actually, it is de rigueur for Israeli prime ministers to launch wars against Palestinians. Netanyahu is therefore following an old tradition.
The third war against Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal from the Strip in 2005, it is also the most bloody, brutal and barbaric, with Israel using everything bar nuclear weapons, accompanied by declarations of punishment of Biblical proportion for the inhabitants. Gazans are ordered to leave their homes, willed on by “the knock on the roof” warning: dummy missiles fired on target homes and other buildings. At the end of its operations Israeli military declares Gazans can return to the rubble to which their homes have been reduced.
Gaza Strip has been under Israeli blockade since 2006 when Hamas won a democratic election, which Israel and its Western backers refused to recognise, calling the group a terrorist organisation and refusing to talk to it – even as the United States had to talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan! Now, a blockade is an act of war as the world saw in the Israeli reaction to the closure of the Straits of Tiran by Egypt; it launched the Six Day War against Arab countries. The people of Gaza cannot be expected to continue to endure living in an open prison that their strip of territory has become under the blockade; the current struggle is to break this inhuman imprisonment of 1.8 million people.
It is worthy of note that in all conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians, the latter are ab initio termed the aggressor party and Israel deemed to be defending itself. In the current fighting in Gaza, truce proposals by mediators allow Israeli military to continue operations while demanding quiet on the part of Gaza militants. And Netanyahu can arrogantly call on what he considers the international community “to stand with a democratic Israel” against a terrorist Hamas, as if democracy in itself is a guarantee of good conduct on the part of a rapacious state.
Israeli occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is the longest in modern history with no end in sight despite 25 years of militant struggle and 22 more of “peace-making”. The Oslo Accord of 1992 and the handshake on the White House lawn a year later have not changed the material and political conditions of the Palestinians. Israel has used legalism, obfuscation and sophistry to prevent progress towards the objective of peace between the two sides based on the concept of land-for-peace, now refined as the two-state solution. Contrary to international law, which prohibits the acquisition of territory through war, and the extant United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding the return of territories captured during its 1967 war, Israel intends to hold on to choice parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in any peace settlement.
This stand was endorsed by a callow president George W Bush who was in thrall to the then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. The two intifadas in the period under reference were the result of frustration on the part of the Palestinians at the Israeli approach to these peace talks. The Palestinian Authority envisaged by the Oslo Accord to midwife the birth of a Palestinian state has been turned into a police force to keep the West Bank and, until recently, Gaza quiet for Israel. At every peace talks meeting the Palestinians are required to show evidence of good faith, while no such burden is placed on Israel whose security is constantly, preternaturally ranked above Palestinian freedom by the so-called mediators from the West. The Palestinians are pressured to accept a contrived state, its various parts linked by narrow strips of land, a state that will be an Israeli backyard supplying unskilled labour and providing market for Israeli products.
Israel will eventually win its current war against the Palestinians of Gaza but the “victory” will not ensure the quiet the country craves. Palestinians will continue to strive against an Israel that practises what the Nobel Peace Prize winner president Jimmy Carter describes as apartheid against them.

M T Usman can be reached at: [email protected]