Israel's
Experiment In Human Despair
By Jonathan Cook
09 July 2006
Countercurrents.org
One
needed only to watch the interview on British television this week with
Israel's ambassador to the UK to realise that the Israeli army's tightening
of the siege on Gaza, its invasion of the northern parts of the Strip
today, and the looming humanitarian crisis across the territory, have
nothing to do with the recent capture of an Israeli soldier -- or even
the feeble home-made Qassam rockets fired, usually ineffectually, into
Israel by Palestinian militants.
Under questioning from presenter
Jon Snow of Channel Four news on the reasons behind Israel's bombing
of Gaza's only power station -- thereby cutting off electricity to more
than half of the Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants for many months ahead,
as well as threatening the water supply -- Zvi Ravner denied this action
amounted to collective punishment of the civilian population.
Rather, he claimed, the electricity
station had to be disabled to prevent the soldier's captors from having
the light needed to smuggle him out of Gaza at night. It was left to
a bemused Jon Snow to point out that smugglers usually prefer to do
their work in the dark and that Israel's actions were more likely to
assist his captors than disadvantage them.
The Alice Through the Looking
Glass quality of Israeli disinformation over the combined siege and
invasion of Gaza -- and its widespread and credulous repetition by the
Western media -- is successfully distracting attention from Israel's
real goals in this one-sided war of attrition.
The current destruction of
Gaza's civilian and administrative infrastructure is reminiscent of
the Israeli army's cruel rampages through the streets of West Bank cities
in the repeated invasions of 2002 and 2003, and the Jewish settlers'
malicious attacks on Palestinian farmers trying to collect their olive
harvests.
The relative absence of these
horror stories today is simply a reflection of the terrible success
of the wall Israel has built across Palestinian farmland and around
Palestinian population centres in the West Bank. Settlers no longer
need to plunder the olive harvest when the fruit is being left to rot
on the trees because farmers can no longer reach their groves.
In the case of the West Bank
invasions, Israeli tanks rolled easily into Palestinian cities that
had already been isolated and crippled by the stranglehold of checkpoints
and roadblocks all over the territority. Israeli heavy armour knocked
down electricity pylons as though they were playing a game of ten-pin
bowling, snipers shot up the water tanks on people's roofs, soldiers
defecated into office photocopiers and the army sought out Palestinian
ministries so that their confidential records and documents could be
destroyed or stolen.
Notably, only in the warren
of alleys in the overcrowded refugee camps of Jenin and Nablus did the
army find the going far tougher and suffer relatively high casualties.
Which may explain the military
caution that has been exercised by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in regard
to the ground invasion of Gaza. The tiny Strip, besieged on its land
borders by the Israeli army behind an electronic fence and on the seafront
by the Israeli navy, is one giant, overcrowded refugee camp. The past
week has seen Gaza "softened up" with airstrikes on its infrastructure
and government ministries. Today, land forces began wreaking more death
and destruction -- fourteen killed at the time of writing -- in "mopping
up" exercises in the pattern established earlier in the West Bank.
Three long-standing motives
are discernible in Israel's current menacing of Gaza.
First, Israel is determined
to continue its campaign of impairing the Palestinian Authority's ability
to govern. This has nothing to do with the recent election of Hamas
to run the Palestinian Authority. Israel's official policy of unilateralism
-- ignoring the wishes of the Palestinian people -- began long before,
when Yasser Arafat was in charge. It has continued through the presidency
of Mahmoud Abbas, a leader who is about as close to a quisling as Israel
is likely to find.
Hamas's electoral success
has merely supplied Israel with the pretext it needs for launching its
invasion and the grounds for demanding international support as it chokes
the life out of Gaza. Israel doubtless hopes that at the end of this
process it will be left with Abbas, a figurehead president backed into
a corner and ready to put his name to whatever agreement Israel imposes.
Second, the attack on Gaza
-- as ever -- is partly a distraction from the real battle. It was widely
recognised that Ariel Sharon's dogged pursuit of his Gaza disengagement
policy last year was designed to free his hand for the annexation of
large chunks of a greater prize, the West Bank, and for securing the
biggest prize of all, East Jerusalem. Nothing has changed on this front.
As Israel keeps all eyes
directed towards the suffering in Gaza, it is starting to make significant
moves in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is preparing for the much-delayed
evacuation of a handful of illegal West Bank hilltop settlements --
known in Israel as "outposts" -- demanded as the first stage
of the implementation of the almost-forgotten US-sponsored peace process
called the Road Map.
These outposts are tiny,
often just a few caravans. It will be much to Israel's advantage if
the world fails to examine too closely the miserly act of evacuating
these places, which doubtless will later be presented both as Israel
having made a huge sacrifice for peace and as having satisfied its side
of the Road Map's conditions.
The loss of these outposts
and a few larger settlements will pave the way for international acceptance
of Olmert's convergence plan, his unilaterally imposed expansion of
Israel's borders at the expense of a viable Palestinian state.
Equally significant are the
overlooked manoeuvres Israel is undertaking in East Jerusalem as it
beats a warpath towards Gaza. Last week Israel stripped four Hamas MPs
of their right to live in East Jerusalem, effectively expelling them
to the West Bank. It also showed that it could lock up them and dozens
of other democratically elected Palestinian representatives with barely
a peep from the international community.
In yet another dose of Alice
in Wonderland, Israel's policy of making hostages of these MPs was referred
to as "arrests" by the Western media. Few bothered to report
that the MPs are being deprived of even their most basic rights, such
as meeting with their lawyers.
As the four Jerusalem MPs'
lawyers have argued, it is a nonsense that Israel allowed these Hamas
politicians to stand in the recent elections and now, after their victory,
it calls their membership of the party "support for terrorism".
It is also a disturbing sign of how easily Israel will be able to begin
ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants using
the flimsiest of excuses.
And third, and perhaps most
significantly of all, Israel is using the siege and invasion of Gaza
as a laboratory for testing policies it also intends to apply to the
West Bank after convergence. Gazans are the guinea pigs on which Olmert
can try out the "extreme action" he has been boasting of.
The destruction of Gaza's
power plant and loss of electricity to some 700,000 people; the consequent
scarcity of water, build-up of sewage that cannot be disposed of, and
inevitable spread of disease; the shortages of fuel and threats to the
running of vital services such as hospitals; the sonic booms of Israeli
aircraft that terrify Gaza's children and unpredictable air strikes
that terrify everyone; the inability of Palestinian officials to run
bombed ministries and provide services; the constant threat of invasion
by massed Israeli troops on the "border"; and the breakdown
of law and order as Fatah and Hamas gunmen are encouraged to turn on
each other. All these factors are designed to one end: the slow demand
by Palestinians, civilians and militants alike, to clear out of the
hell-hole of Gaza.
The traffic through the tunnels that once served Gaza's smugglers will
change directions: where once cigarettes and arms came into Gaza, the
likelihood is that soon it will be people passing through those underground
passages to leave Gaza and seek a life outside.
If this experiment in human
despair works in the small Gaza Strip, its lessons can be applied to
much bigger effect in the West Bank ghettoes left behind after convergence.
This is how ethnic cleansing looks when it is designed not by butchers
in uniforms but by technocrats in suits.