Israel
Targets Hamas’s
Political Leadership
By Jean Shaoul
28 May, 2007
World
Socialist Web
Israel
is continuing to mount air strikes in Gaza as part of its drive to destroy
Hamas as a military and political force and torpedo the Palestinian
national unity government, as well as any possibility of a negotiated
deal with Palestinian leaders.
Israel argues that its air
strikes are aimed at halting Hamas’s ability to launch Qassem
rocket attacks on its towns bordering Gaza. On Sunday, an Israeli man
died as a result of a Qassem rocket in Sederot—the twelfth person
to have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza at Israel in the past
three years.
But the scale of deaths,
injuries and damage sustained by Palestinians defies such claims. Nearly
50 people have been killed in Israeli attacks over the past fortnight.
Dozens more have been injured, including women and children, and many
buildings have been destroyed.
Moreover, while previously
Israel’s military forces have focussed on Hamas’s armed
wing, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on Sunday: “There will
be no limit in acting against the terror groups and against those who
are responsible for the terror. No one is immune.”
Helicopters and fighter planes,
using precision weapons, have conducted air strikes against money-changing
offices and businesses in the Gaza Strip that Israel claimed had been
transferring money to Hamas and other militant organisations, as well
as Hamas’s arms caches, training bases and command posts for its
militia, the Executive Force.
Having eschewed a major ground
offensive against Gaza at this stage, Israel is extending its policy
of targetted assassinations to political as well as militant leaders,
including Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s
political wing.
On Saturday, Israel’s
military forces fired two missiles that landed near Haniyeh’s
home in the Shati refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City. They hit
trailers used by his bodyguards and cut electricity to the crowded camp.
Though the army claimed Haniyeh
was not a target, the missile strike was part of a larger offensive
against Hamas targets that killed five people only hours after Gaza
militants had indicated they would stop their rocket attacks if Israel
halted its air strikes. Following this assault, Hamas rejected any talk
of a ceasefire.
Earlier in the week, Israeli
missiles destroyed the home of Khalil al-Haya, a Hamas member of the
Palestinian Legislative Council, killing eight of his relatives and
neighbours.
In the West Bank, Israeli
forces arrested leading members of the Palestinian government, including
cabinet minister Wasfi Kabaha. Last Thursday alone, 33 Hamas politicians,
legislators, the mayors of four West Bank cities, including Nablus and
Qalqilya, and local council members, were detained in overnight raids.
The army also seized computers and files from politicians’ offices,
charities and a school in Hebron.
Palestinian information minister,
Mustafa Barghouti, described the arrests as “a massacre”
of Palestinian democracy and civil society. Last year, Israel arrested
more than 40 Hamas politicians, including several ministers and the
speaker of the parliament, Aziz Dweik, following the capture of Israeli
Army corporal, Gilad Shalit. They had been elected in January 2006 on
Hamas’s Change and Reform list, which won the parliamentary elections.
Nearly all are still being detained without trial in Israeli jails.
The charges against them include membership of Hamas, which Israel and
the US have designated as a terrorist organisation.
The most senior Palestinian
official arrested in the recent raids, Education Minister Nasser Eddin
al-Shaer, is not even a member of Hamas. He was also detained in last
year’s swoop but was released later by a military court, because
no incriminating evidence was found.
Israel’s foreign ministry
issued a statement saying, “a terrorist organisation remains a
terrorist organisation, even if its members stand for democratic elections.
Membership in such an organisation is a violation of Israeli and international
law.”
Defence Minister Amir Peretz
said in a radio interview that Israel would not make a distinction between
the political and military wings of Hamas. “The arrest of these
Hamas leaders,” he said, “sends a message to the military
organisations that we demand that this firing [of Qassem rockets] stop.
If the rockets do not stop, we will not stop.” He added that Israel
was “biting its lip” and refraining, for now, from launching
a wide-scale ground offensive in Gaza.
Peretz’s deputy, Ephraim
Sneh, went even further. Having described Hamas leaders as “terrorists
in suits,” he was asked if this meant the Palestinian prime minister
could be targetted for assassination.
Sneh replied, “I’ll
put it like this. We don’t care if he’s a ringleader, a
perpetrator of rocket launching or if he is one of the political leaders.
No one has immunity. There is no one who is in the circle of commanders
and leaders in Hamas who is immune from a strike. For what does political
Hamas do? It gives the operational approval to those who are doing the
fighting.”
In other words, Israel has
arrogated to itself the power to kill another country’s elected
leadership so as to eliminate it as a political force. It is to this
end also that Israel has intervened in support of Fatah in the factional
fighting with Hamas that has killed at least 50 Palestinians this past
month.
Confirmation of Israel’s
success in this regard has come from Javier Solana, the European Union
foreign minister. Speaking after talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas and Israeli leaders on Thursday, Solana said he did not know whether
the current Fatah-Hamas unity government had reached its “death,”
but it was a “non-functioning government”.
The recent offensive in Gaza
and the West Bank underscores Israel’s hostility to any form of
Palestinian state. The logic of the demographic situation is that for
Israel to survive as an explicitly Jewish state, the Palestinians in
the Occupied Territories must be driven out and the Palestinians as
a whole reduced to an atomised mass that is easily policed.
No Palestinian leadership,
whatever its political hue, is therefore acceptable to Israel. It had
previously rejected Fatah, which had recognised Israel, as a “partner
for peace” under Yasser Arafat’s leadership. In so far as
Israel continues to have any dealings with Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas,
this is solely for the purpose of fomenting civil strife and chronic
instability so that the Palestinians either leave “voluntarily”
or submit to Israel’s diktats.
The right-wing Likud leader
and former Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu articulated this policy
most openly. Last week he proposed “a wide range of actions...
to apply pressure”. This was to “begin with a general closure
of Gaza,” he said, “through a controlled stoppage of services
such as electricity and water, up to targetted killings and actions
from the area on infrastructure targets, or limited ground incursion
to the radius of the Qassam range or a larger ground incursion.”
Asked if he favoured a large-scale
infantry incursion, Netanyahu said, “I think the problem here
is to return to the balance of deterrence that was so very eroded in
the last year. As a result of the last war, Gaza has turned into Lebanon
Two with bunkers.”
In an interview published
on Thursday in the Financial Times, Netanyahu reiterated Likud’s
long-standing position that the Palestinians already had their own state—Jordan—and
called for “some kind of federation or confederation between Jordan
and the Palestinians”.
Netanyahu, who is closely
aligned with Washington’s neo-conservative clique, also indicated
that the offensive against the Palestinians was part of a broader objective
to reorder the Middle East.
Israel was fighting a war
on several fronts, he stressed. “We now have three live fronts:
one Hizbullah, which has rearmed itself with more weapons than it had
before the war and better kinds of weapons... Second, Gaza, which is
turning itself into a second Lebanon; and, third, Syria, which is arming
itself feverishly, which is something it has not done in 30 years.”
He added: “The largest
issue confronting Israel is the tide of militant Islam sweeping our
region and threatening the entire world. But it is centred on the Middle
East and the two streams—the Shia stream in Iran and the Sunni
stream in al-Qaeda—they sometimes collide with each but more often
than not, as in Iraq, they collude against the common enemy.”
The greatest danger was Iran,
he continued, which Israel claims is funding and training all the terrorist
groups. Here, he said, there were three courses of action: “First,
nothing, in which case they will get [nuclear] weapons, possibly in
three or four years ... Second, you can reserve the military option,
preferably by the US, which has the means to do so. But that should
be a last resort.”
Finally, “you can use
the economic weakness of the regime to put economic pressure upon it
by a combination of actions to limit its credit lines and divestment,
divesting by companies, primarily European companies that do business
there”.
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