Israel: Stop bombing Palestinians! Lift the Blockade! Withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza!

Submitted by dalcassian on 20 July, 2014 - 5:15 Author: Sean Matgamna

What Israel is doing to the Palestinians now is a political, moral, and military obscenity!

Israel has a right to defend itself. Hamas refuses to stop lobbing missiles designed to kill Israeli civilians. That justifies Israel now? It is merely exercising its right to self-defence?

No claims to legitimate self defence can justify what Israel is doing now. On every level they outmatch the Palestinians – massively and overwhelmingly.

The Israelis can shoot down, not all, but many Palestinian rockets, before they do damage. It is surely nerve-racking for Israeli civilians to be under fire, as so many of them are. But the small number of Israeli casualties testifies to how little actual damage Hamas is able to do.

The large and increasing number of Palestinian civilian casualties testify to what deadly power Israel can deploy.

There is no justification in Israel's right to self defence for what it is doing to the Palestinians.

Hamas deliberately places its rocket launchers in built-up civilian areas. That justifies Israel in striking at military targets when to do so means indiscriminately to kill civilians – including children?

Israel cannot let its ability to strike at its enemies be hampered by such tactics by Hamas?

Such an argument could convince reasonable people that Israel has a right to do what it is doing only if Hamas rockets were killing many Israelis – or, if Israel were fighting for its life.

Nothing like that now. Israel is raining down death and destruction on a captive Palestinian population hemmed in on all sides, and militarily almost helpless against Israel. Even if Hamas acquits itself well in the fighting now underway that will not change anything fundamental in the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. It is "shooting fish in a barrel". Except that they are not fish but human beings, many of them children.

It was Hamas that refused to continue the recent ceasefire.That would only justify what Israel is doing to civilian Palestinians if, to repeat, Israel was responding to a serious threat of slaughter to Israeli citizens, or was engaged in a war that involved a threat to its existence.

This slaughter of civilians is being done against a political backdrop in which Israel is slowly encroaching upon the Palestinian majority areas, trying by way of establishing "facts" – settlements – on the ground to stake a perpetual claim to the territory so taken from the people it is so shamefully mistreating.

The fundamental blame that attaches to Israel, no matter what it is doing to the Palestinians at a given time, however, is political blame: it is immensely strong now, strong enough to impose a just settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israelis and the rest of the Arab world. It does not do that. It chooses instead to shoot Palestinian "fish" in a barrel.

There is no just solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict except two states: a fully independent Palestinian state, in contiguous territory, side-by-side with an Israel that has negotiated a just settlement with the Palestinians.

End the blockade!
Two states for two peoples!

Comments

Submitted by John D on Thu, 24/07/2014 - 09:28

Sean,

"The Israelis can shoot down, not all, but many Palestinian rockets, before they do damage. It is surely nerve-racking for Israeli civilians to be under fire, as so many of them are. But the small number of Israeli casualties testifies to how little actual damage Hamas is able to do."

As I posted elsewhere, this statement / position / rationale / point of view is, as of yesterday, simply meaningless. Technically, and now self-evidently dramatically wrong.

Just one old tuppney whizz-bang, even if it fails to land within miles of its hoped-for target, can shut down an airport.

In Israel's case, its major air routes, tourist industry, many exports and imports. That is now the strategic significance of Gaza's rockets.

You should change your analysis to take proven, demonstrated facts into account.

Submitted by dalcassian on Sun, 27/07/2014 - 18:31

In reply to by John D

According to the TV news tonight (Saturday 26th of July) 1030 Palestinians have died in the last 19 days and some 40 Israelis. Most of the Palestinians dead are civilians, most of the Israeli dead soldiers. Some fool wrote somewhere that there is a "subtext" to such comparisons – the wish for more Israelis to die. The point is that such an imbalance in casualties illustrates the enormous power of Israel and the comparative helplessness of the Palestinians against Israeli military hardware.

Israel has a powerful shield against rockets – not all-powerful, and not capable of stopping all rockets, but nonetheless very effective with most rockets most of the time. The Palestinians are defenceless against the Israeli bombardment.

Because of the interweaving of Hamas and the Palestinian society in which it operates, it is impossible for Israel to fight Hamas as it is fighting it without large scale Palestinian civilian casualties.

No matter how "surgical" the Israeli strikes are against Hamas, innocent women and children are in the front line and suffer death and maiming. Saying the fault is that of Hamas for deliberately siteing its guns amidst.civilians is irresponsible evasion.

Israel should not conduct its war like that – and it doesn't need to! That is the essential point.

The threat posed by Hamas is not big enough, the destruction that Hamas is able to inflict on Israel (never mind what it would like to inflict) and the threat it poses to Israel on any level, is simply not big enough to justify Israel inflicting such slaughter and destruction on Palestinian civilians.

Of course, Israel has a right to defend itself and Israelis a right to be outraged that Hamas won't stop lobbing missiles at Israeli civilians. But it does not have the right to go berserk with its military power against a hemmed-in, captive Palestinian people that is not too far from being defenceless against Israeli military might.

Israel should not choose to defend itself like this at such a disproportionate cost in Palestinian death and destruction.

The short argument is that Israel shouldn't do what it is doing to the Palestinians because it is able to do it! Because it is strong enough to do it, it doesn't need to do it. There are alternatives for Israel.

It's true that any government is likely to consider the death of one of its citizens more important than the deaths of 1,000 citizens of a hostile entity and to invoke the right of national self-defence to justify itself. A government that interprets it's right of self-defence as Israel is now interpreting it is a rabidly chauvinist government and should be condemned for it by reasonable and humane people.

The idea that a Hamas rocket can disrupt Israeli air flight schedules and that that justifies the pulverisation of Palestinian society and the slaughter of Palestinians is itself a pretty good example of the steel clad chauvinist mindset that characterises Israel now. .

I don't want to trivialise what Hamas is doing, and trying to do to Israeli civilians. That's bad, and if Hamas had the power to do it, it would be a lot worse.

With Israeli power goes prime, overall, Israeli political responsibility for] what is happening

And all this berserker slaughter and destruction takes place against a political background in which Israel could most likely negotiate or impose a just political settlement that would give the Palestinians their own independent state and morally disarm those who want to destroy Israel.

The idea that it is in Israel's long-term interest to do what it is doing is as preposterous as what it is doing to the Palestinians now is unjustifiable. Ultimate security for Israel must rest on coming to some sort of modus vivendi with the Arab societies all around it. Israel may not always be in the position of comparative great strength in which it stands now.

To untold millions of people all across the world today Israel has become the emblazonment of brutal, dehumanised imperialism, the Palestinians the embodiment of relentless victimisation by that imperialism. That, essentially just, perception is not in Israel's interest either.

The bottom line is that Israel should treat the Palestinians as human beings and stop treating then as creatures who can be casually slaughtered, like captive beasts in an abattoir. To adapt a passage from a well-known and not recently written play:

"Do the Palestinians not have hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die?"

Sean Matgamna

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