[WCUSP] Fwd: links to essential articles on reality Gaza+ Siegman article on Gaza's future-not to mention rest of world

Sun Feb 3 22:28:03 CST 2008

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>
Date: Feb 3, 2008 10:27 PM
Subject: links to essential articles on reality Gaza+ Siegman article
on Gaza's future-not to mention rest of world
To: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>

essential reads if you want reality
>From Robert Stiver of Hawaii, film maker and human rights activist:
1.Immediately below are links to two very current Stephen Lendman
commentaries of serious scholarship -- meticulously researched,
exhaustively documented -- which, if all were right and good with the
pro-Palestinian-rights-and-life movement, would be front and center on
every pol-prostitute's desk {US Congress}-- 535 of them -- on Monday
morning.

http://www.counterpunch.org/lendman01252008.html (Stephen Lendman, "A
Case History of Separation, Forced Displacement and Terror:  Israeli
Repression in the Hebron")

http://www.counterpunch.org/lendman02022008.html (Stephen Lendman,
"Life in Occupied Gaza:  A Prison State")

Here are other essential reads for the "complicit 535":

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/14/6354/ (Chris Hedges,
"The End of the Road for George W. Bush")

http://www.ameu.org/uploads/vol41_issue1_2008.pdf (Khalid Amayreh, "Hamas")

http://www.counterpunch.org/baroud02012008.html (Ramzy Baroud, "People
Power in Gaza: They Simply Did It")

http://www.thenation.com:80/doc/20080218/makdisi (Saree Makdisi, "The
Strangulation of Gaza")

Bob
2.Gaza's future - not to mention the rest of the world
Henry Siegman
London Review of Books, 7 February 2008
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n03/sieg01_.html

The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza's
imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which
Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that
sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail.
That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would
have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza's citizens
surrendered to their fate.

Israel's claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke
its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd - and offensive. It
shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions
imposed by Israel on Gaza's civilian residents redirected against
their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas
for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults
on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by
the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater
divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public
displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert's
government.

Olmert's statement, made shortly before the breakout, that Gaza's
residents could not expect to lead normal lives while missiles from
Gaza were hitting Israel would have been perfectly reasonable if Gazan
residents had indeed been allowed to live 'normal' lives before the
most recent tightening of the noose and if it were the case that
Gaza's civilian residents had any control at all over the firing of
the missiles.

As Olmert knows, neither is the case. The siege of Gaza was imposed by
Israel because Israel's government and the US administration intended
to undo the results of Hamas's victory in the elections of 2006.
Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah's
security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a
way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security
forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would
overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the
cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres.

It is not even true that the siege of Gaza and the boycott of Hamas
were necessary to get a peace process with Abbas and his Fatah party
underway, as Bush and Olmert claimed when they met in Washington in
June 2007. Hamas had announced its willingness to submit to a popular
referendum any agreement that resulted from permanent status talks
between Fatah and Israel. Israel boycotted Hamas because it did not
want Hamas to play any role in a peace process, fearing that this
would exact a far greater price than negotiations with Fatah from
which Hamas was excluded.

Ironically, Abbas probably has far less flexibility in negotiations
with Israel when he is in an adversarial relationship with Hamas. As
long as Fatah and Hamas are at war, Hamas will condemn any compromise
as Abbas's collaboration with the enemy. In the best of circumstances
it would be hard to conceive of the terms of a peace accord acceptable
to both sides: they are entirely out of reach so long as Fatah and
Hamas remain unreconciled.

Certainly the peace process the US and Israel have promoted following
the break between Fatah and Hamas has not produced anything other than
empty rhetoric and emptier promises. On the ground, absolutely nothing
has changed: not in anticipation of the Annapolis conference; not at
the conference itself; not following the conference's conclusion; and
not following Bush's visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah. For all the pomp
and ceremony of that occasion and the uplifting talk of adherence to
Road Map obligations, not a single so-called illegal outpost has been
removed, and the checkpoints that Israel solemnly promised to reduce
have in fact been increased. (Whether the intention to deny all new
construction in East Jerusalem and in the settlements announced by
Olmert's office as I write these lines will suffer a similar fate
remains to be seen.)

Yet Abbas and Fayyad have pretended that they are engaged in a
significant peace process with Israel that could produce, in Bush's
words, 'a viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent' Palestinian
state by the end of this year. Presumably they know better. If not,
the big difference between Fatah and Hamas is not so much that one is
committed to a political process and the other to violence, or that
one is secular and the other Islamic, but rather that the former lives
in a world of fantasy and the other does not.

Does the situation in Gaza justify the relentless missile and mortar
assaults that continue to target Israeli civilians in Sderot? To
argue, as Hamas's leaders do, that these primitive Qassam rockets have
resulted in no more than two or three Israeli deaths over the years,
while Israeli retaliations cause the daily killing not only of
militants but of innocent men, women and children, is not a
justification for Hamas's targeting of Israeli civilians. That Qassam
rockets have not fallen on a kindergarten full of children in Sderot
is not the result of skilful humanitarian targeting on the part of
Islamic Jihad and Hamas militants. It is simply extraordinary luck.

On the other hand, the immorality of Hamas's assaults on Israeli
civilians is not a licence to bring Gaza's civilian population to a
state of near starvation. The insensitivity that prevents Israelis
from seeing that their behaviour towards Palestinian civilians -
whether in Gaza or in the West Bank - is not very different from the
Palestinians' targeting of Israeli civilians could not have found more
unfortunate expression than in Olmert's assurance that while Israel
'will provide the population [in Gaza] with everything needed to
prevent a crisis, we will not supply luxuries that would make their
life more comfortable.' What UNRWA's commissioner-general Karen Abu
Zayd sees as a people 'intentionally reduced to a state of abject
destitution' is seen by Olmert as a people deprived of 'luxuries'.

In the face of such criticism, Israelis angrily respond that instead
of condemning Israel's policy towards Gaza, their critics would be
better advised to demand that Gaza's citizens remove their Hamas-led
government. The absurdity of such a suggestion aside, one has to
wonder how Israelis would respond if they were told by Palestinians
that instead of condemning Hamas's terrorist assaults on Israeli
citizens, they should remove their own government for failing to end
the occupation.

That said, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the breach in the
barrier between Gaza and Egypt has created a new strategic situation.
Of course, the barrier separating Gaza from Egypt will be closed
again, but it is highly unlikely that the status quo ante can be
restored and the absolute closure on Gaza's population reimposed. As
Ha'aretz suggested in an editorial of 24 January, the crisis in Rafah
is an opportunity to pursue policies that are 'more creative than
assassinations and starvation'.

Which brings me to the second of the fundamental realities. The
current goal of isolating Hamas and negotiating a peace agreement with
Fatah is based on the fantasy that such an agreement can be
implemented despite Hamas's opposition. Hamas is a movement with deep
roots and a significant role in Palestinian politics that opposition
from Israel and the US can only strengthen. New border arrangements to
prevent a serious breakdown between Israel and Egypt cannot be
implemented without somehow involving Hamas. And for domestic reasons,
it is inconceivable that either Abbas or the Egyptian government would
consent to the creation of a new cross-border regime that aims at the
continued strangulation of Gaza's population.

The inevitability of four-party discussions between Israel, Egypt, the
Palestinian Authority and Hamas presents the US with an opportunity to
change course and to encourage Israel to engage Hamas in talks aiming
at a ceasefire, the only way to end the Qassam assaults. The talks
could then address the question of the acceptance by Hamas of the Arab
peace initiative. Of course, there can be no certainty that Hamas
would agree: what is certain is that it will never agree while Israel
and the US seek its overthrow, and without negotiations that deal with
both sides' grievances.

Equally important, the issue of Hamas's recognition of Israel should
not be expanded by Israel beyond normal international practice.
Israel's requirement that this recognition include a pronouncement on
the Jewish state's legitimacy, or on its ethnic and religious
character, is gratuitous and inappropriate. A simple statement of
recognition of Israel's statehood should suffice. No US government has
ever asked anyone to affirm the legitimacy of the dispossession of
America's Indians as a condition for the establishing of normal
relations.

If the Bush administration were to take advantage of the new situation
in Gaza to promote internal Palestinian reconciliation it might yet
lay the groundwork for an agreement between Israel and the
Palestinians. If it maintains its current posture, it will remain
essentially irrelevant, with far-reaching implications for all the
parties to the conflict - not to mention the rest of the world.

25 January

Henry Siegman, the director of the US/Middle East Project, served as a
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006,
and is also a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East
Program at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London