|
The Meaning of Gaza’s ‘Shoah’
Israel plots another Palestinian exodus
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
08/03/08 "ICH" -- -- Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan
Vilnai’s much publicised remark last week about Gaza facing a
“shoah” -- the Hebrew word for the Holocaust -- was widely
assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an
imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.
More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing
indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards
the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Vilnai, a former general, was interviewed by Army Radio as
Israel was in the midst of unleashing a series of air and ground
strikes on populated areas of Gaza that killed more than 100
Palestinians, at least half of whom were civilians and 25 of
whom were children, according to the Israeli human rights group
B’Tselem.
The interview also took place in the wake of a rocket fired from
Gaza that killed a student in Sderot and other rockets that hit
the centre of the southern city of Ashkelon. Vilnai stated: “The
more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer
range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon
themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to
defend ourselves.”
His comment, picked up by the Reuters wire service, was soon
making headlines around the world. Presumably uncomfortable with
a senior public figure in Israel comparing his government’s
policies to the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, many
news services referred to Vilnai’s clearly articulated threat as
a “warning”, as though he was prophesying a cataclysmic natural
event over which he and the Israeli army had no control.
Nonetheless, officials understood the damage that the
translation from Hebrew of Vilnai’s remark could do to Israel’s
image abroad. And sure enough, Palestinian leaders were soon
exploiting the comparison, with both the Palestinian president,
Mahmoud Abbas, and the exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal,
stating that a “holocaust” was unfolding in Gaza.
Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was launching a large
“hasbara” (propaganda) campaign through its diplomats, as the
Jerusalem Post reported. In a related move, a spokesman for
Vilnai explained that the word “shoah” also meant “disaster”;
this, rather than a holocaust, was what the minister had been
referring to. Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.
However, no one in Israel was fooled. “Shoah” -- which literally
means “burnt offering” -- was long ago reserved for the
Holocaust, much as the Arabic word “nakba” (or “catastrophe”) is
nowadays used only to refer to the Palestinians’ dispossession
by Israel in 1948. Certainly, the Israeli media in English
translated Vilnai’s use of “shoah” as “holocaust”.
But this is not the first time that Vilnai has expressed extreme
views about Gaza’s future.
Last summer he began quietly preparing a plan on behalf of his
boss, the Defence Minister Ehud Barak, to declare Gaza a
“hostile entity” and dramatically reduce the essential services
supplied by Israel -- as long-time occupier -- to its
inhabitants, including electricity and fuel. The cuts were
finally implemented late last year after the Israeli courts gave
their blessing.
Vilnai and Barak, both former military men like so many other
Israeli politicians, have been “selling” this policy -- of
choking off basic services to Gaza -- to Western public opinion
ever since.
Under international law, Israel as the occupying power has an
obligation to guarantee the welfare of the civilian population
in Gaza, a fact forgotten when the media reported Israel’s
decision to declare Gaza a hostile entity. The pair have
therefore claimed tendentiously that the humanitarian needs of
Gazans are still being safeguarded by the limited supplies being
allowed through, and that therefore the measures do not
constitute collective punishment.
Last October, after a meeting of defence officials, Vilnai said
of Gaza: "Because this is an entity that is hostile to us, there
is no reason for us to supply them with electricity beyond the
minimum required to prevent a crisis.”
Three months later Vilnai went further, arguing that Israel
should cut off “all responsibility” for Gaza, though, in line
with the advice of Israel’s attorney general, he has been
careful not to suggest that this would punish ordinary Gazans
excessively.
Instead he said disengagement should be taken to its logical
conclusion: “We want to stop supplying electricity to them, stop
supplying them with water and medicine, so that it would come
from another place”. He suggested that Egypt might be forced to
take over responsibility.
Vilnai’s various comments are a reflection of the new thinking
inside the defence and political establishments about where next
to move Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.
After the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, a
consensus in the Israeli military quickly emerged in favour of
maintaining control through a colonial policy of divide and
rule, by factionalising the Palestinians and then keeping them
feuding.
As long as the Palestinians were too divided to resist the
occupation effectively, Israel could carry on with its
settlement programme and “creeping annexation” of the occupied
territories, as the Defence Minister of the time, Moshe Dayan,
called it.
Israel experimented with various methods of undermining the
secular Palestinian nationalism of the PLO, which threatened to
galvanise a general resistance to the occupation. In particular
Israel established local anti-PLO militias known as the Village
Leagues and later backed the Islamic fundamentalism of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which would morph into Hamas.
Rivalry between Hamas and the PLO, controlled by Fatah, has been
the backdrop to Palestinian politics in the occupied territories
ever since, and has moved centre stage since Israel’s
disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Growing antagonism fuelled by
Israel and the US, as an article in Vanity Fair confirmed this
week, culminated in the physical separation of a Fatah-run West
Bank from a Hamas-ruled Gaza last summer.
The leaderships of Fatah and Hamas are now divided not only
geographically but also by their diametrically opposed
strategies for dealing with Israel’s occupation.
Fatah’s control of the West Bank is being shored up by Israel
because its leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, have
made it clear that they are prepared to cooperate with an
interminable peace process that will give Israel the time it
needs to annex yet more of the territory.
Hamas, on the other hand, is under no illusions about the peace
process, having seen the Jewish settlers leave but Israel’s
military control and its economic siege only tighten from arm’s
length.
In charge of an open-air prison, Hamas has refused to surrender
to Israeli diktats and has proven invulnerable to Israeli and US
machinations to topple it. Instead it has begun advancing the
only two feasible forms of resistance available: rocket attacks
over the fence surrounding Gaza, and popular mass action.
And this is where the concerns of Vilnai and others emanate
from. Both forms of resistance, if Hamas remains in charge of
Gaza and improves its level of organisation and the clarity of
its vision, could over the long term unravel Israel’s plans to
annex the occupied territories -- once their Palestinian
inhabitants have been removed.
First, Hamas’ development of more sophisticated and longer-range
rockets threatens to move Hamas’ resistance to a much larger
canvas than the backwater of the small development town of
Sderot. The rockets that landed last week in Ashkelon, one of
the country’s largest cities, could be the harbingers of
political change in Israel.
Hizbullah proved in the 2006 Lebanon war that Israeli domestic
opinion quickly crumbled in the face of sustained rocket
attacks. Hamas hopes to achieve the same outcome.
After the strikes on Ashkelon, the Israeli media was filled with
reports of angry mobs taking to the city’s streets and burning
tyres in protest at their government’s failure to protect them.
That is their initial response. But in Sderot, where the attacks
have been going on for years, the mayor, Eli Moyal, recently
called for talks with Hamas. A poll published in the Haaretz
daily showed that 64 per cent of Israelis now agree with him.
That figure may increase further if the rocket threat grows.
The fear among Israel’s leaders is that “creeping annexation” of
the occupied territories cannot be achieved if the Israeli
public starts demanding that Hamas be brought to the negotiating
table.
Second, Hamas’ mobilisation last month of Gazans to break
through the wall at Rafah and pour into Egypt has demonstrated
to Israel’s politician-generals like Barak and Vilnai that the
Islamic movement has the potential, as yet unrealised, to launch
a focused mass peaceful protest against the military siege of
Gaza.
Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jersualem, noted that
this scenario “frightens the army more than a violent conflict
with armed Palestinians”. Israel fears that the sight of unarmed
women and children being executed for the crime of trying to
free themselves from the prison Israel has built for them may
give the lie to the idea that the disengagement ended the
occupation.
When several thousand Palestinians held a demonstration a
fortnight ago in which they created a human chain along part of
Gaza’s fence with Israel, the Israeli army could hardly contain
its panic. Heavy artillery batteries were brought to the
perimeter and snipers were ordered to shoot protesters’ legs if
they approached the fence.
As Amira Hass, Haaretz’s veteran reporter in the occupied
territories, observed, Israel has so far managed to terrorise
most ordinary Gazans into a paralysed inactivity on this front.
In the main Palestinians have refused to take the “suicidal”
course of directly challenging their imprisonment by Israel,
even peacefully: “The Palestinians do not need warnings or
reports to know the Israeli soldiers shoot the unarmed as well,
and they also kill women and children.”
But that may change as the siege brings ever greater misery to
Gaza.
As a result, Israel’s immediate priorities are: to provoke Hamas
regularly into violence to deflect it from the path of
organising mass peaceful protest; to weaken the Hamas leadership
through regular executions; and to ensure that an effective
defence against the rockets is developed, including technology
like Barak’s pet project, Iron Dome, to shield the country from
attacks.
In line with these policies, Israel broke the latest period of
“relative calm” in Gaza by initiating the executions of five
Hamas members last Wednesday. Predictably, Hamas responded by
firing into Israel a barrage of rockets that killed the student
in Sderot, in turn justifying the bloodbath in Gaza.
But a longer-term strategy is also required, and is being
devised by Vilnai and others. Aware both that the Gaza prison is
tiny and its resources scarce and that the Palestinian
population is growing at a rapid rate, Israel needs a more
permanent solution. It must find a way to stop the growing
threat posed by Hamas’ organised resistance, and the social
explosion that will come sooner or later from the Strip’s
overcrowding and inhuman conditions.
Vilnai’s remark hints at that solution, as do a series of
comments from cabinet ministers over the past few weeks
proposing war crimes to stop the rockets. Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert, for example, has said that Gazans cannot be allowed “to
live normal lives”; Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter,
believes Israel should take action “irrespective of the cost to
the Palestinians”; and the Interior Minister, Meir Sheetrit,
suggests the Israeli army should “decide on a neighborhood in
Gaza and level it” after each attack.
This week Barak revealed that his officials were working on the
last idea, finding a way to make it lawful for the army to
direct artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighbourhoods
of Gaza in response to rocket fire. They are already doing this
covertly, of course, but now they want their hands freed by
making it official policy, sanctioned by the international
community.
At the same time Vilnai proposed a related idea, of declaring
areas of Gaza “combat zones” in which the army would have free
rein and from which residents would have little choice but to
flee. In practice, this would allow Israel to expel civilians
from wide areas of the Strip, herding them into ever smaller
spaces, as has been happening in the West Bank for some time.
All these measures – from the intensification of the siege to
prevent electricity, fuel and medicines from reaching Gaza to
the concentration of the population into even more confined
spaces, as well as new ways of stepping up the violence
inflicted on the Strip – are thinly veiled excuses for targeting
and punishing the civilian population. They necessarily preclude
negotiation and dialogue with Gaza’s political leaders.
Until now, it had appeared, Israel’s plan was eventually to
persuade Egypt to take over the policing of Gaza, a return to
its status before the 1967 war. The view was that Cairo would be
even more ruthless in cracking down on the Islamic militants
than Israel. But increasingly Vilnai and Barak look set on a
different course.
Their ultimate goal appears to be related to Vilnai’s “shoah”
comment: Gaza’s depopulation, with the Strip squeezed on three
sides until the pressure forces Palestinians to break out again
into Egypt. This time, it may be assumed, there will be no
chance of return.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth,
Israel. His new book, “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”, is published
by Pluto Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We encourage engaging, diverse
and meaningful commentary. Do not include
personal information such as names, addresses,
phone numbers and emails. Comments falling
outside our guidelines – those including
personal attacks and profanity – are not
permitted.
See our complete
Comment Policy
and
use this link to notify us if you have concerns
about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and remove any
inappropriate postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
