Gaza Crisis

If you say "make them hewers of wood and drawers of water" then I will consider you "fanatical"!

Israel has repeatedly committed war crimes and have been repeatedly condemned by human rights organizations. The fact that Hamas and Hizbollah also commit war crimes is irrelevant. The central difference between the sides is that Israel's war crimes kill and maim more people because their weaponry is more powerful.

For two and a half years, they have been caged and ostracized by the whole world. The line of thinking that states that through war we will gain new allies in the Strip; that abusing the population and killing its sons will sear this into their consciousness; and that a military operation would suffice in toppling an entrenched regime and thus replace it with another one friendlier to us is no more than lunacy.

“That is why the television kills us. Newspapers are better because they give context.”

This war is wrong. It is wrong because it cannot achieve its manifest goals -- long-term "normal" life for the residents of the Negev region. The war is morally wrong because most of the victims are Palestinian and Israeli civilians whose only "crime" is that they live in Negev or Gaza. This war is wrong because it is not heading toward a viable solution of the conflict but is instead creating more hatred and greater determination on the part of both peoples to harm one another. It is wrong because it is leading to stronger feelings that we have nothing to lose by striking further, with greater force. This war is wrong because, even before the last smoke rises from the rubble and the last ambulance carries the dead and wounded to hospitals, our leaders will find themselves signing a new agreement for a cease-fire.

That doesn't justify the Palestinians' violent response, which has been both morally atrocious and wholly ineffective, but it's important to understanding why Palestinian society sees itself in a war for it's own survival, not for Israel's.

This series of pieces from OpenDemocracy provides a good sense of how control extends to vertical space. That's to say, it's not just about square footage. (The author draws a fascinating comparison between settler outposts and crusader forts.) It's also about demographics. The standard argument against a one-state settlement is that birth rates would leave the Arabs in the majority. But settler families are also larger than ones in Israel proper, culturally detached and with children claiming exemption from IDF service. That creates its own cultural splinters.

Overall, we find that Israeli violence leads Palestinians to be less supportive of Fatah and of the peace process, but that this effect wears off within three months. We also find that “local” violence has a larger effect than “distant” violence; that the effect is larger for demographic groups with a higher propensity to support radical positions; and that Palestinian fatalities in targeted killings are no more likely to radicalize the population than all other fatalities.

So why is Israel spinning this the way it is? Well, the answer is obvious – as part of the propaganda war, they want to repeat the 1967 Six Day War mystique of dealing a death blow in the early days of the war, a blitzkrieg, so to speak. And what are the results after day three? A lot of destruction of property. But the Hamas leadership, as far as we know, is intact, and still firing rockets -- more than one hundred today -- this time killing 2 Israelis. So much for another Six Day War.

Gaza: hope after attack

Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad by Matthew Levitt. Yale University Press, in cooperation with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2006. 324 pages, $26.00, hardcover.

Unfortunately, Matthew Levitt’s book does not address the critical evolutionary processes — particularly with regard to its organizational structure and political, social and economic role in Palestinian society — that have characterized the Palestinian Islamist movement and Hamas’s rise to power.