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GAZA CEASEFIRE:
By Richard Becker A ceasefire agreement between the Hamas-led Palestinian
government in Gaza and Israel was announced today, Nov. 21, in Cairo by U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed
Kamel Amr. Clinton made an emergency trip to the Middle East with
the aim of brokering a truce, a clear sign of the Obama administration's
fears that the continuation of the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza was
endangering U.S. imperialist interests in the region.
Since Israel's latest intense bombing campaign
began last week, Clinton, President Obama, and Republican and Democratic
congressional leaders have repeatedly expressed all-out support for the
Israeli side, while pointedly ignoring far higher Palestinian casualties. The House of Representatives "passed" a
resolution expressing its "unwavering commitment" to Israel. House
Resolution 813 was introduced at 12:04 p.m. on Nov. 16, and declared adopted
at 12:05 p.m. the same day! Since Nov. 14, at least 146 Palestinians have been
killed, more than 1,000 wounded, and much of Gaza's infrastructure and public
facilities destroyed by a coordinated air, sea and land-based bombardment. On
the Israeli side, there have been five killed and more than 100 wounded. To hear U.S. officials talk, you would think it was the
other way around. But despite their obscenely pro-Israel rhetoric, it was
also clear that Washington was fearful that a new Israeli ground invasion of
Gaza might provoke rebellions in Egypt, Jordan and other neighboring Arab
countries, and possibly lead to a wider war. Despite the death and destruction inflicted by Israel,
and despite the fact that it has no air force, navy, armored units or
anti-aircraft defenses, the Palestinian forces have not been defeated.
Virtually all news reports from inside Gaza reflect a strong determination to
resist among the population. The terms of the temporary agreement reportedly call
for a halt to the fighting, an end to Israeli targeted assassinations of
Palestinian leaders, and undefined steps to lift the Israeli blockade that
has inflicted massive suffering on the 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza. Lifting the blockade is a critical issue for the people
of Gaza. Whether there will be any real movement toward ending the blockade
remains in doubt, as does the durability of the truce as a whole. ISRAEL’S BLOCKADE: USING FOOD AS A WEAPON While Israel withdrew its settlers and bases from Gaza
in 2005, it has kept the area surrounded and blockaded ever since. As result,
half of all school children are malnourished and two-thirds of infants are
anemic. Eighty percent of Gaza’s population are refugees -- those driven
out of other parts of Palestine by the Zionist military forces in 1948 and
their descendants. After the Hamas party won the January 2006 Palestinian
parliamentary election, Israel imposed a complete blockade on Gaza, with the
support of the United States, European Union and the client government of
Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. That the aim of the blockade was to make the people
of Gaza suffer was highlighted by an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
the following month. It reported on a meeting of top Israeli government
officials where the top advisor to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Dov
Weisglass, said: "It's like an appointment with a dietician. The
Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won’t die." According to the
Haaretz report, the assembled officials "rolled with laughter," at
Weislglass's grotesque "joke." THE MYTH OF ISRAEL
AS VICTIM In the 1960s, the Black
Panther Party had a saying about racist cops justifying their routine killing
and brutalizing of Black people by "masquerading as the victim of an
unprovoked attack." It is a description that perfectly fits
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his predecessors going back to
the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. In the U.S. corporate media, Israel is invariably
depicted as the "victim." Its brutal and cowardly military assaults
are justified as "retaliation," inferring that Israel's actions are
"self-defense." Over and over, since the early 1950s, successive
Israeli governments have staged provocations to prompt responses that could
then be used to justify massive attacks while presenting Israel as the
"victim of an unprovoked attack." The aim has generally been to
gain new territory and/or crush any state or movement perceived as a threat
to Israeli military domination. This familiar pattern was repeated in November 2008.
The murder of five Palestinian civilians on the day after the 2008 U.S.
election broke a ceasefire and set in motion a train of events that led to an
all-out assault on Gaza by the Israeli military. A vast array of weaponry,
including white phosphorous and depleted uranium munitions, was unleashed on
a trapped population. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, while Israeli
forces had 13 killed -– a ratio of more than 100 to 1. This time, the fatal shooting of a mentally disabled
young man on Nov. 5 and a 12-year-old boy on Nov. 9, both killed by the
Israeli army inside Gaza, set off the new round of fighting. Then, on Nov.
14, Israel assassinated a top Hamas leader, Ahmed Al-Jaabari, the very same
day that he had been presented with a proposal for a long-term ceasefire by a
joint Israeli-Egyptian commission. These provocations were no doubt approved at the
highest level of the Israeli government. The extreme right-wing Netanyahu-Lieberman
government desired a new conflict both to further devastate the Palestinian
infrastructure in Gaza and to advance their political prospects in the
January 2013 Israeli election. That hundreds of Palestinians and some
Israelis as well would die in order to achieve these objectives was
incidental to the Israeli leaders. Whether the present ceasefire holds and for how long
can't be known at this point. The only real long-term solution to the
crisis is an to end to colonial occupation and real self-determination for
the Palestinian people, including the right to return to their homeland.
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