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Tag: Gaza

16/02/2024

Gaza: The Final Solution?

15 February 2024

As the Israeli army threatens to invade the last part of Gaza, Australia, Canada, NZ, the UN and most of the world ask them to stop. The citizens of Gaza were already crowded into a very small area. Then they were moved to the South, then into ever smaller areas. Now military action will kill large numbers who have nowhere to shelter. It is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Netanyahu says that he wants to destroy Hamas and that the hostages must be there somewhere. Presumably as he has not found them in the areas he is already occupying.

He is still trying to defeat Hamas militarily and always has intelligence that they are hiding in the civilian population.

The idea that Hamas is separate from the population it governs is absurd. It may have a military wing, but it is a political party that was voted in. The reason that they were voted in was because the Palestinian Authority were seen as patsies for the Israeli government, corrupt and concerned with land rezoning kickbacks in the putative capital of the West Bank Palestinian state, Ramallah.

But even if the Israelis killed everyone associated with Hamas, their actions have guaranteed generations of hatred for the Israelis. The ‘war on terror’ was a silly slogan, as terror is a means of fighting that underdogs use, not a religion, a cause or a people.

Which begs the final question; what is Israel doing? Netanyahu is under a great deal of pressure personally in that he is facing corruption changes and he has actually passed legislation to disempower the courts. This was a cause of many demonstrations before the Hamas raids on 7 October that triggered the current war. He is also dependent for power on far-Right Zionist parties for the survival of his government. In a way he needs the war.

But I wonder if this final stage is actually the final solution of the ‘Palestinian problem’. Israel has pretended that there would be a ‘two state solution’ as it pushed Palestinians off their land and out of their Jerusalem houses, gave their jobs to immigrant guest workers so that they had no means of support, and kept them in a gated city, Gaza. Having deliberately made a two state solution impossible, they then made peace with adjoining countries and talked about a ‘regional solution’, which sounded very like ‘you take the Palestinians’. Now, they may be saying to the rest of the world, ‘Are you going to open the border and let these people escape to the Sinai or will we kill them all?’ Of course if they go to the Sinai they will be a huge refugee problem, but it will not be Israel’s problem, it will be the world’s problem- a ‘regional solution’, as Israel will not take them back.

Israel is already a pariah. It has nowhere to put the Palestinians and would have to rebuild Gaza, which it will not want to do. It cannot integrate them as is being attempted in post-Apartheid South Africa, as the enmity is probably now worse than it was in South Africa. And Netanyahu’s far-right religious backers probably see this as an opportunity for a final solution. Do we really believe the stated reasons for their actions? Who will blink first?

26/11/2023

What is Israel’s End-Game?

25 November 2023

It is hard to see an end to the Palestinian conflict.

Zionists believe that God gave the Jews the historic land of Palestine, and this idea has been supported by some Christians who took the Old Testament literally.

After WW2, the Zionists did terrorist attacks on the war-weary British who let them return to Palestine. In 1948 they ‘Declared the State of Israel’ when they were about a third of the population, killed a village of Palestinians, which made the others flee. They then said that no land title prior to the State of Israel existed and all land titles had to be re-registered and all unoccupied land belonged to the State. They have then declined to register Palestinian-owned land, so they can give away farms in the West Bank or even unoccupied houses in Jerusalem. Settlers, especially from Eastern Europe, are willing to fight to retain land that they are given on the West Bank.

In Jerusalem, the Palestinians had the menial jobs, which made it hard to pay the high rents there, and more recently Sri Lankans or others are given the jobs, so the Palestinians have to go to Ramullah to find work, which does not pay as well, so they have trouble paying their Jerusalem rent. If they move out or do not visit much, as checked up on by their electricity, water or phone location records, their houses are ‘unoccupied’ and given away. The bottom line of all this is the Palestinians being gradually squeezed out of the West Bank and Jerusalem. If they ever leave Israel they may not be permitted to return.

The settlements on the West Bank are now in a pattern on the high ground linked by roads so that the Israeli military can support any settlers troubled by the Palestinian farmers, now defined as terrorists, who try to defend their land. In Jerusalem, Jews own the West side and now take houses in Palestinian East Jerusalem, house by house.

As all this has gone on incrementally for years, Israel has pretended that it has a ‘two state’ solution, as it put the 700,000 settlers in the area that could or would have been Palestine. In other words it was happy to pretend that there was a ‘two state solution’ as they systematically made it impossible.

Hamas recognised that this was a nonsense. They won the elections in Gaza because the Palestinian Authority was corrupted by land deals. Israel bullied Jordan and Egypt into compliance then started making wider friendships with Qatar, Dubai and Saudi Arabia and started to talk about ‘regional solutions’ to the Palestinian problem. It looked like the ‘solution’ for them was to go as refugees to anywhere but Israel. This is why Hamas struck. Naturally everyone is upset about this, but no one suggests what they might have done as an alternative. Perhaps just attack an Israeli military base?

Now Israel has struck back. It is hard to see that flattening Gaza is a rational response. Netanyahu, being personally corrupt, has retained power by sharing it with evermore dodgy coalition partners, from the fanatical Zionists to the fanatical Right wing. He has also tried to undermine the judiciary to avoid personal corruption charges. Now the much-vaunted Israeli spy network has been caught off guard, probably because they relied on AI tracking of Palestinian communications networks, which Hamas, sensibly enough, decided not to use. Netanyahu, who was in trouble already and will now be blamed for the Hamas success has hit back to be the strong man. But simply flattening a city with all its civilians may be revenge, but it is not a solution. He has flattened the Northern half of Gaza, while telling the citizens to move to the South, but cut off all food, water and medical supplies. Now he is bombing the South as well.

Where to from here? Israel seems more bent on revenge than having any rational policy. The other possibility is that they will make Gaza unlivable, and force the US and UIN to allow the Gazans into Egypt as refugees, which will start as temporary and become permanent as Israel does not rebuild Gaza, or let them return to Israel. Israel will be pariahs, but they are already, and the refugees will be someone else’s problem. Numerically there are as many Palestinians as Jews and even if the Gaza population were moved, the West Bank Palestinians would remain.

The other alternatives are:

The ‘Two State solution, with Israel either moving its 700,000 settlers from the West Bank, or getting them to live with the Palestinians sharing the land that they once owned or
Israel grants equal rights to Palestinians within Israel, admits it was an apartheid state and has a reconciliation process based on the South African model.

In that the ‘Two State Solution’ and the ‘Apartheid reconciliation’ model both look absolutely impossible with the bloodshed, killing and bitterness that has been rekindled as never before, it is very hard to see a solution. Yet there are still those who want Israel forced into a ‘Two State solution’ by sanctions, as seen below:

Two solutions for the “Question of Palestine”

18/11/2023

Israel is Developing East Mediterranean Gas fields without Palestinian ownership

18 November 2023

One of the interesting stories that has had little attention is that Israel is developing a major new gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean and selling the gas to Egypt. Naturally, this is off the coast of Gaza, but as Gaza is technically part of Israel and Palestine still does not technically exist as a country, it is not sharing the wealth with the Palestinians.

There have been demonstrations in Jordan, but the Western media has not even mentioned the gas field as far as I have seen.

www.newarab.com/analysis/palestinians-denied-drilling-rights-mediterranean-gas-fields?fbclid=IwAR28q511gNLgvm02ScTZcMRlRNH3eciM2BS7_ProcX8b7sKdUMQ1vm4aGM8

10/11/2023

Is Expulsion of the Palestinians the Israeli End-Game?

10 November 2023

It has been said that Israel has no long-term strategy to deal with the Palestinians within Israel. But Netanyahu had spoken about a ‘regional solution’. The ‘Two State’ solution, where Palestinians were given the West Bank, has been systematically undermined by Israel, which has been settling Jews in a strategic pattern on land that was largely Palestinian occupied for many years. (The Palestinians were not said to own it because all land title prior to the declaration of Israel in 1948 was declared null and void. But in all reasonable assessments they should own the land that they had occupied).

Gaza has been termed a prison. With every aspect of its life determined by Israel including trade, and with a very high unemployment rate this was not an unfair description. Now that it is a flattened and uninhabitable mess, is it not possible that Israel wants to push the Palestinians into the Sinai desert, give the whole problem to the UN as a refugee issue, then offer to buy some land and resettle the Palestinians? There was not much going for Gaza before and there will be less now. Israel is already an international pariah, so what does it have to lose? It is likely to be easier to manage a hostile external force than a hostile internal one. If the Palestinians find jobs and make lives in Egypt all these things may be forgotten in a generation or two?

Here is evidence for the proposition that Israel simply wants to expel the Palestinians:

New Document Leak on Plan to Expel Gaza Population

10/11/2023

The Hamas Perspective on the 7 October attack on Israel

10 November 2023

Terrorism is a word that is often ill-defined. To call someone a terrorist is to assume that they are sub-human, cannot be negotiated with and must be destroyed at all costs or by all methods.

It is forgotten that the US is credited with inventing guerilla warfare during their war of independence aka revolution against Britain. It is also forgotten that when large numbers of Jews wanted to return to Palestine after WW2 the Irgun, their militant group, placed a terrorist bomb in the King David Hotel, the military and civil headquarters of the British Mandate in Jerusalem in 1946. The war-weary British allowed increasing numbers of Jewish refugees into Palestine, and Ben Gurion declared the State of Israel in 1948.

Terrorism is the use of violent action to achieve a political result. It is a tactic usually deployed by the weaker side, as they cannot win a military or political struggle. It naturally strikes fear into the civilian population as they recognise that any one of them could be a random victim; hence the emotive force of the word ‘terrorist’.

But those who use terrorism usually do so in a calculated way, and if progress is to be made in resolving the issue, there must be rational calculation in the response to it and dialogue if possible. An emotive or irrational response is likely to worsen the situation, and Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza would have to be in this category. Unless all Palestinians can be removed from Israel, there is likely to be strife in Israel as long as the Palestinains survive, and if they are removed from Israel, there will be a nidus of hate outside Israel.

Here is the Hamas perspective which needs a response:

https://fb.watch/odoTimrgOg/