GAZA: ONE YEAR ON
A Very Good Piece
By Ben White
Al-Jazeera
"As the one year anniversary of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip is marked, it is vital to re-examine Operation Cast Lead within the wider context of Israel's approach to both Gaza and the Palestinians.
There is a danger that the scale of the devastation and the international protests which followed the war can deflect attention from the broader Israeli policies of collective punishment and deliberately-engineered socio-economic collapse......
Thus even before the widespread targeting of civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military a year ago, the Gaza Strip had been subjected to what the Goldstone report described as "a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation"......
Months before Operation Cast Lead, an aid agency report described how the blockade "is destroying public service infrastructure in Gaza" and "has effectively dismantled the economy"......
The second crucial context for Operation Cast Lead is the overarching political strategy behind Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza. For the humanitarian catastrophe documented in numerous reports by the UN and NGOs is not, of course, a 'natural disaster' but a deliberate, political policy......
Another key Israeli goal, evident in both the ongoing blockade as well as the brutal military assault of Operation Cast Lead, is to punish the civilian population in the hope of turning them against Hamas.....
'De-developing' Gaza
That this was a "carefully planned" assault intended "to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population" was clear at the time......
Targeting civilians to advance a political goal is a standard definition of terrorism: in the words of the US state department, "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets". US federal law describes terrorism as violence or "life-threatening acts" apparently intended "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population"......
But the third and final context for recalling the events of a year ago means looking beyond just Gaza to take in Israel's policies toward the Palestinians as a whole.
Israel's regime of control over the Palestinians, both those in the Occupied Territories as well as those with citizenship in the pre-1967 borders, is a response to political Zionism's historic and contemporary dilemma: how to create and maintain a Jewish state in a land with a non-Jewish population.....Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, aimed at maintaining the domination of one group over another, have been guided by two, parallel principles: maximum land with the minimum number of Arabs, and, the maximum number of Arabs on the minimum amount of land......
There is no 'solution' to Gaza outside of a just peace for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis that can only emerge when the Palestinian people's rights under international law are realised, and Israel's policies of dispossession, separation, and structural discrimination are seriously challenged."
A Very Good Piece
By Ben White
Al-Jazeera
"As the one year anniversary of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip is marked, it is vital to re-examine Operation Cast Lead within the wider context of Israel's approach to both Gaza and the Palestinians.
There is a danger that the scale of the devastation and the international protests which followed the war can deflect attention from the broader Israeli policies of collective punishment and deliberately-engineered socio-economic collapse......
Thus even before the widespread targeting of civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military a year ago, the Gaza Strip had been subjected to what the Goldstone report described as "a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation"......
Months before Operation Cast Lead, an aid agency report described how the blockade "is destroying public service infrastructure in Gaza" and "has effectively dismantled the economy"......
The second crucial context for Operation Cast Lead is the overarching political strategy behind Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza. For the humanitarian catastrophe documented in numerous reports by the UN and NGOs is not, of course, a 'natural disaster' but a deliberate, political policy......
Another key Israeli goal, evident in both the ongoing blockade as well as the brutal military assault of Operation Cast Lead, is to punish the civilian population in the hope of turning them against Hamas.....
'De-developing' Gaza
That this was a "carefully planned" assault intended "to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population" was clear at the time......
Targeting civilians to advance a political goal is a standard definition of terrorism: in the words of the US state department, "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets". US federal law describes terrorism as violence or "life-threatening acts" apparently intended "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population"......
But the third and final context for recalling the events of a year ago means looking beyond just Gaza to take in Israel's policies toward the Palestinians as a whole.
Israel's regime of control over the Palestinians, both those in the Occupied Territories as well as those with citizenship in the pre-1967 borders, is a response to political Zionism's historic and contemporary dilemma: how to create and maintain a Jewish state in a land with a non-Jewish population.....Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, aimed at maintaining the domination of one group over another, have been guided by two, parallel principles: maximum land with the minimum number of Arabs, and, the maximum number of Arabs on the minimum amount of land......
There is no 'solution' to Gaza outside of a just peace for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis that can only emerge when the Palestinian people's rights under international law are realised, and Israel's policies of dispossession, separation, and structural discrimination are seriously challenged."
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