The World's True Outlaw State

What is happening in Lebanon and Gaza today is not an 'excessive overreaction' by Israel to a 'provocation' by Hamas and Hezbollah. It is a long-prepared and massive military assault aiming to fulfil key strategic objectives and using the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers on the border with Gaza and Lebanon as the excuse to justify the utterly unjustifiable. It is not Israelis that are under occupation and it is not the Israeli government that is besieged. Palestinians are under occupation and it is their government that is besieged and being squeezed economically (their own tax earnings is being denied to them), diplomatically, politically and militarily. Gaza is one big prison with all border crossings under Israeli control and Tel Aviv militarily attacking Gaza whenever it deems fit. One may argue that the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit by a Palestinian resistance group is politically wrong because it gives an excuse for further Israel brutality. But as a people under an illegal occupation sustained by force and institutionalised violence, Palestinians have every moral and legal right to attack, kill and kidnap the soldiers of the occupying force but not Israeli civilians.

Israel, however, has no moral or legal right to carry out 'collective punishment' of any kind on Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, let alone endanger and kill civilians which of course they do all the time. Such is the routinised viciousness, humiliating practices and brutality of the Israeli occupation, that there are always Palestinians who will resist in various ways, a few of which are forms of unjustifiable terrorism. But even these cannot remotely compare to the depth and scale of terrorism practiced by the Israeli government. Some 9000 Palestinians including 200 women and almost a 100 children have been incarcerated for the 'crime' of resisting the occupation and its 'laws'. As for the Hezbollah killings and kidnappings of Israeli soldiers, all media reports in India have correctly pointed out that this is a violation of international law and should be condemned. But how many reports, if any, have there been about the fact that even after ending its brutal and illegal occupation of 18 years in southern Lebanon (from 1982-2000), Israel has carried out numerous illegal assaults across the Lebanese border? Who has pointed out that even after a 2004 prisoner exchange with Hezbollah, three Lebanese captured by Israel on Lebanese soil remain imprisoned and that this is a key motive behind the counter-kidnappings by the Hezbollah, which far from being coordinated with the Gaza resistance, are acknowledged by the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as having taken five months to plan?

Killing three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two in and around disputed border territory and firing rockets across the border, are, as the French foreign minister Mr. Douste-Blazy correctly said, "irresponsible acts". But Israel's behaviour in air bombing civilians, (over 300 have been killed), destroying infrastructure, displacing half-a-million people, and preparing for a major ground invasion, is not just profoundly disproportionate, it as an act of war! The US could stop Israel in its tracks at any time but instead, is engaging in time-wasting diplomacy and shameful prevarications about Israel needing to "defend itself" because its existence is threatened. This is because it hopes Israel's military actions might go some way to achieving strategic objectives in the region that it shares with Israel.

With regard to the Palestinians, this Olmert government following Sharon's is quite clear. There must never be a return to 1967 borders, forget what all relevant UN resolutions say. 70% of the Wall extends beyond the Green Line (marking the 1967 borders) and Israel will fully annex at least some 20% of the West Bank including the three big settlement blocs where over 80% of Israelis settlers are located. The other 20% in outlying settlements will be rehabilitated either in the big blocs or inside Israel. There will still be no territorial contiguity for the rest of the West Bank since Israel must control all kinds of access roads, bridges and tunnels to 'protect' its settlers. The Jordan Valley will remain under Israeli military control as well as all airspace over Gaza and the West Bank. The massive expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem is now an accomplished fact and of course East Jerusalem will never be given back though there can be some form of international supervision for visits to Muslim religious sites. Israel will happily conduct the farce of giving a distant suburb Abu Dis to the Palestinians and let it be renamed the Arabic equivalent of Jerusalem. There will never be an Israeli acknowledgement of the Palestinian 'right to return', i.e., Israeli will not apologise for what it did in 1948 in forcing the Palestinian people to flee from their homes where they had lived for centuries.

The US has no problems in supporting such a 'settlement', indeed after the death of Arafat and the election of Mahmoud Abbas, (always the 'favourite' of Tel Aviv and Washington) there were hopes that the Palestinian Authority could be pressurised to accept this. What came as a bitter blow to Israel and the US was the democratic election of Hamas that expressed not just of Palestinian disillusionment with the corruption of Al Fatah but, more importantly, popular refusal to accept the kind of sell-out that was all that was being offered as a possible 'final solution'. Hamas, therefore, had to be undermined so that a more 'reasonable' Palestinian leadership could emerge. To this end there has been a systematic campaign to defame Hamas as a terrorist group, to make its operations so difficult economically and politically, i.e. impose even more suffering on the Palestinian people in the occupied territories as a way of diminishing the support for Hamas. Gaza, of course, has to remain one big prison because if it was to become genuinely free then it would become the centre of Palestinian resistance undermining Israeli plans for extending its annexations in the West Bank. After all, the 'disengagement' is not a withdrawal of occupation, simply its rearrangement. In that period of disengagement alone, while some 8000 Jewish settlers were removed from Gaza, close to 15,000 were settled in the West Bank.

Apart from Hamas, the only serious practical resistance that Israel faces is Hezbollah, which is the only force that has inflicted a military defeat on Israel - it made the price of Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon so high that Israel ultimately withdrew. With the US backing it, Israel has no reason to worry about other governments or the UN doing anything except mouthing meaningless nothings about how there should be a 'peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue', about how 'all sides' must 'share the blame', how Israel should not 'overreact', and so on. The garrison state that Israel is, the arrogance and racism that Israeli state and society has long deeply internalised, has led it to think it can seriously weaken its two main opponents by through brute force and utter contempt for basic principles of humanity as well as of international law. By doing so a) it thinks it will more easily succeed in unilaterally imposing what it wants in the occupied territories; b) establish much stronger Israeli-US control over Lebanon thereby gravely weakening not just Hezbollah but also the one Arab state in the region, Syria, which still seriously opposes both Israel and the US; c) further isolate the other country that continues to defy it and the US -- an Iran that has strong links with Hezbollah and supports Hamas. The US caught in the Iraq quagmire and sharing its strategic goals has every reason to be happy with what Israel is doing.

Word Power