Imposing thy will

Israelis Batter Gaza and Seize Hamas Officials

The Times:
Israel stepped up its confrontation on Wednesday with Palestinian militants over the capture of an Israeli soldier, battering northern Gazan towns with artillery and sending warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping.

In the West Bank early on Thursday, Israeli forces detained the Palestinian deputy prime minister, Nasser Shaer, two other cabinet ministers and four lawmakers in Ramallah, The Associated Press reported, citing security officials. Labor Minister Mohammed Barghouti was detained earlier, they said.

As Israeli tanks hunkered down inside southern Gaza at the airport on Wednesday, after warplanes knocked out half of Gaza's electricity and pounded sonic booms over houses, the crisis seemed to be tipping toward wider violence.

The Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz, approved an extension of the incursion into northern Gaza, where Palestinian militants have been firing crude Qassam rockets into Israel. As of early Thursday, though, Israel denied reports that it was moving tanks into northern Gaza. About 9 p.m. Wednesday, after saying they would drop leaflets urging citizens of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya to leave their homes, Israeli artillery batteries began to shell.

On Thursday, an Israeli warplane fired a missile in Gaza City that an Israel spokeswoman said hit a soccer field near the pro-Hamas Islamic University. Reuters reported that the missile hit inside the university.

Political leaders of Hamas on Wednesday joined the militants to demand the release of Palestinian women and minors from Israeli jails in exchange for the soldier — a condition that the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, vowed would not be considered. The choice, Israeli officials said, was the soldier's unconditional release or an escalation that could widen the conflict regionally: Haim Ramon, Israel's justice minister, raised the possibility of a strike in Syria to kill Khaled Meshal, the exiled political leader of Hamas; the men who hold the Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, are believed to be following his orders.

"We won't hesitate to carry out extreme action to bring Gilad back to his family," Mr. Olmert said of the soldier captured in an attack near Gaza on Sunday led by Hamas.

In what the Israelis said was a message to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, on Wednesday four Israeli warplanes flew over his residence in Latakia, in northwest Syria, where he was believed to be staying. Syrian state television said Syrian air-defense systems fired on the planes and forced them to flee. ...

And there remains widespread approval for the capture of Corporal Shalit and Hamas's demand for an exchange, given that there are nearly 9,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails.

"There is support for this because I am not safe when I walk on the street," said Mustafa Raghib, the director of Gaza's largest flour mill, forced to shut for several hours after the electricity was cut. "I don't live a good life. I am not safe in my country. Give me a good life and I will not support actions like this." ...

Israeli leaders said Wednesday they had ordered the military forward after seeing little progress on diplomatic efforts — including by Egypt and France — to end the crisis. Amid sonic booms that shattered windows, Israeli military planes hit the three bridges, as Apache helicopters attacked all six of the transformers at the power plant — an attack that Israeli officials said was necessary to make it harder to move around Corporal Shalit .

"Nobody understands the logic," Rafik Maliha, the plant's manager, said. "They want to keep people in the dark so kidnappers don't move? What's the relationship?

"If there is no electricity, there is no water," he added. "It is more than collective punishment."

The plant provided some 42 percent of the power to Gaza's 1.3 million residents, and now Gaza is completely dependent on Israel for its power. Mr. Maliha said it would take as long as a year to replace the transformers.

Has Israel gone mad?

One of their soldiers--not a civilian, a soldier--is taken prisoner; negotiations commence, the Palestinians say they want to exchange him for some of their own prisoners. This is an event that has happened literally thousands if not millions of times in human history.

Israel responds by 1) launching a massive invasion of Gaza; 2) destroying the water and electricity infrastructure that thousands of civilians depend on to stay alive; 3) kidnapping senior Palestinian leaders; 4) threatening to kill a Palestinian leader in Syria; 5) threatening to kill the Syrian president.

If the Palestinians had done any of the above, they'd have been justifiably accused of terrorism. Israel does it all, President Bush comes out and--again condemns the initial Palestinian action.

It's very odd; something's afoot. Maybe Israel thinks with the World Cup going on, nobody's paying attention? And they wonder why nobody likes them at the United Nation....

The craziest thing? As the Times reported last week in A Gaza Political Figure Says He's Become a Scapegoat

[Fatah's leader] Mr. [Muhammad] Dahlan described a meeting on Wednesday with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, of Fatah, and the prime minister, Ismail Haniya, of Hamas. "Abu Mazen asked him, 'What's your program? How will you get out of this crisis? What can you tell us?' And Hamas always says, 'God will help us.' Fine. We all believe in God, but politics requires an answer."

Mr. Abbas, with the encouragement of Mr. Dahlan, has seized on a document prepared by prisoners, led by a jailed Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, that calls for a unified Palestinian government and program that would support a Palestinian state within the boundaries before the 1967 war, thus implicitly recognizing Israel. If Hamas does not come to an agreement with him to accept the principles set out in the document, Mr. Abbas has declared a July 26 referendum on the proposal, a vote that Hamas says is illegal.

"Marwan did a great job in the jail on the document," Mr. Dahlan said of Mr. Barghouti, getting a senior Hamas prisoner to sign what "is the first document in our lives" that all Palestinian factions managed to negotiate. "I told Abu Mazen, 'Don't even read the document, just accept it.' And Abu Mazen used the document in a good way," he said, presenting Hamas with a political conundrum.

Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas government spokesman, said in an interview that he was optimistic that the Abbas-Hamas talks would lead to a political agreement without a referendum, allowing Mr. Abbas, as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, full authority to negotiate with Israel on the basis of the 1967 boundaries.

Yup, just as the Palestinians are finally getting their act together, with the most-respected hard-liners challenging Hamas with a political maneuver to reopen negotiations with Israel, the Israelis decide to invade Gaza.

What are they playing at? Are they hoping to provoke the Palestinians into a return to suicide bombings, so they can then point with outrage and wail about how can they be expected to negotiate with terrorists?

It seems like they certainly don't want to sit down at the negotiating table with the Palestinians. The Times article continues:

On Tuesday, Palestinian negotiators from Fatah, Hamas and other factions rushed to finish a draft of a unified political program, based on a document issued in May by Palestinian prisoners. It contains new language that senior Israeli officials said represented a defeat for Mr. Abbas. They said they hoped he would walk away from it because, one official said, "It takes him out of the game" and "further alienates him from Israel." The document now represents, the official said, "The basis for future negotiations with Israel, and for us, this is a total nonstarter."

The Israeli analysis, made by the Foreign Ministry, focuses on new language, inserted in negotiations with Hamas, that insists on the right of return, "without discrimination," for all Palestinian refugees "to their homes and properties from which they were evicted and to compensate them." The Israelis argue that this stronger language gives the lie to any claim that Hamas has recognized the right of Israel to exist, implicitly or otherwise, because such an interpretation of refugee rights would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state by flooding it with Palestinians.

The document has always been silent on the statehood of Israel, but has been interpreted to give it an implicit recognition because it calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, "on all territories occupied in 1967," presumably with Israel next door.

But a senior official, who has also briefed European diplomats, argued that the failure to mention Israel's right to exist speaks more loudly. "We don't see any implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas," the official said. "The most significant reason is that this right of return takes out the two-state solution."

Israel, the official said, is concerned that the document is being praised by European officials, without having yet been read. The document, Israel says, accepts previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements only in so far as they do not "affect the rights of our people," which Israel says means "cherry-picking" previous agreements.

My gosh, the Palestians are de facto recognizing your right to exist, which is the Holy Grail Israeli policymakers have been seeking for decades. So sit down with them and fight it out over the details--the fact that Hamas of all groups was rushing to finish a negotiating document should be cause for celebration.

Don't negotiate via the media; don't worry about what Europe thinks; and certainly don't try to impose your will and force the other side to bow to your superior force. Maybe it's a ploy, so they can negotiate 'from strength'--if so, it's outright damnable and small to try to improve upon a theoretical position at the expense of the lives of women and children.

Not to mention why would you then expect anyone to show up at the other end of the table? Well, except the Palestinian leaders Israel kidnapped... maybe they'll be brought to the negotiating table with guns at their back?

It makes me wonder if Israel doesn't think the status quo, where their (American-subsidized) military might in combination with international sanctions is slowly suffocating the Palestinians, is a 'solution.' It puzzles me--any nation that's okay with having millions of people who hate you as neighbors is stupid at best, masochistic at worst.

Certainly stiff-necked in any case; yes, it's a bad thing that some rogue Palestinian faction that does not want to see negotiations kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Swallow your pride; or if taking an eye for an eye is too deeply entwined in your DNA, go kidnap a Palestinian soldier.

Don't whip yourself up into an orgy of destruction out of an unprofessed unwillingness to sit at the same table as your adversaries, where you'd actually be forced to respond to them as fellow human beings.

Not to mention forced to explain in front of the world why Palestinians families who had their property seized and were run out of Israel at the point of a gun shouldn't at least be compensated. Nor allowed to come back to visit graveyards and remaining relatives--let alone return to their homes. (Odd that the Republicans are so incensed that Fidel Castro kicked people out of Cuba and took their property, but have never said word one about the situation in Israel).

In any case Israel's actions are especially strange since it won't be in a position of strength for much longer. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz explored Israel's demographic problem in an article headlined The demographics point to a binational state

At the end of the War of Independence, after the expulsion and flight of some 700,000 Arabs, the population of Israel consisted of 82 percent Jews and 18 percent Arabs. In 2003, 54 years and almost 3 million immigrants later, the Central Bureau of Statistics' official figures indicated a similar Jewish-Arab ratio (81 percent Jews, 19 percent Arabs), with the figure for Jews including non-Jewish immigrants.

In other words, the great immigration effort, including the dramatic influxes of immigrants in the early fifties and in the 1990s, served only to "balance out" the growth of the Arab population (most of it due to natural increase, and the rest achieved through family unification, the marriage of Arab citizens to foreign nationals and the annexation of East Jerusalem). The result was that the Jewish-Arab ratio remained the same.

If we assume that the proportion of Jews in the population is, in fact, even lower (because the figures do not reflect Palestinians residing in Israel illegally) and that massive immigration is no longer very likely, it becomes clear why more and more demographic experts and Jewish politicians see the question of a "Jewish majority" in Israel as a central issue, even within the 1967 borders.

Professor Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer from the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, is among the more moderate members of his profession. His style is not apocalyptic, and his predictions tend to be highly cautious (some experts, as will be shown later, consider them too cautious). And yet even he is worried. As he explains, a demographic balance is made up of three components: immigration, mortality and birth. ...

Even DellaPergola, given to low-key predictions, estimates that by 2050 Israel's Arab sector may grow to nearly 30 percent of the population, "and although the Jewish majority remains stable with such a ratio, such numbers are more typical of a binational state, with all that the term implies. When those are the numbers, the minority no longer settles for individual civil rights, but demands a collective expression. Cyprus, for example, broke up when the Turks amounted to only 18 percent of the population."

AFP photo of an Israeli soldier directing a tank outside Gaza by David Furst