Three years after the American invasion of Iraq, we are witnessing the beginning of another massive military operation to force a regime change in the Middle East — this time by Washington’s strategic regional ally, Israel, in the occupied territory of Palestine.
Israel’s pretexts are the capture of one of its soldiers in a daring attack, attacks on Israeli communities with home-made Palestinian rockets, the inability of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to rein in anti-occupation armed resistance and the assumption of power by Hamas, condemned by Israel and the United States as a ”terrorist” organisation.
Much has been said about Hamas’s landslide victory in the January 25 legislative elections. In truth, that event only disrupted a status quo that was already crumbling and unsustainable. It did not freeze the so-called peace process, which was already deadlocked by Israel’s insistence on taking unilateral action.
In reality, while Israel’s military offensive targets the Palestinian Hamas-led government, the end goal is to rule out the Palestinian Authority as a peace partner, enabling Israel’s rulers to do as they wish — without the irksome need to negotiate with Palestinians.
At midnight on June 27 Israel unleashed its forces to reoccupy parts of the Gaza Strip, including the airport, and bombed the only electricity-generating grid, the power distribution network and six transformers, plunging the densely populated and poverty- ridden strip into darkness.
Water pipelines, highways that link southern and northern Gaza and four bridges were also bombed, disrupting traffic and restricting movement of the population.
Israeli F-16s meanwhile were terrorising Palestinian civilians with sonic booms. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his Cabinet: ”I want no one to sleep at night in Gaza.”
Israel’s military siege of Gaza is depriving more than 1,4-million Palestinians of fuel supplies, exacerbating power and water crises, and threatening vital health services.
Israel sealed off the Mediterranean coastal strip, practically besieging the Palestinian president, premier and Cabinet ministers in Gaza after kidnapping eight other ministers and 21 lawmakers from the West Bank, thus paralysing the Palestinian Authority’s executive and legislative branches of government.
The offices of the prime minister and the interior ministers were also bombed to rubble, reminding one of the dynamited presidential headquarters of the late Yasser Arafat.
In Gaza, Israeli warplanes targeted universities, schools, soccer fields, clinics, charities and police stations. In the West Bank, news-papers, local television stations, hospitals, cultural centres, municipalities and other social institutions were raided, vandalised and sealed off.
The Israeli war on Palestinian infrastructure was decried by world powers, led by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
However, none of the world powers have objected to Israel’s assault on the Palestinian Authority to force a regime change.
It seems necessary to point out that the latest onslaught was preceded by a suffocating financial siege imposed on the Palestinian Authority by Israel, the US and the European Union since the January 25 elections — a siege that has thinned Palestinians to near starvation.
Why?
”Olmert’s aim is to complete what his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, effectively began when he ordered Israeli tanks into the West Bank in April 2002. Until then Israel had been trying to negotiate peace — or at least an end to violence — with the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords of 1993. Sharon’s aim was to invalidate Oslo, destroy the Palestinian Authority and its security forces and make possible a solution imposed by Israel,” wrote Jackson Diehl in the July 4 Washington Post.
Olmert came to power in March on a platform to unilaterally demarcate Israel’s final borders inside the Palestinian land that Israel occupied in 1967, and annex the Palestinian Jordan Valley and the major settlement colonies to the Jewish state, in a plan that would pre-empt the creation of an independent, contiguous and viable Palestinian state.
Dictating to Palestinians Israel’s three options — perpetuating the occupation, his unilateral plan or civil war — Olmert is crushing all potential Palestinian partners with his roaring F-16s and rolling tanks.
It is not difficult to see where all this is heading. As early as March, James Wolfensohn, the former envoy of the quartet (the US, UN, European Union and Russia), warned: ”I do not believe you can have a million starving Palestinians and have peace.”
Nicola Nasser, a veteran journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank, is the editor of the English-language website of the Palestine Media Centre