MB Civic

Israel on the Offensive
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060717/bishara

by Marwan Bishara

The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has exploited the
capture of Army Corporal Gilad Shalit to restore the country’s diminished
deterrence against militant Palestinian factions, to break the elected
Hamas government and to impose its unilateral territorial solution on the
West Bank. But when the dust finally settles, Israel’s offensive against
the besieged territories–and now Lebanon–will have left the region with
more destruction and death and the Israeli government with the same
strategic deadlock. That’s why instead of lashing out against their
neighbors, Israelis must end the vicious cycle of provocations and
retaliations, and pursue meaningful negotiations to end the occupation.
The Olmert government bases its campaign against Palestinian civilian
infrastructure on three fallacies: that Israel does not initiate violence
but retaliates to protect its citizens–in this case a captured soldier;
that its response is measured and not meant to harm the broader
population; and that it does not negotiate with those it deems terrorists.

But Israel’s offensive did not start last week. The three-month-old
Israeli government is responsible for the killing eighty or more
Palestinians, some of whom were children, in attacks aimed at carrying out
illegal extrajudicial assassinations and other punishments. Hamas has
maintained a one-sided cease-fire for the past sixteen months, but
continued Israeli attacks made Palestinian retaliation only a question of
time. (Palestinian factions not under Hamas’s control had been firing
home-made rockets across the border off and on during this period–almost
always with little or no damage or casualties–but these factions
maintained that the attacks were in response to Israeli provocations.)

Since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000, repeated
Israeli bombardments and targeted assassinations against Palestinians have
aggravated the violence and led to Israeli deaths. In fact, according to
the US academic Steve Niva, who has been documenting the intifada, many
major Palestinian suicide bombings since 2001 have come in retaliation for
Israeli assassinations, many of which occurred when the Palestinians were
mulling over or abiding by self-imposed restraint.

To give three examples: On July 31, 2001, Israel’s assassination of
the two leading Hamas militants in Nablus ended a nearly two-month Hamas
cease-fire, leading to the terrible August 9 Hamas suicide bombing in a
Jerusalem pizzeria. On July 22, 2002, an Israeli air attack on a crowded
apartment block in Gaza City killed a senior Hamas leader, Salah Shehada,
and fourteen civilians, nine of them children, hours before a widely
reported unilateral cease-fire declaration. A suicide bombing followed on
August 4. On June 10, 2003, Israel’s attempted assassination of the senior
Hamas political leader in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, which wounded him
and killed four Palestinian civilians, led to a bus bombing in Jerusalem
on June 11 that killed sixteen Israelis.

Although Israel’s provocations don’t justify suicide bombings, they
demonstrate how its deterrence has lost its effectiveness and why the
source of terrorism lies first and foremost in its aggression and
occupation. In this context, affected Palestinian civilians see themselves
not as “collateral damage” but as victims of state terrorism.

As for the nature of its “retaliation,” one could hardly refer to
Israel’s destruction of the civic infrastructure of 1.3 million
Palestinians as “measured.” The Israeli army began last week’s offensive
on the Gaza Strip by bombing bridges, roads and electric supplies, and by
arresting nearly one-third of Hamas’s West Bank-based parliamentarians and
ministers (according to the Israeli press, the security services are
holding the elected Palestinian officials as bargaining chips with Hamas).

The nature of the Israeli offensive is to punish, overwhelm and
deter
with disproportionate force, regardless of the suffering of the general
public. Cutting off basic services of the Palestinians is not only
unjustified, it is collective punishment of a civilian population–illegal
under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The asymmetry between Israeli and Palestinian firepower mustn’t be
translated into asymmetry between the value of Israeli and Palestinian
life. The Palestinians have captured one Israeli soldier, but Israel holds
more than 9,000 Palestinian prisoners, about 900 of whom are under
“administrative detention,” i.e., without trial. It has held some of these
prisoners for longer than three years. Those in the international
community calling for the IDF soldier’s release need to address, at
minimum, the ordeal of Palestinian women and children in Israeli jails.

The Israeli government, like any other, has the right and indeed the
duty to protect its people, but not at the high expense of the
Palestinians, whose government’s credibility also rests on defending its
people. The use of military force to scare and overawe a civilian
population for political ends–in this case, to pressure the Palestinian
Authority or undermine the Hamas government–is the very definition of
state terrorism.

In its thirty-nine years of occupation, Israel’s attempts to tame or
intimidate the Palestinians have instead led to their incitement and
radicalization. Isn’t it time for Israel to change course? After all, in a
minuscule territory where the longest distance separating an Israeli and
Palestinian area is no more than nine kilometers, Israelis will never be
secure if the Palestinians are utterly insecure.

That’s why Israel’s harsh responses to Palestinian militancy have
generally increased, not reduced, the threat to Israelis. While from 1978
to 1987 eighty-two Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks, that
figure jumped to more than 400 the following decade. And in less than two
years of the second intifada (September 29, 2000, to May 29, 2002), more
than 450 Israelis and 1,250 Palestinians were slain, mostly civilians on
both sides.

Lastly, regarding its refusal to bargain with “terrorists,” Israel’s
previous dealings with Lebanon’s Hezbollah paint a different picture.
Israel’s bombardment of Beirut’s electric generators and its Operation
“Grapes of Wrath” in 1996, which led to the Qana massacre, failed, like
many other operations, to deter the Lebanese resistance, which eventually
forced Israel to negotiate through a third party with those it deemed
“Islamist terrorists” and release hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian
prisoners from its jails in exchange for the remains of dead Israeli
soldiers.

The ongoing saga has once again demonstrated the absurdity of
unilateralism as a viable and secure solution. And yet, the Olmert
government is using the kidnapping of the soldier to undermine the
historic agreement Hamas has reached with PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s
Fatah party over a unity government and de facto recognition of and
negotiations with Israel, its sworn enemy.

Whether we like it or not, Hamas, like Hezbollah, is mostly a
byproduct of an oppressive occupation, not the other way around. That’s
why refraining from excessive use of force and concentrating all efforts
on a negotiated end to the occupation is paramount. Otherwise, Israel will
only increase Hamas’s popularity and push it back to clandestinity and
war.

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