rigorousintuition.ca

[AlicetheKurious]

Double post.

[chlamor]

'An earthquake on top of your head'
Dr Eyad Al Serraj, a practising psychologist in Gaza City, describes his family's terror as the Israeli attack began
The Guardian



A wounded girl is carried to hospital after Israel's attack on Gaza Photograph: Majed Hamdan/AP



Saturday 27 December 2008 15.26 GMT

The bombing went on for about 10 minutes. It was like an earthquake on top of your head. The windows were shaking and squeaking. My 10-year-old was terrified, he was jumping from one place to another trying to hide. I held him tight to my chest and tried to give him some security and reassure him. My 12-year-old was panicking and began laughing hysterically, it's not normal. I held her hand and calmed her and told her she would be safe. My wife was panicking. She was running around the apartment looking for somewhere to hide.

We live on the ground floor so we headed to the basement.

Not very far from our home is the headquarters of the police and there was a massive bomb. The chief of police was killed. Two streets away there was another bomb and more people were killed. The office of the president is about one kilometre from our house and it was also bombed.

We went downstairs to the basement and tried to hide ourselves from the shelling. The child of one of our relatives, who lives in our building, finally came home from school. We hadn't been able to find her. All the phone connections were jammed. She came home and she was in a very serious state of shock. She was pale and trembling and she was describing dead bodies in the streets. On her way home she passed Hamas people in uniform and they were dead.

I had been very apprehensive when I woke up this morning. I had some bread, some cheese and a glass of tea. Like all the people in Gaza I felt that something was going on and something very serious. When Israel allowed the delivery of food and fuel [when it ended the blockade of Gaza yesterday] I said to myself and my friends that Israel is really planning a massive strike. They don't want to be blamed for starving the people.

I was sitting in the living room with my family trying to figure out what to do today for lunch, it's our main meal. What to cook and how to cook, whether we have enough to eat. There was no rice so I wanted to have lentil soup and my wife said "No, there's no lentils in the market." I said "What else can we do?" She said "I bought some cans of food." We were discussing this when suddenly the whole thing erupted. Suddenly there was a big explosion.

Right now I feel very anxious about what's going to happen. I'm worried about how many more people are going to die.

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/27/gaza-attack-eyewitness
_________________
Liberal thy name is hypocrisy. What's new?

[AlicetheKurious]

Israeli Warplanes Fly Low Over South Lebanon
AFP

December 28, 2008

At least five Israeli warplanes on Sunday flew low over south Lebanon, already the target of an overnight reconnaissance flight, a Lebanese security official said.

"At least five aircraft over flew the Bint Jbeil region (south of Beirut) and headed for the port town of Tyre" farther north, the official told AFP.

The security official said an Israeli MK-type reconnaissance aircraft flew over the south all night until dawn broke.

Tension remains high in the region two years after the 34-day summer war in 2006 between Israel and Lebanon's Shiite Hizbullah movement which devastated the south of the country.

Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who is expected to speak later on Sunday about the deadly Israeli air attacks on Gaza, has threatened to "destroy" Israel if a new conflict erupts.

Israel says Hizbullah has "tripled its firepower" since the 2006 conflict and has pledged to attack Lebanese civilian locations in the event of renewed hostilities.

Israeli flights over Lebanon are in breach of U.N. Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the Israel-Hizbullah war.(AFP)

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m50001&s1=h1

[sunny]

[AlicetheKurious]

They're not insane, sunny, they're evil: they know exactly what they're doing, and what they hope to gain.

The world is insane for letting them get away with it.

[sunny]

[ultramegagenius]

looks like Bush and Olmert are trying to provoke Iran one more time in their final days. in lieu of a full-scale escalation, it'll surely wrong-foot any rapprochement being contemplated by the incoming administration. you can bet B & O are listening to NSA intercepts of Chicago and Beirut with equal intensity.

[tom the mad]

To be in Gaza is to be trapped......Peter Beaumont

Gaza. Always the suffering of Gaza, most potent symbol of the tragedy of Palestine. In 1948, during the Nakba – or "The Catastrophe" as Palestinians describe the war that gave birth to the state of Israel – 200,000 refugees poured into Gaza, swelling its population by more than two-thirds. Then Gaza fell under Egyptian control.

The six day war of 1967 saw more refugees, but with it came the occupation of Gaza by Israel – an occupation that, despite Israel's declaration under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that it would unilaterally withdraw its settlements and troops in 2005, has never really ended.

It has not ended, for to be in Gaza is to be trapped. Without future or hope, limited to a few square miles. Its borders, land and sea, are defined largely by Israel (with Egypt's compliance along the southern end of the Strip).

It is not open to the ocean apart from a narrow outlet accessible only to the fishing fleet, a coastal blockade policed by Israel's gunboats, the boundaries of which have only recently been tested by boats of protesters sailing from Cyprus to draw attention to conditions inside Gaza.

Once it was possible for Gazans to pass with relative ease in and out of the Strip to work in Israel. In recent years, the noose around the 1.5 million people living there has been tightening incrementally, until a whole population – in the most densely settled urban area upon the planet – has been locked in behind walls and fences.

Since Israeli troops overran the Strip in 1967, Israeli politicians and generals have always seen it as a problem – a hotbed of radicalism and opposition. And so Israel has ventured failed experiment after experiment in the attempt to control Gaza. It has tried everything except the obvious – to allow its people to be free.

It has tried directly managing Gaza, and a brutal policy of quarantine backed by tanks, jets and gunboats. It has attempted the maintenance of strategic settlements, which only provided a focus for resistance against the patrolling troops. And when that failed, Israel retreated – only to find that, without a proximate enemy, those living inside turned to attacking the nearby towns with crude missiles.

Ironically, one of Israel's experiments involved assisting in the creation of Hamas, which had its roots in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, to counter the power of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation. Israel has been determined to push Hamas ever closer to all-out war since insisting that even though it won free and fair Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, its right to govern could not be treated as legitimate.

Since Hamas took power in Gaza in summer 2007, after a short, brutal struggle with Fatah, Israel's policy has been one of collective punishment, summed up in the policy of "no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis". Not a visible humanitarian crisis, at least.

For what has been going on inside Gaza since the economic blockade began a year and a half ago has cynically stretched the definition of what constitutes the boundaries of such a crisis.

Those seeking urgent medical care outside Gaza's walls are forced to go through a long and humiliating process. Even some of those who are allowed to leave, human rights groups say, have been pressured into becoming informers for Israeli intelligence.

One in two Gazans is now living in poverty. Aid is sporadic, and as the World Bank warned at the beginning of December, the blockade has forced Gaza to become reliant on smuggling tunnels (taxed by Hamas), which risked destroying its conventional economy. Inflation for key products smuggled through the tunnels is rampant, which in turn has brought cash to Hamas.

Equally worrying, from a long-term point of view, has been the corrosion of Gaza's institutions and social cohesion, which has resulted in sporadic eruptions of inter-factional and inter-clan violence.

What Israel hopes to achieve with the present military offensive – beyond influencing the coming Israeli elections – is not clear. For if a long-anticipated ground operation, leading to a partial reoccupation on the ground, is to follow these air strikes – as it did in the war in Lebanon in 2006 – it will have to achieve what neither Hamas nor its rival Fatah can: unifying Palestinian society once more against a common enemy, as Gaza was once united against Israeli settlements inside its boundaries.

If that is not the intention, it is hard to see what Israel's actions are meant to achieve in a community that cherishes its martyrs; where violent death is intended to reinforce social cohesion and unity.

For in the end what has happened in the past few hours is simply an expression of what has been going on for days and months and years: the death and fear that Gaza's gunmen and rocket teams and bombers have inflicted upon Israel have been returned 10, 20, 30 times over once again. And nothing will change in the arithmetic of it.

Not in Gaza. But perhaps in a wider Arab world, becoming more uncomfortable by the day about what is happening inside Gaza, something is changing. And Israel has supplied a rallying point. Something tangible and brutal that gives the critics of its actions in Gaza – who say it has a policy of collective punishment backed by disproportionate and excessive force – something to focus on.

Something to be ranked with Deir Yassin. With the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Something, at last, that Israel's foes can say looks like an atrocity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/27/israelandthepalestinians-terrorism

Surprise.! Surprise.!........The article had its comments section closed.

The following one is still running....

The recklessness of Hamas
Those who have condemned Israel for falling into a trap ought to be just as vocal in condemning Hamas for setting such a trap..........

Seth Freedman......Zionazi whore.!....Comments: 330

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/28/gaza-attacks-israel

[chlamor]

A wounded girl is carried to hospital after Israel's attack on Gaza Photograph: Majed Hamdan/AP

Silence in the face of grotesque slaughter is the most vile form of complicity.

Let's all wait for Obama's "nuanced" position shall we?

Can we hear the refrain of how it is not all "black and white" and "let's wait 'til he's in office?" Can we send that message to the people of Gaza while bombs are dropped on their heads?

Obama and his palfriend Biden "I am a Zionist" can both fuck off.

Anyone think for a moment that once in office Obama will cut US funding and armaments to the Israeli slaughterhouse? How delusional can you be? Let's see.
_________________
Liberal thy name is hypocrisy. What's new?

[RocketMan]

CNN gives a suprisingly long and respectful hearing to Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi. I think her performance here is sublime: measured, in control, right to the point.

http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=2672

Her most important point: the attack is a premeditated, genocidal action.
_________________
Never let me hear that brave blood has been shed in vain,
for it sends an imperious challenge down through all the generations.
Sir Walter Scott

[Extradimensional Beatnik]

Alice: I was asking about the possibilty of this before, hoping very strongly it wouldn't come to pass. Looks like the globalist provocateurs have all their ducks in a row now, from Gaza to Lebanon to Pakistan to Iran. The fuse that is the"Arc of Crisis" is now being lit right in front of our eyes. As horrific as the slaughter in Gaza is, I fear its only Act I of a larger campaign to reshape that part of the world.
_________________
"Walking on water wasn't built in a day."--Jack Kerouac

[StarmanSkye]

Hanan Ashrawi is such a classy, gracious and dignified lady. On the other hand, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gabriela Shalev, can only peddle the same morally-bankrupt, seriously-flawed refrain that only Israel has the 'right' of self-defense. This insular ideology which cannot acknowledge that Israel is a brutal occupying power routinely committing enormous crimes against humanity is the inevitable consequence of Israel's fatalistic assumptions justifying the founding of the state in 1948 by violently appropriating territory and dislocating millions of inhabitants. This leads to such dead-end thinking as Shalev saying, “The hope is that Hamas will understand finally that Israel has the right to defend itself and the duty to protect its citizens.”

Shalev even had the audacity to state that Hamas must cease its intention of wiping Israel off the map -- This is just too tragicaly ludicrous, denoting the huge ideological and moral impasse that the purveyers of fanatical Zionism have successfully internalized, as IF the presumptous overgrown little-more-than-plumped-up-firecrackers Quassam rockets (and some mportars) lobbed willy-nilly towards Israel could ever be much more than figurative gestures with an annoying nuisance value. Shalev's convenient, opportunistic coopting of Iranian President Ahminajad's famously-notorious comment long-since appropriated and spun by the Israeli propaganda machine to constitute some kind of actual threat ought to be seen for what it is -- part of an ongoing campaign of vilifying any and all Palestinian response to Israeli aggression and oppression.

Psychologically, it seems to me that Israeli identity has become so solidly fixated on the romanticized notion of brave and valiant warrior culture beleagured by Arab enemies that peace itself constitutes a dangerous threat to the economic and political status quo, and the very reason d'etre of Israeli society itself. Talk about a self-fulfilling psychopathology -- in which Israel even thinks its reasonable to threaten Europe with nuclear blackmail in the event it should ever feel it would 'lose' an all-out war. It's an elitist attitude in which Israel does not, cannot accept any other people would also fight to the death than accept the ignominy of defeat. In short, its the attitude of a bully. As I've commented before, what really perplexes me is the apparant lack of awareness by Israel's powerful leaders and their supporters that this constitutes the betrayal of the most basic principles of the Abrahamic faith in general and Judaism in particular. Its idolotrous and a repudiation of God's commandments to be a light unto all men and nations. It simply amazes me that a relative minority of zionist zealots have been able to so thoroughly corrupt and pervert Judaism so as to justify similiar if not the very same kind of inhumane barbarisms, cold-blooded murder, arrogant disregard for the lives of others, mass-reprisals and brutality that the Nazis inflicted on Jews and other 'undesireables'.

Lately, again, I've considered what my life would likely be if I were Palestinian, trapped in the open-air ghetto-prison which has become Gaza. I don't doubt I would long since be dead or in prison, either for my guerrilla-style resistance or being a suspect or caught in the crossfire, killed or died as a consequence of being a targetted victim.

Sometimes I try to imagine out-of-the-box tactics and non-violent strategies of resistance I would try if I were Palestinian, ie. a largescale
public spectacle to dramatize the enforced helplessness, frustration and futility of being victim-pawns to an Israeli-centered political drama -- resulting from the impossible contradictions and moral dilemna caused by the assumptions that lay at the core of Israel's creation.

How long will the majority of the world's peoples allow a relative handful of tyrants, despots, frauds, thugs and assorted elite scum to misrule, plunder and kill for the most venal and selfish of reasons? And in irony of ironies, the US has become the world's most dangerous, decietful, violence-prone supporter of war, torture, despotism and terror.


BTW, I agree with Ashrawi's conclusion, the attacks were premeditated and genocidal in intent, Israel's inescapable logic being that anyone who supports or even accomodates Hamas IS Hamas, and that Hamas needs to be eliminated, destroyed, killed to the last man, woman and child. Since Hamas was overwhelmingly elected by a majority in Gaza, this basically gives Israel the justification to murder at will -- at least from that fanatical POV.

Another thing -- Israel's UN Ambassador, Shalev, recounted pres. elect Obama visiting Israel, specif. Sidirot (sp?) which is 12 km from the occupied-Palestine border and frequent target of Quassam rockets, that if he lived there and rockets were flying over his house where his daughters lived, he would do EVERYTHING he could to stop it -- and expects Israel to also do the same. What's entirely left-out of the Israeli justification re: self-defense, is that 'everything' shouldn't ONLY be limited to more death and dsestruction and violence, which has been Israel's preferred method of dealing with the crisis of its own making. What IF the hundreds of billions of dollars spent for armaments and 'security' were instead have been used to invest in a multi-pluralistic, multi-cultural, fully-integrated highly-developed modern single state where Palestinians and Israelis lived together as neighbors with equal human and civil rights and full economic and political and cultural participation/expression? It could have been a model of a new, better post-war human society where social justice and human dignity were the norm enjoyed by all. But of course, the military-industry profiteers and multinational corporatists that have insinuated themselves into commanding behind-the-scenes position hidden by the veneer of civil democracy wouldn't stand for any such threat to their power-and-wealth franchise, eh?

[RocketMan]

That was a beautiful, brilliant post in its entirety, Starman, but this part I'll single out for wholehearted praise:

[AlicetheKurious]

The monstrous Israeli raids continue unabated. Gaza looks like the apocalypse, a city of rubble and blood-soaked earth. Children's corpses, wrapped in white sheets, are laid side-by-side on the floor of hospitals, surrounded by their shell-shocked and screaming relatives. The number of wounded and dying and dead have exceeded 2000, not counting those who remain buried under the ruins.

Even if the raids were to stop right now, and there is no indication they will, how would the survivors live?

The population of Gaza are already refugees, severely malnourished, even more severely traumatized, more than half of them are children, and their homes have been damaged beyond belief.

In the West Bank, ragged children fill their villages' streets, throwing stones at heavily-armed soldiers who respond with live bullets.

This is indeed genocide, in broad daylight and in full view of the world.

[Elvis]

The posts on this thread are great, thanks.

For those unfamiliar with it, here is some background on early funding of Hamas by Israel. I think it illustrates, among other things, how right-wing leaders in Israel don't really want peace.

Three articles:

============================
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10456.htm

Hamas history tied to Israel

By Richard Sale
UPI Terrorism Correspondent

06/18/02 "UPI" -- --- In the wake of a suicide bomb attack Tuesday on a crowded Jerusalem city bus that killed 19 people and wounded at least 70 more, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, took credit for the blast.

Israeli officials called it the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in six years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately vowed to fight "Palestinian terror" and summoned his cabinet to decide on a military response to the organization that Sharon had once described as "the deadliest terrorist group that we have ever had to face."

Active in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas wants to liberate all of Palestine and establish a radical Islamic state in place of Israel. It is has gained notoriety with its assassinations, car bombs and other acts of terrorism.

But Sharon left something out.

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative," said a former senior CIA official.

According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were "weak and dormant" until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da'wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

"Social influence grew into political influence," first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement's spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.

According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini's Iran.

What took Israeli leaders by surprise was the way the Islamic movements began to surge after the Iranian revolution, after armed resistance to Israel sprang up in southern Lebanon vis-�-vis the Hezbollah, backed by Iran, these sources said.

"Nothing provides the energy for imitation as much as success," commented one administration expert.

A further factor of Hamas' growth was the fact the PLO moved its base of operations to Beirut in the '80s, leaving the Islamic organization to grow in influence in the Occupied Territories "as the court of last resort," he said.

When the intifada began, Israeli leadership was surprised when Islamic groups began to surge in membership and strength. Hamas immediately grew in numbers and violence. The group had always embraced the doctrine of armed struggle, but the doctrine had not been practiced and Islamic groups had not been subjected to suppression the way groups like Fatah had been, according to U.S. government officials.

But with the triumph of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, with the birth of Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism in Lebanon, Hamas began to gain in strength in Gaza and then in the West Bank, relying on terror to resist the Israeli occupation.

Israel was certainly funding the group at that time. One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said that not only was Hamas being funded as a "counterweight" to the PLO, Israeli aid had another purpose: "To help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists."

In addition, by infiltrating Hamas, Israeli informers could only listen to debates on policy and identify Hamas members who "were dangerous hard-liners," the official said.

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place," said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

"Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with," he said.

All of which disgusts some former U.S. intelligence officials.

"The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy," said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, "the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism."

"The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer."

"They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it," he said.

Aid to Hamas may have looked clever, "but it was hardly designed to help smooth the waters," he said. "An operation like that gives weight to President George Bush's remark about there being a crisis in education."

Cordesman said that a similar attempt by Egyptian intelligence to fund Egypt's fundamentalists had also come to grief because of "misreading of the complexities."

An Israeli defense official was asked if Israel had given aid to Hamas said, "I am not able to answer that question. I was in Lebanon commanding a unit at the time, besides it is not my field of interest."

Asked to confirm a report by U.S. officials that Brig. Gen. Yithaq Segev, the military governor of Gaza, had told U.S. officials he had helped fund "Islamic movements as a counterweight to the PLO and communists," the official said he could confirm only that he believed Segev had served back in 1986.

The Israeli Embassy press office referred UPI to its Web site when asked to comment.

Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International


============================
http://www.nypress.com/article-5794-israels-hamas.html

Tuesday, April 30,2002
Israel's Hamas

by George Szamuely

The Bush administration’s most recent Middle East caper followed a trajectory we have become familiar with. Eschewing the usual "Israel is our greatest ally" windbaggery, the administration for once issued Israel a mild reproof to balance the standard demand that Yasir Arafat crack down on violence. Israel responded by telling the Americans where they could shove it. Israeli government spokesmen–aka most of America’s pundits–threatened to do to Bush what they did to his father when he had the temerity to insist that Israel not violate U.S. policy by using U.S. funds to build settlements on occupied land. As was to be expected, Bush beat a hasty retreat and professed himself satisfied with Israel’s actions. It was all Arafat’s fault again. He was not cracking down on terror…

The mantra that Arafat crack down on terror has always been a fraud. Who is to do this cracking down? Obviously, Palestinian police, security forces and courts. But they are the chief target of Sharon’s murderous onslaught. Sharon’s strategy today is the same as it was in Beirut in 1982. He wants to destroy and discredit the Palestinian Authority so as to ensure the Palestinians are left without a credible leadership. Chaos and anarchy on the West Bank would then provide Israel with the justification it needs to drive out the indigenous population and render the territory governable.

This has been longstanding Israeli policy. Starting in the late 1970s Israel helped build up the most fanatical and intolerant fundamentalist Muslims as rivals to the nationalist PLO. The terrorist organization Hamas is largely an Israeli creation. A UPI story last year quoted a U.S. government official as saying: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place."

The PLO has long been aware of Israeli strategy. In their 1989 book, Intifada, Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari write that Fatah "suspected the Israelis of a plot first to let Hamas gather strength and then to unleash it against the PLO, turning the uprising into a civil war... [M]any Israeli staff officers believed that the rise of fundamentalism in Gaza could be exploited to weaken the power of the PLO…"

According to Robert Fisk, Israeli support for Hamas continued after the signing of the Oslo accords. One can be pretty sure that this strategy received strong encouragement from Washington, which has also seen the advantage of financing and supporting the most vicious and narrowminded Islamic terrorists on account of their antinationalist and antisocialist credentials. Hamas also served Israel’s purpose admirably by suggesting to the American public that the conflict in the Middle East pitted democratic Israel against all-or-nothing fanatics who wanted to drive the Jews into the sea. Israel’s refusal to surrender conquered land and its continued building of settlements in violation of innumerable UN resolutions could then all be justified as perfectly reasonable responses to an implacable enemy.

It helped to conceal the fact that it was Israel that refused to compromise. In February 1970 Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser declared, "It will be possible to institute a durable peace between Israel and the Arab states, not excluding economic and diplomatic relations, if Israel evacuates the occupied territories and accepts a settlement of the problem of the Palestinian refugees." Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir dismissed the offer.

Next came Anwar Sadat’s peace offer of Feb 4, 1971. He announced before the Egyptian parliament "that if Israel withdrew her forces in Sinai to the passes I would be willing to reopen the Suez Canal; to have my forces cross to the East Bank...to make a solemn declaration of a cease-fire; to restore diplomatic relations with the United States and to sign a peace agreement with Israel…" Israel’s response was the same as before: no return to pre-1967 borders and the establishment of a settlement on occupied Egyptian territory at Yamit, near the Gaza Strip.

In 1977 Sadat took the extraordinary gamble, knowingly risking his life, of flying to Jerusalem in the hope of persuading Israel to respond to his magnanimity and sign a comprehensive Middle East peace treaty. Though the Israelis refused to make any concessions on the Palestinian issue, their apologists have been smugly congratulating themselves ever since for their amazing generosity in withdrawing from occupied Sinai and even destroying the settlements they had built there. Even these "concessions" were fiercely resisted in Israel by, among others, Golda Meir.

Twenty years later, Ehud Barak’s hopelessly inadequate offer at Camp David was vehemently denounced by the Safires and Krauthammers as "appeasement." It set the stage for today’s insanity.

===========================
And this, from, er, Executive Intelligence Review (containing some worthwhile info):

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/2902isr_hamas.html

This article appears in the January 18, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Israeli Roots of Hamas Are Being Exposed

by Dean Andromidas


Speaking in Jerusalem Dec. 20, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer made the connection between the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Israel's promotion of the Islamic movement as a counter to the Palestinian nationalist movement. Kurtzer's comments come very close to EIR's own presentation of the evidence of Israel's instrumental role in establishing Hamas, and its ongoing control of that organization.

Kurtzer said that the growth of the Islamic movement in the Palestinian territories in recent decades—"with the tacit support of Israel"—was "not totally unrelated" to the emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their terrorist attacks against Israel. Kurtzer explained that during the 1980s, when the Islamic movement began to flourish in the West Bank and Gaza, "Israel perceived it to be better to have people turning toward religion rather than toward a nationalistic cause [the Palestinian Liberation Organization—ed.]." It therefore did little to stop the flow of money to mosques and other religious institutions, rather than to schools.

According to the Dec. 21 Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Kurtzer made these extraordinary statements at a seminar on religion and politics sponsored by Oz V'Shalom-Netivot Shalom, a largely Anglo-American organization that promotes peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein, the head of Har Etzion Yeshiva in Alon Shvut, who is an active advocate of a just regional peace, also spoke. Kurtzer said that as a result of the growth of Islam at the expense of education, there are now Palestinians who are "determined terrorists that use religious beliefs in a perverted way to appeal to the masses."

Kurtzer said that cultural and religious interaction is potentially a way to "build bridges." But instead, "the perverted use of religion in the region is today becoming one of the great challenges for the years ahead." He said that there is no "inherent component" in Islam that advocates violence. But one of the five principles of Islam, jihad—resistance—"in classic religious associations connotes religious belief and fervor, not violence." But extremists have distorted the meaning of jihad, so it now has a connotation of violence in the service of a religious purpose.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

This statement is extraordinary given the fact that Kurtzer is a very senior diplomat, having held the post of Ambassador to Egypt just prior to going on to Tel Aviv. He is also an Orthodox Jew who is not shy of criticizing the extreme anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic views held by certain Arab circles. But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rarely grants the United States' highest representative in Israel an official audience.

The ambassador's comments are an acknowledgment of what any serious Middle East observers knows: Hamas has always been seen as a tool by which Israel could undermine the nationalist movement led by Palestinian Authority President and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat. Similar statements by Arafat have been dismissed by Israel as "cranky" propaganda. In an interview with the Dec. 11 Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Arafat said, "We are doing everything to stop the violence. But Hamas is a creature of Israel which at the time of Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Shamir [the late 1980s, when Hamas arose], gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques. Even [former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of [Egpytian President Hosni] Mubarak."

To the Italian daily L'Espresso, Arafat laid out the reasons for this support. "Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and authorizations, while we have been limited, even to build a tomato factory. Rabin himself defined it as a fatal error. Some collaborationists of Israel are involved in these [terror] attacks," he said. "We have proof, and we are placing it at the disposal of the Italian government."

On one level the support for Hamas is simply the application of the old saying, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Indeed, in the minds of crude Israeli ultra-nationalists and fascists such as Sharon and his faction, this is indeed the case. Sharon is not interested in peace and therefore is not concerned that the violence and needless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians continue. In the Jan. 3 Ha'aretz, Yossi Sarid, chairman of the Meretz party, wrote, "What does frighten Sharon ... is any prospect or sign of calm or moderation. If the situation were to calm down and stabilize, Sharon would have to return to the negotiating table and, in the wake of pressure from within and without, he would have to raise serious proposals for an agreement. This moment terrifies Sharon and he wants to put it off for as long as he possibly can." In contrast, Sarid said that Sharon understands "that the terrorists and those who give them asylum are not the real enemies. Instead, the real enemies are the moderates.... You fight terrorists—a pretty simple operation—but you must talk with moderates, and this is a very tricky, if not dangerous, business."

More important for the survival of not only the Palestinian people, but especially Israel itself, is the dangerous role of the puppetmasters outside the region, who are manipulating both sides of this deadly game as part of their own demonic plans to spread the policy of a "clash of civilizations." In this regard, Sharon, and his "Greater Israel" policy, is just as much a puppet as the Palestinian, strapped with explosives, who blows himself up at an Israeli bus station.

Two Decades of Undermining Arafat

Given the level of control that the Israeli intelligence services such as the Shin Bet and Mossad have been able to exert over the Palestinian territories during the last 35 years of Israeli occupation, the capability to manipulate militant and violent organizations, such as those associated with Hamas, should not surprise anyone familiar with intelligence and even routine police operations. This should be obvious, considering that Israel has routinely recruited thousands of collaborators and provocateurs among the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have passed through Israeli prisons in over 35 years of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Most convincing is a comparison of the development of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their antecedents, and the growing national and international legitimacy of the PLO and its undisputed leader, Arafat.

Hamas is an acronym for Harafat al-Muqawama Al-Islamiyya, or Islamic Resistance Movement. Its spiritual leader is Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who, despite his fiery anti-Israeli sermons, has had an unusual relationship with the Israeli authorities. In 1973, Yassin established the Islamic Association—at a time when it was Israeli policy to promote what Ambassador Kurtzer refers to as the "Islamic movement."

One might ask: Why should Israel promote an Islamic movement which later turns around and attacks it? How could the Israeli secret services be taken in by a Yassin? They weren't. The simple fact is, that the stated policy of Hamas is simply the flip side of Sharon's "Greater Israel" policy that refuses to seek a territorial compromise. The Hamas charter in 1988 stated, "The land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations, and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it.... Peace initiatives, the so-called peace initiatives, are all contraray to the beliefs of Hamas, for renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion." In this rhetoric there is no room for a state of Israel—as there is none for a state of Palestine in Sharon's "Greater Israel."

Israel's Hamas relations intensified after the Arab League, in 1974, decided to recognize Arafat and the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people—in effect, a government in exile. By 1979, top Yassin acquired an official permit from the Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin. This coincided with the signing of the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. That treaty embodied detailed clauses calling for the establishment of a Palestinian Authority in the Occupied Territories, which would be the precursor for the Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Gen. Ariel Sharon has been the chief proponent since this treaty was signed, of the policy of ensuring that these clauses would never be implemented. His chosen alternatives were war in Lebanon and the expansion of the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. Sharon was helped by the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by Anglo-American-controlled, Egypt-based Islamic terrorists.

`Policy of Strengthening Islamic Bodies'

Israeli toleration, if not initial sponsorship of the Islamic movement, has been acknowledged and well documented in Israeli sources. In 1997, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, at Tel Aviv University, published a study, "Hamas: Radical Islam In A National Struggle," authored by Anat Kurz and Nahman Tal. It stated that the Islamic Association, "the platform of which contained no nationalist clauses, obtained a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration in 1979 to conduct its activities. The permit was apparently consistent with the Israeli policy of strengthening Islamic bodies as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalist groups."

The rapid expansion of the Islamic Association led to clashes on the Palestinian University campuses in the Occupied Territories in the 1980s, betwen PLO-affiliated students and those associated with the Islamists. This expansion was aided by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where Sharon hoped to solve the "Palestinian problem" by militarily crushing the PLO—which was then based in Lebanon—and by carrying out genocide against the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in impoverished refugee camps in Lebanon. Despite his orchestration of the massacre of thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, Sharon failed to eliminate Arafat. Nonetheless, Arafat and the PLO were exiled to Tunisia, their influence severely weakened.

Sheikh Yassin, along with other Hamas leaders, was arrested in 1984, after it was discovered that the Islamic Association had maintained arms caches. But the organization was not banned. In fact, Yassin was soon released as part of an unprecedented prisoner exchange between Israel and Ahmed Jabril's PFLP-General Command. This deal, made with one of the most violent of all anti-PLO Palestinian groups at the time, was made in a period when the Mossad was busy assassinating the most moderate of PLO leaders.

Then, in 1988, the Islamic Association created Hamas as a direct alternative to the PLO, which had launched the first Intifada the year before. 1988 was also important because the PLO, at the 19th Conference of the Palestinian National Council in Algeria in 1988, accepted the United Nations Security Council resolution of 1947 calling for two states in Palestine. They also called for convening an international peace conference based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which established the land-for-peace concept. This was a de facto recognition of Israel by the PLO and Arafat. By the end of 1988, the Reagan Administration extended official recognition to the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people.

When Palestinian leader Abu Jihad began negotiating with Hamas, in an attempt to win its mass base over to the new policy, he was promptly assassinated by the Mossad.

Yassin, as all senior leaders of Hamas, is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the far-flung international Islamic organization with operations throughout the Islamic world. In the past, Anglo-American factions have not hesitated to manipulate the Brotherhood's various factions to destabilize secular Arab regimes. When Zbigniew Brzezinski launched the Afghan war against Russia in the 1980s, many of the Arab mujahideen fighters were recruited through Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks. The Muslim Brotherhood story fills volumes; the crucial point here is that Hamas, one of its branches, has traditionally stood in opposition to the secular nationalism of Arafat, the PLO, and its supporting governments.

Hamas has a peculiar organizational structure which contrasts sharply with that of the PLO. While within the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas exists as a broad political movement, its militant wings, the Izza-Din Al Qassam and Islamic Jihad, split-offs from the organization, are administered totally separately. These latter organizations, which are responsible for the attacks, are under the control of leaders who operate from abroad. Their offices are in London, where the group's magazine, Falatin Al Muslimah, is based; Jordan; Syria; and the United States, particularly in Virginia and Texas. Although Arafat has periodically tried to bring the popular base of Hamas into the Palestinian fold, the foreign-based military leadership has always opposed him.

This bifurcation dovetails with Sharon's strategy of launching brutal attacks against Hamas targets, in order to elicit the equally brutal response from Islamic Jihad and the Izza-Din Al Qassam. Thus Arafat, and diplomatic goals, are undermined, and the fires of civil war within the Occupied Territories are stoked.

The Anti-Oslo Terror Campaign Begins

The Oslo Accords marked the first glimmer of hope for a resolution of the Middle East conflict. And, the first suicide terrorist attack aimed at destroying it was not launched by Hamas or Islamic Jihad or another Palestinian faction. The first suicide attack was launched on Feb. 25, 1994, by Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein, when he entered the Mosque of Hebron and killed 50 Muslim worshippers as well as himself. Goldstein was a member of Kach, the terrorist organization founded by the late Meir Kahane, who also founded the Jewish Defense League in the 1960s in the United States. Kach, which is well connected to Sharon, is on the official U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations.

The unprecedented massacre was calculated to set the stage for a suicide bombing campaign by Hamas and its split-off, Islamic Jihad, over the next year. In fact, it set into motion the "cycle of violence" that has yet to end. The Goldstein attack came at precisely the point when Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and Arafat began the formal implementation of the Oslo agreement which envisioned the establishment of a Palestinian state by 1998. The first Hamas-linked suicide attacks did not start until two months later, in April 1994, when Rabin and Arafat signed the agreement for the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. The agreement called for the conduct of free elections throughout the territories—which would eventually establish the international legitimacy of the Arafat-led government.

But despite this terror campaign, which lasted for months under a massive crackdown by Arafat's security forces, the Rabin-Arafat alliance, although seriously weakened, was not broken. This alliance was finally broken with Rabin's assassination by an Israeli, on Nov. 5, 1995.

The next phase of attacks followed the "targetted assassination" of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash on Jan. 5, 1996. Although said to be "revenge attacks," they were in fact part of Hamas' campaign to get Benjamin Netanyahu elected Israeli prime minister. This was admitted by Ibraham Ghawshah, Hamas' official spokesman resident in Amman, Jordan. He said that it was part of their strategy to influence Israeli public opinon to bring down the entire Oslo process. The election of Netanyahu indeed fulfilled all their hopes, especially after he launched his own provocations, which not only brought about the pre-calculated Hamas response, but also brought the region several times to the brink of war.

This tit-for-tat campaign reached the height of insanity when Netanyahu, under the direction of Sharon, who was a member of his government at the time, launched a Mossad assassination attempt in 1997 against the Jordan-based Hamas official Khalid Mishaal. Not only did the attempt fail, but it led to Israel agreeing to release Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Yassin from an Israeli jail, where he had been under arrest since 1989. Yassin was allowed to return to Gaza to rally Hamas against the Oslo process in general, and Arafat in particular.

This pattern has continued to this very day. Netanyahu's downfall in 1999 led to the short-lived government of Ehud Barak, who despite much talking and negotiating, furthered the Oslo process not one iota. By the end of the Summer of 2000, the stage was set for Sharon's ultimate provocation, his Sept. 28 march on to the Islamic holy site Al-Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount.

Since coming to power, Sharon has done everything to ensure the collapse of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. If successful, it would either bring Hamas to power or lead to political chaos within the terrorities.

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