فتوى حماس المحرمة للعمليات العسكرية ضد إسرائيل |
Israel's ceasefire with Hamas is holding, but unless Israel completely lifts its blockade and includes Hamas in two-state negotiations, renewed rocket attacks from Gaza are likely.
Should that happen, Israel would not be justified in arguing self-defense.
As part of a November ceasefire agreement with Hamas, Israel has partially lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip, at least allowing construction materials into the region pummeled by Israeli airstrikes. It’s a single, forward step that ends a five-year ban on such materials. But without progress in settling the overall conflict, Palestinian rocket or suicide attacks and heavy Israeli responses will almost surely resume.
After Cast Lead, a number of major human rights investigations – including the Goldstone Commission, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch – concluded that Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportional attacks against the Gazan population, economy, and societal infrastructures constituted war crimes. At the same time, none of these groups sought to refute Israel’s claim that it acted in self-defense.
Essentially, Israel and its supporters argue that even though Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli population centers have continued, and thus justify Israel’s right to defend itself.
Their argument is wrong on several counts. First, even though Israel withdrew its Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005, it continued its indirect occupation of the strip – especially through its land and naval embargo that followed the violent takeover of the strip by Hamas in 2007.
Israel continues to wield great power over Gaza’s economy, water, electricity, telecommunications, and transportation networks. Among other measures, it has refused to allow Gaza a functioning airport, seaport, or commercial crossing on its border with Egypt, radically cutting Gazan trade and commerce with the outside world.
The stated reason is for security purposes, but the result is widespread hardship on ordinary Gazans, including heavily restricted movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza; inadequate imports of water used for drinking and irrigation; farmers prevented from tending to and harvesting their fields and crops in border areas, and inordinate harassment of Gazan fishing boats.
Additionally, Israel has continued to assassinate Palestinian militants and periodically attack Gaza’s governmental and police institutions, electrical generating system, roads, bridges, farms, and olive orchards – and many of its bombs and shells have fallen on schools, ambulances, and hospitals, whether intentionally or not.
It cannot be seriously maintained that Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel – even though morally wrong – are “unprovoked” or have nothing to do with this history.
A second reason that the self-defense argument fails is that even if Israel had genuinely ended its occupation and repression of Gaza, it has not ended its direct occupation over East Jerusalem and much of the West Bank. Instead, it has expanded the number of Jewish settlements and land-grabs in those areas.
Consequently, the Gazan people retain their right of resistance to occupation and repression.
To believe otherwise is like believing that, if the British had withdrawn from New Jersey in the 1770s but continued to occupy the other 12 colonies, New Jersey residents would no longer have had the right to take up arms to support American independence.
Israel, however, has repeatedly refused to negotiate long-term truces with Hamas, and it has even broken past agreements. While Hamas still refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, since 2009 there has been substantial evidence that it is ready to go beyond ceasefires and join with the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank in supporting a two-state political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Although Hamas’s position has been ambiguous and sometimes contradictory, this does not justify Israel’s refusal even to negotiate with Hamas to explore the peace possibilities.
Related
- THE PALESTINIAN SPRING: A New OSLO UNDER COOKING IN CAIRO
- Uprooted Palestinians: The Good War: Israel, Egypt
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1 comment:
Besa, the end of Syria? http://thenakedfacts.blogspot.com/2013/01/zionist-israhelli-think-tank-besa.html?m=0
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