Reason Wafawarova on Thursday
THERE is a time when the sickening realities of this world’s bad news become so distasteful that one cannot simply put up with continued absorption of the barbarous perversions. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, plane crashes, Gaza are all part of the tragic headlines hitting our ears these days, and sometimes one gets the feeling it is better to stay uninformed than to be overwhelmed with such catastrophes like the Israeli inflicted Gaza waterloo.

Zimbabwe is largely a Christian country, and one cannot second-guess the possibility of creating enemies as a writer when it comes to analyses on the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Condemning Hamas or Islamists as enemies of Israel is perhaps as sensitive as condemning Israeli brutalities on largely unarmed Palestinian civilians, especially women and children.

It is hard to maintain intellectual integrity when one has to deal with some readers who are somewhat seriously convinced that the wanton killing of innocent women and children in the 21st century has something to do with imperious interpretations of utterances made by Biblical prophets 5000 years ago.

Whoever condemns Israel shall be cursed, and whoever supports Israel shall be blessed, we are told; and if we dare question this religious logic there is something fundamentally wrong with both our faith and our understanding of scriptures.

The doctrinaire attitude behind some of the support offered to Israel by some of our religious people is just too magisterial for any meaningful debate, and writers hailing from the Christian community like myself sometimes have to brave it in order to meet the basic requirement of intellectual responsibility or common decency — telling the truth.

Noam Chomsky recently described the ongoing Israeli offensive on Gaza as a “hideous atrocity, sadistic, vicious, murderous, totally without any credible pretext.”

Chomsky argues that Israel has essentially caged Palestinians like fish in the pond, and that it periodically shoots in the pond, just to make sure the fish are kept reminded of their inescapable captivity.

The ongoing bombings are an example of one of such reminders, and the normal trend is that the bombing campaign is followed by a ceasefire.
There have been numerous such attacks before, and so have there been subsequent ceasefires.

What has happened in the past is that a ceasefire is considered effective when Israel concedes that Hamas is observing its declared terms. Normally Israel continues to violate the ceasefire terms, and the violations escalate to a point when the ceasefire is broken by a Hamas reaction.

Almost always, the Hamas reaction is reported as an attack on Israel, and action from Israel is portrayed as retaliation or some form of a response, purportedly in self-defence.

After the Hamas reaction comes a more vicious Israeli military action aptly described by Israeli military strategists as “mowing the lawn.”
Let us look at the current lawn-mowing period. It is a successor event to the deadly November 2012 Israeli attack on Gaza, which was followed by a 19-month ceasefire period — a period where Israeli officials grudgingly concede that Hamas observed the ceasefire conditionalities.

The ceasefire terms were that Hamas would not fire any rockets into Israel, and that Israel would end the 8-year blockade on Gaza, and would also stop attacking whomever they called militants or terrorists in Gaza.

By Israel’s own admission Hamas lived up to the ceasefire conditions. Then came the April 2014 Unity Agreement between Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah in the West Bank.

The agreement evidently infuriated Israel, forever reliant on its alienating divide and rule tactics.
The last thing any Israeli government wants is Palestinian unity encompassing the West Bank and Gaza, or Hamas and Fatah.
It was more incensing for Israel when the United States seemed to endorse the unity agreement.

Something had to be done, and Israel launched a massive rampage in the West Bank. There was a pretext good enough to give to the world for this splurge. Three Israeli settler teenagers had vanished in the West Bank and Benjamin Netanyahu ordered “Hostage Rescue Operation,” despite intelligence that the youths were already dead. The deliberate pretense was meant to sustain the strength of the contrived pretext for the bombing frenzy.

Eventually the killing was acknowledged and blamed on Hamas, with no practical evidence given. Instead Israeli leading authorities were reported pointing out that the killers were probably from a rogue clan in Hebron, the Qawasmeh.

This turns out to be the true story behind the killings, and the clan in question is an extremist rogue Palestinian gang that does not follow any orders from Hamas.

Israel went on a massive arresting campaign, incarcerating hundreds, and wanton killings increased.
An anticipated Hamas response followed. The rocket attacks on Israel started, and from then on mainstream media reports told us how Israel was “retaliating” to Hamas “rocket attacks.”

When Israel was rampaging the West Bank, there was no talk of the 2012 ceasefire being violated, but as soon as Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel, we began to hear that the 2012 ceasefire conditions had been violated.

Now a quarter of the Palestinian population has been displaced, 206 000 are huddled in UN shelters — themselves not spared the marauding aerial Israeli attacks, almost 2000 Palestinians have been killed, 75 percent of them civilians, and 420 of them children. It is based on these casualty figures that world opinion has found Israel wanting.

This campaign is part of the grand strategy to maintain the separation of the West Bank from Gaza, and this has been happening for the last 20 years.

Of course this is in violation of the 1993 Oslo Accord, which declares the West Bank and Gaza as a single territorial entity.
Israel and the US have shown unbridled resoluteness in keeping the two separate, and this ongoing bombing is just part of the efforts to achieve this untoward goal.

The thinking is quite understandable. Israel knows that Gaza is the only outlet to the outside world for any eventual Palestinian entity, whether a country, a state, a colony, or whatever Israel will let it be. To Israel the West Bank is an imprisoned entity between Israel itself and the Jordanian dictatorship, and for greater settler plans it must never be allowed to unite with Gaza.

In any event Israel is systematically driving Palestinians out of the Jordan Valley, sinking wells and erecting settlements.
As has become the norm, they first call them military buffer zones, and as soon as a ceasefire is announced they convert them to Israeli settlements.

More than any other preached pretext, including Obama’s claim that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” what we are seeing at the moment is Israel dealing with a threat — the undesirable unity agreement between Gaza and the West Bank.

The long-term settler war objectives are best served by a divided Palestinian, and in the name of avenging the barbaric deaths of innocent teenagers the world has been made to watch a dramatic retaliation to the April Gaza/West Bank unity agreement.

International public relations are very important, and as such Obama has tepidly told the world that the US is opposed to the new reality of Israel’s expanded settlements. It is all hypocritical rhetoric where the US has to be seen to be officially opposed to Israel’s expansionism agenda.

The US is so opposed to this agenda that when the UN Security Council considered a resolution calling for the termination of Israeli expansionism and settlement President Barrack Obama had to veto the resolution. It really does not matter that the settlements are illegal at international law, as determined by the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice.

Obama’s winks over the atrocities in Gaza are quite sickening. He pretends to condemn the violence from all sides while he simultaneously sends military aid to Israel.

Regardless of whatever amount of violations of international law, Israel is assured of military aid, economic aid, diplomatic aid, and ideological protection from the US.

Now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the temerity to blame 90 percent of the deaths of Palestinian people massacred by his own army on Hamas.

This is what Netanyahu said: “Israel accepted and Hamas rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal of July 15th. And I want you to know that at that time the conflict had claimed some 185 lives. Only on Monday night did Hamas finally agree to that very same proposal, which went into effect yesterday morning.

“That means that 90 percent, a full 90 percent, of the fatalities in this conflict could have been avoided had Hamas not rejected then the ceasefire that it accepts now. Hamas must be held accountable for the tragic loss of life.”

We are supposed to take seriously a man who blatantly murders civilians, and then suggests that the victims must be held accountable for their own loss of life.

This ceasefire in question was an agreement between Israel and the Egyptian military dictatorship, never communicated to Hamas, but just announced to the world through the media.

It would have been a huge surprise if Hamas accepted the conditions of the ceasefire.
The broader perspective is that 100 percent of the casualties and the subsequent devastation of Gaza could have been avoided had Israel not continuously violated the 2012 ceasefire agreement by rampaging the West Bank and continuously provoking Hamas into a trap response.

We are not going to talk about the Gaza blockade — no exports and no imports, no fishing for Palestinian fisherman, a third of arable land declared a no go area for Palestinians and so on. Palestinians just have to put up with that.

Israel is banking on its military supremacy and its assured US backing to pursue a policy of repression and expansionism ahead of its own security, and that is exactly what apartheid supremacists were doing in South Africa 20 years ago.

Like Israel is doing today apartheid supremacists were convinced that world opinion did not matter for as long as they enjoyed US backing.
We all know there is a 40-year-old overwhelming international consensus on a two state settlement, only opposed by Israel and the US.

But we also all know a day came when the US had to tell the apartheid brutes in South Africa that the game was up, and we also know that a time came when the Americans had to tell the Indonesians that the game was up in East Timor.

What we are seeing right now is the fourth war on Gaza in a decade, and we have already explained the lawn-mowing hypothesis.
From however, many angles one might look at things, Israel’s numerous war offensives fail the criteria test for a Just War. The cause is not just, the intentions are not good, there is no legal authority for the wars themselves, the means used are not in proportion to the end that Israel seeks to achieve, and apart from the wanton punitive killings of Palestinian civilians and children, there is no real prospect of military success. Lastly Israel really does not bother pursuing all other ways of resolving its problems with Palestinians before resorting to military action.

World attention is now resting on Iraq; another messed up American democratisation project, alongside Afghanistan and Libya. Israel is outside the public gaze and it can safely be assumed that the mowing of the Gaza lawn can continue unabated.

Perhaps President Mugabe, the new SADC chairperson was right in saying that in Palestinian children Israel sees future terrorists, and in their mothers Israel sees wombs that give birth to future terrorists. In the wisdom of this logic both are legitimate war targets.

However, this inhumanity does not even rise to the level of nonsense, and the military strategies of Israel are not exactly tactics of a just war, and as such can never help bring lasting peace to this world.

People of the world we are one and together we will overcome.

REASON WAFAWAROVA is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.

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