THE leading Israeli paper Haaretz comments: “Thanks to the funnelling of millions of Qatari dollars to Gaza, with Netanyahu’s repeated approval as part of a deliberate, malicious policy aimed at burying the two-state solution, Hamas acquired inordinate military capabilities.”
This refers to a meeting of the Israeli premier’s Likud party in which Benjamin Netanayu explained to his party’s dullards that the strategic aim of preventing a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict depended on provoking the highest level of disunity among Palestinians.
Thus the Islamic charity that begat Hamas was covertly supported by Israel against the secular and left-wing forces in the Palestine national movement.
To this day the mechanism that manages this process is visible in Qatar where bilateral and multilateral links are maintained by the various parties in the region and where a section of the Hamas leadership have sanctuary.
The reasoning behind the Israeli strategy is that Gaza remains alienated from the West Bank, the refugees in the camps and the Palestinian diaspora, and is thus able to develop as a de facto state with the added inducement that thousands in the economically stricken Gaza get temporary permission to work in Israel.
The Hamas leadership successfully lulled Netanyahu into thinking that the visceral hostility of Palestinians to those occupying the lands of the fathers had been transmuted into an acceptance of the status quo and jobs that are better paid than in Gaza itself.
When, last week, the armed forces of this officially sanctioned quasi-state breached the Israeli security barrier — whose standing military guard had been redeployed to the West Bank by Netanyahu to protect zionist settlers stealing Palestinian land — they are characterised immediately as “terrorists” despite their clear military competence.
Israeli civil society will hold Netanyahu to account for this, but in mitigation of this murderous war criminal we can say that underestimating the character of Palestinian resistance to occupation and their sense of violated nationhood is as deeply rooted among Israelis generally as it is in the zionist leadership.
Nothing can justify the deliberate targeting of civilians and such is the injustice of war that many of the Israeli dead and captured are no less civilians that the countless victims of Israeli terror over the decades.
Credible accounts have surfaced in Israel of how some Israelis died in crossfire in maladroit manoeuvres by the Israeli security forces.
We can trust to the most principled in Israel’s vigilant opposition to eventually dig out the facts, but in the final accounting it will be revealing to find out how many casualties were drawn from the military and police personnel who live in this curtain of fortified frontier settlements facing the Gaza perimeter fence.
In a hastily revised account of the bombing which left 500 dead at the Gaza Christian hospital, blame is now placed by a rapidly back-tracking Israeli media machine on a rogue Palestinian rocket.
In the present war Israel claims 3,500 rockets have been fired, including 500 targeted on Tel Aviv on Saturday evening. The Hamas military commander Mohammad Deif puts the figure at 5,000.
Since 2001 almost 20,000 rockets have hit Israeli-held territory, killing 28 people. It is unusually perverse and vengeful God who ordains that more than 700 rockets are required to kill one Israeli but just one missile to kill 500 Palestinians.
It is vital that the movement of solidarity with Palestine commands the streets again this coming weekend but equally important is pressure on Israel’s Nato sponsors to compel it to end the occupation, end apartheid and restore the 1967 borders.
If the two-state solution is to be killed, then many more Palestinians and Israelis will die.
