Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumDennis Kucinich: Israel Invades Gaza Because It Can
Israel invades Gaza because it can. Gazans, in the face of an invasion, have no ability to strike back, while Israel strikes forward. Israel has total military superiority, an air force which can knock and then bomb, a navy which can shell Gazans from miles off shore, an army which can roll tanks into Gaza nonstop. Gazans have no army, navy, or air force with which to defend. Israel, as any nation, has a right to defend itself, but it confuses offense with defense. It is on the offensive in Gaza.
Israel, with its overwhelming military strength, is attacking and invading Gaza in violation of international and U.S. law. Its construction of settlements violates the Oslo agreement. Its Central Bank dries up the Gaza economy and blocks payments to Gazan civil servants. Its total control brings the Palestinians to utter subjection and total despair.
Israel can kill, injure, and humiliate Palestinians at will, with impunity, which is exactly what gave rise to Hamas and strengthens Hamas' hold in Gaza, even as the IDF advances. Israel will go door to door in Gaza in the hunt for Hamas, which comprises the government of the Palestinians and is therefore a necessary party to any peace talks. It is axiomatic that if you kill your partner for peace, you will have no partner for peace.
There will be no peace, for now, as Gaza is turned into an abattoir, to collectively punish Gazans for supporting Hamas. Israel, in its attempt to divide Hamas from the Gazans, will actually multiply Hamas' strength in Gaza and elsewhere. Israel may indeed find and kill Hamas officials. But it is not the current individuals who make up Hamas who constitute Israel's deep dilemma, which threatens its long term security. It is Israel's policies which gave rise to Hamas and which, if left unaltered, will spawn increased resistance no matter how many members of Hamas Israel is successful in apprehending or killing.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-j-kucinich/israel-invades-gaza_b_5598535.html
4now
(1,596 posts)I was wrong about him and I am sorry for any bad things I ever said about him.
Maybe getting out of congress allows someone to speak the obvious truth.
ellenrr
(3,864 posts)InAbLuEsTaTe
(24,122 posts)cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
Chemisse
(30,817 posts)I commend him for this.
Shemp Howard
(889 posts)I'm a huge fan of Dennis Kucinich. I find his honesty and candor refreshing. And I agree with almost everything he says in this article.
But yet I am very disappointed in Kucinich here. He does not say one word about Hamas firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel. Those rockets are undeniably a major part of the picture. To ignore the rockets is to turn a thoughtful article into a propaganda piece.
Response to ellenrr (Original post)
cerveza_gratis This message was self-deleted by its author.
Divernan
(15,480 posts)Here's an article which expands on what Kucinich refers to, i.e., the Israeli policies which have given and continue to give rise to Hamas. This article (from the UK, not the US, of course) documents an Israeli policy of violent colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Just this February, the UNs special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Territories Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law at Princeton University submitted his final report to the UN Human Rights Council. Presenting his findings at a news conference in March, he said that Israels policies in the West Bank and Gaza bore unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/israels-attack-gaza-culmination-66-years-settler-colonialism/
Headline: Israels attack on Gaza is the culmination of 66 years of settler-colonialism
Israel claims its latest onslaught against the population of Gaza is a response to Hamas rocket-fire, targeted at "terrorists" and motivated to "restore quiet." However, an analysis of the IDF's public relations points and war doctrines as well as the historical context of the events, shows the root cause of the crisis to be Israel's decades-long programme of violent settler colonialism. . . . .
(Just one of the documented examples of Israeli policies from this article - thanks Wikileaks!), subtitled,
Calibrating the Gaza starvation diet
A US diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks in 2011 quoted Israeli officials saying they wanted to keep Gazas economy on the brink of collapse. The idea was to ensure the economy was functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.
One of the mechanisms to do this was what veteran Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook called Israels starvation diet for Gaza. Israeli Defence ministry documents obtained by the Israeli human rights group Gisha showed that Israeli officials had calculated the minimum number of calories so-called red lines needed by Gazas population to avoid malnutrition. But as Cook reports, while this figure required allowing in 170 trucks a day, in practice Israeli military officials permitted an average of just 67 trucks per day into Gaza (compared to a daily 400 before the blockade).
The facts on the ground in Gaza demonstrate that food imports consistently fell below the red lines, said Robert Turner, operations director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). No wonder a 2012 UNRWA report forecasts that if Israels policies toward Gaza continue, the strip will be uninhabitable by 2020.
iandhr
(6,852 posts)This guy gives liberalism a bad name.
mikeysnot
(4,757 posts)good luck with that...
RufusTFirefly
(8,812 posts)"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
...
A look at Israel's decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals -- including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists -- reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences. Time and again, Israel's efforts to find a pliant Palestinian partner that is both credible with Palestinians and willing to eschew violence, have backfired. Would-be partners have turned into foes or lost the support of their people.
WSJ from 2009: How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas
shira
(30,109 posts)noiretextatique
(27,275 posts)for Hamas.