Israel Agrees to Truce With Hamas
In what will undoubtedly soon be called one of Israel’s biggest mistakes in the last five years, the news has hit the wires that Israel has agreed to a truce with Hamas in Gaza. The deal has been brokered by Egypt, and it will start this Thursday.
“Israel has accepted the Egyptian proposal,” said David Baker, a spokesman for the Israeli government. “We hope this will lead to a cessation of the constant rocket fire on Israeli towns and cities.”
Israel is expected as part of the deal to ease the economic blockade of Gaza, which is controlled by the Islamic group Hamas. Israeli government officials emphasized that sanctions would be lifted in accordance with the security situation on the ground…
Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official, was dispatched to the Egyptian capital to finalize the deal on Tuesday night. On his return Wednesday morning, he told Israel Radio that the cease-fire arrangement did not constitute a peace agreement with Hamas, but a practical understanding aimed at achieving calm…
Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas leader in Gaza, confirmed at a news conference that a truce was about to come into effect and that it would last for six months.
Maintaining a note of caution, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Tuesday that it was “difficult to determine how long” an agreement would last.
It’s a temporary solution, and a bad one at that. Israel has to force Hamas into recognizing the right of the Jewish nation-state to exist, and it has to force Hamas to stop indoctrinating little children with hatred towards Jews generally, and to Jews living in Israel specifically.
The economic blockade is a way to do so; Hamas suffers tremendously because of it. Hamas will not change the slightest bit if it can get away with hatred and violence because Israel is willing to give in whenever a Hamas Palestinian cries that he does not have any money or electricity. Additionally, it has to be kept in mind that the Palestinian people as a whole are quite supportive of terrorism. They too have responsibilities.
"Additionally, it has to be kept in mind that the Palestinian people as a whole are quite supportive of terrorism."
So, Israelis seem to have no problem with Israeli bulldozers attacking civilian property, arbitrarily razing houses without warning (forcing seniors to jump out of windows) SIMPLY to send a political message. I call that terrorism, and refusae to give either party a moral high ground on the basis that the region is locked in an muddled dance of death
On 28 December 2006, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published its annual report about the Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories. Israeli forces killed this last year six hundred and sixty citizens. The number of Palestinians killed by Israel last year tripled in comparison to the previous year (around two hundred). According to B’Tselem, the Israelis killed one hundred and forty one children in the last year. Most of the dead are from the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli forces demolished almost 300 houses and slew entire families. This means that since 2000, Israeli forces killed almost four thousand Palestinians, half of them children; more than twenty thousand were wounded.
B’Tselem is a conservative organization, and the numbers may be higher. But the point is not just about the escalating intentional killing, it is about the trend and the strategy. As 2007 commences, Israeli policymakers are facing two very different realities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the former, they are closer than ever to finishing the construction of their eastern border. Their internal ideological debate is over and their master plan for annexing half of the West Bank is being implemented at an ever-growing speed. The last phase was delayed due to the promises made by Israel, under the Road Map, not to build new settlements. Israel found two ways of circumventing this alleged prohibition. First, it defined a third of the West Bank as Greater Jerusalem, which allowed it to build within this new annexed area towns and community centers. Secondly, it expanded old settlements to such proportions so that there was no need to build new ones. This trend was given an additional push in 2006 (hundreds of caravans were installed to mark the border of the expansions, the planning schemes for the new towns and neighborhoods were finalized and the apartheid bypass roads and highway system completed). In all, the settlements, the army bases, the roads and the wall will allow Israel to annex almost half of the West Bank by 2010. Within these territories there will be a considerable number of Palestinians, against whom the Israeli authorities will continue to implement slow and creeping transfer policies — too boring as a subject for the western media to bother with and too elusive for human rights organizations to make a general point about them. There is no rush; as far as the Israelis are concerned, they have the upper hand there: the daily abusive and dehumanizing mixed mechanisms of army and bureaucracy is as effective as ever in contributing its own share to the dispossession process.
The bar set continually higher: Palestinians pass by a pool of blood after the Israeli shelling of a residential area in Beit Hanoun in the northern of Gaza Strip in which at least 18 people were killed, 8 November 2006. (MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)
The bar set continually higher: Palestinians pass by a pool of blood after the Israeli shelling of a residential area in Beit Hanoun in the northern of Gaza Strip in which at least 18 people were killed, 8 November 2006. (MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)
And lastly… Israeli killed more than 10000 people in Mideast, most of them was children and women… More than 1 million people moved to unsafe places…
So what will u say Edited by MvdG: no insults to persons allowed. Try it again, and you’re banned. to this GENOCIDE ? even I’m an objective journalist in London, I can honestly say that Israeli is a murderer, you? can u say? Edited; same goes for this remark.
utsu,
So you believe that those who respond in counterproductive ways to violent attacks by groups pledged openly to genocide are morally equivalent?
Your refusal to see extreme differences in the goals and the intended targets of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis makes you completely non-credible in my view. Apparently, the only thing that the Israelis should do properly in the face of violent attacks by genocidal enemies in your eyes is to shut up and die.
Personally, I concede that many aspects of Israeli policy have been counterproductive and morally problematic, but I cannot in good conscience conflate those errors to the genocidal goals and intentional targeting of civilians practiced by Palestinian factions like Hamas.
Let’s blockade LIKUD too!
Likud is Israel’s popular right-wing party.
And it refuses to recognize the right of Palestine to exist.
I don’t recall anyone threatening to impose sanctions on Israel when Likud placed this in their 1996 charter:
That means Palestine would NEVER exist.
Since anything west of the Jordan River includes Gaza & the West Bank.
In case you thought people simply overlooked this in 1996…
Here is Likud’s main platform in 2008:
Israel will not allow the establishment of an Arab Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. The Palestinians will be able to manage their lives freely in the framework of an autonomous regime, but not as a sovereign, independent state.
The Jordan River will be the State of Israel’s permanent border.
Jerusalem is the Jewish people’s everlasting capital; it will not be divided, nor will any negotiation to the effect be conducted. Israel will continue to push for the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. Israel will ensure the freedom of religion and faith as well as free access to all holy places in Jerusalem, for all religions. The boosting of Jewish settlement activity in the Golan Heights will continue. Likud is widely expected to win the next Israeli elections.
I expect to see yet another fair display from Americans…
Sanctions and insults to Palestinians.
Arms and subsidies to Israelis.