Current Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak
Last week,
several social and physical laws were proven. The first law determines that if
you increase pressure on a closed area which has no safety valve, it will
eventually explode. The siege that Israel
imposed on 1.5 million men, women, the elderly and children living in the Gaza
Strip, resulted in a humanitarian crisis and hunger which caused the population
to break through the wall hermetically sealing Gaza. The wall was broken at its weakest
point, on the border with Egypt,
allowing hundreds of thousands of hungry and besieged people to enter the Sinai
and stock up on food and medicines. The second law determines that human beings
do not always react as those in power anticipate; instead of giving in to
Israeli pressure, the residents of Gaza
decided to break the siege themselves. The third law relates to surprises of
the rulers—the intelligence community, military, think tanks and “analysts for
Arab affairs”—along with the Israeli government, did not anticipate what
occurred last week in Rafah, and no one noticed the destruction of the wall by
the Palestinian government in Gaza. Yet another instance in which all of these
people were surprised, as they were by the first Intifada, by Yasser Arafat’s
rejection of Barak’s “generous offers,” by the second Intifada and Hezbollah’s
response capacities in the summer of 2006.
This
surprise is not the result of stupidity on the part of those who are supposed
to understand what could happen, but of the blindness of the ruler who is
incapable of referring to those under his boots as human beings with autonomous
wills and their own ability to take decisions. In the eyes of the occupier, the
occupied is an object, not a subject capable of thinking and reacting outside
of the occupier’s set scenario. Throughout history, this blindness has
accompanied each colonial war, from Algeria
to Afghanistan, from Vietnam to Iraq—Israeli colonialism is no
exception.
The day in
which the residents of Gaza broke through their
prison wall is indeed a day of celebration, like that of the Soweto
revolt in South Africa or
the Budapest
uprising fifty years ago, a celebration that distinguishes between what is human
and what is beastly: the longing for freedom and the willingness to mold their
lives by themselves. And if the initiative of the Gaza
residents and their leaders represents the human, the siege of Gaza
represents the bestiality of the occupier who, with the weak excuse of Qassam
rockets on the city of Sderot,
does not hesitate to impose punishment, sentencing 1.5 million people to
hunger. Indeed, the uplifting of spirits brought by the television pictures
from Gaza must not erase the simple and painful
fact that the Israeli abuse of Gaza’s
residents has not stopped. It is reasonable to assume that the military
headquarters is cooking up even more cruel acts of punishment than the
“experiments” about which Ehud Barak has so bragged. It is appropriate that the
“Coalition against the Siege of Gaza” did not cancel the solidarity convoy
planned for 26 January, as the residents of Gaza still need this same solidarity, and for
a very long time to come.
The
politicians, advisors, senior officers and journalists will no doubt be held
accountable for what is undoubtedly defined as a war crime. On the bench of the
accused, Minister of Defence Ehud Barak will have a special place of
(dis)honor. The man who experiments on human beings is the same man who is responsible
for the slaughter of Palestinian citizens of Israel
in October 2000, for the bloody attack planned on the cities of the West Bank at the end of 2000, not to mention his actions
as a military man. This bloodstained man carries the mark of Cain on his
forehead, and when he will travel around the world, he must be treated as a war
criminal for whom courtrooms are waiting in order to carry out justice.
Menachem
Mazuz, the Israeli Attorney General, announced this week that no one would be
tried for the massacre that occurred in October of 2000. Ehud Barak, the person
holding primary responsibility, should not have been allowed off yet again.
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