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Editorial

Crocodiles Tears

Israeli leaders and the Israeli media mourn the fate of the Palestinians from Gaza: “once again they are harming themselves, killing each other,” “how can we negotiate with them, if they are unable to live together and fight each other?!”

What a hypocrisy!

First, the Israelis consciously created an environment that made these clashes nearly unavoidable—closing one and a half million human beings in a tiny territory, without domestic resources or connections with the rest of the world, is a recipe for big tensions and eventually violence. The Israeli responsibility, however, is not only circumstantial: in coordination with the American administration, the Israeli government pushed Muhammad Dahlan to launch a coup d’état against the elected Palestinian government; they allowed the transfer of arms and ammunitions to Dahlan militias; they promised the end of the international boycott if and when the government—which is a national unity government with Fatah ministers—will be overturned.

Once again, however, they miscalculated the true relation of forces, ignored the popular support enjoyed by Hamas and the true nature of Dahlan militias, composed essentially of corrupted thugs. In less than a day, Dahlan and his men have been smashed and forced to escape… to Israel, which didn’t accept to give them shelter.

The people of Gaza will pay, now, the price of their resistance to the coup: the Gaza Strip, with all its population, including elders and babies, has been labeled a terrorist zone and excluded from the category of humanity: total siege, starvation, military incursions, bombardments and shelling will be the only way to deal with the Gaza Strip and its population.

The collaboration of President Mahmoud Abbas with the US-Israeli plan may cost him his function, if not his life: he agreed to cut the West Bank from Gaza and to establish a new government in Ramallah that lacks the support of the elected Parliament. In exchange, the Israeli government declared its readiness to give him part of the Palestinian tax money, which has been de facto confiscated by Israel. Additionally, the US administration and the European Union declared their readiness to send financial support.

One factor has been forgotten: Hamas is not only a Gaza phenomenon. In the last elections, it also garnered a majority in the West Bank, and it has the capacity to create big problems for the new Palestinian “West Bank government.”

The dream of Israel, to separate Gaza from a “Palestinian State in the West Bank” is no more than an illusion, and it will not take a long time for Olmert and Bush to discover this fact.

In Brief

Arcadi Gaydamak on the Russians in Israel

“To those who must drink their vodka with lard of all things, I say, before they open their jaws, they would do well to understand and begin to think. I don’t want to be popular among those who on principle must drink their vodka with lard. Even if they are the majority, their opinion doesn’t interest me at all.” (Harretz, 15 June).

 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—Israel’s Counter-Attack

British newspapers are full of expensive advertisements denouncing the call for academic boycott of Israel. This is the first move of a planned counter-attack led by a committee composed of two major Jewish organizations in Great Britain, Israeli academics, the Israeli Embassy in London and the American Jewish Lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

The main demand of that campaign is to reverse the decision of the British University and College Union (UCU) calling for a boycott of Israel, by a referendum of the members of the union. “The implications of an eventual failure in that battle can be disastrous” said Ronnie Fraser, chair of Academic Friends of Israel. Fraser himself is quite skeptical of overturning the vote in the union and advocates a strategy oriented directly at the academic institutions themselves. In his opinion, strengthening Israeli-British academic cooperation is the only way to win the battle over the boycott. He is supported by the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom, an Israeli body recently established in Bar Ilan University. The head of that board, Ofir Frankel, advocates a long-term strategy: “We are working in collaboration with the Israeli government and trying, for example, too revive the Israeli-British research fund. In parallel, we are active in strengthening the academic ties between the two countries, and prove to the boycott supporters that the boycott will only bring about stronger academic ties between Israel and Britain.”

Alan Dershowitz is advocating a counter-boycott: “we will isolate (the boycotters) from the rest of the academic world.”

Help! Barak is Back

Two weeks ago, Ehud Barak has been (re)elected chairman of the Labor Party, and yesterday, he replaced Amir Peretz as the Minister of Defense. This is not good news. Though Peretz succeeded to be the exact opposite of what made him, originally, a positive alternative to the generals/leaders of the Labor Party, when he tried to compete with these generals on who will be more brutal and aggressive (in Lebanon as well as in Gaza), his replacement by Barak portends dark days for Israel and the whole region.

The short term of Barak as the Prime Minister of Israel (1999-2000) was characterized by the decision to brutally reconquer the Occupied Palestinian Territories (The so-called “second Intifada” and the massacre of 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel in October 2000. Barak invented, several years before Ariel Sharon, the politics of unilateralism, when he decided to withdrawal from Lebanon without negotiations. The same year, he unilaterally suspended the negotiation process with the PLO, arguing, “Arafat rejected his generous offers.”

Now, that dangerous man, described by some Israeli commentators as both an autistic and megalomaniac, is back in control of the military and determined to use it as soon as possible.

There is a debate in Israel if Barak was the worst Israeli prime minister, or may be only the penultimate-worst, leaving the main title to Benjamin Netanyahu. And here is the real bad news: at the next elections, which will put an end to the tragicomic farce of a political party named Kadima, under Olmert leadership, the choice of the Israeli voters will be between the Labor Party and his new leader Ehud Barak or the Likud and its old leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel has many sins on its conscience, from the aggression in Lebanon to the colonization of the West Bank, from the starvation of Gaza to the support of murderous dictatorships in Latin America, from Dier Yassin to Qana. The punishment should be, however, proportional, and the prospects of the future Israeli leadership seem to be a too severe punishment.

State of Siege

The Gay Pride in Jerusalem

Thousands of police officers have arrived to Jerusalem in these past days, from various other cities of Israel. A larger number than in the days of the visit of President Sadat to the Knesset, and more than during 2001-2002, the years of the numerous suicide bombings in Jerusalem. The reason for such a massive police mobilization is the Gay Pride parade.

Every year, the Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem (in Tel Aviv and Haifa, these parades do not provoke any problem) is a source of troubles for the police forces: the religious communities and their spiritual as well as political authorities are threatening to turn the city into chaos if that “abomination” will dare to parade in the streets of the “Holy City.”

In the past years, even weeks before the parade, young orthodox burned tires and garbage cans, and confronted the police in their neighborhoods.

This year too, violent confrontations have occurred in Jerusalem, but the parade will still take place, under heavy police protection.