Tuesday 26 February 2013

Rockets from Gaza

This is just a very brief posting expressing my frustration and anger yet again for the BBC reporting of this incident. The fact is that Israel has broken the ceasefire agreement over 100 times since November. Farmers, fishermen and even children have been killed and maimed; agricultural buildings and land have been bulldozed; fishing boats within the area that is meant to be safe, have been confiscated and individuals taken into custody; not to mention the deaths in the West Bank of Palestinians demonstrating peacefully who have been hit by live rounds or imprisoned and abused and tortured. There are hunger strikes going on right now, with prisoners near death. One man has just died in an Israeli prison and the post mortem indicates that the death was caused by torture and not the heart attack that Israel claims.
Each time Israel extends a security zone it is done on Palestinian land. When the area is already small, that amounts to a lot of farmland, grazing areas as well as housing. Gaza is becoming more and more restricted by Israel's 'security needs', which means that when children or farmers or fishermen get shot and often killed, Israel claims that they had ventured into such security zones and were therefore killed or maimed legitimately. These zones can change frequently and are often reduced as a means of collective punishment. Many consider such Israeli  State behaviour as incitement to more violence rather than a means for securing greater security for Israelis.

Many people believe that Palestine is on the verge of the 3rd Intifada. Is that what Israel wants, because if not, they do seem to continually goad the Palestinians into action.

So yet again there is the bald simple news item on the BBC that a rocket has been fired from Gaza into Israel.  No one was hurt, yet you know as well as I do that this is likely to be either the pretext for more open violence from Israel or the excuse for lack of peace negotiations, even more settlement building and 'Price-Tag' incidents, because we all know that Israel does "not have a partner for peace"!


A quote from an article by Jonathan Cook:

The latest talks between Hamas and Fatah broke down in Cairo this month, even though unity, in the view of most Palestinians, is a precondition of their seeking viable statehood. The talks’ failure followed the “arrest” by Israel of 25 Hamas leaders in the West Bank, seizures that Palestinian human rights groups and Hamas warned were intended to disrupt reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Israel has repeatedly undermined Abbas’s rule, and kept his PA close to collapse, by turning on and off one of its major sources of income — tax monies Israel regularly collects on behalf of the Palestinians and is supposed to pass on.
As a result, Abbas is trapped between various pressures impossible to reconcile: the need to keep Israel happy, to maintain legitimacy with his own people and to foster a shared political agenda with other Palestinian factions.
The sticks that Israel wields force Abbas to keep the door open to negotiations even as most Palestinians recognise their utter pointlessness. Likewise, his constant need to appease Israel and the US serves only to widen differences with Hamas.
The Palestinians are stuck in a political and diplomatic cul-de-sac, unable to move forward either with the development of their national struggle or with talks on viable statehood. Whatever Obama’s intentions, the reality is that this will be another four years of diplomatic failure.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.


4 comments:

  1. Miranda: thanks for your email informing about this blog and your imminent travels. I shall be following your blog enthusiastically. Safe journey, bon voyage and may God grant peace through you. Salaams.

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  2. Miranda - got your email and we have bookmarked this blog. Have a safe journey, and keep us informed - as you always do.

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  3. Hi Miranda - safe journey, and am glad to be able to follow your progress via this site.

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  4. Good job, Miranda. Hi from the Brazilian journalist you've met in Jerusalem. :-)

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