How it started in Gaza |
PM Benjamin Netanyahu had to seek a way out of isolation.
Last updated: 12 Jul 2014 10:52
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More than 100 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its aerial assault on the Strip [EPA]
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| Beginnings matter. Questions about culpability and responsibility, about the narrow cynicism that defines so much of life in the Gaza Strip, sequence and motive - they all go to beginnings. Why are Israeli men and women battering and gnashing lives and livelihoods in that prison camp? How did it start? Why are they killing? What are they after? How will it end? The answers are embedded in our crusty beginnings. How it started In the beginning, Zionists invaded Palestine. They expelled the Palestinians and Gaza, an ancient place that hosted Ramses II, Alexander the Great, and Salahuddin, became a tent city. A wasteland for the dejected and destitute. It didn't take long for Palestinians in Gaza to begin to fight to reclaim their homes from the Ashkenazis that displaced them. The Fedayeen - refugee militiamen - commenced with overnight raids as soon as the shock of their ignominious defeat began to wear. The first Israeli massacre in Gaza occurred in 1956. My father was a small boy at the time, but he remembers how the men were rounded up and shot. Today, his grand-nephews and -nieces, also refugees, also born in camps, cower in terror as the third generation of Ashkenazis in Palestine shows them their place. Life in the shadows, balanced precariously on obsidian with fire on either side - that's their inheritance. The latest round Among Israeli elites, Gaza is everything to everyone. Israeli politicians attack Gaza to enhance their electoral appeal. They use it to muzzle the opposition, to preserve a coalition or to distract from a domestic scandal. Israeli generals like to invade to provide troops with "battle" training or to test new wares, and to debut new formations and tactics; Hamas is not Hezbollah, after all. 
The recent move towards Palestinian reconciliation undertaken by the Hamas and PLO leaderships, threatened to end the political - if not material - isolation of Gaza. It posed a risk to the current state of things by providing Hamas, a political movement which came to power through elections, with a means for re-entering the realm of international legitimacy. Once the Americans and Europeans agreed to recognise the new caretaker government, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to seek a way out of his new, uncomfortable isolation. He could not attack the Palestinians solely for their political reconciliation - the Americans would admonish him for that. Nor, to his great consternation, could he convince world powers to repeal their endorsement of the new government. Desperately, he sought a way out. Restoring Netanyahu's balance It came in the form of tragedy. When the three Jewish-Israeli settler teenagers disappeared in the West Bank, the Israeli leadership claimed that they were still alive. Through its prerogative as the enforcement vehicle of Israeli apartheid, the army spent three weeks smashing into hundreds of homes and terrorising their occupants in the search for the three youths. More than 500 Palestinian men were rounded up and imprisoned as Netanyahu clamoured for the teenagers' return and inveighed against Hamas, the group he claimed kidnapped the youths. No evidence was offered. Only bluster, bombast, and fatalistic conviction delivered in a sonorous tone of voice. As Max Blumenthal has documented, it was all a shameful and cynical political show. The Israeli leadership knew within the first day of their disappearance that the youths were dead; bullet holes, blood samples and a telephone recording provided evidence of what happened. But the ever-receptive Jewish-Israeli public demanded revenge and by the time the extent of the sham was revealed, the Israelis had killed nine people in the West Bank and three more in the Gaza Strip through missiles they fired in "retaliation" for the West Bank murders.  More than a month after the reconciliation, it appears that Netanyahu has succeeded - his balance has been restored. Israelis are free to indulge in a grand delusion of self-righteousness. "No normal country could tolerate terrorists firing missiles into its urban centres," they say. "No normal country practises the crime of apartheid." "No normal country demolishes the homes of suspects… or punishes millions of people… or seeks vengeance and vengeance and vengeance in a fit of bloody wrath," we might wearily reply. Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American who was born in the Gaza Strip. He is a Soros Fellow, co-editor of After Zionism (Saqi Books 2012) and co-founder and CEO of liwwa.com. Follow him on Twitter: @ahmedmoor
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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