Gaza
If you want the ins and outs of the Israeli/Hamas face-off you’re better off elsewhere. I think it’s probably worth noting however that the Israeli government needs to realise that, in taking its policy on Gaza directly from Escape from New York, the film was meant to be entertainment not a blueprint for shredding the human rights of an entire population.
On the other side Hamas need to remember that if you’re going to include thousands of people in your insane deathwish by going up against a massively more armed and resourced nation in a fight you can’t win, it’s maybe an idea to consult them first.
The response of British politicians, such as it is, is worth noting. At the time of writing, Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague has been almost entirely silent on the matter of Gaza in the newspapers (or maybe they don’t think him worth quoting). He did give a thirty second soundbite on Radio 4 this lunchtime on how there was probably nothing much that could be done.
He then spent considerably longer justifying his other jobs outside of his shadow cabinet position. ‘You can gain in your effectiveness as a politician from a wide acquaintance with the world,’ said after-dinner speaker Hague with no trace of irony as the children of Gaza and Ashkelon screamed.
David Miliband also waited until day three of the bloodbath before offering his thoughts. ‘I think that any innocent loss of life is unacceptable and in this case there have been massive casualties, some of them civilians and some of them children,’ which really is a gutsy thing for a New Labour foreign minister to say.
Whether he meant innocent loss of life in just this conflict or all conflicts he didn’t say, but I think we’re safe in assuming that the level of unacceptability of civilian deaths depends very much on who is firing the missiles. Either way, it’s a pronouncement that must have drawn bitter and ironic laughter from both the Israeli and Hamas high commands. At least he’s called for cease-fire which is more than his predecessor did when Israel fired more than a million cluster bombs into Lebanon in 2006.
Update: Word from Tony Blair, special envoy to the Middle East, is in. The statement neglects to tell us just where Blair is right now in this time of crisis (he likes to keep his holiday destinations hush hush after all) or from which celebrity’s mansion it was sent.
Posted on December 29th, 2008 at 3:48pm under New Labour, T.W.A.T., Tories
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Hmm, let me see now. The Palestinian authority has no air force, no navy, no mobile armour, no submarines, no WMDs …. so you have to ask why the Israelis are so scared of them. It’s like a sadistic father keeping a dog chained up in a cage and encouraging his children to stab it with hot pokers every few days, just for laughs. That’s Gaza today, a cage full of almost defenceless people being bombed and shot from above.
Hamas need to remember that if you’re going to include thousands of people in your insane deathwish by going up against a massively more armed and resourced nation in a fight you can’t win, it’s maybe an idea to consult them first.
They did!
In the sense that they voted for Hamas, yes. But I wonder if the election manifesto promised what’s starting to look like suicide by cop on a national scale.
This has nothing to do with Hamas and everything to do with Israeli domestic politics. The ending of the ceasefire is simply an excuse for Kadima and the IDF to show that they can still give a pounding to a weakling after being humiliated by Hizbullah. Likud was going to win the elections in six weeks’ time; now the nutjobs that would have voted for war have been given it by Kadima, so they can vote for them instead. This is murderous cynicism, nothing more, nothing less.
We can only dream of the US President’s plane crashing in the centre of Gaza.
“I don’t give a fuck about your war or your President.”
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, Hamas voted in in US backed elections?
According to Daniel Levy, this was:
A disaster was waiting to happen, and no-one was doing much about it. There was of course a date for the end of the ceasefire – December 19th. As that date approached both sides sought to improve their relative positions, to test some new rules of the game. Israel conducted a military operation on November 4th (yes, you had other things on your mind that day), apparently to destroy a tunnel from which an attack on Israel could be launched, Hamas responded with rocket-fire on southern Israeli towns. That initiated a period of intense Israeli-Hamas dialogue, albeit an untraditional one, largely conducted via mutual military jabs, occasional public messaging and back-channels. Again though the main reliance was on Egypt – by now in an intense struggle of its own with Hamas. When Hamas pushed the envelop with over 60 rockets on a single day (December 24th), albeit causing no serious injuries and mostly landing in open fields (probably by design), Israel decided that it was time for an escalation. That happened today – on a massive scale – with an unprecedented death toll.
http://www.prospectsforpeace.com/2008/12/what_next_on_gazaisrael_and_wh.html
(via Juan Cole, who is a great source of info, as ever)
Another link from Juan is on Israel’s funding of Hamas as a counterweight to PLO in the 70s onwards,
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10456.htm
I have to say I had high hopes for Blair in his role as Middle East Envoy. I expected that by now both the Israelis and Palestinians would be screaming “Look, we’ll sign any kind of deal you want, just send that fucker back home”.
[...] (as Gordon Brown and his UN diplomats can tell you). We need a moral philosopher of the calibre of David Miliband to decipher this for us. Posted on January 7th, 2009 at 10:53 [...]