Aggression Under False Pretenses???

Ismail Haniyeh (Prime Minister [Hamas] of the Palestinian National Authority) wrote in WaPo As Americans commemorated their annual celebration of independence from colonial occupation, rejoicing in their democratic institutions, we Palestinians were yet again besieged by our occupiers, who destroy our roads and buildings, our power stations and water plants, and who attack our very means of civil administration. Our homes and government offices are shelled, our parliamentarians taken prisoner and threatened with prosecution.

And this is just because to thank them for withdrawing completely from Gaza and giving us the country we said we wanted, we launched 1,000 rockets into their land, and tunnelled into their land and killed soldiers and took one hostage. Don't they understand this is the way Palestinians say thank you.

The current Gaza invasion is only the latest effort to destroy the results of fair and free elections held early this year. It is the explosive follow-up to a five-month campaign of economic and diplomatic warfare directed by the United States and Israel. The stated intention of that strategy was to force the average Palestinian to "reconsider" her vote when faced with deepening hardship; its failure was predictable, and the new overt military aggression and collective punishment are its logical fulfillment. The "kidnapped" Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit is only a pretext for a job scheduled months ago.

Then why were you stupid enough to give them that "pretext"

In addition to removing our democratically elected government, Israel wants to sow dissent among Palestinians by claiming that there is a serious leadership rivalry among us. I am compelled to dispel this notion definitively. The Palestinian leadership is firmly embedded in the concept of Islamic shura, or mutual consultation;

The fact that we have frequent gun battles with Fatah is just our way of consulting them.

suffice it to say that while we may have differing opinions, we are united in mutual respect and focused on the goal of serving our people.

Actually we don't care about serving our people, we want to destroy Israel.

Furthermore, the invasion of Gaza and the kidnapping of our leaders and government officials are meant to undermine the recent accords reached between the government party and our brothers and sisters in Fatah and other factions,   Read More

on achieving consensus for resolving the conflict.

And it is getting harder for us to wage war against Israel when they keep killing or arresting our leaders.

Yet Israeli collective punishment only strengthens our collective resolve to work together. As I inspect the ruins of our infrastructure -- the largess of donor nations and international efforts all turned to rubble once more by F-16s and American-made missiles -- my thoughts again turn to the minds of Americans. What do they think of this?

They think you are idiots for attacking Israel with 1,000 rockets and kidnapping a soldier. You should have begun building the country of your own you pretend to want.

They think, doubtless, of the hostage soldier, taken in battle -- yet thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of women and children, remain in Israeli jails for resisting the illegal, ongoing occupation that is condemned by international law. They think of the pluck and "toughness" of Israel, "standing up" to "terrorists." Yet a nuclear Israel possesses the 13th-largest military force on the planet, one that is used to rule an area about the size of New Jersey and whose adversaries there have no conventional armed forces. Who is the underdog, supposedly America's traditional favorite, in this case?

Israel is surrounded by a large number of Arab countries. Four of them attacked a peaceful Israel in 67, and in so doing lost a lot of land to Israel. Israel has given back some of the land, to countries that want peace. You don't want Peace; you just want to destroy Israel.

I hope that Americans will give careful and well-informed thought to root causes and historical realities, in which case I think they will question why a supposedly "legitimate" state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject refugee population without ever achieving its goals.

Which are to live in peace. Which they do, until terrorists attack with Suicide Bombers, rockets, etc.

Israel's unilateral movements of the past year will not lead to peace. These acts -- the temporary withdrawal of forces from Gaza, the walling off of the West Bank -- are not strides toward resolution but empty, symbolic acts that fail to address the underlying conflict.

Which is they continue to live, while you want them dead.

Israel's nearly complete control over the lives of Palestinians is never in doubt, as confirmed by the humanitarian and economic suffering of the Palestinians since the January elections. Israel's ongoing policies of expansion, military control and assassination mock any notion of sovereignty or bilateralism. Its "separation barrier," running across our land, is hardly a good-faith gesture toward future coexistence.

If you showed them you wanted peacful coexistence, they would not need the separation barrier.

But there is a remedy, and while it is not easy it is consistent with our long-held beliefs. Palestinian priorities include recognition of the core dispute over the land of historical Palestine and the rights of all its people; resolution of the refugee issue from 1948; reclaiming all lands occupied in 1967; and stopping Israeli attacks, assassinations and military expansion.

Try showing them you can live in peace in Gaza, without firing rockets into Israel, and without killing or kidnapping Israeli soldiers. Maybe then they will listen to you.

Contrary to popular depictions of the crisis in the American media, the dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank; it is a wider national conflict that can be resolved only by addressing the full dimensions of Palestinian national rights in an integrated manner. This means statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, and resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly, on the basis of international legitimacy and established law. Meaningful negotiations with a non-expansionist, law-abiding Israel can proceed only after this tremendous labor has begun.

Or the alternative is to kill all of you. Since you are the one originating the attacks, that seems the best way to proceed.

Surely the American people grow weary of this folly, after 50 years and $160 billion in taxpayer support for Israel's war-making capacity -- its "defense." Some Americans, I believe, must be asking themselves if all this blood and treasure could not have bought more tangible results for Palestine if only U.S. policies had been predicated from the start on historical truth, equity and justice.

However, we do not want to live on international welfare and American handouts. We want what Americans enjoy -- democratic rights, economic sovereignty and justice. We thought our pride in conducting the fairest elections in the Arab world might resonate with the United States and its citizens. Instead, our new government was met from the very beginning by acts of explicit, declared sabotage by the White House.

All they did was say we would not give you handouts until you agreed to live in peace with Israel.

Now this aggression continues against 3.9 million civilians living in the world's largest prison camps. America's complacency in the face of these war crimes is, as usual, embedded in the coded rhetorical green light: "Israel has a right to defend itself." Was Israel defending itself when it killed eight family members on a Gaza beach last month

They were responding to rocket attacks, and it is not clear what killed the family members, an Israeli Rocket, a Hamas rocket, or a Hamas bomb, or a mine.

or three members of the Hajjaj family on Saturday, among them 6-year-old Rawan? I refuse to believe that such inhumanity sits well with the American public.

We present this clear message: If Israel will not allow Palestinians to live in peace, dignity and national integrity, Israelis themselves will not be able to enjoy those same rights. Meanwhile, our right to defend ourselves from occupying soldiers and aggression is a matter of law, as settled in the Fourth Geneva Convention. If Israel is prepared to negotiate seriously and fairly, and resolve the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967, a fair and permanent peace is possible. Based on a hudna

a tactical cease-fire that allows the Arabs to rebuild their terrorist infrastructure in order to be more effective when the "cease-fire" is called off

(comprehensive cessation of hostilities for an agreed time), the Holy Land still has an opportunity to be a peaceful and stable economic powerhouse for all the Semitic people of the region. If Americans only knew the truth, possibility might become reality.

CQ blogged The Israelis pulled out of Gaza completely, however, several months ago. They packed up the IDF, forced thousands of settlers out of their homes, and sent everyone back into Israel. The Palestinians held Gaza for themselves. What did they do with it? They used it as a launching pad for Kassam rockets into Israel almost since the day the IDF left. Now Haniyeh wants us to hearken back to our colonial roots to understand ... what? That an act of war, repeatedly taken, results in a military response?

Blue Crab blogged What in HELL is the Washington Post thinking? They are giving op-ed space to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister of the Palestinians? A terrorist front man gets top space in a top American newspaper?.... The reality is that the Palestinians, as represented by Haniyeh want Israel destroyed. Nothing else will do. And the Washington Post has decided to be their mouthpiece.

They had to. The NYT was busy helping Al Qaeda.

blogged

Meryl Yourish blogged The hundreds of women and “children” (funny how a 19-year-old palestinian is a “youth” or “child,” but a 19-year-old Israeli is a “soldier”) are in jail because they took part in terror attacks. You know, that “resistance” thing Haniyeh talks about? It includes knives, bombs, molotov cocktails, and generally killing Israelis. As for the “battle” that took the soldier? It was a sneak attack, a shoot-from-behind operation made by terrorists dressed as close to Israeli soldiers as possible.... Hamas doesn’t want “democratic rights.” Hamas wants an Islamic Caliphate established where Israel stands today.