BB FANS

Even Barack Obama can't solve the Middle East problem - and he'd be foolish to try
Hopes are pinned on President-Elect Barack Obama to fix the Middle East crisis, but without strong leaders on either side, he doesn't stand a chance, argues our Diplomatic Editor
Telegraph

Bruce Anderson: Israel is in danger of fighting the last war, not the next one

As long as Israel occupies the West Bank, Palestine will be Arabs' sore tooth.
Independent

Gaza battles rage as envoys appeal for truce

By Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters
Monday, 5 January 2009


Israeli tanks, planes and ground forces pounded Gaza today and the defence minister said the offensive against Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave would go on until Israel was safe.

International efforts to secure a ceasefire moved ahead with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Middle East special envoy Tony Blair visiting the region, but they seemed able to offer little beyond words.

The death toll in besieged Gaza rose on Monday to at least 530 people. Victims included three Palestinian children and their mother when a tank shell hit their home in Gaza City and seven members of another family were killed in a refugee camp.

The Israeli army said "many dozens" of Islamist fighters had been killed since ground troops went in on Saturday in a stated attempt to end rocket fire by Hamas into southern Israel.

"Hamas has so far sustained a very heavy blow from us, but we have yet to achieve our objective and therefore the operation continues," Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said.

A Hamas official said a delegation from the Islamist group would head for talks in Egypt, which has also opened contacts to achieve a ceasefire. But senior Hamas political leader Mahmoud Zahar urged Hamas forces to fight on "in the name of God".

"They legalised for us knocking down their synagogues when they hit our mosques, they legalised for us knocking down their schools when they hit our schools," he said in a speech broadcast in Gaza.

Gunbattles intensified in eastern Gaza City and in the north of the strip today. Militants fired mortars and grenades and detonated mines, and claimed to have hit a troop carrier.

They were also trying to lure Israeli soldiers into built-up areas, witnesses said.

A military spokeswoman said the air force bombed more than 30 targets, including homes of Hamas members used as weapons depots, tunnels and a suspected anti-aircraft rocket launcher.

Israel launched its offensive with an air blitz on Dec. 27 to curtail the rocket attacks from Hamas-ruled Gaza before an Israeli national election next month.

Four Israelis have been killed by salvoes fired into Israel since the offensive began. An Israeli soldier was killed in fighting on Sunday and 48 have been wounded since the invasion.

Israel's advances into Gaza have carved the 40-km long coastal territory, home to 1.5 million people, into two zones and forces have surrounded its largest urban area, Gaza City

Bombs on Monday hit a hospital morgue where a family were mourning a paramedic killed in an airstrike on Sunday. Three people were killed and 17 wounded, medical workers said.

"We were sitting in the mourning tent when suddenly they bombed us, we ran to rush the casualties to hospitals but they bombed again," Abdel-Dayem told Reuters.

Gaza residents were in dire need of food, medical supplies and other aid but the hostilities were hampering relief efforts, aid agencies said.

At a house at the Beach refugee camp, Umm Ala Mrad sat on a mattress surrounded by her nine children. An Israeli warship intermittently fired shells, hitting buildings by the shore.

"Every time a shell is fired from the sea I rush to carry my children out of the house. But how and what should I do, who should I carry first and who should I leave for a next go," she asked a reporter.

Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, heading an EU peace mission, could offer her little comfort. "We do not have a specific plan for a ceasefire because the ceasefire as such must be concluded by the involved parties," he said in Jerusalem.

"We can mediate, we can assist a solution but it's not up to us to propose the conditions."

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, envoy for a major powers group called the Quartet, said a ceasefire was a priority.

"We are doing everything we possibly can to bring about an end to a situation of immense suffering and deprivation," he said after meeting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.

The Quartet wanted an immediate ceasefire respected by all sides and to get humanitarian aid flowing into Gaza, Blair said.

Sarkozy said he "condemned this offensive" for distancing chances for peace and making it harder to get aid to Palestinians in Gaza. He met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and will head for meetings in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The United States, Israel's closest ally, has looked all but sidelined by the pending transfer of its presidency. The Bush administration has supported Israel, saying Hamas must halt rocket fire at Israel for a truce to take shape.

As part of any halt to the fighting, which has led to protests across the world, Israel is seeking international help to bolster security along Gaza's border with Egypt to prevent Hamas from rebuilding tunnels and rearming.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni rebuffed European proposals for international observers in the Gaza Strip after any ceasefire, pushing instead for teams that will help search out and seal off tunnels that could allow Hamas to rearm.

Hamas called off a six-month truce last month and stepped up attacks on southern Israel, citing Israeli raids and a blockade of the enclave that Israel occupied until 2005.

Global oil prices, meanwhile, jumped to a three-week high on Monday after an Iranian military commander called for an oil boycott over the Israeli offensive.
Independent

It breaks my heart to see Israel's stupidity
It has a right to respond to attacks, but will not achieve its ultimate aim - peace - until it stops thinking in military terms
timesonline

Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask


So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?

Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.

Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
Independent

Deborah Orr: There wouldn't have been Gaza rockets without the blockade
Blair to his credit at least understands that the invasion and the blockade are linked
Wednesday, 7 January 2009

Tony Blair, the Middle East envoy, reckons that a ceasefire in Gaza could be negotiated very soon, provided that the tunnels from Egypt that provide the territory with, among other things, smuggled weapons, are closed off. It's a shame that he did not express his ambitions in another way. Perhaps a ceasefire could be negotiated very soon if legitimate channels for the import of all goods except arms into Gaza were opened up.

Such a suggestion, however, might be seen as critical of Israel's own perceived position as a reluctant aggressor and defensive state. The international community has completely accepted Israel's justification for its attack on Gaza, so much so that all of its spokespeople are careful not to refer to any Israeli action that can be viewed as provocative, such as its suffocating 18-month long blockade on that tiny, overpopulated strip of land.

Supporters of Israel's action are fond of reiterating Israel's narrow justification for its action. Who else would put up with regular rocket attacks from a neighbour, it asks? No one suggests that they would be happy to. It is accepted that Israel has the right to defend itself, and so it should be. Yet few would acquiesce without protest to a swingeing two-year blockade by a neighbour either, though no Western leader ever seems seriously to ask that highly pertinent question.

On the contrary, Blair implies that in order to obtain a ceasefire, Gaza's Hamas leadership must prove itself willing to comply proactively with the blockade against it, as well as refraining from actually firing weapons. Yet Hamas does not only import arms through Egypt's tunnels. It also imports everything from livestock to medical supplies – about 90 per cent of all goods entering the area.

Politically Hamas is popular not only because of its refusal to abandon armed struggle and accept the state of Israel, but also because it organises social support more efficiently than other groups. Even during the siege it has found some ways to mitigate the effects of Israeli policy on Gazans. The blockade is viewed by many as "collective punishment", because it exists to discomfort ordinary citizens and thereby undermine the ability of Hamas to govern. The idea of the blockade was to turn Palestinians away from the group that it had democratically elected. Yet Blair's peace plan considers that the blockade should be extended, with the ability of the Israelis to control the flow of goods into Gaza further strengthened. So the long-standing humanitarian crisis that is the result of the blockade would actually be augmented in order that the more extreme and immediate horror of warfare could be curtailed.

Increasingly, the international community concerns itself mainly with crisis management in Israel-Palestine, and this plan of Blair's is a perfect example. Being seen as one of the brokers of a ceasefire is a fine thing. But a willingness to accept and refine a system that keeps 1.5 million people effectively imprisoned in order to achieve one, is not a strategy exactly guaranteed to foster long-term stability, or even hope. The Israeli fight is against Hamas in general, not just Hamas rockets, and the attack and the blockade are intimately linked.

Certainly, the ideological position of Hamas is abhorrent, as is the organisation's inability to comprehend the absurdity of its own propaganda. Its leadership insists that Israel should view its rocket-fire as "symbolic", and simply put up with it in order to preserve a fig-leaf of dignity for the Palestinians as "people of resistance".

In believing this, Hamas acknowledges the importance of symbolism. But it fails to understand that Israel cannot then accept what its rocket fire symbolises. This, of course, is the impossible ambition that Hamas will not relinquish – the imposition of an Islamist state covering all of the Israeli and Palestinian territories. Hamas wants Israel to accept that this is what Hamas wants, but to be relaxed about it, because all parties know it cannot be obtained (at least for a while).

Herein lies the paradox of "disproportionality". Hamas refuses to stop fighting because this would be an acknowledgement that it cannot win against its far more powerful enemy. Yet because it will not disengage from "symbolic" armed struggle, it offers Israel the international justification it needs in order to stay engaged, and with much more deadly effect.

Blair, elbow-deep as he is in the rhetoric of the "war on terror", is as keen to isolate Gaza because of the ideological rhetoric of its leadership as the Israelis are. His line is that a two-state solution can only be achieved if "Palestinian unity" is delivered first. He would not, of course, approve of the sort of Palestinian unity that would be delivered were the Palestinians on the West Bank to vote Hamas as well. Like Israel, he has a certain type of Palestinian unity in mind. Yet in this respect he is making the same insane demand on Hamas as Hamas makes on Israel. He wishes for Hamas-led Gaza to dissolve itself in order that his problem can be solved.

Blair, to his credit, understands at least that the present military action and the long-standing blockade are linked, even if he is wary of making any links that portray Israel as aggressive. Yet he actually signs up to that aggression because he is interested only in challenging the blockade in ways that will damage Hamas. He believes that a peace process cannot be pursued unless Gaza becomes more like the West Bank. Yet one easy way of doing this would be to accord the same rights of governance to Hamas as are accorded to the Palestinian Authority, as long as a ceasefire is respected.

The blockade, therefore, has to be dismantled, except with regard to the import of weapons. Under a ceasefire, there is simply no moral justification for the continued siege against Gaza, the cutting of its water supplies, its electricity, its medical aid, its fuel and its food. Yet Israel continued to do this during the six-month ceasefire that Hamas delivered, because it wishes to disrupt the ability of Hamas to govern the Palestinians who voted for it, not just the ability of Hamas to fire its "symbolic" rockets.

It is unreasonable to attack Gaza because it does not respect a cease-fire that brings it no benefit, but only further pain. It is unreasonable to undermine the democratic choices its people have made, because we do not approve of them. It is unreasonable to sabotage Hamas in its social work as a region's selected administrator, because we fear this may also burnish its popularity as an anti-Zionist group. Yes, the rockets must stop. But so must the siege.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

Israel 'kills aid worker during humanitarian window'

Israeli troops have broken their own three-hour ceasefire by firing on an aid convoy in the Gaza Strip, it has been claimed.

According to the United Nations one Palestinian aid worker has been killed and several wounded in the attack.

All of the workers involved in the incident at the Erez crossing were civilian contractors, the head of the UN relief agency in Gaza told al-Jazeera.

"They were coordinating their movements with the Israelis, as they always do, only to find themselves being fired at from the ground troops," John Ging said.

"It has resulted tragically in the death of one and the injury of two others."

Yesterday Israel announced it would cease military operations daily for three hours starting 13:00 local time (11:00 GMT) to allow aid to be distributed to civilians in Gaza.

ViewLondon

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TimesonLine

UN halts Gaza aid after two staff die and Red Cross claims Israel ignores wounded

Israel 'astounded' as Vatican labels Gaza 'one big concentration camp'

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DailyMail