What Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza can and should be called a war crime, genocide, and to borrow from the lexicon of one Israeli official, a holocaust. Israel has declared open season on Palestinian infants and children, against those who can do nothing in return.
Not only have more Palestinians been murdered in the past five days than at any other time in the past eight years, but tough voices from Israel say that the slaughter will continue, that Israel has still not hit Hamas hard enough and that a full-scale invasion of Gaza is coming up.
The root of the Gaza problem is not, as Israel and the US like to claim, Hamas. It is that hundreds of thousands of human beings are rotting there in refugee camps — camps that are incubators of poverty and despair, ignorance, and hatred and violence spawned by Israel.
It would be suicidal for Israel to invade Gaza. Israel and its friends may not mind the huge number of casualties in a ground offensive but can the Jewish state ensure that reoccupying the Gaza Strip would put an end to the rocket fire on Sderot, Ashkelon and their environs? When Israel controlled the entire Gaza Strip, hundreds of rockets were fired on its southern towns anyway.
From a historical point of view, there can be no solution to the problem of Gaza as long as there is not at least a modicum of hope for these desperate people somewhere on the horizon. Thus, in parallel to the fighting, there has been a diplomatic effort between Egypt and Israel, aided by the European Union and the United States, to negotiate a package deal between Israel and Hamas. The idea would be to reopen the Gaza-Egyptian border at Rafah under renewed European monitoring, allow Gazan exports through Rafah, push the Egyptians to patrol the border better, release the captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit and arrange a cease-fire in Gaza, with Hamas promising to stop rockets in return for a halt in Israeli military action. While this ambitious plan hardly looks like taking off at present, it is assisted by the results of a recent opinion poll indicating a majority of Israelis favor a truce with Hamas which will cease fire if Israel stops its military operations in Palestinian areas and ends the blockade of the territory which has cut essential supplies to its 1.5 million inhabitants. Unfortunately, the situation is getting worse, with Gaza essentially still closed to normal commerce, with severe shortages of oil, gasoline, medicine and chlorine for drinking water.
For now Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may not be keen on ordering a major ground operation in Gaza, in part because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to visit Israel, to nudge Palestinians and Israel closer to an accord that should, according to Annapolis and President Bush, be reached before the end of the year.
The timing of Rice’s visit to the region could not have been worse if she sought to talk peace. But her presence could help prevent more Israeli attacks, and hopefully lead to a stoppage of this free flowing Palestinian hemorrhage of blood.
