Israeli terror

The scene that has emerged from Israel's air attacks on Gaza makes it impossible today to concern oneself with any other subject. The agencies have recorded that the attacks began at the hour when students were leaving school. Thus a significant portion of the nearly 300 dead were women and children.

Israel cites as a pretext for its air attacks the rocket fire Hamas began immediately after the six-month ceasefire agreement with Hamas ended. Although Hamas's attacks hit Israel, they can only very rarely be effective, because those who fire the rockets have no high technology; the rockets, launched with the intention of hitting wherever they may, in fact cause no serious damage in Israel, and perhaps, thanks to the Israeli government's propaganda apparatus, merely unsettle the civilian population considerably. That is all. Yet Israel's response to this harassing fire goes far beyond what the word "disproportionate" can express. It behaves like a terminator looking for a pretext to set in motion a war machine blinded by a perverse lust for killing. In all the targets hit in the attacks of the last few days, the vast majority of those who died are civilians.

According to one claim, by punishing the people Israel is trying to make them think that these deaths, these sufferings that befall them, are because of Hamas. In this way it is trying to drive a wedge between Hamas and the people of Gaza. Yet all the attacks it carries out are drawing not only Gaza but gradually the whole of Palestine further into Hamas's sphere of influence.

Israel is trying to give the world the image of a country that, though it has done all it can to make peace with the Palestinian people, has never received the response it wanted, whose efforts are constantly brushed aside by the "ungrateful Palestinians", which is constantly attacked and has no recourse but to defend itself against these attacks.

Yet even during the period in which the ceasefire was in force, at close range, it never refrained from displaying its most provocative behavior toward the Palestinians. During the six-month ceasefire the intense blockade and embargo imposed on Gaza turned the world, in the literal sense of the word, into a dungeon for the Palestinian people living there. Israel did not refrain from using even the appearance that observing the ceasefire gave it as an opportunity to go on quietly establishing and consolidating settlements.

Establishing these settlements is in itself a big enough affliction. The arrival of people gathered from all over the world and unrelated to this region narrows the Palestinians' space every day, first of all. Moreover, securing their comfort and security means that, with each passing day, still more of the Palestinians' security, freedom and their already nonexistent comfort is lost. Each settler who arrives goes on squeezing the Palestinians' living space a little more, like a vise.

As the way to ensure the security of the new settlers, Israel finds no other way than to confine the Palestinians more. The most normal way imaginable of securing the newly settled areas would be to build a security wall around them, but instead of this normal way, the way followed is to build a wall around the Palestinians who have lived near these areas for centuries, confining them and bringing all their movements under control. The Palestinians' living spaces thus turn by themselves into a "concentration camp". In these concentration camps the Palestinians' smallest movements are in fact watched with advanced technologies, with a perfect panopticon skill. The savage embargo conditions maintained for months simultaneously with the ceasefire already keep filling the Palestinians with a desire either to end the ceasefire or for a reckoning after it.

Israel has no intention of establishing, in the near or distant future, an order with the Palestinians in peace that aims at ensuring the security of both sides and the most basic human rights. All the plans it makes are built solely on the future of the Jewish people. The only role written for the Palestinians within this state is nothing other than that they somehow leave and go away from these regions.

In particular, the settlements being established around Jerusalem are advancing rapidly toward completely severing the geographical link between Jerusalem and the Arab-Muslim world. Security reasons are entirely a pretext; it is very clear that Israel is doing this to appropriate Jerusalem for itself alone and to make the Gaza region, too, thoroughly unbearable and a place to be abandoned for the Palestinians.

No other remedy can be thought of for the peace of the new settlements. It explains this rationale to the whole world in this language. It is able to get the world to accept every inhuman attack for the sake of its own security. But behind this lie of "self-defense" it goes on carrying out the plan of seizing its real, great goal with the help of all the war apparatus at its disposal.

Israel is trying to intimidate even the last resisters, who have no weapons left other than the stones in their hands, a few rockets and their lives that have still not left them in spite of everything.

Yet they resist there not only to defend themselves, but to awaken and save Israel itself from the great heedlessness into which it has fallen, from its obsession with being chosen, its obsession with privilege.