Israel is once again trying to teach the Palestinians, especially Hamas, the Islamist group in control of the Gaza Strip, a lesson that it has repeatedly failed to do despite its overpowering military arsenal.
One would think that the Israeli establishment, now in a state of disarray thanks to the discredited leadership of the outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, would realise that a new approach is needed if it wants to live side by side in peace with the Palestinians.
It's increasing chokehold on Gaza and its coastal strip on the Eastern Mediterranean, where some 1,500,000 Palestinian refugees live, will ultimately backfire.
The five-month ceasefire between and Israel and its Islamist neighbours was, by all accounts, shattered by Israel's foolish military action when it blew up one of the many tunnels that link the Gaza Strip with Egypt because it suspected that arms were being smuggled to the Palestinian territory.
In fact, these tunnels mostly serve the Palestinian people in this small and impoverished territory in providing much-needed food and medical supplies, and now that all the border crossings from Israel have been shut down after Palestinian militants, not members of Hamas, have retaliated against the recent Israeli invasion.
The Israeli retaliation is now fodder for the Israeli politicians who are in the midst of an election campaign that will pick a successor for the Olmert regime. Haaretz, the leading Israeli paper, warned that those seeking to occupy Gaza, as has been demanded by several Israeli politicians, "should be reminded that Israel agreed to the truce because it recognised that the price of a large military operation in Gaza would be intolerably high."
It added that "such a war would lead to a direct, prolonged and complicated [re-]occupation of Gaza and made [Israeli] soldiers easy targets, without ensuring the cessation of [Palestinian] rocket fire."
Anapolis failure
Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip has prompted an outcry by many European nations but, shockingly, not the Bush administration, probably because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has just returned from her 19th visit to the region empty-handed. In other words, the year-old Annapolis pledge to achieve a mere "outline" for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, as advocated by the Bush administration, was an embarrassing failure.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon led several other key UN officials in condemning the Israeli-precipitated humanitarian crisis. He was said to be "concerned that food and other life-saving assistance is being denied to hundreds of thousands of people," and emphasised that "[Israeli] measures which increase the hardship and suffering of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip as a whole are unacceptable and should cease immediately."
The top UN human rights official, Navi Pillay, described the Israeli action as a "direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law [and] it must end now." The former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, said in a radio interview, "It's almost unbelievable that the world doesn't care while this is happening." She stressed that "their whole civilisation has been destroyed, I'm not exaggerating."
Robinson promised: "When I see 1.4 million trapped in a situation of collective punishment, without rights, I have to raise that and I will go on raising it."
Some European politicians took a more daring step, sailing earlier this month to Gaza from nearby Cyprus. Among them were members of parliament from Britain, Ireland, Switzerland and Italy who were not allowed earlier to cross from Egypt into Gaza. This was the third time that the US-based Free Gaza Movement had arranged such a trip despite the blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza territory, and more are planned in the next few weeks. All were successful in delivering much-needed medical supplies and equipment.
British parliamentarian Clare Short, a former minister of international development, said the trip aboard a boat called "Dignity" was necessary because "the international community has not done its job in upholding international law."
In an obvious bid to tone down the international condemnation the wily Israeli prime minister announced this week that he was planning to release some 250 Palestinian prisoners, all supporters of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and not his rival, Hamas. But Abbas was not appeased and went on to describe the Israeli blockade as a "war crime".
All this pain has not moved the Bush administration to issue a straightforward criticism of the Israeli action or a plea to lift the blockade. True, the attention of Americans is now focused on their unbelievably poor economic situation, the feeding of some 750,000 persons, half of the population of the Gaza Strip, merits some humanitarian attention.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist.
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