Topic: world
As if to echo our story yesterday on the real nature of Israeli society with 30% fanatical expansionists and apologist for assassination of PM Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the broadsheet News Corporation press runs splitting stories about the Arabic people.
The Daily Telegraph has another subliminal effort with an example of harsh treatment of Australian Arabs in Kuwait airport on page 3.
The more serious broadsheet The Australian carries various more directly relevant stories about:
Exiled militant leader Khaled Meshaal aloof from Gaza Strip's ... 13 Jan 2009
Hamas leadership at odds over Gaza truce | The Australian 13 Jan 2009
They even run a splitting story about outgoing VP Cheney on torture advice to new Obama Presidency:
Dick Cheney warns of security risk if Barack Obama bans waterboarding... 13 Jan 2009
But what really matters in the Gaza "endgame" has been 3 major developments in geopolitics
1. Obama has said he will launch an organised expert policy team on the Palestinian massacre by Israel (our words) on day one 20th January 09 which doesn't sound like a blank cheque to Israel from here;
2. Following on from 1, serious talks with Iran as sponsors of Hamas: Barack Obama signals that door is open to talks with Iran | The ... 13 Jan 2009
3. Livni as Israeli candidate in the Feb elections and Foreign Minister announcing justifications for annexing the border between Eqypt and Gaza and (as we understand it) foreshadowing possibly thousands of homes destroyed in a 1 mile plus wide tunnel exclusion zone over some 9 km in the Philadelphi area.
This always complex and fraught regional political power struggle suggests some things to this writer:
A. Israel is running out of time to pursue unaccountable blockade and seige of Gaza and is loading up its bargaining chips for the poker game with Obama's negotiating team on day one 20th January;
B. The Friends of Israel and Livni as minister proper are running out of propaganda excuses for the expansionist aggression based on traditional reliance on western Holocaust guilt, or rose tinted moral superiority of their domestic population (given the real phenomenon of Yigal Amir, Rabin's assassin and his 30% approval rating there).
C. The real forces driving the massacre of innocent civillians by the IDF, given the 4 months of real truce with no Hamas rockets July to October 2008, is
(i) the very real fear and loathing within Israel over capacity for greater weaponry to be smuggled from Iran into Gaza seeking revenge for the displacement of 4.5 million Palestinian refugees, grown from some 700,000 since 1948, 1967 Arab wars with Israel;
(ii) electoral politics up to Feb 09 vote in Israel pandering to the 30% supporters of a Greater Israel annexing Gaza and the West Bank for 'The Chosen', based on a massive religious conceit. The truth is many Peoples have suffered great suffering not just the Jews and in comparable numbers. The 30 year Occupation and at times crippling blockade is an essential but insufficient condition for such ambitious annexation.
Of course Hamas could capitulate to Israel's demands under severe military pressure and 5000 civillian deaths and injuries, that is for renewed Occupation like the captured Fatah Govt in the West Bank. This would mean suffering all the indignities and corrosions of sovereignty that an effective occupation/blockade by Israel involves there - given suspension of civilised legal system with objective Constitution - via powermongering by the IDF and land grabs by illegal squatter towns, medical and food shortages causing premature deaths. But then that would just be in the eyes of Hamas a return to the slow suicide of the previous 30 year Israeli Occupation. And they were elected to break free of that Israeli oppression by the 1.5 million Gazan population, if they can.
We presume Israel will seek to finish it's military campaign by 20 January but that anything could happen before then though nothing good for the innocent civillians of Gaza.
