Gaza: voices from the ground
If you want to know what bloggers in Gaza and Israel are saying about current Israeli military operations there, rather than just reading what people thousands of miles away think about them, click here for the Global Voices website.
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Robin,
Following the link I did not see anything that I had not seen already. Israelis blaming Palestinians, Palestinians blaming Israelis. The same old story. However, not a single comment from a blogger, criticizing their own side. Until the people on both sides realize that what they are doing is also wrong, there will be no peace in the Middle East.
Recently I read a thread on the BBC web-site- it dealt with the question whether the rest of the world should help Africa. I was surprised to see how many people actually commented that they were fed up of hearing about Africa. The predominant feeling was that Africa's problems are Africa's doing. I must say I am starting to feel the same way about the Middle East. It seems that whatever plans there are for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, there will be somebody to throw a spanner in the works by sendig bombs across the border.
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Robin,
I fully agree with Isenhorn's assessment of the situation.
For far too long Britain and its people, media and politicians have wrung their hands at the violence, truces, wars and fragile peace of many parts of the world including the Middle East, Africa and other far-flung corners of the world but, in all honesty and brutal frankness, the religious, ethnic and tribal conflicts that dog the the Middle East and Africa, in particular ,are conflicts that will only ever cease once those nations, tribes and peoples grow up and realise that violence simply begets more violence.
It took centuries of war, conflict and pestilence for the Europeans to reach the kind of amicability of today and, even now, I believe it would not take very much for the nation states to fall into conflict - if there was not the political willpower to maintain collective peace and prosperity.
The Israelis and Palestinians have simply got to grow up and be part of the world and not simply part of the Middle East. Once they do that then they might just figure out the way to live side-by-side in relative peace and, hopefully, prosperity.
In the meantime the rest of the world may wring its hands in horror but must avoid taking sides and/or declaring one side to be any better or worse behaved than the other.
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Yoram Dinstein who says that the deliberate targeting of civilians and the indiscriminate bombing by Israel are equally forbidden;
Norman Finkelstein an expert on the historical record of the Palestine Israel conflict;
Ali Abunimah:..."[We have to look at the] Warsaw Ghetto or Guernica to find crimes in the modern era of the scale of the viciousness and of the deliberateness of what Israel is committing with the full support of the United States[.]"
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/29/israeli_attacks_kill_over_310_in
Zaki Chehab - Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement chronicles how Hamas first acquired weapons Shin Bet (the Israeli secret service) to fight Fatah.
The US funded Fatah to overthrow Hamas in July 2007.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
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Hamas, the elected government of the people who call themselves Palestinians has one unifying dogma that binds their members together, an unwavering committment to destroy the state of Israel. In their own crude militarily hopeless way, they have attempted to wage a relentless war against Israel in the only ways they can, through terrorizing and killing civilians with suicide bombs, rockets, and whatever else they can find. They do this with reckless disregard for the consequences to their own civilians whom they use as human shields and cynically point to when they are inadvertently wounded or killed in retaliatory attacks. To say that Fatah was substantially different seems rather inaccurate to me. Fatah's disagreement with Hamas was one of method and degree, not the final outcome, and that Fatah was corrupt. To this end, the creation of a Palestinian state would only be one more step on the road to ultimately ending the existance of Israel, the establishment of a legitimized terrorist state right on Israel's border. Under such circumstances, it is impossible to see how peace in the usual sense can ever be achieved. Fatah, Hamas, Arabs, and Moslems everywhere have repeated the lie that the Israelis have no legitimate claim to the land they live on and that it was all stolen has been told so often and so unquestioningly that they now pretty much all believe it. Who after all would make peace with someone who stole your property. This is why I think, I have yet to hear even one Palestinian say that the rockets being fired at Israel should stop. I have yet to hear even one voice on that side say that Israel has a right to have a nation on that land which is safe and secure. Talk of a return to the nearly impossible to defend borders prior to the war of 1967 is absurd especially so given that nearly half a million Israelis now live on the West Bank of the Jordan River, a fact which seems impossible to change. Equally absurd is the right of five million Palestinian refugees and their families to come live in Israel. Nor is it likely that Israel would give up control over its holiest religious site, the wailing wall in East Jerusalem especially when it was denied access to Jews when Jordan controlled it. Nor is it likely to easily give up the sparsely populated by militarily important Golan Heights which has a commanding view of much of Israel and was used by the Arabs in three of their four wars to annihilate Israel.
The plight of the Palestinians in Gaza grows increasingly precarious every day. One real disaster such as collapse of a major utility such as gas or water, an outbreak of an epidemic disease such as colera or typhoid could kill many of them and there won't be much the outside world could do about it. If Hamas actually cared what happened to the Palestinians, they would consider stopping what they are doing to avoid this possibility. However, it seems that the inhabitants are more valuable to them as martyrs than as citizens.
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