[Marxism] Israel's Lies

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Israel's Lies - London Review of Books Special
 
WRITTEN BY Henry Siegman  
clip -- 
Western governments and most of  the Western media have accepted a number of 
Israeli claims justifying the  military assault on Gaza: that Hamas 
consistently violated the six-month truce  that Israel observed and then 
refused to 
extend it; that Israel therefore had no  choice but to destroy Hamas's capacity 
to 
launch missiles into Israeli towns;  that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, 
part of a global jihadi network; and  that Israel has acted not only in its 
own defence but on behalf of an  international struggle by Western democracies 
against this network. 
I am not aware of a single major  American newspaper, radio station or TV 
channel whose coverage of the assault on  Gaza questions this version of 
events. 
Criticism of Israel's actions, if any  (and there has been none from the Bush 
administration), has focused instead on  whether the IDF's carnage is 
proportional to the threat it sought to counter,  and whether it is taking 
adequate 
measures to prevent civilian casualties. 
Middle East peacemaking has been  smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let 
me state bluntly that each of these  claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, 
violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop  firing rockets into Israel; in 
return, 
Israel was to ease its throttlehold on  Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it 
tightened it further. This was confirmed not  only by every neutral 
international observer and NGO on the scene but by  Brigadier General (Res.) 
Shmuel Zakai, 
a former commander of the IDF's Gaza  Division. In an interview in Ha'aretz 
on 22 December, he accused Israel's  government of having made a 'central 
error' during the tahdiyeh, the six-month  period of relative truce, by failing 
'to 
take advantage of the calm to improve,  rather than markedly worsen, the 
economic plight of the Palestinians of the  Strip . . . When you create a 
tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip  continues,' General Zakai 
said, 'it 
is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an  improved tahdiyeh, and that their 
way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . .  . You cannot just land blows, 
leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic  distress they're in, and 
expect that Hamas will just sit around and do  nothing.'
 
 
full article --
 
<_http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/01/24/israels-lies-london-review-of-books
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