ISRAEL last night threatened to assassinate Palestinian Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh if Hamas militants did not release a captured Israeli soldier unharmed.
The unprecedented warning was delivered to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a letter as Israel debated a deal offered by Hamas to free Corporal Gilad Shalit.
It came as Israeli military officials readied a second invasion force for a huge offensive into Gaza.
Hamas’s Gaza-based political leaders, including Mr Haniyeh, had already gone into hiding.
But last night’s direct threat to kill Mr Haniyeh, a democratically elected head of state, sharply raised the stakes.
theaustralian.news.com.au
Haaretz: The government is losing its reason
Bombing bridges that can be circumvented both by car and on foot; seizing an airport that has been in ruins for years; destroying a power station, plunging large parts of the Gaza Strip into darkness; distributing flyers suggesting that people be concerned about their fate; a menacing flight over Bashar Assad’s palace; and arresting elected Hamas officials: The government wishes to convince us that all these actions are intended only to release the soldier Gilad Shalit.
But the greater the government’s creativity in inventing tactics, the more it seems to reflect a loss of direction rather than an overall conception based on reason and common sense. On the face of it, Israel wishes to exert increasing pressure both on Hamas’ political leadership and on the Palestinian public, in order to induce it to pressure its leadership to release the soldier. At the same time, the government claims that Syria – or at least Khaled Meshal, who is living in Syria – holds the key. If so, what is the point of pressuring the local Palestinian leadership, which did not know of the planned attack and which, when it found out, demanded that the kidnappers take good care of their victim and return him?
…As the prime minister said in a closed meeting: “They want prisoners released? We’ll release these detainees in exchange for Shalit.” By “these detainees,” he was referring to elected Hamas officials.
Irish MP: Israel an “abhorrent and despicable” regime
…He said, “Israel is without doubt one of the most abhorrent and despicable regimes on the planet. According to the UN Secretary General for Political Affairs, in the month prior to the capture of the Israeli soldier by Palestinians at least 49 Palestinians, including 11 children, were killed by Israeli forces and 259 injured. A ground assault on Gaza began yesterday involving tanks, bulldozers, thousands of troops undercover of air fire and the demolition of key pieces of civilian infrastructure including bridges and Gaza’s electric power plant. The bombardment of civilian infrastructure amounts to collective punishment and a crime against humanity and the abduction and imprisonment by Israel of some 25 democratically elected Palestinian representatives demonstrates the true nature of Israel’s commitment to not so democratic principles.
Offensive pushes Hamas government near collapse
JERUSALEM, June 29 (Reuters) – With most ministers either in hiding or the hands of Israeli forces on Thursday, the Hamas-led Palestinian government functioned in little more than name.
The Israeli offensive aimed at bringing home a captured soldier threatens to finish off the Islamist militant group’s attempt at elected government, already straining under international sanctions and a domestic tussle for power.
But rather than reviving near-dead hopes for peacemaking, any collapse of the Hamas administration could create a vacuum that moderate President Mahmoud Abbas would struggle to fill and leave few prospects except further violence.
“The government’s capability is almost nil, but it is still the legitimate government,” said Palestinian political analyst Ali Jarbawi. “Abbas is also in a very precarious position.”
On the one hand, Israel is merely carrying out its plan to destroy the Hamas regime, using a kidnapped soldier as a pretext. The Haaretz editorial bemoans the death of reason. But Israel has been operating well outside reason for a long time now.
A teacher of mine in the 1970’s said Israel’s unreason could be explained by ‘the battered child syndrome.’ The abused child grows up to be an abuser. And like guilty parents, the West, covers up for the criminal behavior of this beleaguered child, toothlessly begging for ‘restraint.’ I remember reading a book about the Jewish resistance during their holocaust, and their systematic assassinations of former Nazis in Europe after the war. The author said something to the effect that the Jews had come to understand, through their history in Europe, that no one would at the end of the day stand for them but themselves.
UN resolutions and global condemnation have never fazed Israel. It is not interested in being part of a ‘global community’. It is the wounded ‘ousider’: paranoid, reckless, and lethal, ever seeking self-protection regardless of the cost to anybody else. The power of the ‘Israeli lobby’ with its relentless propaganda machine speaks to Israel’s success in leveraging the guilt of the West into a protective shield that ensures impunity, whatever the crime.
Pounding 1.4 million people in Gaza, kidnapping a government, threatening its prime minister, all in the name of a 19-year-old soldier…a single soldier. On the face of it, it’s insane. Israel’s insanity benefits those whose interests lie in fracturing the Middle East, and is all of a piece with the deconstruction of Iraq and the impending attack on Iran. Israel is ‘our’ battered child, and its pathology has always been used as a hammer to pound the Middle East into submission, furthering Western interests.
Of course the irony of the battered child’s desperate attempts to achieve security only guarantee the opposite. The Palestinians will never stop fighting, and neither will anyone who hungers for justice. The only state which will emerge will be a single state. Either that, or nation states will become obsolete, and finally the madness will cease.
