Here’s a nice Spitting Image sketch, from the 1980s/early 1990s:
(h/t to Jews sans frontieres)
On this topic, worth recalling are the words of Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa’s (Jewish) Minister for Intelligence Services, who said of the Israeli occupation:
“The occupation reminds me of the darkest days of apartheid, but we never saw tanks and planes firing at a civilian population. It’s a monstrousness I’d never seen before. The wall you built, the checkpoints and the roads for Jews only – it turns the stomach, even for someone who grew up under apartheid. It’s a hundred times worse…
We know from our experience that oppression motivates resistance and that the more savage the oppression, the harsher the resistance. At a certain point in time you think that the oppression is working, and that you’re controlling the other people, imprisoning its leaders and its activists, but the resistance will triumph in the end.”
Gaza today has become less a Bantustan and more an “animal pen whose denizens cannot be domesticated and so must be quarantined.” The 1.4 million Palestinians surviving in Gaza, over half of whom are children, have been “intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution” by relentless siege and bombing, which has caused “widespread deterioration of health services, industries and private sector” with a “grave [humanitarian] impact”.
Israeli repression in Gaza and the West Bank continues – As’ad Abukhalil notes that while Olmert was meeting with Abbas yesterday to indulge in more meaningless meta-talks, three Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces – purportedly in reponse to the firing of Qassams into Israel by Palestinian militant groups. The reality is that the Qassams are primarily a reaction to Israeli incursions, an attempt to create a deterrent to Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip. In any case, Hamas has repeatedly offered Israel a ceasefire in exchange for an end to the siege. Israel has flatly rejected the idea, consistent with its frankly stated policy to overthrow the Hamas government (as outlined, for example, by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh on last week’s HARDtalk). The reason for this hostility towards Hamas is not because it is involved in terrorism against Israel: the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades have claimed responsibility for far more attacks than Hamas, which until recently had largely refrained from military action against Israel. Neither is it the result of Hamas’ political rejectionism: quite the opposite, in fact, as Henry Siegman explains:
“The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres…
Hamas had announced its willingness to submit to a popular referendum any agreement that resulted from permanent status talks between Fatah and Israel. Israel boycotted Hamas because it did not want Hamas to play any role in a peace process, fearing that this would exact a far greater price than negotiations with Fatah from which Hamas was excluded.”
In other words, Israel fears the threat of a Hamas “peace offensive” far more than it does the pathetically inept Qassams.
And in the background to it all, the construction in the settlements continues as inexorably as ever. People often point to the ongoing settlement as being somehow incongruous with the “peace process”, but in fact the two are indivisibly linked. As Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir explained of his participation in the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference,
“I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years and meanwhile we would have reached a half million people in Judea and Samaria.” (via)
Cross-posted at The Heathlander
