Bitter paralysis

I commend this excellent article from Jonathon Cook. Cook is probably the best western journalist in the region at the moment. He dwells on the nature of the Israeli 'peace camp' and examines their policies and aspirations with incisiveness and honesty. He argues that people like Uri Avnery relied on having someone such as Arafat to pull the Palestinian side together. Someone they could do business with. With the Palestinians disunited and in factions, the vision of these 'peaceniks' is under threat.

One aspect of the factionalism on the Palestinian side that Cook does not go into detail about, is the deliberate intervention in Palestinian affairs by Israeli agents in order to keep them disunited and to stoke disputes. Of course the fault is not entirely due to Israeli agents but it has been encouraged and exploited. Using blackmail they produce informers. These informers serve a dual purpose. They inform the Israelis about the whereabouts of people on the hitlist for murder. Secondly, they are made to carry out acts designed to stoke fighting between Fatah, Hamas and other parties. The rivalries were preexisting and well-known but were largely kept under control by the leaders of the parties. With Gaza in the paralysed brutalised state it is, it does not take much for tensions to boil over trigger feuds. It says much for the endurance and courage of the people that they can still come together to help one of their own from being blown to bits by an Israeli missile as they did today in Gaza. The Israeli state though it is powerful and brutal, is also paralysed for a different reason. They desperately want to carry out the last genocide, to wipe the slate clean and erase any remnants of Palestine from history. Yet with the world watching wearily and warily, it cannot bring itself to do the final wholesale massacre to kill or drive out the Palestinians once and for all. Some Palestinians in despair wish the end would come soon, longing for an end to the bitter lingering enduring tortured rape of their society.

If they were evicted, where would they go? Not Eygpt, not Jordan, not Syria and probably not bomb strewn devastated Lebanon. Perhaps the rich ones could emigrate but the majority are trapped. Nowhere to go, no-one to turn to but each other and god. It is not the militants who are fighting the zionist enemy, but the whole Palestinian people. The media can pretend there is a difference( usually in order to help Israel justify its murder), but there is not. Man, woman and child knows, this is about survival. To the zionists, all Muslims are enemies direct or indirect. They are people who stand between them and a racially pure Jewish state. They are people who claim the holy places as their own. Palestinian Christians also fall into this category. But this is one group of Christians that Bush and Blair do not speak out for.