Gaza City bombed during Israel attack

Blair: Gaza's great betrayer

Posted by Jon King on Feb 05, 2010

Tagged with: gaza, gaza strip, goldstone report, hamas, israel, map, medical aid for palestine, middle east, middle east peace envoy, new world politics, operation cast lead, qassam rockets, tony blair, unrwa

Historian Avi Shlaim asks: What has Middle East Peace Envoy Tony Blair done to further peace in the Middle East…?

Blair: Gaza’s Great Betrayer

By Avi Shlaim for MAP

It’s more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region?

Virtually nothing, argues the historian Avi Shlaim

The savage attack Israel unleashed against Gaza on 27 December 2008 was both immoral and unjustified. Immoral in the use of force against civilians for political purposes. Unjustified because Israel had a political alternative to the use of force.

The home-made Qassam rockets fired by Hamas militants from Gaza on Israeli towns were only the excuse, not the reason for Operation Cast Lead.

In June 2008, Egypt had brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. Contrary to Israeli propaganda, this was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three.

Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters. When Hamas retaliated, Israel seized the renewed rocket attacks as the excuse for launching its insane offensive.

If all Israel wanted was to protect its citizens from Qassam rockets, it only needed to observe the ceasefire.

While the war failed in its primary aim of regime change in Gaza, it left behind a trail of death, devastation, destruction and indescribable human suffering.

Israel lost 13 people, three in so-called friendly fire. The Palestinian death toll was 1,387, including 773 civilians (115 women and 300 children), and more than 5,300 people were injured. The entire population of 1.5 million was left traumatised. Across the Gaza Strip, 3,530 homes were completely destroyed, 2,850 severely damaged and 11,000 suffered structural damage.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, tending to the needs of four million Palestinian refugees, stated that Gaza had been “bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age”; its inhabitants reduced to building homes from mud after the fierce 22-day offensive.

War crimes were committed and possibly even crimes against humanity, documented in horrific detail in Judge Richard Goldstone’s report for the UN human rights council. The report condemned both Israel and Hamas, but reserved its strongest criticism for Israel, accusing it of deliberately targeting and terrorising civilians in Gaza.

The British government did not take part in the vote on the report, sending a signal to the hawks in Israel that they can continue to disregard the laws of war. Gordon Brown’s 2007 appointment as a patron of the Jewish National Fund UK presumably played a part in the adoption of this pusillanimous position.

One year on, the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas on earth, continues to teeter on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, in force since June 2007, restricts the flow not only of arms but also food, fuel and medical supplies to well below the minimum necessary for normal, everyday life.

Reconstruction work has hardly begun because of the Israeli ban on bringing in cement and other building materials to Gaza.

Thousands of families still live in the ruins of their former homes.

Hospitals, health facilities, schools, government buildings and mosques cannot be rebuilt. Nor can the basic infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City’s sewage disposal plant.

Today, 80% of Gaza’s population remain dependent on food aid, 43% are unemployed, and 70% live on less than $1 a day…

Read Full Article HERE…

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