Slow bleed: “Israel” has made death a way of life in Gaza

Source: Daily Star, 10-11-2006
The slaughter in Gaza has lessons for all concerned in the Middle East, but some are more obvious than others. The danger is that some or all of the players in the region, both indigenous and not, will fail to accurately interpret what is happening and so run the risk of continuing to fuel a cycle of perpetual instability.
The Lebanese, for instance, would do well to carefully observe and fully absorb both the causes and the consequences of the internal divisions that have destabilized the Occupied Territories for years, but especially since Hamas won January`s legislative elections. The source of Hamas` dispute with the traditional ruling party, Fatah, centers on whether and how to deal with "Israel". The result of the ensuing feud has been to open the way for the Jewish (Zionist) state to attempt the imposition of nonsensical "solutions" that rely totally on its superior military power - and so serve only to prolong the acrimony between two peoples.
The Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo next week to discuss the recent killing of 18 Palestinian civilians in a single artillery barrage need to understand that their purpose will not be well served by limiting their purview to a single event, or even to the week-long offensive that preceded it: The "Israeli" military has been bleeding Gaza for six years, long before and ever since the laughable "withdrawal" of August 2005. The massacres have come at a slower pace than those in Lebanon this past summer, but the victims have been just as brutally killed and have been even more numerous. The ministers need to be fully cognizant of this monstrous crime if they are to take what should be their next step: an attempt to communicate the scale of the problem to both the White House and the newly elected US Congress.
Washington, too, has much to gain - or at least considerable losses to avoid - by drawing the appropriate conclusions from the bloodletting in Gaza. More than 100,000 US troops are currently mired in the Iraq mess, and every act of injustice committed by "Israel" with America`s blessing exposes those men and women to the fury of Iraqis and other Arabs who have resolved to stop turning the other cheek.
The Middle East will not know stability unless and until "Israel" finds something other than the profligate and indiscriminate use of force to function as its foreign policy. But that can only be made to happen by a US government that finally understands how misguided has been its traditional practice of unconditional support for the Jewish state. That realization will not take place of its own accord: It is therefore up the Arabs to get much better at articulating what should be an easy argument to make.