Palestine's Unfolding Horror

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4238
Date Written:  2014-09-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2014
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX20809

Weissman interviews Dr. Hisham Ahmed regarding the Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2014, its underlying causes, and possible impact on the political prospects for the future of Hamas and Israel.

Abstract: 
-

Excerpt:

I think what the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and his foreign minister Lieberman -- who are the most extreme -- calculated that this is an opportune moment regionally and internationally to lash out at Palestinians. Gaza has been under siege for over eight years now. There is a government in Egypt, headed by Sisi, which is anti-Palestinian, which has tightened the noose around the neck of the Palestinian people by closing the only outlet out of Gaza, the Rafah checkpoint. So Netanyahu thought that this would be a good moment indeed to "teach the Palestinians a lesson."

Netanyahu has nothing to offer; to get out of the embarrassment of the failed negotiations that Kerry has led for the past several months, I believe, Netanyahu wanted to set up a whole new set of events, mainly by launching attacks at Palestinians.

The conventional wisdom has always been that Israeli warplanes would fly over Gaza, drop bombs, kill people for a couple of weeks, and then they would stop, while maintaining the siege and the blockade around Gaza.

This time, Netanyahu was right in the sense that regionally, this was a good moment for him to attack, but he was completely wrong in the sense that if you push any people into the corner, as is the case in the Gaza Strip, they're bound to try to defend themselves. And therefore there are some casualties now amongst Israelis.