ANALYSIS – For the last seventy years, one nation has been allowed to act without answering to any international law or norms. If anyone else had perpetrated the massacres committed by the government of Israel against the people of historic Palestine, there is no doubt that the world would have acted swiftly to end the bloodshed. But this is Israel which is regarded as a special case by the USA who uses its power as one of the five permanent members of the security council to give carte blanche to its vital ally in the region. Before its assaults on Gaza which have followed a siege punishing its people for daring to vote for Hamas, Israel had tricked the weak Palestinian Authority into working with it before seizing land during a vicious war in 2002. By then of course a wall had been constructed by that ghastly man called Ariel Sharon to protect the people of Israel from terrorists using suicide bombers to attack main land Israel. This was of course the same Sharon who along with Menachem Begin launched a war into Lebanon to destroy the PLO and oversaw the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The war in Lebanon resulted in the creation of Hezbollah and later Hamas who are now the latest terrorists that the Israeli state is dealing with as it pounds Gaza without imputiny. Terrorism is of course awful. It was awful in the 30s and 40s too when the Stern gang, Irgun and a wanted terrorist called Menachem Begin plied their deadly trade against the defenseless Palestinians. Today, Israel is attempting to disarm Hamas in the same way that it did the PLO – but it won’t succeed no matter how many people it kills. Trouble is that unless the world acts to rein in this pariah state it is going to continue to on it murderous rampage against the people of historic Palestine and that throws into the doubt the validity of the UN and the rule of law its charter is designed to uphold.
ANALYSIS – What the Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, what the Soviet Union learned in Afghanistan, what Israel should have learned in its war with Hezbollah it is now learning in this its latest war against the Palestinians of Gaza – that you can not conquer a people that don’t want to be conquered. Since its creation in 1948, the Israeli state was assured of one thing – that the people they had driven out of historic Palestine would never be able to fight back, after all how could an ant crush a tank? Technological superiority failed the Germans in the second world war, it did so the Americans in its many battles with the third world, as well as the Soviet Union. Those Goliaths inflicted horrendous damage on the enemy killing millions of people – but eventually they left the lands they tried to bend to their will. Israel’s mighty army is finding that what ever it throws from its deep armour, the enemy is still able to fight back. The doctrine of the harder you hit them the less likely they are to come back, may have succeeded in Chechnya for Putin’s Russia, but that success remains a temporary one and will not help the Israelis in Gaza. The Palestinians are more united than before, and whats more Hamas’ actions have scored some spectacular successes especially when the fighting is man on man before retreating into tunnels, as well as downing a F16 plane and forcing the cancellation of flights to Tel Aviv from an outside world still reeling from the downing of flight MH17 over the skies of war torn Ukraine. What this all means is that Tel Aviv will be unable to achieve its stated aim – to crush Hamas, which like Hezbollah did in the Lebanon war of 2006, is able to meet a vastly superior hitech army with low tech asymmetric resistance. Israel will feel less secure after this war – for it knows that the Palestinians are no longer the defenseless people it could once push around. And will find as the French did in Algeria, that the court of world opinion will never forget the biblical scenes it is witnessing in this war against the Palestinians of Gaza.
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