Why Israel will never Truly let go of Gaza. -Tanya Rienhart

[Tom Joad]

http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0046197.html

Whatever the fate of the captive soldier Gilad Shalit, the Israeli army’s war in Gaza is not about him.

As senior security analyst Alex Fishman reported, the army was preparing for an attack months earlier and was constantly pushing for it, with the goal of destroying the Hamas infrastructure and its Government. The army initiated an escalation on June 8 when it assassinated Abu Samhadana, a senior appointee of the Hamas Government, and intensified its shelling of civilians in the Gaza Strip.

Governmental authorisation for action on a larger scalae was already given by June 12, but it was postponed in the wake of the global reverberation caused by the killing of civilians in the air force bombing the next day. The abduction of the soldier released the safety-catch and the operation began on June 28, with the destruction of the infrastructure in Gaza and the mass detention of the Hamas leadership in the West Bank, which was also planned weeks in advance.

In Israeli discourse, Israel ended the occupation in Gaza when it evacuated its settlers from the Strip and the Palestinians’ behaviour therefore constitutes ingratitude. But there is nothing further from reality than this description. In fact, as was already stipulated in the Disengagement Plan, Gaza remained under complete Israeli military control, operating from outside. Israel prevented any possibility of economic independence for the Strip and from the very beginning, Israel did not implement a single one of the clauses of the agreement on border-crossings of November 2005. Israel simply substituted the expensive occupation of Gaza with a cheap occupation, one which in Israel’s view exempts it from the occupier’s responsibility to maintain the Strip, and from concern for the welfare and the lives of its 1.5 million residents, as determined in the fourth Geneva convention. Israel does not need this piece of land, one of the most densely populated in the world, and lacking any natural resources.
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Another bit of fantasy propaganda by the Israeli policy apologists is that Israel was planning to "end the occupation of the West Bank". Ignoring that not only was Israel planning to keep most of its settlements in the West Bank, abandoning only a few... hundreds of thousands of residents would remain in Jewish-only settlements would remain under Olmerts plan, (in fact, in essence, annexed to Israel), and yet at the same time, the fantasy is, Israel can somehow claim that the occupation has ended.

"Ending the occupation is the one thing that Israel is not willing to consider, the option promoted by the army is breaking the Palestinians by devastating brutal force."

Time for Israel to reconsider. Or time for the world to act.