Here's how it starts (from the BBC):
Quote:
On Wednesday, before the truce came into effect, at least 40 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza at Israel, and the Israeli army killed one Palestinian militant in an air strike.
The militant group, Islamic Jihad, which lost several members to Israeli air strikes in recent days, claimed responsibility for some of the attacks.
|
What's frustrating is the same as what was frustrating during the attempts at sabotaging the Northern Ireland peace negotiations and IRA ceasefires. We've got a state - Israel - with all the backing and support behind it that it does, and when it acts, it tends to do so with government backing. And then we've got terrorist activity from the other side, against it. Now Hamas might have the mandate of having been democratically elected, but to deny that even in a ceasfire it's far less likely to be able to exert control over ALL those disparate militant groups that continue to engage in violence seems naive to me, just as expecting Sinn Fein to have been in a position to guarantee no attacks by the Real IRA was naive. They will always get through somehow.
In those circumstances, what you would expect - and hope for - is for the democractically elected element, the official party, Hamas, to condemn those attacks being carried out against Israel. Yet when it's done this on several occasions in the past, it's been met with Israeli insistence that Hamas control all the terrorists, or else "Israel will respond".
Now this is what I think is reckless, "deliberately naive" I'm tempted to call it. And this is the point at which it becomes necessary for me to repeat the phrase, to understand is not to condone* (and I can't emphasize that strongly enough)...
Controlling those renegade elements, or whatever you want to call them (terrorists), inevitably becomes much harder (though NO LESS NECESSARY) when the inequality of the two sides becomes more apparent. Since the last ceasefire collapsed in April 2007, 14 Israelis and about 600 Palestinians have been killed in fighting between the two sides. That's not to turn it into a pissing contest, but when you combine that fairly consistent inbalance with the structural difference, the vast inequality in living conditions between everyday people of both sides, and the overwhelming sense of powerlessness, surely it's inevitable that anger from the Palestinian side is going to run so much deeper and be more widespread, likely spilling over into terrorist activity from more extreme elements, than from the Israeli side? (That's not even going into the longstanding sense of anger at Israel's perceived 'land grab' in the first place).
I repeatedly ask myself, is it really that hard to grasp that the only way to maintain negotiations and secure peace is for the official parties of those negotiations to accept that there will almost certainly continue to be terrorist activity carried out to try to stall that process, not officially sanctioned but from certain groups out of the control of the official organisations. And for the reasons mentioned above, that will mostly come from the Palestinian side - not because Palestinians are somehow genetically more pre-disposed to violence, not because they're "the baddies", the unciviilised natives - but for reasons of organisation and anger that are intrinsically different to what Israel faces. What is surely incumbent upon those at the top is to condemn such activity whenever it happens, and to only take 'defensive measures' when that is
genuinely what they are - as opposed to tit-for-tat (or rather tit-for-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat) vengeance.
It continually saddens me that official representatives of both sides so often seem to allow the peace process (and that's the key - it is a PROCESS) to slip away.
(* For the benefit of anyone who needs to hear me say it, of course rocket launches and market bombings and other indiscriminate violence are utterly deserving of condemnation, and by far the people to condemn the strongest are the terrorists.
)