Whatever may be the fate of the captive soldier Gilad
Shalit, the Israeli armyís war in Gaza is not about
him. As senior security analyst Alex Fishman widely
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 8 June
when it assassinated Abu Samhadana, a senior appointee
of the Hamas government, and intensified its shelling
of civilians in the Gaza Strip. Governmental
authorization for action on a larger scale was already
given by 12 June, but it was postponed in the wake of
the global reverberation caused by the killing of
civilians in the air force b! ombing the next day. The
abduction of the soldier released the safety-catch,
and the operation began on 28 June with the
destruction of infrastructure in Gaza and the mass
detention of the Hamas leadership in the West Bank,
which was also planned weeks in advance. (1)
In Israeli discourse, Israel ended the occupation in
Gaza when it evacuated its settlers from the Strip,
and the Palestiniansí behavior 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 Israelís view exempts it from! the occupierís
responsibility to maintain the Strip, and from concern
for the welfare and the lives of its million and a
half 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. The problem is that one cannot let
Gaza free, if one wants to keep the West Bank. A third
of the occupied Palestinians live in the Gaza strip.
If they are given freedom, they would become the
center of Palestinian struggle for liberation, with
free access to the Western and Arab world. To control
the West Bank, Israel needs full control Gaza. The new
form of control Israel has developed is turning the
whole of the Strip into a prison camp completely
sealed from the world.
http://www.counterpunch.org/reinhart07142006.html
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