Hamas throws a hardball

One month ahead of Israeli general elections, Israeli political parties are vying to woo an increasingly jingoistic Jewish public to their respective camps. As may have been expected, their main tool of attracting voters is hateful anti-Palestinian rhetoric.

This week, a spate of vitriolic, racist and even bellicose statements against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, coloured the Israeli elections campaign.

The often-base litany started immediately after Hamas's electoral victory on 25 January, when Likud Chairman Benyamin Netanyahu compared the Islamic movement's triumph with Hitler's rise to power in Germany in the mid-1930s.

Netanyahu -- a master of bombastic sound bites -- didn't bother to explain how a ravaged people languishing under a sinister military occupation who have a hard time feeding their own children and a even harder time accessing their schools, hospitals and places of work, thanks to ubiquitous Israeli army roadblocks, can be compared to the nefarious Third Reich which destroyed Europe and caused the deaths of tens of millions.

Netanyahu's analogy drew no negative reactions from Israeli society. Quite to the contrary, leaders of nearly all Jewish political parties, including the Labour Party headed by the purportedly "moderate" Amir Peretz, sought to out-manoeuvre Netanyahu by prominently featuring a decidedly anti-Palestinian discourse in all their proclamations.

Take, for example, Tzivi Livni, the former Likud extremist, who now serves as Israel's foreign minister. Other Israeli parties, especially on the right and the extreme right, continue to argue over which approach should be adopted toward the "so- called Palestinians". The more pragmatic parties, such as the Likud, propose apartheid-like arrangements in the West Bank, where Palestinians are packed in Bantustans and enclaves until they become fed up with their misery and subsequently emigrate.

The more Talmudic-minded parties, such as the National Union and National Religious Party (Mifdal), propose three alternatives for dealing with Palestinians: enslavement whereby non-Jews living under Jewish law are forced to become "water carriers and wood hewers," expulsion, or outright extermination. Interestingly, these "alternatives" encompass not only Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, but Israel's Palestinian citizens as well -- so-called Israeli-Arabs.

Putting Talmudic whims aside, the Israeli government has actually stepped up its efforts to further narrow Palestinian horizons, employing a combination of psychological war, vitriolic propaganda and disinformation, as well as draconian and extremely repressive measures on the ground.

Indeed, while telling the international community that Israel is not interested in starving Palestinian children, Israeli officials have indicated that they are willing and ready to blockade Palestinian population centres and induce a "diet", as suggested by Israeli government official Dov Weisglass last week. In the past, Israeli occupation soldiers, acting like armed robbers in broad daylight, stormed Palestinian banks and seized millions of dollars in cash. Indeed, there is no guarantee that the perpetually nervous Israeli political-military establishment won't do it again to realise the ultimate Israeli goal of bringing the Palestinians to their knees. As if severe economic pressure and acts like seizing Palestinian tax money were not enough, one Israeli security official actually threatened this week to assassinate Ismail Haniya, the next Palestinian prime minister, if a "single terrorist act" is carried out from this point forward. Avi Dichter, former head of the Shin Bet, Israel's chief domestic intelligence agency, said that Haniya and his colleagues had no immunity from assassination.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/784/re3.htm