A Fair Assessment
Gaza strategy divides Israeli military analysts
Sharp differences of opinion over how Israel can achieve aim of reducing Palestinian rocket fire
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 December 2008 16.16 GMT
Israel has said the goal of the past three days of intense bombing in Gaza is to stop rockets being fired by Palestinian militants into southern Israeli towns.
The rockets have claimed fewer than 20 lives in the past eight years, but have become an increasingly serious problem for the Israeli government.
To reduce the rocket fire, Israeli military analysts argue, is a modest goal. However, even within Israel there remain sharp differences of opinion about how to achieve that.
Most believe the latest conflict will eventually end with a new lull in the fighting, or at best another short-term ceasefire agreement – the latest in a long line of temporary ceasefires in the conflict between Israel and militants in Gaza.
Although Israel has put in place some preparations for a major ground invasion – preparing a call-up of reserves and deploying tanks near the Gaza border – that is still seen as by no means an inevitable step.
Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general and a military analyst at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, said the point of the conflict was for Israel to exact the best conditions it could in a future ceasefire with Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls Gaza after winning Palestinian elections three years ago.
“The military operation is changing the dynamic, making it clear to Hamas that it is going to pay a very high cost for violations of the ceasefire,” Brom said. “I think Hamas deluded itself by thinking Israel is kind of paralysed because of its political system or the possible reaction of its population to some suffering.”
For nearly six months until mid-December Israel and Hamas held a ceasefire in Gaza, although it broke down in the final weeks with violations on both sides. Now both Hamas and some Israeli leaders have said they are not willing to return to a ceasefire deal.
Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, told Fox News on Saturday when the bombing began: “For us to be asked to have a ceasefire with Hamas is like asking you [the US] to have a ceasefire with al-Qaida. It’s something we cannot really accept.”
Despite his words, the reality is that a new ceasefire agreement is probably the best Israel could hope to achieve. As Alex Fishman, a columnist in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, put it bluntly today: “The answer to the question of what we want is simple: To stop the fire. In order to stop the fire, we have to reach an arrangement, and in order to persuade Hamas to reach an arrangement, we are now breaking its bones – among other reasons, so that the price it demands will not be high,” he wrote. “But we have not yet decided, amongst ourselves, what price we are willing to pay.”
Yet there are others who raise broader questions about Israel’s policy towards Gaza, particularly in the past three years since Hamas won the surprise electoral victory.
Yossi Alpher, a former senior official at Mossad and a military commentator, agreed that Israel was seeking a ceasefire on more acceptable terms. But he was critical of the tough economic blockade Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip in recent years, limiting imports to humanitarian supplies and preventing all exports, a policy that has all but wiped out private industry and brought Gaza’s economy to collapse.
“The economic siege of Gaza has not produced any of the desired political results,” he said. “It has not manipulated Palestinians into hating Hamas, but has probably been counter-productive. It is just useless collective punishment.”
He said that in future Israel would have to choose either to recognise Hamas was around to stay and to talk to the movement, however unpalatable that might be for most Israelis, or to fully re-occupy the Gaza Strip, topple Hamas and bear all the costs involved.
Some have even spoken out publicly against the current devastating bombing in Gaza. Tom Segev, one of Israel’s most respected historians, has been particularly critical, arguing that the premise of bombing to secure a peace agreement was false. The government was failing to learn the lessons of the past, he said.
“Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over,” Segev wrote in yesterday’s Ha’aretz newspaper. “Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
You’ll Go To Hell For What Your Dirty Mind Is Thinking
A Book of Matches=recording.
In other news:
Does anyone want to buy my Macbook Pro?
</JGlaus>
Liars Own The World
I bought a textbook for college. The semester is over and now I’m going to sell the book on Amazon since I don’t need it anymore. This is perfectly legal. I could sell it on the streets and that would also be legal. The writer, publisher, editor, and everyone else involved with the making of that book won’t see a single penny from my sale. MP3’s don’t magically appear on the internet. Someone bought a cd, ripped it to their computer, and uploaded it to the internet. If I then download the MP3 that someone else uploaded, that’s illegal. Got milk?
-JGlaus
Dear Diary
Before the internet, people just kept journals; now we have blogs. Most people would describe a blog as an internet journal. On the surface, this is correct. The only apparent difference is that a journal is generally written in a book, but a blog is typed on a computer. Other than that, they are essentially the same. In both a blog and a journal people write about their experiences, their feelings, and their thoughts. However, while the blog and the journal may be a similar medium, they both serve very different purposes.
Except for the diaries of famous dead people, journals are typically private. They act as a way to express one’s feelings or recount the day. Keeping a journal is a good exercise for your brain. Recounting the events of the day improves memory skills, while expressing your thoughts and feelings boosts intelligence and enhances communication. But whether your journal is simply a retelling of your experiences or a cathartic way to get out your feelings, it is your own personal tool for doing so.
So how is a blog any different? Well, if you’ve ever kept a journal, most likely no one has ever read it. It is usually something private. There is the cliché of the bratty little brother stealing his sisters diary and finding out about all her secret crushes. The blog, though, is published on the internet and has the potential to be read by thousands of people.
You could make the argument that people write blogs instead of journals purely because computers have replaced the pen and paper, and therefore a blog is not just for attention. But if this were true, why wouldn’t people just type up documents and save them on their computer instead of publishing it to the internet?
This doesn’t just apply to blogs. Any form of art that is created and put on display is done so for a reason. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’m not making a judgment. I’m not really saying much at all. It might not be done purely for attention. Maybe it’s part of our very human need to connect to others; to know we’re not alone in what we’re feeling (I apologize to all my English teachers for using a semicolon up there). Anyway. I started writing this post a long time ago and just found it again and decided to finish it. So there’s that. Think about things. It’s healthy.
-JGlaus
