It's almost as if the current Israeli government is using a weekend when few are watching to do things which at other times might draw substantial negative comment in the US. This Ma'an article indicates that the Likud Government is now raising the stakes in terms of punishment on Palestinians for unity activities.
Israel warned on Saturday that it would cut the supply of water and electricity to the Gaza Strip if rival Palestinian movements Fatah and Hamas form a unity government.
"The foreign ministry is examining the possibility of Israel pulling out of the Gaza Strip in terms of infrastructure," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told the daily Yediot Aharonot website.
A unity government deal "would transform the Palestinian Authority into a terrorist authority and would put an end to any hope for a peace agreement" with Israel, said Ayalon, who is also a Knesset deputy from the nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party.
Bold added by diarist.
The article also reports that seventy percent of Gazan electricity and its water supply come through Israel. The percentage of water so supplied is not stated.
The article and others in Israeli papers also indicate that the millions of shekels in taxes and excises which Israel is required to pay over to the Palestine authority and which Israel has been withholding will not be paid over if the PA Hamas unity deal is successful. That withholdingis reportedly financially incapacitating the PA government, although the payover is required by the Oslo accords. In the first part of the withholdings, the premise on the Israeli government's part was that PA had breached the Oslo accord requiring it by seeking international recognition as an independent state without first getting Israel's agreement to that in direct negotiations. This continued withholding is stated to be on the basis of WB-Gaza unity agreements if they are successful, without reference to Oslo that this diarist has found. They simply won't do it.
Ma'an also reports that Israel plans to build an additional fifty thousand housing units in East Jerusalem, some in illegal settlements, in the next twenty years under a provision of law based on Israeli state ownership of the East Jerusalem land which permits only Israeli Citizens and Jews to buy the homes, by obtaining a permit which Palestinians can apply for but which historically are almost never granted to Palestinians.
It also appears from this article that a serious contest is now looming in the next few months over the control of the Likud Party between Netanyahu's faction and a more nearly pro settler faction which Netanyahu may well lose, in favor of pro settler groups, by reason of the number and location of Israeli voters entitled to particpate in the election of the Likud Central Committee who are from WB areas called by that faction Judea and Samaria.
The time may have come for those here to consider a couple of questions which can no longer be finessed. And we may have reached the time at which peace talks are not an option anymore.
The first of these questions, relating to Gaza, and the denial of water and electricity to the entire area, relates to what an occupying power may do to the million and a half civilians living there not all of whom are Hamas members, to prevent the unity of the two Palestinian areas, on an international basis.
The reported plan to cut water and power is one whose damage will fall on all there resident, Hamas or not.
This conduct directly raises issues of international law against making war on civilians to obtain political ends and denying essential resources to millions of persons, already subject to a massive economic blockade whose purpose is not to avoid import of weapons, but to make sure that the economic development of Gaza is limited to the maximum degree so that almost the the only items exportable from there are agricultural items, strawberries and tomatoes and such, which used to be produced by the now absent Israelis who were removed by Israeli policy under Sharon, In the current wrinkle, Gazan merchants are being barred by new permitting regulations from service Israeli customers either because Israeli merchants want the blockade continued to eliminate competition, not IDF. as reported here..
A related issue for Americans is the degree to which under American principles, the US government should be supporting this tactic, denying water and power to an entire jurisdiction, and all its civilians and hospitals and schools, for a political gambit like this. The anti humanitarian nature of this cutoff of water and power is unavoidable. Is this something Obama and Hillary should be supporting or is it finally a step too blunt and ugly, too far.
The second question is how it is that Israel can insist that it and only it will determine how the nationhood of Palestine shall be organized, whether it has any right to insist that WB and Gaza must remain divided, not even prepared to wait for elections to see who the Palestinians themselves want to lead them.
The announced Israeli policy is to enforce that with communal punishments on both areas, an attempt to bankrupt WB so that even the services Israel claims it wants PA to perform, policing and security at some level, cannot be performed, and to set out to deprive Gazan civilians of essential utilities en gross. Israel's government cannot avoid knowing that no deal, direct negotiations or not, will be enforceable and durable when obtained by these sorts of coercive society punishing measures, assuming that it itself is prepared to show up at direct negotiations, something the Deputy Foreign Minister has said will be rendered impossible by a successful unification of the two Palestinian areas.
As we have all heard here, Israel and its supporters insist on recognitiion of an ethnicity for Jews in Israel which is defined not by norms set by others but only by Israel. However, the same government which insists on that for itself is now also determining by and for itself who may and who may not, in the millions, be part of the nation of Palestine and limiting the choices for Palestinians to make that same determination for themselves as Israel and its supporters insist on making for Israel. Under the policies reported above, Gazans and WBers may not join together. Period. And there will be no negotiations with Israel if they do. Period. Because Israel will not participate in negotiations for a two state solution where they do not control and dictate the content of the state not them. Period.
Yes, I understand that Hamas' political positions are if taken literally and enforced, vastly hostile to the State of Israel. But what I also understand is that there is a material difference between Hamas, the political party Israel now wishes it had not helped arise, and the million and a half people of Gaza, about whom literally nothing is being said when we sit here and MSM reports on peace negotiations, and whose intentional suffering created and maintained by Israel we don't even blink at. It is as if Gaza is intended to be excluded from any peace arrangements made because of the conduct of a small part of its population, the members of a particular Political Party, the more hated by Israel because of Israel's past relationship with it. The repeated threats by Israeli pols of running another Cast Lead, II, during the US election year, indicate to me some concern that Israel may simply elect to take back Gaza, and then the Good Lord only knows what would happen to the million and a half Gazans there now; there are already reports in Ma'an of tank attacks over the border in Gaza in the last week.
This soured relationship with a country or entity Israel has worked with in the past is something that Israel has done more than once as the reporting of Israel's participation as a form of intermediary in the Iran half of the Iran Contra deal in today's Times indicates a past relationship post 1979 with those it also now seeks to destroy.
A third matter of concern is the upcoming Likud brawl, which will be a battle for survival for Netanyahu over against the rightist supporters of settlements. No matter what many here think of Netanyahu, we may be looking at a more nearly impossible situation of the pro settlement rightists take over Likud in the next few months, because there is no possibility of recognition of any rights of Palestinians at all with them.
In some manner, this situation reminds me of the aphorism that Power Corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely.
Please comment on the above substantive matters, under the usual rules for my diaries, which include no flame wars, no personal insults or abusive language addressed to or about participants, no OT, and anyone desiring to assert facts or law required to link to substantiation of those acts or laws, rather than just asserting them.
9:20 PM PT: Thank you all for this diary making the Rec List.
Mon Nov 28, 2011 at 4:10 PM PT: Update II. Apparently the electricity is off in parts of Northern Gaza, per Ma'an today.