What cease-fire?
By
Amira HassTalking about making and breaking a cease-fire spares the Palestinians from having to admit the failure of their Qassam missile publicity stunts. Proposals to widen the cease-fire to the West Bank sidestep any need for an inter-Palestinian debate on the destructive uselessness of a suicide-based "armed struggle."
"Cease-fire" is yet another hollow term, showing that the Palestinian representatives - elected or not, Hamas or Fatah or Palestine Liberation Organization-Tunis, from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to the last spokesman of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' "Brigades" - keep falling into the traps set for them by the politics of Israeli occupation.
Talking for and against the cease-fire fits in with the distorted picture of reality that Israel has been constructing since September 2000, of two symmetric, fighting sides - in which the Palestinians are the aggressors and Israel, attacked, defends itself and retaliates.
On the Saturday and Sunday before the Palestinians "broke the cease-fire," Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed nine Palestinians. Among them was a 17-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and a policeman who was on the roof of his house and was not involved in any "battle."
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But even if none of the nine had been killed, there would have been no cease-fire on Saturday and Sunday, just as there was no cease-fire last week and in the weeks before that. Because the military occupation, even when it does not kill, is Israeli fire, which has not ceased for 40 years - regardless of the Palestinians' reactions or lack thereof.
Israeli fire includes the Civil Administration's every refusal of a permit to build a Palestinian house, every person who is denied passage from Gaza to the West Bank, every shekel of tax money that is not transferred to the Palestinians, every roadblock in the West Bank, every dunam of land stolen since June 1967, and every settlement - old or new, big or small, within the Israeli consensus or not. Neither the Qassams nor any negotiations process has managed to stop this Israeli fire.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/852315.html