US blocks cease-fire, gives Israel carte blanche to continue killing in Gaza
By Barry Grey
3 January 2009 The efforts of Israel to terrorize the civilian population were indicated in a January 1 report by the New York Times, which wrote: "Tens of thousands of Gazans have received recorded phone calls from the Israeli Army warning them that their houses have been marked as targets because they harbored either militants or weapons facilities like rocket workshops. Noncombatants were urged to clear out. Hundreds of thousands of leaflets gave the same message."
Precisely where the residents of marked houses are to go in the besieged and surrounded territory, the Israeli military does not say.
The air war is already the bloodiest conflict in Gaza since Israel seized the territory in 1967. But the killing and destruction in the first week of the attack could be a mere prelude to something far more horrific. There are powerful elements in the Israeli military and political establishment that are itching for something akin to genocide.
This was indicated, according to Friday's Financial Times, by an analysis for Israel's Institute for National Strategic Studies presented on Wednesday. The author, Shlomo Brom, a former head of the armed forces' strategic planning unit, warned: "As is common in these situations, Israel's primary problem is finding an exit strategy.... The main risk is that, partly due to the success of the initial military moves, Israel will get caught up in the view that it is necessary to eliminate physically the rocket fire capabilities of Hamas."
In fact, the largely ineffectual homemade rockets fired from Gaza, provoked by Israeli's brutal blockage of the territory, serve as a pretext for a war driven by the political and geo-strategic interests of both Israel and the US. For its part, the Israeli ruling elite is determined to overcome the damage to its image of military invincibility resulting from its failure to destroy Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War, and to create the conditions for permanently crushing Palestinian resistance to decades of colonial-style occupation. Its military violence is at the same time driven by growing social tensions within Israel itself.
For the US, aggression by its main political and military ally in the Middle East is seen as a means of advancing the hegemonic aims of American imperialism against such obstacles as Iran and Syria in the oil-rich and strategically crucial region.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/gaza-j03.shtml
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