Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Ottimo editoriale di Ronnie Kasrils

Ronnie Kasrils, ministro dell'intelligence del Sud Africa, veterano
della lotta contro l'Apartheid nell'African National Congress,  e
incidentalmente il primo Sud Africano di religione Ebraica a far parte
del governo, sul conflitto medio Orientale.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspxarticleid=282802&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/
Israel is like the elephants of the Kruger National Park, observed
Ariel Sharon's former spokesperson on a recent visit to South Africa.
Ra'anan Gissin was speaking as the guest of the country's Zionist
Federation: "We just want to be left alone," he pleaded. "We seem
docile, but if you wound us we can go crazy because we are an
endangered species."
As the world has seen, Lebanon -- half Israel's size -- has just
experienced the wrath of the behemoth: its people, capital, towns,
villages, highways, bridges, power and water utilities ground into the
dust.
The apparent trigger of rage was the seizure by Hizbullah of two
Israeli soldiers -- one originally from Durban.
For a Hamas attack on an Israeli army post two weeks previously -- and
the abduction of a soldier -- the people of Gaza paid a price of
200-to-one killed and vital infrastructure flattened. The death toll in
Lebanon is more than 1 200 to 150 Israeli dead, 120 of the latter being
soldiers. One third of Lebanon's dead are children. Thousands more
have been mutilated, their homes razed to the ground; one quarter of
Lebanon's population were displaced. The country remains blockaded.
Norwegian writer Joostein Gaarder responded: "We no longer recognise
the state of Israel. We could not recognise the apartheid regime. We
call child murderers 'child murderers'. We do not recognise the
principle of a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye."
The world struggles to understand the cause of the conflict. Talk of
Israeli Jews being an endangered species is the standard Zionist
position. The Jews began returning to Palestine at the end of the 19th
century to reclaim their biblical homeland. As they acquired land, they
were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Arabs. The
settlers were forced to defend themselves.
In fact, from the onset, Zionism aimed at the dispossession of the
indigenous population so that Israel could become a wholly Jewish
state. As the Palestinians became aware of these intentions they, quite
naturally, began resisting. At Israel's independence in 1948, based
on the United Nations Partition Plan -- about 56% of the land to the
Jewish state and 44% to the Palestinians -- Israel acquired the power,
aid and resources to expand to 78% of the former territory, expelled
Palestinians and, with American backing, became the regional
superpower.
With the illegal Jewish settlements, security road network and the
construction of the monstrous wall around the militarily occupied West
Bank, the remaining Palestinians are ghettoised within 12% of their
original territory. This dispossession is reminiscent of apartheid and
its 13% of Bantustan homelands. For many this is the fundamental cause
of the conflict.
Lebanon, too, has been a part of Zionist annexation plans. Israel long
regarded the Litani river to its north as its natural border, and
constantly sought to turn the country into a Christian bulwark against
the Muslims. It invaded in 1948, 1978 and 1982 and stayed in the south
until 2000, before being driven out by Hizbullah. In that period Israel
provoked civil war, connived in massacres, created a proxy army in the
south, and still holds on to strategic farmland. No wonder a retreating
Israeli soldier grumbled that Lebanon was a never-ending story.
What lies behind Israel's latest aggression? Could such a
disproportionate response really have been because of the abduction of
two soldiers? There have been constant border skirmishes. Israel could
have responded with local action or the prisoner exchange sought by
Hizbullah. The dogs of war were let loose instead.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was, of course, the subject of a
testosterone evaluation. Unlike most of his predecessors, he is no
former army general. As new bull elephant he had to prove his mettle,
see off attacks from his right flank and teach the Arabs a lesson. But
there is more to Israel's backlash than that.
Noted Israeli peace activists had previously warned that the military
was waiting to use any provocation in order to unleash "a possible
combination of intensified state terror and mass killing" on the
population of Gaza to protect Sharon's "unilateral disengagement"
strategy at all costs.
Additionally, Israel has positioned itself within the new strategy of
counter-terrorism propounded by the Washington neo-conservatives in the
post-9/11 world. Many commentators suggest that, for the United States,
the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hizbullah, Hamas, Syria and
Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to
change the strategic playing field in the Middle East. A senior Israeli
official explained that the Hizbullah raid had provided "a unique
moment with a convergence of interest". For Israel this new paradigm
is seen as most welcome, for it shifts focus away from the Arab-Israeli
conflict as the root cause of the problem. Some would argue that such
"convergence" gave Israeli hawks the incentive for launching the
Lebanon onslaught. Some would point out the grave risks of tying the
destiny of Israel's people to such an agenda.
People's resistance in a just cause is not easily crushed. One reason
for Gissin's South African visit was to assure local Zionists that
Israel did not lose the war to Hizbullah. They lost the war on the
airwaves, he said, not on the ground. But, clearly, they lost it both
ways. Hizbullah, whom they declared they would eradicate, again taught
them a lesson in the Litani valley, and again exposed the myth of
Israeli invincibility. Repression has the habit of generating more
resolute resistance -- in Lebanon and in Palestine.
Israel lost the battle for public opinion because the world saw the
corpses of Arab children being dug out from the rubble of destroyed
buildings.
Are people not saying: "Now Jews, too, have behaved like Nazis."
Those were the words of Israel's first minister of agriculture,
Aharon Cizlang, in May 1948 after the Deir Yassin massacres. He added:
"And my entire being has been shaken."
How much longer will the world permit Israel to get away with land
theft and child murder? The sieges and check-points, the collective
punishment and targeted executions, the house demolitions and ethnic
cleansing, and the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and
government ministers. When Israel's new military chief, Dan Halutz,
ordered a one-ton bomb dropped on an apartment block in Gaza City to
take out a Hamas leader, he said that his only feeling was the
sensation of the bump of the plane as the device was released. No
remorse for the women and children blown to smithereens along with the
target. He said he slept well at night.
Like Cizlang, we are all shaken. We feel sorrow for those who died
under rocket fire in Israel. But we do not blame Hizbullah or
Palestinian resistance any more than we blamed South Africa liberation
forces when civilians died. We blamed the racist policies of a corrupt
government that cynically placed its own people in the line of danger.
By bombing Beirut, Israel's leaders knew there would be retaliation,
just as when they carry out targeted assassinations to provoke reaction
and wreck unwanted negotiations. To them the terror of their own
citizens, fleeing south or hiding in their bomb shelters, is an
acceptable part of their cynical calculations. As Tanya Reinhart,
Israeli peace activist, observed: "For the Israeli military
leadership, not only the Lebanese and the Palestinians, but also the
Israelis, are just pawns in some big military vision." And how
telling it was that when the missiles fell on Haifa, among the victims
were Israeli Arabs whose government does not bother to provide them
with shelters!
Like Gaarder, we must call baby killers "baby killers" and declare
that those using methods reminiscent of the Nazis be told that they are
behaving like Nazis. May Israelis wake up and see reason, as happened
in South Africa, and negotiate peace. And finally, yes, let us learn
from what helped open white South African eyes: the combination of a
just struggle reinforced by international solidarity utilising the
weapons of boycott and sanctions.
Ronnie Kasrils is the South African Minister of Intelligence and writes
in his personal capacity

Israeli soldiers -- one originally from Durban.
Infatti gli 8 morti e gli svariati civili feriti dal lancio di razzi su
una citta' non contano ... per dei *POVERI COGLIONI* come l'autore del
pezzo.
-Stefano