Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Hard Truths About the Conflict

Hard Truths About the Conflict
By Robert J. Lieber
Thursday, January 1, 2009; A13
After Israel's dramatic airstrikes, the world's media are filled with
images of suffering Palestinian women and children, innocent victims
in what is being referred to as a renewed cycle of violence.
Predictably, both sides are being urged to call a halt, though in much
of the Middle East and parts of Europe these demands, and the blame,
fall especially heavily upon the Israelis. In America, there is
relatively greater understanding and sympathy for Israel, but here,
too, concern is growing about the violence.
While the details of the conflict often appear complex, the
fundamentals -- hard truths about Gaza, its Hamas rulers and the wider
Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- are straightforward. First, despite
the tragic deaths of civilians, Israeli's airstrikes have been
precisely aimed at Hamas fighters, installations and rocket launchers.
Inevitably, the use of force causes injury and death to innocents, but
from initial figures announced by U.N. personnel, it appears that more
than 80 percent of those killed were Hamas security personnel or other
militants -- a ratio that might compare favorably with the use of
force by U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. In view of Hamas's
practice of deliberately placing missile launchers and other weapons
in the midst of densely populated areas, the precision is remarkable.
It also reflects the fact that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seek to
minimize civilian deaths, while Hamas deliberately targets civilians.
Second, what we are witnessing is not a "cycle" of violence. The IDF
airstrikes are a reaction to the unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks
against the Jewish state. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in the
hope that the Palestinians would use the opportunity to prepare for an
eventual agreement and a two-state solution in which they would live
side by side in peace with Israel. Since then, there have been more
than 3,500 such attacks aimed at areas of southern Israel, including
over 200 launches since Dec. 19, after Hamas chose not to extend a six-
month truce. The expanding range of these missiles now covers an area
populated by as many as 700,000 Israelis.
Third, Israel and Hamas have profoundly different aims. Israel has
accepted the principle of a two-state solution as the basis for ending
the conflict. Hamas, by contrast, rejects this. Its language of
"resistance" or "ending occupation" (even though no Israelis, civilian
or military, other than the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, have
"occupied" Gaza for the past three years) is but a veiled expression
of Hamas's actual objective: destroying Israel and creating an
Islamist Palestinian state in its place. Credulous observers may see
more peaceful purposes, but Hamas leaders periodically reassert these
objectives, whether in the Hamas covenant or, in the words of a
prominent Hamas cleric, Muhsen Abu 'Ita, speaking on Al-Aqsa TV and
calling for "the annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine."
Fourth, any realistic hope of progress toward a peaceful resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a successful two-state solution
requires that Hamas suffer a severe setback in the present fighting in
ways that seriously damage its capabilities and weaken its political
credibility among Palestinians. Leading officials of Egypt, Saudi
Arabia and the Palestinian Authority know this and, notwithstanding
their formulaic criticisms of Israel, have explicitly blamed Hamas for
the current violence. PLO and Fatah officials fault Hamas for the
deaths in Gaza, and an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,
Nimr Hammad, told the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar: "The one
responsible for the massacres is Hamas, and not the Zionist entity,
which in its own view reacted to the firing of Palestinian missiles."
Indeed, Hamas's position as a radical, terrorist, adventurist,
Islamist organization is underscored by the absence of support for it
by Muslim governments other than Iran and its surrogates.
Successful negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis remain
highly desirable, but their achievement would require that a single
credible Palestinian authority ("one authority, one gun, one law," as
Abbas puts it) be able to speak on behalf of its people, represent
them in difficult but meaningful negotiations, and possess the
capacity as well as the will to enforce its side of a binding
agreement. But Hamas represents an alternative source of authority and
a direct challenge to the existing Palestinian leadership in the West
Bank, while also -- through its non-recognition of Israel, its support
for terrorism and its refusal to accept prior negotiated agreements --
rejecting even the most basic prerequisites for negotiations.
Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel, not because they
embraced the ideas of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism,
but because they concluded that the effort to destroy the Jewish state
had failed and that refusing to come to terms with it was harmful to
their national interests. Ultimately, peace will be possible only if
most Palestinians and their leaders become convinced that terrorism
and violence are a dead end and that they cannot under any
circumstances prevail over Israel through the use of force. If today's
conflict leaves a seriously weakened and politically damaged Hamas,
that result is more likely to enhance the prospects for peace than to
weaken them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/31/AR2008123102773_pf.html
----
"Accanto, la nota" (Luca Logi / rodewalder)
cfr 
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2008/12/luca-logi-e-i-piselli.html

 Hard Truths About the Conflict
dove sono i 49 palestinesi seccati durante la tregua? Chissà perchè i
fact checherks filoisraeliani non ne parlano mai, nelle loro dure
verità