Back in the 1960s, Israel launched air strikes against “terrorists” in Lebanon. Countless thousands of air raids later, they were still staging air strikes to “wipe out terrorism” in Lebanon or to “root out the evil weed of terrorism” (Begin) – the 1982 Lebanon invasion costing around 17,000 lives – and during the siege of Gaza (2008-9) with its more than 1,100 Palestinian dead and 13 Israeli dead (four killed by their own side). President-elect Obama was silent on that – but voluble today, when he condemned “this senseless act of terror against innocent youth”.
In 1996, Hezbollah said that Israel had “opened the gates of hell”. Hamas warned that Israel was “opening the gates of hell”. The same corrupt script, you see. And blood will have blood – at least Macbeth sounds original.
And we must forget that Palestine is meant to be a state – if only Netanyahu would shine his new-found enthusiasm for Kurdish statehood upon his Palestinian neighbours – and that statehood would mean an end to all violence, would it not? But Mahmoud Abbas, as corrupt as the late Yasser Arafat, has done a deal with the corrupt Hamas which allows Israel’s corrupted political administration to insist that there can be no peace if Hamas is part of a Palestinian government – even though, when Hamas was not part of the Palestinian cabinet, Netanyahu claimed that he had no Palestinian negotiator to talk to because Abbas could not speak for Hamas.
In the end – speak it not today – it’s all about land. It’s about the colonies which Israel is building against international law on Arab land – colonies for Jews and Jews only – on the very occupied West Bank in which the three Jewish teenagers were killed, travellng to see their families in the very illegal Jewish colonies which are destroying peace. No, this does not justify their deaths.
Their murder was vicious, cruel and unforgivable. Their families do not deserve this grief. Justice should be done. Justice. And that means murderers on trial. And land unthieved. But first… More blood.
By Robert Fisk
