Desertpeace

The seizures are partly intended to warn Hamas leaders that they could lose their power and liberty, if not their lives, unless they act to release a captured Israeli soldier, a senior Israeli military official said. But Israel has also concluded that Hamas, which had largely kept to a cease-fire before, is now openly engaged in violent acts against Israel and must be treated differently.

It was unclear what would happen to those held if the Israeli soldier were released, but the officials described the seizures as part of a plan well beyond seeking that.

In and near Gaza, Israeli forces held their positions on Thursday night, appearing to pause in an expected ground assault but continued to pound northern Gaza with artillery fire. Early Friday, the Palestinian Interior Ministry was set on fire by an Israeli airstrike.

In explaining the shift toward Hamas, Israeli officials said Thursday that they had agreed to let Palestinian parliamentary elections go ahead five months ago, despite the participation of Hamas, under American pressure.

Hamas won the elections and formed a government that Israel and its allies have worked to weaken, especially through economic pressure, in an effort to get it to recognize Israel and forswear violence.

“So long as they were smart enough not to openly exercise terror, no one touched them,” said the senior Israeli military officer. “But now they’ve gone back to it, so we have the right to deal differently with this terrorist government and try to remove them.”

The Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz, said Thursday: “The masquerade ball is over. The suits and ties will not serve as cover to the involvement and support of kidnappings and terror.”

The Israelis cited Hamas’s firing of Qassam rockets beginning this month, its public declaration that the cease-fire with Israel was over and its open involvement in the raid into Israeli territory early Sunday that resulted in the deaths of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a wounded corporal, Gilad Shalit, 19.

The seizures of the Hamas political leaders, under criminal law, for alleged membership in a terrorist organization and involvement in terrorist acts, were approved this week by the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, “because he agreed that the public interest has changed, and there are moments a state can say, ‘We have a public interest in activating the criminal law,’ ” said Jacob Galanti, the Justice Ministry spokesman, in an interview.

“When you see Qassams flying every day and the event on the Gaza border,” Mr. Galanti said, the policy changes. “It’s true, we knew they were members of Hamas before they ran for office, and for the last six months we know they are in the Parliament. I’m not sure they had any immunity, but officials came to Mazuz and said that the public interest had changed, so they wanted a legal tool to take care of the problem.”

All those seized will be able to have lawyers and will appear in court as in other criminal trials, Mr. Galanti said, like the one successfully prosecuted against the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, who was convicted in 2004 of conspiracy to murder.

Jihad al-Wazir, who was the finance minister in the old Fatah government and deputy governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority, was one of those rousted out of bed early Thursday by Israeli soldiers in combat gear who hammered with their feet on his door.

“I tried to calm them down, and said, ‘Come in, come in,’ ” said Mr. Wazir, who lives in the elegant Gemzo Suites apartment building in Ramallah, just across from the headquarters of the Fatah faction.

Numerous Hamas ministers and legislators of the Palestinian Authority live there too, and they, like Mr. Wazir, were ordered to dress and come outside. Unlike Mr. Wazir, many of them were taken away, their hands cuffed.

Mr. Wazir said he knew why. “They’re raising the ante,” he said. “It’s not about releasing the soldier, it’s more sinister than that. It seems to me they’re going for the long haul.” But the result, he said, would actually “reinforce the radicals.”

Ali Jarbawi, a professor and dean at Birzeit University here, said he thought the real goal was to remove the Hamas government from power.

Israel wants to continue with its unilateral policies based on the idea that there is no “Palestinian partner,” said Mr. Jarbawi, who turned down an offer from Hamas to join the government as an independent. “If you build up your strategy on having no partner, then you have to ensure you don’t have one. So when Palestinians tell you that there is about to be a political agreement among the factions, putting their house in order at last, you intervene.”

Analysts say the crisis is also further weakening the position of the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. Mr. Abbas, they say, is being pulled, and is pulling Fatah, closer to Hamas in the face of the Israeli threat, when he originally wanted to pull Hamas closer to Fatah.

“Abu Mazen is being squeezed by everyone, he’s being smashed,” Mr. Jarbawi said.

Menachem Klein, a political scientist at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and an expert on Palestinian politics, sees Mr. Abbas pushed toward Hamas for two reasons. He cites the cold shoulder Mr. Abbas got from the new Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, which pushed Mr. Abbas “to try to empower himself domestically and build up a coalition against Olmert’s unilateral plans,” and the Israeli operation, which compels a united Palestinian front.

“The arrest of the Hamas politicians — Abbas and everyone understands that as a step against the government,” Mr. Klein said. “It’s part of a grand strategy, to undermine the Hamas government, that the Israeli cabinet decided upon in its first meeting after Hamas took power.”

Jonathan Fighel, a former colonel now at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, said the seized Hamas members were really a bargaining chip for the release of the soldier. Israel, he said, “has to collect cards for future negotiations.”

By News Agencies

Hamas and Fatah on Tuesday completed an agreement over a plan that implicitly recognizes Israel, ending weeks of acrimonious negotiations, a top official said.

“We have an agreement over the document,” said Ibrahim Abu Najah, coordination of the “national dialogue” over the proposal.

Palestinain Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah has been trying to coax his Hamas rivals into endorsing the document, which calls for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, based on the 1967 borders.

All the obstacles were removed and an agreement was reached on all the points of the prisoners’ document,” Rawhi Fattouh, a senior aide to Abbas, said after factions meeting in Gaza initialed the accord.

Tuesday 27 June 2006, 17:22 Makka Time, 14:22 GMT

Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniya have reached agreement on a manifesto at the heart of a power struggle between their rival groups.

David Fickling and agencies
Tuesday June 27, 2006

The attack by the Palestinians, who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza, marked a “major escalation in cross-border tension” (Alan Johnston) that threatened to overturn “a week of progress on two fronts” (John Lyon): namely, the recent talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan, and between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas.

Thus, according to the BBC’s analysis, this attack ends the immediate chances for “peace” negotiations and provides the context for the next round of the conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza. We are left to infer that all the suffering the army inflicts in the coming days and weeks should be attributed to this moment of “escalation” by the Palestinians.

We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population and deepening the psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children.

We can ignore the deaths of more than 30 civilians, and dozens of horrific injuries, in the past few weeks at the hands of the Israeli military, including three children hit in a botched air strike last week, and a heavily pregnant woman and her doctor brother killed a day later as a missile slammed into the room where they were eating dinner.

We can ignore the blockade of Gaza’s “borders” by the Israeli army for months on end, which has prevented Palestinians in the Strip from trading goods at crossing points with Israel and from receiving vital supplies of food and medicines. As a captive population besieged by Israeli soldiers, Gazans are facing a humanitarian catastrophe sanctioned by Israeli government policy and implemented by the Israeli army.

We can ignore Israel’s bullying of the international community to connive in the starving of the Hamas-led government of funds and diplomatic room for manoeuvre, thereby preventing the elected Palestinian leadership from running Gaza. So desperate is the situation there that Hamas officials are being forced to smuggle in millions of dollars of cash stuffed in suitcases to pay salaries.

And finally we can ignore the violation of Palestinian territory by Israeli commandos who infiltrated Gaza a day before the Palestinian attack to kidnap two Palestinians Israel claims are terrorists. They have been “disappeared”, doubtless to be be held in administrative detention, where they can denied access to lawyers, the courts and, of course, justice.

None of this provides the context for the Palestinian attack on the army post — any more than, in the BBC’s worldview, do the previous four decades of occupation. None is apparently relevant to understanding the Palestinian attack, or for judging the legitimacy of Israel’s imminent military “reprisals”.

In short, according to the BBC, we can ignore Israel’s long-standing policy of unilateralism — a refusal to negotiate meaningfully with the Palestinians, either the old guard of Fatah or the new one of Hamas — with its resort to a strategy of collective punishment of Gaza’s population to make it submit to the continuing occupation.

In the skewed moral and news priorities of the BBC, the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants — the “escalation” — provides a justification for “fierce retaliation” against Gaza, with the inevitable toll on Palestinian civilians and militants alike. The earlier killing of tens of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, however, is not presented as justification for yesterday’s Palestinian retaliation against the army.

In other words, on the scale of moral outrage the BBC ranks the deaths of Israeli soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation far above those of Palestinian civilians enduring the illegal occupation.

There is another notable asymmetry in the BBC’s assessment of the “escalation”. Participation by the military wing of Hamas in the attack is evidence, suggest the reporters, of the role of the Palestinian leadership in “escalating tension”. But the killing by the Israeli army of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach on June 9, and many more civilians since, was apparently not an “escalation”, even though it provoked Hamas to renounce a ceasefire it had maintained for 16 months in the face of continuous Israeli military assaults.

So how is the ordinary viewer to make sense of these events — the endless “cycle of violence” — with the BBC as guide. (And the BBC is no worse, and possibly better, than most of other Western broadcasters. At least its reporter Alan Johnston is based in Gaza.)

Not only do its reporters exhibit the biases associated with its institutional racism — as an organisation, the BBC chooses to identify with Israeli concerns before Palestinian ones — but they then compound this distortion by repeating uncritically Israel’s own misrepresentation of events.

The reporters, like so many of their colleagues, fall into the trap of presenting the conflict through the eyes of the Israeli government, the same government whose prime minister, Ehud Olmert, last week proudly displayed his ethnic chauvinism by setting the suffering of the Jewish residents of Sderot, who face a mostly non-lethal smattering of Palestinian home-made Qassam rockets, far above the rising death toll of Gaza’s civilians from the army’s constant aerial and artillery bombardment. “I am sorry with all my heart for the residents of Gaza,” Olmert said, “but the lives and well-being of Sderot’s residents are more important than those of Gaza residents.” In other words, a potential threat to a single Jew is more important than the deaths of dozens of Palestinian innocents.

Thus we learn without comment from the BBC that Olmert has denounced the killing of the two soldiers as “terrorism”, even though the word cannot describe an attack by an occupied people on an occupying army. How is it possible for a few men with light arms to terrorise one of the most powerful armies in the world? What next: are we to listen sympathetically to claims by the US that its soldiers are being “terrorised” by Iraqi insurgents?

The defence that the BBC is simply reporting Israel’s position does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it even conceivable that we might hear a BBC reporter neutrally repeat a Hamas statement that the Israeli army is terrorising Palestinians by reckless shelling civilians in Gaza, even though the word’s usage in this case would better satisfy the dictionary definition? The shells most certainly do spread terror among Gaza’s civilian population.

We hear too without comment that Olmert is holding both Hamas and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the attack. The BBC dutily repeats Israeli claims that Abbas has the resources to fight “terror” even as the money to pay Palestinian security forces is held by foreign banks unwilling, at Israeli and American behest, to hand it over, and as Hamas and Abbas are locked in battle for control of the Palestinians’ shrinking government.

Does common sense not recoil from the suggestion that both Hamas and Abbas can be equally blamed for the attack when the two are bitter rivals for power? Or that either can be held accountable when Israel has refused to negotiate with them or treat them as the genuine representatives of the Palestinian people?

Again, would the BBC report with due solemnity claims by the Palestinians that they hold Olmert and Peretz personally guilty for the civilian deaths in Gaza over the past fortnight, even though in an enlightened world both should be standing trial for war crimes?

Instead, however implausible the Israeli version of reality, the BBC happily sows confusion on behalf of the Israeli army. Like other broadcasters, it credulously reports preposterous arguments seeking to exonerate the Israeli army of responsibility for the shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed a Palestinian family of seven. It treats as equally credible the army’s belated version in which Palestinian militants are said to have laid a single mine at a favourite seaside picnic spot in the futile hope of preventing the Israeli navy landing along the Strip’s miles of coastline. (In consequence, the BBC excludes the seven dead and dozens of Palestinian injured in that Israeli attack from its list of recent civilian casualties in Gaza).

And both BBC reporters note gravely Israel’s concerns that this is the first time Palestinian militants have broken out of the fenced-off Strip since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly a year ago. Somehow the fact that the Palestinians have briefly escaped from their cage appears to make the attack all the more shocking not only for Israel but for the two reporters.

This attack in Israel, they tell us, is the most serious to date, with the implication that it is therefore illegitimate and part of the same “escalation”. Even ignoring the fact that this attack was against Israeli soldiers besieging, imprisoning and shelling the Palestinians of Gaza, does the BBC not to pause to consider the double standard it is applying?

Was the Israeli army’s incursion into Gaza a day earlier to capture two alleged Palestinian militants not an equal escalation? Was it not an equal violation of Palestinian sovereignty? Of course not. The BBC knows, as do the rest of us, that the army never really left Gaza and the occupation never really ended. But you won’t hear that from any of its reporters.

A few years ago, I dedicated two columns to the ideology of occupation, following a nice synopsis of it given by an Israeli settler. Most of those arguments are still on the market today. You can still hear Israelis explain away the occupation by resorting to the Palestinian rejection of the partition plan, 60 years ago. Also the notion that “they want to throw us all into the sea” can boast a continuous career from the Passover Hagadah (“in every generation they rise against us to destroy us”) up to the current political use of the Hamas Charter. But some things have changed. If you nowadays ask an Israeli about the occupation, what answers will you get?

The orthodox and hard-line right wingers (Likud and rightward) would probably come up with more traditional arguments (“it’s all our land,” etc.); but if you come across a mainstreamer – one of those who consider themselves “moderate right-wingers,” “centrists,” or “leftists” (the terms are near-synonyms in present Israeli discourse), voters of Kadima, Labor, or Meretz – I think this is what you are going to hear.

“The Occupation Has Ended”

Almost all the Israelis really believe the occupation of Gaza is over. The Palestinians there are now free to run their lives as they like, and Israel has nothing to do with it. They envisage a similar scenario being realized, or perhaps realized already, for the West Bank behind the Wall.

This fiction has become popular since the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last summer; but its roots go back to the Oslo years, when especially the Zionist Left (Yossi Sarid, et al.) cultivated the myth that a Palestinian state in fact already existed, or was about to emerge within a fortnight (not later than 1998, as the Oslo Accords indeed stated; remember also Bush’s broken deadline). In fact, this fiction represents a deep Israeli desire to deny: since the liberal Israeli knows the occupation cannot go together with democracy and justice, the occupation should disappear – but in a virtual way, by being denied. On a deeper level, many Israeli liberals believe Arabs cannot go together with culture and modernity, so denying their existence, both virtually and actually, by locking the undesired neighbors behind a big Wall and forgetting all about them, sounds like a pretty good solution.

“We’re Here, They’re There,” Said the Jailer

“We’re here, they’re there” was Ehud Barak’s sophisticated “peace slogan.” The actual power relations between “here” and “there” have to be denied; in fact, the only thing that reminds the Israelis of these power relations is the Palestinian violent resistance. Were it not for “terrorism” (a term used indiscriminately for both legitimate and illegitimate Palestinian violence), the Israelis would have happily forgotten all about their locked-up neighbors by now. Accordingly, the persistent homemade Qassam missiles that terrorize the Israeli town of Sderot are conceptualized by Israelis as typical Arab ingratitude, as shameless ungratefulness for the great gift that Israel has presented the Palestinians by withdrawing from Gaza, allegedly restoring their freedom, honor, and well-being.

The reality is different. Having pulled its settlers out of Gaza, Israel is now imposing a total siege on the tiny Strip: the 1.5 million Palestinians locked up there have no access to the sea (Israel never let the Gaza seaport be built), no access to the air (Israel destroyed the Gaza airport), and all the crossings are under Israeli control (i.e., practically closed most of the time). Since the Hamas victory in the elections, Israel and the international community have also been imposing an economic siege on the Strip, severing the financial ties with the Palestinian authority; to pay their Authority’s employees, the Palestinians have to smuggle cash through the crossings. Israel’s “security system” – the Occupation incarnated – is the one who decides whether Gazans will have flour, medicines, and any other goods, how much, and when.

While this economic and physical siege is being imposed by air, sea, and land, and while Gaza is daily bombarded by missiles, artillery, and naval fire, “center-left” Israelis can say things like “Israel has left Gaza. The Palestinians could use this fact to finally rebuild Gaza, to build houses for refugees, to encourage investments, and to create jobs. Gazans could finally live like humans” (quoted from a letter to the excellent Hebrew Web site Ha’okets).

The situation in the West Bank is not so very different. The Palestinians there are locked in smaller cages than in Gaza, but the siege is less hermetic. While the Palestinians are locked behind huge walls, with a satanic system of roadblocks and permits, and sliced by roads-for-Jews-only and by settlements, harassed day and night by army incursions into their villages, houses, and bedrooms, many Israelis believe the occupation is now retreating, and its end is just a matter of time, or rather of semantics.

Alas, colonialism does not disappear by being denied; in fact, the Israeli occupation is at its peak, worse than ever before. There is no better evidence for that than the discussion about whether or not there is a humanitarian crisis in Palestine, once a rich Land of Milk and Honey.

A Propos

Ha’aretz reported Tuesday that the Knesset would debate a new bill, harshly criticized by leading jurists, that would make it possible to extend a suspect’s remand without him being present in court, and to prevent him from seeing a lawyer for 30 consecutive days. The bill was submitted by the Justice Ministry and is supported by the Shin Bet security service.

During the week of Israeli restraint, the army killed a Palestinian family who went on a picnic on the Beit Lahya beach in the Gaza Strip; after that, the army killed nine people in order to liquidate a Katyusha rocket.

But in the discourse of restraint, the first killing does not count, because the army denied its involvement, and the second was deemed a necessary act of self-defense. After all, Israel is caught in the midst of Qassam attacks, and must defend its citizens. In this narrative, the fact that Israel is content merely to bombard the Gaza Strip from air, sea and land is a model of restraint and humanity that not many states could match.

But what is driving the Qassam attacks on Israel? For 17 months, since it declared a cease fire, Hamas has not been involved in firing Qassams. The other organizations have generally succeeded in launching only a few isolated Qassams.

How did this evolve into an attack of something like 70 Qassams in three days?

The Israeli army has a long tradition of “inviting” salvoes of Qassams. In April of last year, Sharon took off to a meeting with Bush in which his central message was that Abbas is not to be trusted, has no control of the ground, and cannot be a partner for negotiations. The army took care to provide an appropriate backdrop for the meeting. On the eve of Sharon’s departure, on 9 April 2005, the Israeli a rmy killed three youths on the Rafah border, who according to Palestinian sources were playing soccer there.

This arbitrary killing inflamed a wave of anger in the Gaza Strip, which had been relatively quiet until then. Hamas responded to the anger on the street, and permitted its people to participate in the firing of Qassams. On the following two days, about 80 Qassams were fired, until Hamas restored calm. Thus, during the Sharon-Bush meeting, the world received a perfect illustration of the untrustworthiness of Abbas.2

At the beginning of last week (11 June), Olmert set out on a campaign of persuasion in Europe to convince European leaders that now, with Hamas in power, Israel definitely has no partner. The USA does not appear to need any convincing at the moment, but in Europe there is more reservation about unilateral measures. The Israeli army began to prepare the backdrop on the night of the previous Thursday (8 June 2006), when it “liquidated” Jamal Abu Samhadana, who had recently been appointed head of the security forces of the Interior Ministry by the Hamas government. It was entirely predictable that the action may lead to Qassam attacks on Sderot. Nevertheless, the army proceeded the following day to shell the Gaza coast (killing the Ghalya family and wounding tens of people), and succeeded in igniting the required conflagration, until Hamas again ordered its people, on 14 June, to cease firing.

This time, the show orchestrated by the army got a bit messed up. Pictures of the child Huda Ghalya succeeded in breaching the wall of Western indifference to Palestinian suffering. Even if Israel still has enough power to force Kofi Annan to apologize for casting doubt on Israel’s denial, the message that Hamas is the aggressive side in the conflict did not go unchallenged in the world this time. But the army has not given up. It appears determined to continue to provoke attacks that would justify bringing down the Hamas government by force, with Sderot paying the price.

Even though it is impossible to compare the sufferings of the residents of Sderot with the sufferings of the residents of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in the North of the Gaza Strip, on which 5,000 shells fell in the past month alone3, my heart also goes out to the residents of Sderot. It is their destiny to live in fear and agony, because in the eyes of the army their suffering is necessary so that the world may understand that Israel is the restrained side in a war for its very existence.

This op-ed went to press an hour before the Israeli air force killed three more children in a crowded street in North Gaza, on Tuesday, June 20.

Tanya Reinhart is a Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and the author of Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 and The Roadmap to Nowhere. She can be reached through her website.

NOTES

1. On Monday, June 12, the headlines announced that the Defence Minister Peretz blocked an initiative of the army to launch a massive land offensive in Gaza (e.g. Amos Har’el and Avi Issacharoff, Ha’aretz, June 12, 2006). In the inside pages of the weekend papers, it turned out that this was a “media spin” produced by Peretz bureau “based on a security consultation held the previous night” (Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel, Lost innocents, Ha’aretz, June 16-17, 2006).

2. This sequence of events is documented in detail in my book The Road Map to Nowhere, to appear in July, 2006 (Verso).

The two men met briefly in the margins of a conference in Petra, Jordan, hours after a pregnant woman and her brother were killed by a missile that struck their home, bringing the Palestinian civilian death toll to 13 in little over a week. Three Palestinian children died in an attack on Tuesday.

The Israeli air force commander, Major-General Eliezer Shakedi, defended air strikes as the most accurate means of targeting militants short of a full-scale ground offensive into Gaza. The military nevertheless said it was launching an investigation into the latest botched raid.

The most severe congestion occurred in Gush Dan (the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area), where heavy traffic is not uncommon, even without these extenuating circumstances.

The reason for the unusually heavy jamming of traffic is the fact that the roads around Neveh Shalom and the routes leading to the area are not equipped to handle the amount of traffic that came through them on Thursday. In recent weeks, the producers of the concert have been preparing the access roads and parking lots for the large amounts of cars that were expected, however, route 3, the road that leads to the site of the concert, is at one point only one lane wide, which delayed traffic considerably.

The Jerusalem Police and the national Traffic Police came out in unprecedented numbers to deal with the traffic situation. They predicted that 20,000 vehicles would make their way to the concert, carrying 54,000 drivers and passengers. 950 police officers and 600 security personnel took part in securing the event. 180 police officers and 200 ushers were designated to direct traffic in the area.

The barrier was the first stop on a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories for Waters, who had been criticized by some fans for planning to play a concert in Israel.

“It’s a horrific edifice, this thing,” Waters told reporters as he stood beside a section of the barrier in Bethlehem.

“I’ve seen pictures of it, I’ve heard a lot about it but without being here you can’t imagine how extraordinarily oppressive it is and how sad it is to see these people coming through these little holes,” he added. “It’s craziness.”

Waters added to graffiti with red spray paint and a marker pen. Waters was lyricist, songwriter and singer for Pink Floyd, the former British rock group famous for “The Wall” and “The Dark Side of the Moon”.

Israel has built almost half the barrier, which has the stated aim of keeping suicide bombers out of its cities.

Condemned by Palestinians as a land grab, the barrier has been branded illegal by the World Court because it cuts through occupied territory. Israel is rerouting some sections after a Supreme Court order to lessen Palestinian hardship.

Waters is due to perform a concert at the Arab-Jewish coexistence village of Neve Shalom on Thursday as part of his world tour.

The concert was originally planned for a Tel Aviv sports stadium but, following criticism by fans in Britain, Waters changed the location to the peace village, where Israeli Jews and Arabs live in a joint community.

In 1990, Waters performed “The Wall” along the Berlin Wall that separated East and West Germany to celebrate reunification.

He told reporters he hoped Israel’s barrier would also be brought down one day. More than 90 percent of the barrier is razor-tipped fence, but towering concrete walls are used in built-up areas.

“It may be a lot harder to get this one down, but eventually it must happen,” Waters said.

Massive traffic jams expected for Waters show
The concert by the former Pink Floyd soloist is expected to cause massive traffic jams tonight on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway and Route 3 between the Latrun and Nahshon intersections. About 20,000 vehicles are expected to try to reach the concert venue near Neveh Shalom on a road that has between two and four lanes.

Jerusalem Police and national traffic police will deploy unprecedented forces to cope with the extraordinarily heavy traffic burden. A total of 950 police officers and 600 security guards and ushers are to maintain security at the concert, while 180 police officers and 200 parking attendants will direct traffic in the area.

“It is possible that at some point we will decide to direct vehicles against the normal traffic patterns in order to ease the burden,” one source said.

“We recommend that drivers remain patient and leave early to attend the concert. Drivers coming from the Tel Aviv area are advised to leave as early as 4 or 5 P.M. The official concert will begin at 8:45 P.M., but opening acts will begin as early as 6 P.M,” said Police Commander Tzion Shai, an officer in the special missions division of the Jerusalem police force.

Police predict that 45,000 people will attend the concert.

“We recommend that drivers who are not attending the concert make use of alternate routes, like Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway 443 or Route 44 from Kiryat Gat to the Beit Jubrin intersection, and proceed to Jerusalem from there,” Shai said.

This week, according to reports in the Israeli media, even Marc Garlasco, a Pentagon expert on the effects of battlefield weapons hired by Human Rights Watch to investigate the deaths, “conceded” that he could not contradict the findings of the Israeli army’s own inquiry.

Presumably that is because Israel is not letting him or anyone else near their evidence. But Garlasco’s slight change of tune — even if it is not exactly a ringing endorsement — leaves the door ajar just wide enough that the Israeli army will doubtless slip through it to escape being held accountable yet again.

The army has been claiming for more than a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing.

The army’s case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western “thought” about Arabs and Muslims.

To be plausible the army account requires two preposterous assumptions: first, that Palestinian militants are so fanatical that they consider it acceptable to lay a mine secretly in an area frequented by local families; and second, that they are so primitive that their best military minds could not work out the futility of placing a single mine along miles of coastline that could be used for a landing (or are we to assume that there are many more of these mines waiting to explode?).

To support its case, the army has produced two pieces of evidence that apparently make its denials of responsibility “airtight”.

First, it claims that a piece of shrapnel removed by doctors from an injured Palestinian transferred to an Israeli hospital was not from one its shells but more likely from a Palestinian explosive device.

Given that, unlike Israel, the Palestinians do not have any factories manufacturing mines or rockets and are forced instead to make them out of any spare metal parts they can get their hands on — doors, pipes, wrecked cars, fridges — this evidence is meaningless. Palestinian witnesses have already said the beach victims were standing close to taxis when the shell exploded. So if the shrapnel was not from an Israeli shell, it suggests only that the missile also damaged other metal objects — possibly the cars — sending a shard into at least one of the victims.

The army will have a lot of explaining to do if reports on Israeli TV, not usually noted for its independent approach, confirm that another piece of shrapnel found in a victim is from an Israeli shell. So far, of course, the army is denying the report.

The second piece of evidence is supplied by the army, which says one of its many drones that circle overhead spying on Gaza round the clock shows the families calmly still on the beach, and later an ambulance arriving, tens of minutes after the army had finished shelling the area.

The problem with the Israeli evidence is that we have to take the army’s word for it: that the families shown are the ones who were about to be shelled, and that the timings given are accurate.

It also means we have to discount a lot of counter-evidence supplied by Garlasco, journalists, doctors and Palestinian witnesses — and even the Israeli army. The army, for example, has admitted that one of the shells it fired in the area is unaccounted for, a striking admission in itself. The drones apparently were no help in locating this “missing” explosion, even though they were spying on the area.

Garlasco has already determined that the injuries sustained by the beach victims accord with a blast above ground — an Israeli shell — rather than one underground — a Palestinian mine.

The many Palestinian witnesses have all put the time of the blast close to when the shelling occurred, and report that the reason they were queuing for taxis was because of panic sown by the shells they were hearing landing nearby.

Independent journalists have shown that, according to the clocks on the hospital computers that admitted the dead and injured, the timing of the first blood tests were taken soon after the Israeli army shelling — and certainly too soon to accord with the army’s account of when the Palestinian mine supposedly exploded. Doctors have also confirmed that they were called to the nearest hospitals well before 5pm — at about the time, or even before, the army claims the mine went off.

The outrage expressed in some quarters at the failure simply to believe the army’s version might sound more convincing were Israel welcoming an international investigation to adjudicate on the matter. But of course it is not. Just as in spring 2002, following the deaths of many civilians in the Palestinian town of Jenin and the destruction of the heart of the local refugee camp during a prolonged attack by the Israeli army and air force, Israel is rejecting all suggestions of an independent inquiry.

So why not just take Israel’s word for it? Its army is the most moral in the world, after all, and a state of law like Israel would gain nothing from lying in such a bare-faced manner.

The only problem is that Israel and its security forces have been caught out lying repeatedly during this intifada and before it, not just to people on the other side of the world who cannot verify the facts but also to its own courts and public.

Ths week, for example, the Supreme Court ordered the army and Ministry of Defence to pull down several kilometres of the steel and concrete barrier they have erected on Palestinian land in the West Bank after it was proved that the security considerations behind the choice of the wall’s route were entirely bogus. Official documents reveal that the wall was located there to allow for the future expansion of nearly illegal Jewish settlements on yet more Palestinian land. The army and government concocted the fib and then stuck to it for more than two years. Chief Justice Aharaon Barak called their systematic lying “a grave phenomenon”.

And at the start of the intifada, back in October 2000, the government and police covered up the fact that live ammunition and sniper units trained to deal with terror attacks had been used against unarmed Arab demonstrators inside Israel. For more than six months the government and security services denied that a single live round had been fired, despite mounting evidence to the contrary that lawyers and journalists like myself had unearthed.

They might have got away with their brazen lies too, had it not been for an unusual series of events that led to the appointment of a state inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor Or, who quickly exposed the truth.

That happened not because of any urge by official bodies to come clean or the inevitable triumph of Israeli justice. It happened for one reason alone: the prime minister of the day, Ehud Barak, feared losing the impending general election to his rival Ariel Sharon and thought he could buy back Arab votes by setting up an inquiry.

The inhabitants of Gaza have no such leverage inside the Israeli legal and political system. They have no friends inside Israel. And now it looks like they have no friends in the international community either.