7-06-06, 9:11 am

  Three years after the U.S. invasion to change the Iraqi regime, Washington’s strategic regional ally, Israel, has launched a massive military operation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to force another regime change in the Middle East, with an end goal to incapacitate the Palestinian Authority and rule it out as a negotiating partner.   Israel’s pretexts are a capture of an Israeli soldier in a daring attack, attacking Israeli communities by Palestinian home-made rockets, the inability of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to rein in anti-occupation armed resistance, and the assumption of power by Hamas, condemned by Israel and the United States as a “terrorist” organization.   However Hamas’ landslide victory in the January 25 legislative elections had only disrupted a status quo that was anyway crumbling and unsustainable. It did not interrupt the peace process, which was already stalled and deadlocked by Israel’s insistence on its unilateral policies.   Hence Israel’s military offensive is ostensibly targeting Hamas both as a resistance movement and government, but the end target is incapacitating the Palestinian Authority (PA) and ruling it out as a credible negotiating partner.   Very well aware of Israel’s end game, President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the Israeli invasion as a “collective punishment” and a “crime against humanity,” and to reinforce national unity he has temporarily suspended the July 26 controversial referendum on the “prisoners’ document,” and angrily condemned the Israeli onslaught on “his” government.       To render the Palestinian people under occupation leaderless, Israel has trapped their presidency and premiership in the Gaza Strip and rounded up those cabinet ministers, lawmakers and influential community leaders who remained at large in the West Bank, and forced the fortunate among them to go into hiding, including the deputy premier and the parliamentary speaker.   Israel sealed off the Mediterranean coastal strip, practically besieging the Palestinian president, premier and cabinet ministers in Gaza after kidnapping eight other ministers and 21 lawmakers from the West Bank, thus paralyzing the PA’s executive and legislative branches of government.   Several mayors were also kidnapped by Israel while many others went underground in the West Bank, thus paralyzing the local government as well and forcing civilian life to a standstill.   All the detained and besieged officials were democratically-elected in transparent polls that were extensively monitored internationally and locally.   Offices of the prime and interior ministers in Gaza were bombed to rubble, which reminds one of the dynamited presidential headquarters of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.   However none of the world powers has objected to Israel’s war on the PA to force a regime change.   And to bring the Palestinian people to their knees, Israel at midnight on July 27 unleashed its occupation forces against the Palestinian infrastructure, reoccupied parts of the Gaza Strip, including the Gaza airport, and bombed the only electricity-generating grid, the power distribution network and six transformers, and plunged the densely-populated and poverty-ridden strip into darkness.   Water pipelines, highways that link southern and northern Gaza, and four bridges were also bombed, disrupting traffic and restricting movement of the population.   Israeli F-16s meanwhile were terrorizing Palestinian civilians with sonic booms. Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert vowed to his Cabinet Sunday: “I want no one to sleep at night in Gaza.”   The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem on Monday condemned the sonic booms as “collective punishment.”   Israel’s military siege of Gaza is depriving more than 1,400,000 Palestinians of fuel supplies, exacerbating the power and water crises and threatening the vital health services.   Expressing concern about the humanitarian consequences of Israel’s military escalation, the International Committee of the Red Cross and human rights groups called on Israel to fully respect the rules of international law.   Israeli warplanes targeted universities, schools, soccer fields, clinics, charities and police stations were targeted in Gaza. In the West Bank the Israeli forces raided, vandalized and sealed off newspapers, local television stations, hospitals, cultural centers, industrial plants, municipalities and other social institutions.   The Israeli war on Palestinian infrastructure was decried by world powers, led by the United Nations chief Kofi Annan in a statement Monday.   James Wolfensohn, the former envoy of the Quartet (of U.S., U.N., EU and Russia) in March warned: “I do not believe you can have a million starving Palestinians and have peace.”   Israel’s military onslaught was preceded by a suffocating Israeli, U.S. and European economic and financial siege imposed on the PA since the January 25 elections, a siege that has thinned Palestinians to near starvation.   Why?   “Olmert's aim is to complete what his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, effectively began when he ordered Israeli tanks into the West Bank in April 2002. Until then Israel had been trying to negotiate peace -- or at least an end to violence -- with the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords of 1993. Sharon's aim was -- to invalidate Oslo, destroy the Palestinian Authority and its security forces, and make possible a solution imposed by Israel,” Jackson Diehl wrote in The Washington Post on Tuesday.   Olmert came to power in March on a platform to unilaterally demarcate Israel’s final borders inside the Palestinian land Israel occupied in 1967, annex the Palestinian Jordan Valley and the major settlement colonies to the Jewish state, in a plan that would pre-empt the creation of an independent, contiguous, and viable Palestinian state.   Dictating to Palestinians an Israeli three-option alternative: Either perpetuated occupation, his unilateral plan or civil war, Olmert is crushing all potential Palestinian partners by his roaring F-16s and rolling tanks.  

--Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank. He is the editor of the English-language Web site of the Palestine Media Centre (PMC).