Then, of course, you’ve got the American media, which has systematically distorted the accounts of what’s going on in Israel-Palestine, never tells the story from the perspective, or almost never tells the story from the perspective, of the Palestinian people and what it is suffering. As a result, most Americans have a very distorted or skewed view of what’s going on there and have a great deal of antagonism towards the Palestinian people, an antagonism that is not warranted based on the actual behavior of the Palestinian people, since the Palestinians have indicated a strong desire for a peaceful resolution of this conflict.
However, there is this Hamas group, which is the group that says, “No, we will never accept a peaceful resolution.” And there, I think, it’s important for us to acknowledge that the Palestinian people, like the Israeli people, have a section of them that are extremists, that are not interested in resolving the issue, that are willing to continue this struggle for hundreds of more years if necessary.
I think that that is a tragedy on both sides, that both sides have these extremist elements and feed on each other and help give power and support to each other, because every time the Israeli Right acts in a disgusting and repressive way, as it has done in the past few months in the city of Hebron, the Arab city of Hebron, where we’ve seen literal pogroms - that is, groups of Jews attacking random Palestinian civilians, the kind of things that used to happen to Jews all through our history – when that happens, that gives great strength to those forces in the Palestinian world that say, “See these Jews are impossible. They understand nothing but force and they will never allow us to exist in a normal way in this society in Palestine.”
Conversely, when Hamas or other extremist groups in the Palestinian world engage in acts of terror against Israeli civilians, of course, those acts are, number one, totally outrageous and morally inexcusable, but secondly, they are also things that strengthen the Israeli Right because the Israeli Right is then able to say, “You see? This is who we have to deal with.”
There’s a great tragedy that’s been going on. This tragedy is now being played out in Gaza in the last week or so, as a cease fire that had been worked out with Hamas some six months ago has expired and Hamas said it would not restart that cease fire, because Israel had been continually violating its terms. What Israel had been doing is using the cease fire and the cover of cease fire to go and assassinate various leaders of Hamas or other militant Palestinian groups, both in the West Bank and in Gaza. That was a strong violation of the terms of the cease fire, at least as Hamas understood those terms. Hamas said, “Look, if we’re going to just be sitting ducks here and you’re going to use cease fire and continue to kill us, we don’t want this, we’re not going the honor this cease fire.”
Hamas, not honoring the cease fire, began to fire these rockets. Their rockets are not like advanced weaponry that the United States has or that Israel has. They’re rockets that, by-and-large, have been unable to reach Israeli cities, to which I say, “Thank God.” I’m delighted that they don’t have more advanced weaponry. In any event, their attacks were largely symbolic and this past week they launched all these rockets, most of which ended up in the desert, affecting nobody, but…
KALL: Eighty in one day, they launched.
LERNER: Yeah, but they were more for pride than for military effectiveness. Those rockets were the excuse that Israel then used to make a bombing raid on Gaza, in which it killed 250 Gazans, most of them civilians, 20 of them children, and wounding another 1,000 people, and…
KALL: Wait… I’ve been reading in a lot of places that it’s up to 350 now, that 60 of the 350 were civilians, the rest were Hamas operatives or something like that.
LERNER: Well, I guess these claims, that my basis for the information that I read also on the web, I’m not there personally and I don’t think that anybody… that we have a good objective source for knowing exactly these numbers. I think what we’re going find is that, until the fighting stops, we’re not going to know. We get reports from the hospitals in Gaza that are totally overwhelmed with the numbers of people who are wounded or killed. As far as the claim of who is a civilian and who isn’t a civilian, this is part of the propaganda battle, I guess, that goes on, because the issue of…
KALL: It is kind of hard to picture how they could figure that out so clearly in such a short time.
LERNER: Exactly, because you can pretty much tell when it’s women and children, that they’re civilians.
KALL: Right. What I’ve been picking up lately in trying to pull these pieces together is that there are a lot of power politics motivations on both sides, both the Israelis and Hamas. Recent polls have Hamas less popular than George W. Bush and their popularity was falling and they had nothing to lose. There was an article in the Washington Post suggesting that they refused to renew the truce because they would lose their credibility as resistance fighters and that they had something to gain by getting conflict started. Then the Israelis, what are they going to do, say, “Let’s make nice with Hamas, who are shooting rockets at us?” It would have been like handing the election over to her opponent, Netanyahu.
LERNER: I would never underestimate the venality of the political leaders on all sides of this struggle. On the other hand, I don’t think that Hamas would have initiated this attack had there not been the targeted assassination going on through the period of the alleged cease fire by Israel against various leaders of Hamas and of others in the Palestinian world, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Similarly, I don’t think that Israel would have taken the stand that it did if Hamas had been a more reasonable group, trying to seek some longer-term solutions to the problems. We’ve got bad people on both sides, as well as good people on both sides. I do think that, in the case of Israel, where I can say I have a greater understanding of the political dynamics than I do in Hamas world, because Hamas isn’t so dependent on democratic support as it has been, as Israeli government is.
The Israeli government has at its top Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, and these two people are the ones who were responsible for the war in Lebanon two years ago that turned out to be a disaster for Israel. They’re about to end their rule and Israel is going to the polls in February, so they didn’t want to end their rule in Israel with history judging them to have been these huge military failures. By being able to attack Gaza and come away with some kind of military victory, they could easily have felt that this attack would up their popularity.
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