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Title: Israeli minister threatens "holocaust" as public demand ceasefire talks
Source:
http://electronicintifada.net
URL Source: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9354.shtml
Published: Feb 29, 2008
Author: Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada
Post Date: 2008-02-29 14:47:39 by robin
Keywords: None
Views: 211
Comments: 1
Israeli minister threatens "holocaust" as public demand ceasefire talks Palestinian medics carry a wounded child after an Israeli missile destroyed the labor union headquarters in Gaza, 28 February 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) On 28 February, Vilnai's colleagues added their own inflammatory statements. Cabinet minister Meir Sheetrit stated that Israel should "hit everything that moves" in Gaza "with weapons and ammunition," adding, "I don't think we have to show pity for anyone who wants to kill us." Poster Comment: Matan Vilnai said Palestinians risked a "shoah", the Hebrew word for a big disaster - and for the Nazi Holocaust. Mr Vilnai said Israel would use all its might to defend itself, after rockets hit the city of Ashkelon, 10km (six miles) from Gaza. Hamas leader Ismail Haniya said it was ready for a large-scale Israeli attack. Israeli air strikes have killed about 30 Palestinians in the past three days. Four Palestinian boys were killed in an Israeli raid as they played in a field in northern Gaza on Thursday. Several militants, including a Hamas commander, were also killed. The string of attacks came a day after a rocket fired by Hamas killed an Israeli student on the outskirts of Sderot, about a mile from Gaza, the first such death in nine months. 'No choice' The barrage continued on Friday with militants aiming several Grad rockets at Ashkelon, home to 120,000 people. The Iranian-made rockets are said to have a range of about 22km (14 miles). One rocket hit a block of flats in the city, breaking through the roof and slicing through three floors below, while another landed near a school, wounding a 17-year-old girl. It is the first time Israeli officials have ordered Code Red sirens to be sounded in Ashkelon and reports say soldiers from the Israeli military's Home Front Command have been hanging posters around the city instructing residents on what to do when the warning sounds. "It's a city with large facilities - a huge soccer stadium, and a basketball stadium, and a beach. No-one is ready for this," Ashkelon mayor Roni Mehatzri told Israel Radio. Israel's leaders have been under pressure in some quarters to launch a ground invasion of Gaza to end the rocket fire and although they are reluctant, Mr Vilnai admitted on Friday that they will have "no other choice". Speaking on Israel Army Radio, Mr Vilnai said if Palestinians increased rocket fire, they will bring upon themselves a "shoah". The BBC's Katya Adler in Jerusalem says many of Mr Vilnai's colleagues have quickly distanced themselves from his comments and also tried to downplay, them saying he did not mean genocide. "We're getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we've used a small percentage of the army's power because of the nature of the territory," he added. Separately, the chairman of the Knesset's defence and foreign affairs committee, Tzachi Hanegbi, said Israel "must make a strategic decision to order the army to prepare quickly". A recent opinion poll has indicated a majority of Israelis favour a truce with Hamas. 'Crazy war' The Islamist movement, which seized control of Gaza in June, has said it will cease fire if Israel stops its military operations in Palestinian areas and ends the blockade of the territory which has cut essential supplies to its 1.5m inhabitants. Addressing a crowd of around 2,000 Hamas supporters at a rally held after Friday prayers in Gaza City, Mr Haniya, a former Palestinian prime minister, said Israel was deluded if it thought it could now remove his group. "Gaza today faces a real war, a crazy war led by the enemy against our people," he said. "What does a large-scale raid mean? You were in the Gaza Strip and you quit because of the resistance. What does assassination mean? If some leaders are assassinated, would the cause be assassinated?" he asked. Several senior Hamas leaders, including Mr Haniya, have remained out of public view during the last six weeks because of fears that Israel might try to kill them. Mr Haniya, who was dismissed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas ousted his Fatah movement in Gaza, said any Israeli attempt to invade would "end in terrible failure just like all the other rounds have failed". A senior Palestinian negotiator in the ongoing peace talks between the PA and the Israeli government, Saeb Erekat, also condemned the recent Israeli air strikes and urged both sides to work towards a ceasefire. "We strongly condemn this bloodbath and the massacring of our people," he told al-Jazeera. Israel Threatens To Unleash 'Holocaust' In Gaza
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 29 February 2008
Israeli officials began damage limitation efforts after the country's deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip with a "holocaust."
The comments came a day after Israeli occupation forces killed 31 Palestinians, nine of them children, one a six-month-old baby, in a series of air raids across the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed that the attacks were in retaliation for a barrage of rockets fired by resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip which killed one Israeli in the town of Sderot on Wednesday, 27 February. Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, said the rockets were in retaliation for the extrajudicial execution of five Hamas members carried out by Israel on Wednesday morning. Israeli occupation forces have killed more than 200 Palestinians since the US-sponsored Annapolis peace summit last November. In the same period, five Israelis have been killed by Palestinians.
Speaking to Israeli army radio today, Vilnai said, "the more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."
A report on the BBC News website headlined "Israel warns of Gaza 'holocaust'" noted that in Israel the word "holocaust" -- shoah in Hebrew -- is "a term rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi genocide during World War II."
The BBC later reported that "many of Mr. Vilnai's colleagues have quickly distanced themselves from his comments and also tried to downplay them saying he did not mean genocide." An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Arye Mekel, claimed that Vilnai used the word "in the sense of a disaster or a catastrophe, and not in the sense of a holocaust."
The attempt to limit the damage of Vilnai's comments is not surprising. It was recently revealed how another Israeli official, Major-General Doron Almog, narrowly escaped arrest at London's Heathrow airport in September 2005, in connection with allegations of war crimes committed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. British police feared a gunfight if they attempted to board the El Al civilian aircraft on which Almog had arrived and on which he hid until he fled the United Kingdom back to Israel as a fugitive from justice.
Incitement to genocide is a punishable crime under the international Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948 after the Nazi holocaust.
"The 8 Stages of Genocide," written by Greg Stanton, President of Genocide Watch, sets out a number of warning signs of an impending genocide, which include "dehumanization" of potential victim groups and preparation, whereby potential victims "are often segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved." [1]
Vilnai's holocaust threat, however much Israeli officials attempt to qualify it, fits into a consistent pattern of belligerent statements and actions by Israeli officials. Israel has attempted to isolate the population of Gaza, deliberately restricting essential supplies, such as food, medicines and energy, a policy endorsed by the Israeli high court but condemned by international officials as illegal collective punishment.
As The Electronic Intifada has previously reported, dehumanizing statements by Israeli political and religious leaders directed at Palestinians are common (see "Top Israeli rabbis advocate genocide," The Electronic Intifada, 31 May 2007 and "Dehumanizing the Palestinians," Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 21 September 2007)
And today, Tzachi Hanegbi, a senior member of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party said that Israel should invade Gaza to "topple the Hamas terror regime" and that Israeli forces, which now enforce the occupation of Gaza from the periphery and air, should prepare to remain in the interior of the territory "for years."
While Israeli leaders escalate the violence and threats, some other top officials and a vast majority of the Israeli public support direct talks with Hamas to achieve a mutual ceasefire, something Hamas has repeatedly offered for months.
"Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with
the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive
soldier Gilad Shalit," the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on 27 February citing a Tel Aviv University poll. The report noted that half of Likud supporters and large majorities of Kadima and Labor party voters support such talks and only 28 percent of Israelis still oppose them.
Knesset Member Yossi Beilin, leader of the left-Zionist Meretz-Yahad party, called for an agreed ceasefire with Hamas, noting that "there have been at least two requests from Hamas, via a third party, to accept a cease-fire," Haaretz reported on 29 February. Israel's public security minister, Avi Dichter, visiting Sderot the previous day, criticized Israel's military escalation, saying, "Whoever talks about entering and occupying the Gaza Strip, these are populist ideas which I don't connect to, and in my opinion, no intelligent person does either." And, in an interview with the American magazine Mother Jones, published on 19 February, the former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, Efraim Halevy, repeated calls for Israel and the US to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas. Dismissing lurid rhetoric about the group, Halevy stated that "Hamas is not al-Qaida," and "is not subservient to Tehran."
The question remains as to why when the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians, some senior Israeli officials, and Hamas leaders are all talking about a ceasefire, the Israeli government refuses to accept one and the US refuses to call for one. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has blamed the escalating bloodshed entirely on Hamas, and has failed to call for a ceasefire. This echoes her support for Israel's merciless 2006 bombardment of Lebanon which she notoriously celebrated as being "the birth pangs of a new Middle East."
The Palestinian and Israeli populations are exhausted by the relentless bloodshed, however unequal its toll. They are paying the price of a failed policy, pushed by Washington and its local clients, which attempts to demonize, isolate and destroy any movement that resists the order that the United States seeks to impose on the region.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006)
(11 images)
Israel's deputy defence minister has said it will be left with "no choice" but to invade Gaza, if Palestinian militants step up rocket attacks. 
posted today by Brian S
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