The Gaza Air Strikes: Why Israel Attacked - Yahoo! News
Israel's strike on Gaza had been expected for days, but it was still a surprise when it finally came. Taking advantage of good weather, which is forecast to last at least three days, Israeli planes bombed some 40 Palestinian police stations, posts and other targets early Saturday morning, killing more than 150 people including a number of senior Hamas military leaders. The first strikes came in a coordinated three-minute blitz.
Israeli officials say the strikes were necessary to force an end to the rocket attacks from Gaza, which is ruled by the radical Islamist group Hamas after it split from the Palestinian Authority run by President Mahmoud Abbas out of the West Bank. Palestinian militants in Gaza have long launched Kassam and other rockets at Israeli towns across the border, and in the past six weeks the number of attacks has increased dramatically. After the attack, Israeli officials said the number of Palestinian rocket attacks could now spike to 200 a day. Hamas announced that it had sent a rocket toward Askelon; one man in the Israeli town of Netivot, east of the Gaza strip, was killed. Israel also expects Hamas to launch suicide attacks against Israel. A Hamas leader promised as much Saturday.
But Israel is prepared to ratchet up the pressure still further in the hope that it will force a workable ceasefire. Saturday's attack was authorized two days previously, and though no Israeli ground troops have crossed into Gaza so far, that remains an option according to Israeli officials. Dozens of Israeli air force planes remain in the skies above Gaza. "If they retaliate they will feel it stronger and the number [of casualties] on the Gaza side will rise", a senior Israeli military source told TIME.
But Israel will need to move carefully. Air strikes that kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians are only likely to fuel support for Hamas, and ramp up international pressure to end the operation quickly. (See photos of Gaza border tension.)
Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in June. Israel wants the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and is extremely wary of becoming embroiled in a military operation in Gaza with no clear exit strategy. Hamas needed the truce to relieve the catastrophic economic strain imposed by the Israeli siege and to consolidate its control over Gaza. And so, for very different reasons, the two sides found themselves negotiating - not directly, because neither side recognizes the other - but through an Egyptian mediator. But in the past few weeks the ceasefire has all but broken down.
Indeed, even as the Israelis said the operation was continuing, Egypt was among the diplomatic casualties. Cairo had played host to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Dec. 25. She took the opportunity to criticize Hamas for its rocket attacks. The silence of her Egyptian hosts is now being seen by Palestinians as indirect collusion with Israel, damaging Cairo's ability to play mediator. Furthermore, in the contest for primacy between Hamas and Abbas's Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas, as the "victim" of this episode, emerges as the victor in the eyes of Arabs and Palestinians. Already, elements of Abbas' own Fatah Party, the bulwark of the PA, are campaigning against the security cooperation with Israel and talking about boycotting meetings with the Jewish state.
Both Israel and Hamas have their reasons for a return to open hostilities. Livni and her allies face a looming election against the more hawkish former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hamas may be pushing for tactical gains, like doing away with a 600-meter no-man's land established by the Israeli military on the Palestinian side of the boundary fence. The recent rocket attacks were also well timed because of the political vacuum in the U.S. In Washington, officials have been urging Israel to refrain from an invasion or other operations in Gaza during the White House transition. The air attack on Gaza has shattered that hope. With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem
View this article on Time.com
Here's more background:
Jews have lived in Israel, continuously, for 6000 years. Rulers have come and gone, but the Jews remained. fast forward to the 1800's; the Russians conducted intense pograms against the Jews, killing many, and causing more to flee, many to what was then called Palestine under Turkish Ottoman rule. Between 1880 and 1917, when the ottoman Empire lost Palestine to the British Empire in WWI, there were several distinct waves of Jews who emigrated to Palestine, joining the Jews already there. In 1910 Palestine was about 1/6 jewish; by 1947, it was 1/3 jewish.
By the early 1900's, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem started foamenting anti-semitism. In the 20's there were a number of massacres of Jews, notably in Jerusalem and Hebron in 1929. In 1934, IIRC, the Grand Mufti met with Hitler in Germany, and offered his support in furthering his Final Solution.
The Jews, in response to Arab harassment, formed militias, which became the Hagana, or 'Defense', which later became the IDF. The Holocaust fanned the ever burning flame of Zionism, the desire to return to Israel, the ancestral homeland, as a people.
The Brits were enamored with exotic locals, and loved the idea of sunning themselves while being waited on by darkies, but never wanted to get their hands dirty. As with most other lands they conquered, they royally (pun intended) ****ed Palestine up. There were around 20 years of dithering and hand-wringing; they drafted documents, notably the Balfour declaration:
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 (dated 2 November 1917) was a classified formal statement of policy by the British government stating that the British government "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" with the understanding that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." [1]
Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country".
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely
Arthur James Balfour
The Brits were caught in between skirmishing Jews and Arabs, and when the UN recommended Palestine be divided, they threw up their hands, drew relatively arbitrary lines in the sand, and split. Here is a map of those lines:
The Orange is Jewish. If you're not familiar, the large southern orange bit is the arid Negev desert, so a majority of the land allotted to the Jews was bone dry and not condusive to living. The northern areas are very lush and green.
In Nov 1947, the Brits, the League of Nations, and the US essentially handed the respective areas to the Jews and Arabs. The jews accepted their allotment, the ARabs refused it and refused to negotiate. The British Mandate ended officially on May 14, 1948, and the Jews declared the STate of Israel the day before. The Arab countries, all of em, attacked Israel the next day, in a year long War of Independence. The Palestinians living in Israel mostly fled at the ARab countries request to allow for the impending slaughter of the Jews, which did not happen. Many of these ended up in refugee camps in Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.
There have been many wars, all due to attack or impending attack by superior Arab numbers, all of which Israel has won. Israel has returned land captured in a defensive war for peace.
The current situation boils down to this: the Palestinians are pawns, used by their own leaders and the Arab world as leverage against Israel. Hatred for Jews runs deep in the ARab world, and did before Israel existed. The Arabs refused to live next to Jews in 1947, and gambled on killing them all and retaking the land. They lost that gamble.
Keep in mind there was never, in history, a Palestinian people; Israel/Palestine was never under Palestinian rule; Palestinians did not exist, nor call themselves 'Palestinian' until after Israel was formed. Before Israel it was British land; before that it was Turk, back to the 1500's; before that it was Mamluk, then Crusader, then Arab Caliphate or something. They have no claim as a 'people', or as a country. Individual Palestinians DO have claim to individual plots of land. No more, no less.
Arafat ****ed his people, and damaged them beyond belief. He showed extreme pride in his child terrorists, he set the school curriculum to 'full hate', and fostered an environment of poverty, hopelessness, and violence. He died with a net worth of ~$1 BILLION; instead of using hundreds of millions of dollars of aid from the international community, he instead horded it for himself, and trickled enough to his people to fund nasty acts of terror.
Israel turned the West Bank over to him in 1994, and it fell into ruin; and again in 2005, Israel turned Gaza over to full Palestinian controL, and the same happened.
I don't like what's happening. I'd rather have a beer, or felafel, with the palestinians, than hurt them. But their choices (like 80% of Gaza voting for a terror organization with the avowed intent of the destruction of the state oF israel) have equal, and opposite reactions. Israel sustained 5000 rockets on their southern most cities over the last 3 years, condoned by the Hamas gov't. Israel, for the most part, did nothing in return.
Enough.