Date: February 29th 2008

ISRAELI MINISTER THREATENS "HOLOCAUST" AS PUBLIC DEMAND CEASEFIRE TALKS

By Ali Abunimah,

The Electronic Intifada
29 February 2008

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9354.shtml

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)

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."

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).

Endnotes
[1] See: http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/8stagesofgenocide.html



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