MORE than 15 Israeli air strikes on Thursday, Friday and early Saturday destroyed Gaza Strip water, power and roads and killed seven Palestinians. Yesterday, Israeli air attacks were continuing and Israel had sealed off the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Accompanying the Israel assaults was a clear message from the Israeli Defence Minister, Mofaz. Speaking for Sharon, he said that there would be no Palestinian state, or even an interim agreement with the Palestinians, and that Israel would await the next generation of Palestinian leaders before there could be any peace. On behalf of Sharon, Mofaz ripped up the ‘roadmap’.
This is a major change from just a few months ago when President George Bush declared that a Palestinian state would be established before he finished his second term in 2008, and was calling Abbas, President Abbas.
The transformation has taken place because the Palestinian people have refused to allow the Palestine National Authority and the Palestinian government to do the will of the US. The US wanted all Palestinian liberation movements disarmed and Hamas barred from standing for elections. Bush and Rice piled the pressure on but the Palestinian masses have said time and time again ‘No’.
Faced with the prospect of Hamas winning a democratic election, and the armed struggle continuing in the West Bank, Sharon refused to meet Abbas in a summit and instead flew to the US to meet Bush to get permission to resume bombing Gaza and to rip up the roadmap.
There, Bush gave Sharon everything that he wanted by withdrawing his pledge that there would be a Palestinian state established in his second term.
After his meeting with Bush, Sharon was able to report that ‘No demand has been made on Israel to take steps as long as the Palestinians do not make good on their pledge to dismantle the terror organisations.’
Bush went on to meet Abbas and told him: ‘I believe that two democratic states living side by side in peace is possible. I can’t tell you when it’s going to happen.’
He added: ‘The way forward must begin by confronting the threat that armed gangs pose to a genuinely democratic Palestine as well as to lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians,’ said the US president.
The Haaretz newspaper was told by Israeli officials about the way forward as agreed with the US. ‘The Americans accept the fact that because of the disengagement from Gaza, we are entitled to respond to terror much more harshly.’
Following Bush’s meetings with Sharon and Abbas, the US leader not only refused to lay down a timetable for the Palestinian state, he also refused to pressure Israel to release Palestinian detainees, limit Jewish settlement expansion, halt the building of Israel’s Apartheid Wall on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, or ease travel restrictions on Palestinians there.
Now Israel is making war ‘to the end’ with the Palestinian masses, determined to wipe them off the map, and to prevent a Palestinian state getting on the map, by the method of mass murder.
The Zionists are determined that the Palestinian entity is to be Gaza, while a walled and sealed off West Bank is to be integrated into Israel, and to try to bomb the Palestinians into acceptance.
Meanwhile, the Iranian president is under massive assault for saying that Israel should be wiped off the map, while Israel is actually doing its utmost to bomb the Palestinians off the map, and with Bush and Blair, the great Christian politicians of the day, not even noticing that mass murder is taking place in Palestine.
