ISRAELI air raids are pounding the Gaza Strip for a fourth day. At the same time Gaza is being shelled from the sea by Israeli naval units!
Gaza’s interior ministry and Islamic University were heavily hit yesterday. Hamas says 300 Palestinians have died since Saturday, and that 1400 have been seriously injured in the Israeli blitzkrieg.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said Israel was in ‘a war to the bitter end’ with Hamas, as he massed large numbers of tanks and 6,000 reservists on the border with Gaza.
At the UN, the Security Council joined international calls for restraint by urging an end to all violence between Israel and Gaza.
The US, Israel’s strongest ally on the council, said the onus was on Hamas to stop rocket fire first and commit itself to a truce.
British Foreign Secretary Miliband echoed the US position.
He called for an urgent ceasefire. He did not call on the much more powerful aggressor, Israel to cease fire at once on the 1.5 million defenceless citizens of Gaza.
This is the same position as Blair occupied during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He demanded that Hezbollah ceasefire, when it was under massive attack, allowing the Israelis three weeks to destroy the infrastructure of the Lebanon.
Miliband told the BBC: ‘We are now paying a terrible price for the slow and faltering pace of negotiations not just over the last year, probably not just over the last 15 years `– and it is the fundamental need for a comprehensive settlement that is the only way to resolve this in the interests of the Palestinians or the Israelis.’
He said any ‘innocent loss of life’ was ‘unacceptable’ and continued calls for a ceasefire.
He added that the authority of Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas – whose Fatah party controls the West Bank but not the Gaza Strip – had to be reinforced.
This is all just bourgeois cynicism since everybody knows that over the last 15 years the UK has supported every go-slow move that the US and Israel has made to prevent the formation of a viable Palestinian state.
Miliband says that Abbas’s authority must be ‘reinforced’. In fact, as he knows, Israel is slaughtering Gazans to try to destroy Hamas, so that Abbas will be able to feel secure enough to make the kind of deal with Israel that the US and the UK are desperate to see take place.
Miliband continues: ‘Everyone wants both sides to stop and everyone wants those with influence to use that influence to put a stop to this.’
Miliband says that the butcher and its victim are equal, and they must both stop fighting!
He added that Brown had spoken to Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and the UK had made clear Israel ‘must abide by its humanitarian obligations. . . The UK supports the prompt and sufficient delivery of food, fuel and medicine into the Gaza Strip.’
These are just more crocodile tears. Everybody knows that Israel is going to slaughter just as many Palestinians as it wants to – men, women and children – humanitarian obligations just do not come into it.
The UK being for the prompt delivery of foodstuffs and medicines is also the same type of hypocrisy. If this is the case why doesn’t the British government deliver them by sea, as individual groups have done.
In fact, the UK was central to the US-UK-Israeli drive, after 2006, to starve the Palestinians into overthrowing the Hamas government, which the Palestinian people elected freely and democratically.
Gaza has been blockaded ever since with a colossal loss of life and with much suffering.
For this situation Britain is directly responsible, despite Miliband’s crocodile tears.
The British trade unions must support Hamas. They must demand that Israel ceases fire and ends the siege of Gaza and impose a worldwide trade union boycott of Israel and its trade until it does. If Hamas calls a Third Intifada the British trade unions must give it their full material and moral support.