If there was any hope for stability in the Middle East, it rested on an Israeli-Palestinian peace. After 7 days of air strikes on Gaza by Israel to knock out Hamas, the solution looks more and more like war. With no other country willing to step in forcefully and the UN still arguing about the wording of a draft resolution, the Palestinians are on their own. Israel will do what's best for Israel and the Palestinians will bleed a little more, a lot more if the Israeli Army poised for an invasion of Gaza moves in. See the interactive AP map.

The U.S. could stop the war, simply through diplomatic pressure on Israel who really owes its existence to U.S. support. Why the U.S. won't is rather a mystery, but then Bush is still President and Condoleezza Rice says she's trying, under the calm skies of Washington. Basically in her view, it's all Hamas's fault. But Rice didn't say that not even in so many words. The drift is there in what she did say on camera today plus you get something more from what she didn't say. Here's Rice unedited on AP Video. Ahh the art of diplomacy like fine wine, while war rages on. Hopefully Obama will reconsider U.S. policy and really push for a ceasefire. With the conflict escalating, he'll have fewer and fewer options by the time he's sworn in. A ground invasion of Gaza by Israel is already likely.

The burning question is why don't the Arab governments in the region do something positive for the Palestinians? If they had then the Palestinians wouldn't have been so desperate to place their faith and votes in Hamas instead of fully supporting Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Tiny Gaza from refugee camp to a tragic ghetto of a million and a half, now is being rained on by the world's best small air force turning Gaza into a death camp. The Palestinians have nowhere to go and nothing they can do except bleed and die, completely roofed and walled in by Israel and surprisingly Egypt, which had closed its only border crossing with Gaza before the air strikes started.

Egypt doesn't support Hamas either and didn't want to encourage Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority who used to police the Gaza border before Hamas ousted them. Jordan, more or less pro-U.S. like Egypt and tolerant of Israel is even less of a friend since the days of the Palestine Liberation Organization which the Jordanian Army pushed out of Jordan. That leaves Lebanon, with loads of problems of its own from the days of its civil war with the Christian Militias and the long Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, still troubled with a Hezbollah faction much like Hamas, dedicated to overthrowing Israel, Lebanon would like to pacify and integrate. That leaves Syria as the Palestinians' closest neighbor and ally, but with a nearby U.S. War in Iraq, they're not looking to intervene, lest they give the Israelis and the Americans a pretext for bombing and invasion.

The only upfront ally the Palestinians have is Iran, and nobody in the governments of the Middle East and Washington wants any meddling from Iran in anything, not the Saudis either who like most other Arab states wish the Palestinian problem would go away and Iran too. Iran supplies some weapons and martyr money to Palestinian families of suicide bombers. If it makes sense to some Iranians and Palestinians as a form of solidarity and compassion, it only lights a slow fuse of hope and despair in Palestine while infuriating Israel and the Americans, igniting massive retaliation.

Further afield there is some sympathy for the Palestinians from Turkey, but then how can they deliver on that when Turkey is in NATO and has been campaigning for years to join the European Union. So Palestine stands alone, becoming more and more desperate. If some of the Arab states like Egypt are longing for the good old days of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, perhaps they should have supported Arafat when the Israelis were bombing him in Ramallah.

Even if it makes no sense, Hamas has been firing home-made rockets into Israel from Gaza as an act of desperation to make Israel pay for the dismemberment of Palestine. Egypt and Israel could have been more accommodating before Hamas came to power and to Hamas itself which after all was elected with a majority in the Palestinian Parliament. They knowing Arab bravura better than anyone else, should have spotted this in the face of Hamas, instead of taking Hamas at its rhetorical face value. The PLO was misread in the same way as a bunch of tough-talking terrorists who would never negociate. Hamas has a humanitarian side, providing more social welfare support to the Palestinians than they ever did. Hamas was popular with the Palestinians, more so with Hamas backing the old PLO ideals, since the Palestinian Authority failed to re-create a Palestine. Now with the Israelis counter-attacking with massive firepower, 4 Israelis dead by Qassam rockets since the last ceasefire ended, but over 400 Palestinians dead so far by Israeli rockets and bombs, who is running a war of terrorism if not both sides?

Will the avowed goal of stopping Gaza rockets by the Israeli Military be met by bombing every Hamas Police Station, Mosque and even the houses of Hamas leaders? Not a chance, as the Israelis must know too. So why are the Israelis doing it? Hamas is an easy politically correct target, according to Rice, though that's facile and misleading. Although Hamas won parliamentary elections, it staged a coup against the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, forcibly taking over Gaza after Abbas tried to shut them down. An outlaw regime only because its rights were thwarted. Israel in any case wants it crushed. But there's a better reason the Israelis aren't yet advertising, a new development in rockets from Gaza. Iranian rockets with a much longer range. Beersheba was hit recently, 46 km inside Israel, probably by a new Grad missile and the Israeli military thinks that Hamas has also acquired dozens of longer range Fajr-3 rockets that could hit Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona. Possibly Israel keeps its nuclear warheads at Dimona as well. A Chernobyl type disaster could rock Dimona if it were hit hard and then what?

Until I found out today that Hamas had these new rockets and Dimona is 20 miles from Beersheba, I couldn't imagine why Israel would mass troops and armour for an invasion. Now I think we can count on a full scale attack. Israel has already hit some of the secret tunnels between Gaza and Egypt probably used to smuggle in the new missiles. A ceasefire? Not until after Israel gets what it wants.

It all makes sense to governments. But the people pay the price. People even in this Holy Land of constant strife and war want peace. Yet governments let things slide until war is inevitable and understandable. Here's another view of the conflict by ordinary people in Gaza and the Israeli border town of Sderot in a series of 80 short documentaries just out in English by arte.tv, a group of French and German videographers.

--Alan Gillis

With the Cease-fire in Gaza broken twice in the last few days, the chances for peace without change in the status quo are about zero. It's the only thing that both sides in the conflict are willing to bet on.

An initiative from President Obama might break the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock. In his recent interview with Al Arabiya and his instructions to his new Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, we have the beginnings of a shift in American foreign policy.

"And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating. . ."

The problem is if this is another fact-finding mission, all the facts are already in, and not much can be gained by rehashing what is already well known to everybody involved, except more time to do nothing. The situation in Gaza is critical.

Once the formalities are over like Mitchell's tour (another link to Reuters Video below) through Arab capitals that started with Egypt, and Israel where he is now, are we going to get any new insights or action, when no one seems to know what to do? It's not only true in Washington, it's true throughout the Arab world and right inside what's left of Palestine. Even Israelis are divided. If they want peace, few are willing to make any concessions to Palestine. Some Israeli settlers in the West Bank would even fight their own government if they should be evicted as part of a peace deal with Palestine. In Gaza, the Arabs think all they have been doing is making concessions or being forced into more of them by Israeli influence and its war machine.



In Israel, Mitchell has been confirming the unchanging U.S. position of full support for Israel, though making it clear the U.S. still wants a Two-State solution for Israel and Palestine. Israel could have delivered this solution a long time ago unilaterally, in the same way it launched the recent war on Gaza and then its own cease-fire. Israel must know negotiations with Palestinians will always fail now, because after repeated humiliations, Palestinians can't face conceeding the loss of Palestinian territory for any other State, namely Israel which has been doing the humiliating. In the West we've learned to swallow our pride to avoid conflict, but any student of Arab culture knows that there's only one thing of more importance than saving face: Never submit to any humiliation whatever the cost.

The humiliations suffered by the Palestinians have peaked with the fierce and disproportionate retaliation on Gaza by Israel. There was a chance when Yassr Arafat was alive and a deal was close, but at the last minute, arguably one side or the other backed off, and then Arafat was bombed in Ramallah in a seige calculated to demoralize and humiliate. Falling sick, it wound up costing him his life and the chance for peace.

After his death, Hamas came to the fore, a Muslim brotherhood encouraged initially by the Israelis as a counterweight to Yassr's Fatah. But Obama's positive approach and outlook on Palestine, still looks like a good sign if he follows through. He has an ally within the Israeli Government for his old Two-State solution. The question is will he support the Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert?

"I think it is possible for us to see a Palestinian state - I'm not going to put a time frame on it - that is contiguous, that allows freedom of movement for its people. . ."

Here's the CBS full coverage page of Obama and his message to the Arab world on Al Arabiya and a complete transcript of what he said. It's the old Two-State solution. While we're waiting on a time frame, perhaps some people in DC should do some homework.



In an interview on The Real News Network, Jan 6, 2009, Phyllis Bennis, a Senior Analyist with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, considers (video and transcript) "Historical amnesia and Gaza":

"The key question is where we start, because when you decide to start the clock determines how you define the crisis. If you start the clock on the day that a rocket from Gaza, whether it was Hamas or someone else, hit something in Sderot, then everything Israel is doing is a reasonable response to that reality, to rockets.

If you take a step back, you could begin with one week before the military strikes began, when the six-month-old ceasefire had begun to fray somewhat on both sides. And Israel responded by cutting off all entry and exit to the Gaza Strip—no food, no electrical fuel, no nothing. . .

You could go back six months and look at when the Israeli military, the Ministry of Defense, began planning for this attack, just as they were negotiating the ceasefire, according to the Israeli paper Haaretz. That was the beginning of the planning for this attack. It was not because the ceasefire didn't work. They were planning this attack even as the ceasefire was being implemented.

But ultimately you could go back and back, and you need to go back to 1967, when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip. . .Everything remained under Israeli control. So the occupation continued despite the fact that the settlers had been pulled out and soldiers were no longer permanently on the ground—they would enter, they would kill people, and they would leave.

It's that context and it's that time line that we need to start with. So the question of where do we start is exactly the most important question that is not being asked. . ."

Unfortunately, the 22 day war on Gaza is the bitter end of 60 years of conflict and neglect. It has been so devastating for Palestinians that it is in itself almost an insurmoutable obstacle to peace. In Palestine and in the UN the Israeli war has been seen not as a war against Hamas, but a war against civilians and Palestine itself, so overwhelming and brutal it flies in the face of the Geneva Convention.

The Phyllis Bennis interview continues in "Israel and international law" (transript and video) concluding with:



". . .Israel is the occupying power, and as the occupying power, it has very clear obligations under the Geneva Convention. One of the most clear, Article 33, is a prohibition on collective punishment, and it's absolute. . . you cannot punish any person in the occupied population, except for an act that he or she personally committed. . .Telling people in robocalls to their cell phones, "Your house is going to be bombed in five minutes," doesn't make it okay to then bomb a house. . .

And I would mention that Congressman Dennis Kucinich here in the United States has actually issued a call for the United Nations to investigate the violations of Article 33 of the Geneva Conventions.

Other international laws include the illegality of attacks on civilians. . .It is illegal to target civilian targets. And saying, for example, that the television station is pro-Hamas does not make it a military target; saying that the university is used for Hamas recruiters does not make it a military target. These assertions are simply false, and, unfortunately, in the mainstream Western press, certainly in the United States, they are not being sufficiently challenged.

There's another law, also within the Geneva Conventions and others, against disproportionate military attacks. That applies only when the idea of a military assault is legal. In this case, I think that's a very questionable one. But even if it's legal, you cannot use disproportionate military attacks. And in this case, the level of death and destruction should give very clear evidence that this is absolutely disproportionate."

"Allegations of (Israeli) War Crimes" go forward in this Jan 25 2009 ABC Video.



On the chances for peace, CBS News put together a segment for 60 Minutes, Jan 25, 2009, "Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution?" (Video and transcript)

Fifteen years of negotiations later, even those in Palestine and Israel who think it's the best compromise, don't think it will work now. History has passed them by. Correspondent Bob Simon reports:

"Palestinians had hoped to establish their state on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have split it up with scores of settlements, and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive - or ride - on the older roads.

When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank. . .

Demographers predict that within ten years Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank [280,000 Jewish settlers] and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank, or they could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could try apartheid. . .

Apartheid? Israel is building what it calls a security wall between the West Bank and Israel to stop suicide bombers. The Palestinians are furious because it appropriates eight percent of the West Bank. Not only that. It weaves its way through Palestinian farms, separating farmers from their land. They have to wait at gates for soldiers to let them in. Settlers get a lot more water than Palestinians, which is why settlements are green and Arab areas are not. . .

But one very important Israeli says she intends to move them out. She's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a candidate to become prime minister in elections next month. She's also Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, and she told 60 Minutes peace is unthinkable with the settlers where they are.

"Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?" Simon asked.

"It's not going to be easy. But this is the only solution. . .As simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order," Livni said.". . ."

Yet the construction of new Israeli settlements and houses authorized and illegal still continues. An Israeli rights group with access to a classified Israeli Defense Ministry database says Israeli authorities are "systematically violating international law and the property rights of Palestinian residents", reported yesterday by AP.

Perhaps Livni is our last chance at peace. But critics say that the Gaza incursion just before Israeli elections, was to boost the popularity of Israeli hardliners like the current Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert and another rival, Benjamin Netanyahu. It seems to have worked with Israeli public opinion soaring in support for Olmert's successful operation in Gaza.

Meanwhile the brutal roadside bombing of Israeli soldiers 3 days ago and another massive retaliation by the Israeli Defense Forces crushes the last lingering hopes both peoples have, as in this Jan 28 2009 BBC Video, "Israel launches attacks in Gaza".

Obama isn't likely to meddle in Israeli internal affairs, like publicly backing Livni and knocking Olmert. Of course this is what all the diplomats are for. Signals in the dark, back off or else. But if Obama doesn't resort to the weapons of diplomacy, the reign of terror in Israel and Palestine will go on, as it has in the long ongoing wars in Iraq and Afganistan, largely a result of total American Foreign Policy support of Israel. Like a gift of $3 billion a year in American weapons and military aid for Israel.

After 22 days of war on Gaza, Israel announced a unilateral cease-fire to take effect today at midnight GMT. The toll so far over 1300 Palestinians dead, over 5,000 wounded. Israeli casualties 10 soldiers in Gaza and 3 civilians killed by Hamas rockets. A few hours later Hamas announced its own 7 day cease-fire. The fighting has stopped more or less. It might hold, though France 24 reported 17 more rockets fired from Gaza today and retaliatory strikes from the Israelis killing a Palestinian.

A token force of Israeli soldiers and tanks have already pulled out of Gaza back to Israel. The Israelis are leaving behind most of their army to contain Hamas. A peace deal has to be worked out first between Hamas and Israel, before the Israelis will open borders and pull out entirely. Hamas wants it done before its 7 day cease-fire ends. Indirect negotiations are going on with Egypt as the broker. A rushed summit meeting of some world leaders is underway now in Egypt to come up with a plan for a sustainable truce. Though why an Israeli cease-fire?

Israel said that its objectives were met and exceeded, confident it can manage the situation. As the war proceeded fewer and fewer rockets were fired into Israel. With Hamas badly hurt and the Palestinians cowed by Israel's fierce campaign and much of Gaza in ruins, the Israelis have a victory of sorts. Though there are other factors in Israel's decision. The battle for Israel's high moral ground has been lost in the media coverage with world opinion turning sharply against Israel.

Recent hits on the UN Gaza headquarters and food warehouse where 700 people had taken refuge shocked the UN and Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary General. This on top of 4 attacks on schools, 3 of them UN schools, besides offices of The Associated Press and another media center in Gaza City. The terror in Gaza where demonstrably no place was safe from the Israeli Defence Forces alarmed everyone, perhaps even the Israeli government, under pressure itself at home from Israeli human rights organizations. Limiting access to press scrutiny Israel provoked charges of censorship. Foreign journalists couldn't even get in, a few treated to short IDF guided tours across the border and back as a gesture to freedom of the press.

Everyday life had become a nightmare of insecurity. Public places like mosques, even a cemetery, some hospitals, the Islamic University of Gaza, had been hit by Israeli
bombs, shells and missiles. Places where ordinary Gazans had sought sanctuary from the bombardment had been decimated and many killed and injured. According to hospital counts, about half the dead were civilians and that means women and children. Of the men killed and quickly buried, a count of Hamas dead, given the chaos, may never be known. More bodies are now being found in the rubble-strewn towns.

Again and again, no matter how strong the outcry, for the IDF anyplace was a potential Hamas hideout. Professor Akram Habeeb of the Islamic University of Gaza says on the second night of the bombing his own university was hit by F-16's. "I realized", he wrote in protest, "that its (Israel's) target bank had gone bankrupt. . . .Why would Israel bomb a university? Israel did not only target my university last night. It also bombed mosques, pharmacies and homes."

Once the invasion began, instead of going in and sweeping up Hamas resistance (why else have troops on the ground) it was still bomb and burn them out. It minimized Israeli casualties, but the effect was to maximize the destruction and unfortunately the killing of innocents. The situation was so horrendous that Medecins Sans Frontiers or Doctors Without Borders, called the Israeli intervention in Gaza a "massacre".

When the Israeli PM, Ehud Olmert said there was hostile fire coming from the UN and that's why Israeli solders fired on it for 2 hours setting the emergency food depot ablaze, John Ging, head of operations for the UN Relief and Works Agency said the claim was "total nonsense" and "typical misinformation". According to UN officials, the Israeli shells were (banned) white phosphorous.

In Israel 9 human rights groups have condemned the Israeli attacks on Gaza, accusing the military of war crimes: "wanton use of lethal force" and a series of "blatant violations of the laws of warfare". They also accused the IDF of preventing rescue teams from reaching the wounded and failing to care for them as required by international law. Pressure is mounting internationally for an Israeli War Crimes Probe.

Perhaps the spectre of a war crimes investigation and a humanitarian catastrophe raised by the UN worried the Israeli cabinet into a cease-fire. In an Israeli attack on a UN school in Beit Lahiya 2 days ago where 1600 had taken shelter, 2 boys were killed in the shelling. With the UN compound's food stores still smoldering, Ging condemned the attack."The question that has to be asked is for all those children and all those innocent people who have been killed in this conflict. Were they war crimes? Were they war crimes that resulted in the deaths of the innocents during this conflict? That question has to be answered," he said. Added to this a humanitarian crisis looming, the basic necessities of food and water in short supply, all bad press for the Israelis. Food shortages in part due to farmhouses attacked and burned, food trucking a dangerous job, the markets couldn't provide enough, "even for those who do have money," Ging said.

Last Monday the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution accusing Israel of "grave" human rights violations against Palestinians and decided to set up a fact-finding mission to "investigate all violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by Israel."

The IDF's use of colossal force was also due not just to military strategy and the new looser rules of engagement where Israeli units can proceed on their own initiative to destroy a possible target. It's in the types of weapons used. Precision weapons like smart bombs and missiles of course but also with enormous destructive power. Israel denies using banned weapons including white phosphorus, but there's already plenty of evidence on the IDF's use of banned white phosphorus. Besides the phosphorus attack on the UN compound in Gaza, there have been other reports from civilians and doctors treating burns.

If chemical weapons have been banned, what's this if not chemical? Nerve Gas or phosphorus, both are lethal and both burn, the phosphorus burns worst of all. Phosphorus has only been approved as a smokescreen device. The UN has banned the use of phosphorus as a weapon. In clouds for smokescreens but in Gaza also delivered in wide air bursts, dozens of phosphorus tails coming down from one explosion as we have all seen in numerous videos and photos on the news. Banned battlefield weapons used in cities and unfortunately against civilians who can't run away. They get maimed or killed in one sudden explosion or fire.

The IDF knows from experience that Hamas was not massing its fighters in any one place for the convenience of an Israeli bomb. Gone to ground, or in small cells fighting a guerrilla war, taking potshots at the Israelis. How can battlefield weapons be used to stop Hamas? Simple, destroy enough of Gaza and you'll destroy Hamas.

Even worse a new experimental weapon, Dense Inert Metal Explosives or DIME, was apparently being used by the IDF. DIMEs are small but powerful bombs of metal powders that have a short range of 5-10 meters. The exploding metal powders tear bodies to pieces without any evidence of shrapnel. In survivors injuries are brutal as though flesh and limbs have been torn off. So new, DIME hasn't been banned yet. Was it being tested on Gazans like other new weapons have been tested in other wars? It's clear there is no high moral ground from which these horrific weapons are fired.

This was no surgical operation. The war was fought on TV and the Internet. With the war brought home worldwide it certainly dawned on many that this was a brutal war of subjugation of the Palestinians through terror and destruction of Gaza. I suppose like in other wars, this one could have melted away as civilians fled. But the Palestinians had no place to go. Did the Israelis hope that people would flee their towns and cities leaving Hamas behind in the wreckage? Except that Israel and Egypt sealed all the borders. The Israeli campaign didn't spare the countryside either. Everywhere a threat of war, no safety even in farmhouses targeted and destroyed.

Hopefully there will be peace now. Perhaps Israel thoughtfully pulled back from the brink before it had no reputation to loose.

There is one other major factor. In 2 days Barack Obama will be sworn in as President of the United States.

What's happening now? Here's an eyewitness account by Sameh Habeeb, a Palestinian journalist from his blow-by-blow blog GazaToday:

"Thousands of people appeared on the Gaza streets. Everybody is trying to explore what has happened to his relatives, houses and areas. I have documented a massive devastation throughout east, north and west of Gaza Strip.

The devastation storms everything needed for normal life. Houses, schools, hospitals, clinics, police stations, charities, universities and streets totally and partially destroyed.

More than 100 dead corps were found today by paramedics mostly civilians and a family of 8 members. Samouni family which was massacred before found 17 more dead bodies under the rubbles. Many families still seek rest of members and relatives who were lost during the war time."

The photos above are his taken today, Copyright (c) 2009 Sameh Habeeb

Video:

France 24: "Embedded with Gaza medics", a harrowing report from a journalist who tags along with an ambulance driver in Gaza City, http://www.france24.com/en/20090116-gaza-israel-assault-medics-violence-hospital-war-palestinian

Guardian: "Gaza: Lives in ruins", eyewitness accounts of Israeli atrocities including white phosphorous shelling,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/jan/16/gaza-israelandthepalestinians

Guardian: "Phosphorus bombs in Gaza -- the evidence", a doctor describes phosphorus burns and a new type of very small shrapnel causing major internal damage, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/jan/16/gaza-israel-khan-yunis-white-phosphorus

Reuters: "Gaza doctor in mobile phone plea", while a Gaza doctor is being interviewed on live Israeli TV, his house is hit by a shell, killing 5 of his family, http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=97211&videoChannel=1

Reuters: "UN school in Gaza hit by shells", the fourth school hit, the third and latest UN school shown here where 2 boys died, http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=97207&videoChannel=1

--Alan Gillis

The Israeli Defence Forces are pulverizing Gaza. From the air and sea and now the ground assault with heavy Israeli armour and soldiers carving up Gaza into manageable pieces. The big push is on for Gaza City center, the apparent Hamas stronghold. It's as though the Israelis have mounted a fierce campaign to crush some powerful modern Gaza army threatening Israel, and a hostile people that can't be persuaded to surrender unless they and their cities are smashed. But Gaza has no real army apart from Hamas fighters and police, and ordinary Gazans want peace. So do Israelis.

Day 18 of the IDF's surgical operation against Hamas has been so gigantic and horrific, that you can only call it War. The video and pictures of horror coming out of Gaza tell the real story, contradicting the reasonable sound bites from politicians, diplomats, and key personnel from the IDF. Even the statistics of 870 Gazans dead, maybe 3,000 wounded versus 13 Israelis dead, are misleading. With statistics it looks like the IDF is right. A better idea would be to get the IDF to tell us just how many rockets hit Gaza, how many bombs and shells, just what is the tonnage here? A one ton bomb can wipe out a neighborhood and how many neighborhoods have the Gazans lost? What's the IDF doing anyway, destroying neighborhoods? With few Hamas hard targets, what else are they going to do with all that firepower except destroy the life of Gaza, like gamblers who figure if you hit enough numbers on the roulette table, you're going to win.

To soften this dirty war, the media as usual impose their own family values on the graphic face of war and terror. Understandable, you don't want your real kids to see real blood and guts spilled, real children maimed and killed. Yet it's OK in a horror movie or a nasty video war game. A calm and reassuring media coverage, avoids stirring the outrage people would feel, that people might stop with big demonstrations outside the UN or at embassies and parliaments. There have been some strong protests in France with cars burning in Paris. Perhaps too, if the media published the terrifying reality, it would only blunt our revulsion to violence as movies and games have done. Though shocking images of violence in Gaza are available on the Internet from Gazans themselves. They live with violence. They want it broadcast. Getting the full story in Gaza is difficult. Since November foreign press reporters haven't been allowed into Gaza by the Israelis apart from those already there. A few are now embedded with Israeli Army units. Many more international reporters and photojournalists are still trying to get in. Israel's highest court has agreed they should be allowed in, but not the Israeli government which is ignoring the ruling.

In the West Bank, it's the quiet before the storm, with some orderly demonstrations for peace in Gaza and sporadic violence. Anti-Israel anti-American demonstrations have been suppressed by the Palestinian Authority, including a ban on the Hamas flag. Last week Palestinian riot police broke up a Gaza rally at Birziet University, beating students with clubs and hauling away protesters in vans. A clash between Hamas and Fatah supporters broke out in Ramallah. In East Jerusalem Israeli policemen put down a violent demonstration. It's hard to say how deep the rift is in the West bank between Fatah and Hamas, except there's anger on both sides. The inner breakdown in Palestine, the Hamas-Fatah split certainly hurts all Palestinians. But Hamas has a popular legitimacy even if it's banned in the West Bank, unlike its characterization by Israel and the U.S. as a terrorist organization hiding out in Gaza.

With a long enough preamble, 8 days of heavy bombing, the IDF massing for an invasion, why did governments and media fail to see the inevitable assault on Gaza? Halfway around the world, I saw it coming in "Rockets In Gaza". The Security Council at the UN was quickly alerted by a Libyan resolution for a cease-fire, but the Americans scuttled it. This is an astounding failure in American diplomacy, though it didn't get much media coverage. A strong UN resolution for a cease-fire with some sanctions if it failed, for either Hamas or Israel, might have worked or bought Gaza some time. Now with the invasion in full swing, instead of a bold UN Resolution, there's finally a watered-down one. The U.S. is still not onboard, though only abstaining this time. According to the media, both sides in the conflict shrugged it off. Unworkable say the Israelis. We weren't consulted says Hamas. Yet Hamas did consider the Resolution and Khalid Meshaal replied at length, oddly again not much reported.

Meanwhile people get maimed, people die. If the statistics carted out on casualties are right, 25% civilian, that means about 650 Hamas fighters dead. That's 19,350 to go or maybe a hundred thousand more bombs and rockets and shells, never mind automatic weapons fire that shatters windows and doors, blasting useless brick and stone with an overkill of a thousand rounds a house as in Rafah. Though Israel says it doesn't want to destroy Hamas, just their key people and their capacity to launch rockets against Israel. With the conflict simplified into Israelis versus terrorists, the Israeli position sounds reasonable. But the recent history of Gaza doesn't support it.

The Israelis had launched a campaign to cripple Gaza with a blockade 18 months ago still in effect, to punish Hamas for seizing power in Gaza, though Hamas had won the Palestinian election. Yet there was a cease-fire in effect which Israel claims was broken by Hamas rocket fire while Hamas accuses Israel of breaking the cease-fire first. The rockets from Hamas were the provocation for Israel's overwhelming retaliation.

If Israel broke the cease-fire as Norman Finkelstein says and Hamas retaliated, then Israel's War on Hamas is illegitimate, and Gaza the innocent victim.

If we can believe Israel and only Hamas rockets and Hamas must be stopped, why not stick to that? With all the fancy military surveillance and precision weapons, why not hit these Hamas rocket sites from the air? Why not employ surface to air missiles to shoot down incoming Hamas rockets, say with the Patriot Missile batteries the U.S. delivered to Israel way back during the First Gulf War? American weapons are being used against Gaza instead. Too difficult say the Israelis. Short range missiles aren't in the air long enough to get a fix on them. Hamas has no missile bases, just portable home-made rockets and some Grads or maybe some longer range Iranian Fajr-3s. So it's difficult. Well so what? The simpler expedient of demolishing Gaza is better? Better for Israel minimizing Israeli casualties. Well, Gazans won't think so. The Israelis are turning every Palestinian and their children against them. Israel's war machine is sowing the seeds for Perpetual War. There isn't really a precedent for this. Though it started like this:

A homeland secured by a pair of British and French civil servants instigated by Lord Rothschild in a piece of Palestine the Brits controlled, for a people who'd been absent 2,000 years since the days of the Roman Empire when Trajan booted them out for insurrections.

There's a lesson or two there somewhere, then and now for both sides. If the Jews had kept the peace and waited out a page of history, they could have avoided 2,000 years of tragedy. But it wasn't that simple. Religion played a bigger role than Roman occupation. Caligula duly deified by the Roman Senate, even appointing his horse a Senator, ordered a statue of himself placed in the Jewish Holy of Holies like in other temples throughout the Empire. Augustus started the custom in the provinces where there was no shortage of idol worshippers. It hadn't got as far as Israel. That was the limit until Caligula. Was it madness or a Roman Emperor with a wicked sense of humor? Both certainly, but in any case patience and diplomacy failed because of ignorance. Both sides failed to see the consequences.

Then not happy with the British Protectorate, the Israelis started another insurrection, a war of liberation against the British for a new state of Israel. Then the Six Day War that started the Occupation and scattered the Palestinians.

The closest thing to a precedent is the English colonizing Northern Ireland starting in the 1600s and we know how long that took and how much terror was sown and blood was shed before there was peace. Conflicting religions and cultures also played their part, Catholic Irish, Protestant English, privileged modern English interlopers, impoverished and humiliated Irish traditionalists. Do the Israelis want to follow this sort of model of a 300 year war?

Here's a professional Arab video, no blood and guts, but Palestinian children giving vent to their tragedy. If it's propaganda, it's haunting and it still hits home, showing angry children passionately hit hard by death and destruction throughout their short lives. How would any kid feel growing up without a childhood, knowing only the uncertain terror of the present and a future of war? One day when it's their turn they'll fight. Flat and unemotional but official talking heads in suits giving interviews on the Gaza problem on TV isn't propaganda of course.

What is it with governments anyway? Why don't they employ some historians, some thinkers, some doctors? Why is it that in our democracies the rule is only lawyers and businessmen get elected?

The handwriting is on the wall. The IDF will occupy Gaza. It's the only way they can meet Israel's stated objectives. Get ready for a long bitter history.

--Alan Gillis

On Tuesday the Israelis will be electing a new government. Their choice will either bring a peaceful settlement with Palestinians closer, or continue the siege of Gaza engineered by the outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Though popular because of his successes, he is resigning to fight old corruption charges at home.

With the Israelis largely supporting the 3 week war on Hamas, renewed support for Olmert's political party Kadima, hasn't materialized. Some Israeli critics have suggested the timing of the war just before the election was to boost support for Olmert and his party. Though given that his possible successor, Tzipi Livni, his Foreign Minister, is a moderate, half the equation has to be discounted. Olmert as a politician on his way out, an old soldier and the most highly decorated one in Israel, was looking at how history would remember him.

The war may in fact have hurt Livni's chances to become the next Prime Minister. Supporting a Two-State solution and prepared to enforce it if Israeli settlers on Palestinian land would refuse relocating, she told CBS News on 60 Minutes recently, she finds the ground cut from under her. The devastating and yet popular war plays in favor of her conservative Likud rival Benjamin Netanyahu.

Popular anyway as a former Prime Minister, with a charming iron-fisted charisma, he has been catapulted forward as the logical successor to Olmert. Livni though with plenty of experience in government and pretty tough herself, closely involved with the punishment mission in Gaza, probably hasn't enough support for what amounts to a radical peace for the Two-States.

Even the Palestinians who were never wholeheartedly convinced it was in their best interests, would be angered by half a loaf after Gaza. The war has changed things.

Netanyahu reading his public correctly and the new peak in mutual hostilities as a fact of life, hammers the new reality of constant struggle against an implacable Hamas, as hard as Olmert did.

"It is clear Hamas is rearming", Netanyahu told Israeli Radio eleven days ago. "The next government will have no choice but to finish the work."

Israel then is choosing either more aggression or an extremely difficult peace. Since war works well enough to satisfy most people and countries with major disagreements, it goes forward here on both sides. Hamas talks tough, Netanyahu talks tough. If by some happy chance Livni does get elected, then Israel and the world could avoid a catastrophe in the Middle East.

Of course Netanyahu could make his vision work with military might. Israel certainly has the resources to bomb Palestinians into submission. With little practical support from the West and the Arab world alike, apart from some humanitarian aid, Palestine goes it alone. But Netanyahu could falter if Israel's chief backer, the U.S. withdrew its support, either financially or militarily or at the UN.

The Obama factor is still an unknown, though announcing a cease-fire just before his inauguration shows Israel is wary. On record as supporting both a Two-State solution and Israel's right to self-defense, it seems President Obama has no room to maneuver. What he will do or wouldn't do however, will change the face of the Middle East for a generation. Unless there's a basic change in the conflict.

Looking at history, it seems unlikely that Israel or America will go for any kind of reasonable peace that will mean concessions from Israel. They'll talk about it as they been talking about it since 1967.

That leaves the Arab world which also has been talking about a solution since 1967. Though the Arabs are great talkers they haven't got any new ideas either and so the interminable conflict goes on. Within Arab countries the people say it is their own pro-Western governments who refuse to take any action to support Palestine. Most Arabs if they could push their governments over the edge would take the road to war as they did in 1967.

Just how much inertia there is and just how much anger it will take to overcome it, will eventually lead to the time-honored solution of war. Israel and America would seem to take their chances in the meantime, hoping that inertia, reliable so far, will continue to triumph. This is the political solution at present, one Netanyahu is betting on heavily.
Then again there are other avenues no one seems to be considering in Arab capitals, besides the status quo or war. For Gaza there is an alternative that no one would like, but one that would bring an interim peace, possibly painless and permanent.

Egypt would have to march in invited by Gazans or not, and guarantee Gazan sovereignty. Palestinians wouldn't like it and the Egyptians wouldn't like it either, as relations even now between them are deeply strained. Egypt too shut its border with Gaza.

Israel would be angered, but unlikely to wage war, as they keep saying they have no territorial ambitions in Gaza. To make it a perfectly friendly arrangement, Gaza could be turned into a demilitarized zone by Egypt.

With a de facto incentive in place, perhaps the Israelis would come to terms with the West Bank. Of course they'd worry about other incursions from their Arab neighbors to settle the continuing West Bank question.

With Gaza at peace, other options for the West Bank could be considered by Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Many Palestinians are still scattered about in these countries as well as in refugee camps since 1967.

Jordan is keeping its distance from any involvement with the Palestinian cause, since its fortunes like Egypt's are tied to keeping the peace, and not offending Israel and the West. Both countries rely not on oil for revenue and power, but on friendly commercial relations and foreign aid.

But Palestine's Arab neighbors could still keep the peace and buttress the rights of the Palestinians on their own territory and in the West Bank. They could easily create an enlarged West Bank, by cementing many Palestinian communities and refugee camps into a largely contiguous Palestinian territory, that would form a Greater Palestine as a confederation of Palestinian Provinces still under the jurisdiction and protection of their respective Arab governments. The Palestinians would have their own federation and government for internal affairs.

It wouldn't cost Arab states any land or sovereignty. With some serious talk and signing of agreements, they could rewrite history without shedding any blood or losing face. The Palestinians would finally be pleased with their future as a people and culture guaranteed by their neighbors.

In time, faced with a de facto Greater Palestine, Israel might allow the West Bank to integrate with Greater Palestine. And the need for a Greater Palestine would then dissolve, as the Palestinians returned home. Palestinians would have their own country again.

On ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos during the war in Gaza, Shimon Peres, the Israeli President said on camera he would accept any workable solution.

"Well, clearly, if there is somebody that can stop terror with a different strategy, we shall accept it."

Here it is, my own idea of a resolution that would stop the terror. Not purely an intellectual abstraction, but based on my first-hand experience of both Arab and Jewish peoples and cultures with a grasp of politics and history.

With the Arabs taking a peaceful initiative, there would be no spoilers. Who could possibly object? The Palestinian militants could be absorbed into the armies of their host countries. Money wouldn't be a big factor either to build this new Palestine. Everyone gains and peace is the result. Any takers?

--Alan Gillis