11-Jul-06: Destroying "fair elections" in Beit Hanoun

It's a busy morning in Beit Hanoun. That's the Gaza town from which many of the missiles fired into civilian areas of Israel have orginated in the year since Israel self-liquidated its presence in Gaza. It's intriguing to see how a person's perspective colours what you see happening there.

Reuters has this on their newswire this morning:

Israel keeps up Gaza attacks, draws Hamas threats
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli air strikes killed a militant and wounded several gunmen and civilians in Gaza on Tuesday as part of an offensive that Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said would only ensure Israelis have no peace. "We present this clear message: If Israel will not allow Palestinians to live in peace, dignity and national integrity, Israelis themselves will not be able to enjoy those same rights." In the latest action in the Gaza Strip, Israeli aircraft fired missiles at militants transporting and setting up rockets near the northern town of Beit Hanoun, the Israeli army said. Local residents said one militant was killed and two other gunmen critically wounded. Several civilians were also hurt in the attacks. Israel, which quit the Gaza Strip last year, has been carrying out air and ground operations in the territory since June 28, three days after militants abducted an Israeli soldier in a cross-border raid. More than 50 Palestinians, some 20 of them civilians, have been killed since the offensive began, Gaza residents and medics said.

On it goes, on and on. Israelis killing people all over the place. Palestinians struggling for peace. For dignity. For national integrity. In Beit Hanoun. Who are these Israeli monsters that are so opposed to peace, to dignity, to national integrity, to Beit Hanoun?

A little further down the page, the same Reuters/Al-Mughrabi piece gets to the heart of the matter: what the Israelis are really on about. This comes courtesy of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, a certified terrorist in an expensive suit, who is quoted directly:

The Gaza invasion is only the latest effort to destroy the results of fair and free elections held early this year in the Palestinian territories.

Haniyeh's been very busy. He has an op-ed article of his own in today's Washington Post.

I hope that Americans will give careful and well-informed thought to root causes and historical realities, in which case I think they will question why a supposedly "legitimate" state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject refugee population without ever achieving its goals... In addition to removing our democratically elected government, Israel wants to sow dissent among Palestinians by claiming that there is a serious leadership rivalry among us.

First F-16's. Then Apache helicopter attacks. And now this: Israelis sowing leadership rivalry in the ranks of the Palestinian statespeople. The gall.

In its coverage today, Yediot Aharonot, the Israeli daily, spends less time on what people say, more on what they're doing. Reporting on events in Beit Hanoun under the headline "IDF: We foiled rocket launching attempt", it says Israeli forces this morning identified 3 Qassam missile launchers at a location just east of Beit Hanoun. It promptly attacked them in an operation that combined elements of the Southern Command and of the Israel Air Force. The Israelis say the timing of the strike could not have been finer; carried out moments before the missiles would have been launched. Quoting Palestinian sources, it says a group of gunmen preparing to launch the missiles was hit. The missiles remained in their launchers, unfired, and then they exploded. An hour later, according to the same report, the Air Force spotted and struck a car carrying more Qassams and other weapons in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, just east (meaning closer to Israel) of Beit Hanoun. This resulted, according to Palestinian sources quoted in the report, in one gunman killed and two injured.

Since Operation Summer Rains began some two and a half weeks ago, IDF forces say they have done this sort of thing - finding and striking clusters of terrorists - some 15 times. Reuters, Associated Press, APF and the other major wholesale packagers of news are largely ignoring these strikes, propounding instead a narrative long on deep motivation (both Palestinian and Israeli), short on events or factual analysis.

For us, it's the things being done to people that mean the most. Our analysis comes down to this. A Hamas regime, sitting behind an undisputed border on the ruins (literally) of towns which Israel abandoned less than a year ago and which Israel has zero interest in controlling again, lobs explosive-laden missiles into Israel hour after hour, day after day and says it fully intends to keep it up. Hamas does this because of a perceived injury to its dignity and national integrity - and of course in the name of peace. Israel finds Hamas' civilian-facing weaponry with the help of the IDF's pinpoint military technology and takes them out along with the people who tend to them. It selects military targets and sometimes misses, but always with the aim of neutralizing the lethal weaponry controlled by Hamas and other terror groups.

It ought to be clear where we stand on these issues. And perhaps it's unreasonable to ask distant consumers of news reports to choose sides. But it surely is reasonable to ask those distant consumers of news reports to believe the claims each side makes about itself, or at least to take them seriously. Hamas is saying, and Reuters is helping them say it, that they want to punish Israelis. Let's believe them. For them, this is about a huge chip on the collective shoulder. Or if you prefer (i.e. if you're gullible enough), about resentment that Israel is trying to steal the Palestinians' election result. That's a state of mind that most of us know cannot be easily displaced. How do you resolve it? How do you answer it? How do you even discuss it?

For Israel's part, it's saying we keep catching bad people - terrorists - in the act, and we're ready to do everything we need to do to stop them. If that's not what government has to do, who needs government?