Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb reflected in Two Invasions, One Reasoning, on similarities between Operation Defensive Shield, Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002, and Operation Summer Rains, Israel’s invasion of Gaza that is still raging, and in the past 24 hours alone, has claimed the lives of 25 Palestinians.
“Two very important peace offers,” Rev. Dr. Raheb believes, the first declared 28 March 2002 by the Arab Summit meeting in Beirut, and the second announced 27 June 2006, that Hamas and other Palestinian parties had reached an agreement based on the Prisoner’s Document, is the common denominator.
Israel is burying the peace process underneath the bloody rubble alongside Palestinian and Lebanese casualites.
Hamas and Hizbollah hope to negotiate the release of prisoners held in Israeli detention. The occupation that holds Rev. Dr. Raheb and other Palestinian Christians and Muslims prisoner will never set its captives free so long as the racist state has an option to do otherwise. Israel’s in-your-face attitude grows exponentially with every brutal and humiliating restriction it imposes on the Palestinians as it laughingly claims to be a peacemaker without a partner.
It is now barring Palestinians with foreign passports, refusing to renew three-month visas, closing the West Bank to foreign nationals, and targeting anyone currently in the area with a foreign passport deemed sympathetic to the Palestinians.
“According to sources at the Bir Zeit University (BZU) in the West Bank, Israeli measures are also targeting academics and lecturers working at Palestinian universities, whether foreigners or Palestinians carrying foreign passports. At least two professors and an administration official at BZU have been barred from returning to the West Bank without any explanation.”
Israel has destroyed airports, a television station, bridges, power stations, a university, homes, roads and a civilian shelter, so far. It murders children with impunity. It has destroyed the offices of ministers and arrested dozens of elected officials. It ignores thousands stranded at the Gaza-Egypt terminal at Rafah, even as people perish from heat stroke and lack of medical attention.
The long-term effects of this crime spree, possible due the financial and military coercion applied to detractors by the U.S., and fear of Israel itself, a state that knows and has no limits, are immeasurable.
The great lie is that Israel was ever interested in a peace process at all.