#henry_siegman

Elie Barnavi : « L’attaque du Hamas résulte de la conjonction d’une organisation islamiste fanatique et d’une politique israélienne imbécile »
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/10/08/elie-barnavi-l-attaque-du-hamas-resulte-de-la-conjonction-d-une-organisation

https://img.lemde.fr/2023/10/07/0/0/5760/3840/1440/960/60/0/58cf042_1696683862587-800146.jpg

Surprenant, oui. Car enfin, comment l’armée la plus puissante de la région, l’une des premières au monde nous assure-t-on, comment des services secrets aussi performants, capables de localiser un chef terroriste au troisième étage à gauche dans un immeuble qui en compte trente, ont-ils été incapables de voir venir le coup, puis de le prévenir ?

C’est là qu’intervient le second terme : prévisible. Car ce que nous venons de subir n’est pas un décret du ciel. C’est la résultante d’une conjonction de deux facteurs : une organisation islamiste fanatique dont l’objectif déclaré est la destruction d’Israël ; et une politique israélienne imbécile à laquelle se sont accrochés les gouvernements successifs et que le dernier a portée à l’incandescence.

Au fil des ans, un rapport de force s’est installé entre Israël et le Hamas, où ce dernier a fini par s’assurer une sorte de droit d’initiative. C’est lui qui décidait de la hauteur des flammes, en fonction de l’évolution de ses intérêts. Ainsi, que le Qatar, son financier, ne se montre pas assez généreux à son gré, ou assez rapide, il lui suffisait d’une salve de roquettes pour entraîner Israël dans une spirale d’où les habitants sortaient meurtris. Mais lui obtenait ce qu’il voulait au prix d’un cessez-le-feu nécessairement éphémère.

Pour sortir de ce cercle vicieux, il eût fallu que le gouvernement de Jérusalem imagine une solution : la réhabilitation politique de l’Autorité palestinienne couplée à celle, économique, de la bande de Gaza. Cela supposait toutefois la résurrection du « processus de paix », alors que le découplage des deux tronçons du territoire palestinien était précisément censé éviter cela. Le Hamas, finalement, était bien utile.

Atmosphère de guerre civile latente
Avec l’actuel gouvernement, cette « politique » a atteint son point de perfection. L’unique souci du premier ministre étant de s’extraire du mauvais pas judiciaire où il s’est fourré, il a composé sa coalition d’ultraorthodoxes et de nationaux-religieux messianiques – la version juive du Hamas –, dont l’Etat de droit est le dernier souci, et avec lesquels il a conclu un pacte faustien : à lui la tête des juges de la Cour suprême, à eux la « Judée-Samarie » biblique et le libre accès au mont du Temple, de plus en plus investi par les zélotes. Comme on sait, ce pacte a eu un prix : l’insurrection civile de l’Israël démocratique et libéral, le coup grave porté à la cohésion de l’armée et des services, l’atmosphère de guerre civile latente qui s’est installée dans le pays. Le Hamas, comme le Hezbollah au nord et son patron iranien à l’est, a bien étudié la situation.

Mais les zélotes n’en ont eu cure, le premier ministre non plus. A la question de savoir où était l’armée au moment de l’attaque, la réponse est simple : en Cisjordanie. Détail anecdotique : à la veille de l’attaque, un bataillon entier était affecté à la protection d’une prière publique et d’une « leçon de la Torah » sur la chaussée qui traverse la ville d’Huwara, au sud de Naplouse. Il n’en fallait pas bien davantage pour faire barrage à l’invasion des commandos du Hamas. L’opération du Hamas ne s’intitule-t-elle pas le « Déluge d’Al-Aqsa » ? La prochaine Intifada est une question de temps.

US Jewish leader to Israel: Stop killing Palestinians, end occupation - Palestine Post 24
▻https://ppost24.com/post/473/us-jewish-leader-to-israel-stop-killing-palestinians-end-occupati

https://ppost24.com/thumb/830x506/uploads/images/2019/11/mm7IW.jpeg

In an interview with Democracy Now, Siegman, who is the former head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America, he said that Israel is actually implementing a destruction policy in #Palestine.

Commenting on Hamas charter that calls for destruction of Israeli occupation, Siegman said: “The difference between Hamas and Israel is that Israel is actually implementing [a destruction policy] — actually preventing a Palestinian state which does not exist.”

He added: “Millions of Palestinians live in this subservient position without rights, without security, without hope and without a future.”

#sionisme #Henry_Siegman

#Henry_Siegman, Leading Voice of U.S. Jewry, on #Gaza: “A Slaughter of #Innocents”
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/30/henry_siegman_leading_voice_of_us

“When one thinks that this is what is necessary for Israel to survive, that the Zionist dream is based on the repeated slaughter of innocents on a scale that we’re watching these days on television, that is really a profound, profound crisis — and should be a profound crisis in the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success,”.

“What undermines this principle [” assault on Gaza is necessary because no country would tolerate the rocket fire from militants in Gaza “] is that no country and no people would live the way that Gazans have been made to live. … The question of the morality of Israel’s action depends, in the first instance, on the question, couldn’t Israel be doing something [to prevent] this disaster that is playing out now, in terms of the destruction of human life? Couldn’t they have done something that did not require that cost? And the answer is, sure, they could have ended the #occupation.”

#sionisme #carnage

Israeli Self-Defense Does Not Permit Killing Civilians - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/22/self-defense-or-atrocties-in-gaza/israeli-self-defense-does-not-permit-killing-civilians

#Daniel_Levy apporte d’excellents arguments au débat soulevé par @reka ici : ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/278368

Il me semble même qu’on ne saurait mieux dire,

To be clear, Hamas does carry responsibility for this situation – its targeting of Israeli civilians violates international law. The Hamas charter, its political platform and its military activities all deserve to be condemned. But Israel’s share of the responsibility is far greater. That is a hard conclusion to draw but a necessary one if our understanding of events, our responses and policies are to improve.

There is no military solution but Israel refuses political solutions. Humans do not respond well to humiliation, and will always find ways to resist.

Israeli self-defense does not include the right to (again) kill hundreds of Gazan civilians, to bomb hospitals or even to warn people to evacuate buildings when there is nowhere for them to go. The Israeli government’s attempt to a priori blame Hamas for all losses and thereby absolve itself of responsibility for casualties cannot be accepted.

Take a step back from this latest escalation. Most Gazans are refugees, their roots lie in the war and expulsion of 1948. From 1967 they lived under direct Israeli occupation and under blockade ever since, almost for the past decade.

Israel is not offering Gazans “quiet for quiet.” When Hamas ceases to fire, when it is “quiet,” Israel returns to normality, but Gazans remain cut off from the world, denied the most basic daily freedoms we take for granted.

Step further back to the West Bank, where the Palestinian strategic alternative to Hamas is pursued. The Fatah movement of President Abbas recognizes Israel, pursues peaceful negotiations and security cooperation. That is met with entrenched Israeli control, ever-expanding settlements, and Israeli military incursions into Palestinian cities at will.

So what would you do under such circumstances? Perhaps start by not denying another people’s rights in perpetuity, including the right to self-determination. Reverse the current incentive structure that reciprocates both Fatah demilitarization and Hamas cease-fires with variations on an Israeli brand of deepening occupation.

There is no military solution, but Israel’s government refuses any political solution – neither it nor the governing Likud Party have ever voted to accept a Palestinian state. Hamas’s nonrecognition of Israel is troubling, and so should this be.

Humans do not respond well to humiliation, repression and attempts to deny their most basic dignity. Palestinians are human. Palestinians will find ways to resist — that is human — and sometimes that resistance will be armed. When the Palestinian struggle abandons, rather than uses, international law, as Hamas does, it is right to call that out and to respond proportionately (Israel has gone well beyond proportional), even as channels should be kept open with Hamas.

Of course, Israelis do not respond well to being under fire either, but unlike the Palestinians they have a state, an army, American support and weaponry, and, thankfully, their freedom.

What would you do under such circumstances? Start by treating the Palestinians as humans, as you yourself would wish to be treated.

This isn’t a new Netanyahu
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.577730

This isn’t a new U.S. aurait été au moins aussi bien, qui, par autant de paliers qu’il y a de mandats présidentiels étasuniens, aide l’Etat sioniste à déposséder les Palestiniens.

Yet again the experts have been proven wrong : There’s no newly pragmatic Bibi, so perhaps the time for a UN Security Council-brokered peace has come.

It has been widely reported that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who is starting his U.S. visit today, is likely to accept Secretary of State John Kerry’s framework for a two-state peace agreement between Israel and the PLO, even though several of his coalition partners have threatened to bring down his government were he to do so. Indeed, he has been warned they would leave his government even if he were just to agree to freeze new construction in the settlements while negotiations proceed.

These reports were construed by many as an indication of an important change in Netanyahu’s former bitter opposition to Palestinian statehood, which he always maintained was intended by Palestinians as a platform from which to assault the very existence of the Jewish state. To be sure, Netanyahu famously committed himself to a two-state solution in his Bar Ilan speech of 14 June, 2009. But no one in Israel believed him. Both his critics and his supporters understood it was intended to gain time for the achievement of irreversibility for Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank.

Now, however, it is widely believed that Netanyahu has finally come to understand that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is not sustainable, for it threatens to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.

Unfortunately, this reading of Netanyahu’s intentions is as mistaken as it has always been in the past. Each time he has been elected to office - it is now his third time - the experts assured us we were dealing with a newly pragmatic Bibi, and each time they were proven wrong.

When Netanyahu was elected as prime minister in 1996, I was visiting former president Hosni Mubarak, who told me that messages he had received from Netanyahu through intermediaries reassured him that he had acquired a new and promising pragmatism. He dismissed the doubts I expressed, but the next time we met he declared his deep disappointment with Netanyahu and questioned his honesty. We had that same discussion when Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister in 2009.

To say that Netanyahu is not a visionary leader is an understatement. To be sure, he is a clever tactician who knows how to stay in office. That goal, which he believes is unbreakably linked to retaining his leadership of Israel’s political right wing, trumps every other domestic and international challenge that faces Israel. If reports about his current willingness to accept Kerry’s framework for a negotiated agreement are correct, it is evidence of Netanyahu’s tactical savvy, not of his conversion. For the new pragmatism he is credited with would be nothing more than more of the same—a deception providing additional time for a deepening of the settlement enterprise and for preparing the ground for blaming Palestinians for the failure of Kerry’s effort.

Why so pessimistic a conclusion? Because it is also reported that
Netanyahu has convinced Kerry to present a framework that would not set the 1967 border as the starting point for minor territorial swaps; would not clearly require the capital of the new Palestinian state to be in East Jerusalem; and would not allow Palestinians, rather than Israel’s IDF, to control the new Palestinian state’s borders. The framework would also not prevent the presence of Israeli military and security forces, rather than international forces, to monitor the Palestinian transition to full statehood, and would allow Israel’s continued control of the Jordan Valley.

In other words, the framework would be entirely consistent with Israel’s continued control of Greater Israel.

As to the threat posed by Netanyahu’s acceptance of Kerry’s framework to the survival of Netanyahu’s coalition government, the only party likely to leave it in those circumstances is Habayit Hayehudi headed by Naftali Bennett. It is a party that Netanyahu could easily replace (the Labor Party’s new head, Itzhak Herzog, regularly declares his readiness to join Netanyahu’s government). Nothing would make Netanyahu happier than the departure of Bennett, a man he detests.

The only way Kerry could change the long history of U.S. diplomatic failure in bringing about a two-state accord is if he abandons the notion that the parties themselves are capable of reaching a reasonable two-state agreement if the U.S. provides the proper diplomatic formula. The U.S. should long ago have understood that given the vast discrepancies in the economic, military, and diplomatic capacities of Israel and the Palestinians, if left to their own devices, no such agreement is possible.

The only way the U.S. can persuade Israelis to accept a reasonable two-state accord is by changing Israel’s cost/benefit calculations, which can happen only if the U.S. informs Israel that it is pulling out of a fraudulent peace process and will allow the Security Council to set Israel’s borders and the consequences for noncompliance. This would instantly produce a new Israeli reasonableness that may yet rescue the Jewish and democratic character of the state.

That Israel needs such rescuing is beyond question. For would even one of the fourteen thousand participants in this week’s AIPAC meeting in Washington D.C. accept the democratic claims of a country that condemns its Jewish population to the kind of half-century-long subjugation, disenfranchisement and dispossession that the Palestinian people have been subjected to?

A state of the Jews would be well advised to heed the admonition of its sages in the Ethics of the Fathers: “Do not presume to judge your fellow man until you have stood in his place.”

Have we not stood in that place?

Les New York Times sont bien entendu en première ligne pour promouvoir l’#escroquerie.

#Palestine #États-Unis #Henry_Siegman