No subject

in Gaza began Dec. 27, in fact Palestinians have been dying from 
bombardments for many weeks. On Nov. 4, when the Israeli-Palestinian 
truce was still in effect but global attention was turned to the U.S. 
elections, Israel launched a "preemptive" airstrike on Gaza, alleging 
intelligence about an imminent operation to capture Israeli soldiers; 
more assaults took place throughout the month.

The truce thus shattered, any incentive by Palestinian leaders to 
enforce the moratorium on rocket fire was gone. Any extension of the 
agreement or improvement of its implementation at that point would have 
required Israel to engage Hamas, to agree to additional trust-building 
measures and negotiation with our movement -- a political impossibility 
for Israel, with its own elections only weeks away.

 Not that the truce had been easy on Palestinians. In the six-month 
period preceding this week's bombardment, one Israeli was killed, while 
dozens of Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli military and police 
actions, and numerous others died for want of medical care.

The war on Gaza should not be mistaken for an Israeli triumph. Rather, 
Israel's failure to make the truce work, and its inevitable resort to 
bloodshed, demonstrate again that it cannot permit a future built on 
Palestinian political self-determination. The truce failed because 
Israel will not open Gaza's borders, because Israel would rather be a 
jailer than a neighbor, and because its intransigent leadership 
forestalls Palestinian destiny and will not make peace with history.

This week's war is not an attack on the Izzidin al-Qassam units -- our 
movement's military wing -- but is simply aggression targeting the 
people, infrastructure and economic life of Gaza, designed to sow terror 
and loose anarchy; it aims to establish new "facts on the ground" --  
that is, heaps of rubble with bodies trapped beneath -- in advance of 
the coming American administration.

Israel claims loudly that it had no other choice this week but to rain 
death on refugees in camps, killing dozens of women and children, while 
Defense Minister Ehud Barak (the once and would-be prime minister) --  
his eye fixed on February elections -- employs mass murder as his 
party's latest vote-getting appeal, an electoral strategy fit to shame 
the most hardened Chicago political operative.

But, of course, options remained available. Israel might have relented 
months ago, for the sake of the truce, in its criminal determination to 
starve Gaza, cutting off much of its fuel and choking all commerce to a 
trickle, blocking relief organizations from delivering food and 
medicine, and consigning Gaza's citizens to famine rations. Only the 
most cynical observer would call this grinding attrition "good faith" 
adherence to the truce. Blockades, after all, are explicitly acts of 
war.

Palestinians everywhere mark the closing of the Bush era with relief; 
nevertheless, skepticism runs high that any justice for our people might 
come from a new president who remained ominously silent in the presence 
of the latest Israeli onslaught, and who has aligned himself so 
thoroughly with Israel's interests, so long in advance of taking power. 
Barack Obama's helicopter ride two years ago above the Holy Land was not 
unusual in the annals of American parliamentarians junketed on "fact 
finding" trips by Israel's lobbyists; yet his fond remarks on what he 
saw -- "houses and streets like ones you might find" in any American 
suburb -- were notable for their silence as to any troubling sights. Did 
he miss the security roads and checkpoints that riddle the West Bank, or 
the construction of the wall, or the illegal settlements? Perhaps his 
helicopter flew too high.

But now, amid Israel's latest attack on our people, as the death toll 
rises in the hundreds, with thousands wounded -- all victims of American 
taxpayers' largesse -- Palestinians wonder how Obama will react to the 
escalating crisis. They demand of the next White House a new paradigm of 
respect and accountability, because when Palestinians see an F-16 with 
the Star of David painted on its tail, they see America.

Palestinians are understandably guarded about the coming administration, 
noting its appointments with trepidation. The soon-to-be secretary of 
State is unforgettable for urging years ago U.S. recognition of 
Jerusalem as Israel's "undivided" capital, while the administration's 
chief of staff bears the stain of his father's service in the banned 
terrorist Irgun paramilitary, a Zionist group responsible for numerous 
atrocities.

Renewed calls today for our movement to "recognize the right of Israel 
to exist," in the face of murderous onslaught, ring as hollow as 
Israel's continuing claims to be acting in "self-defense" as her jets 
bomb civilians. Without debating here the Zionist state's fictive, 
existential "right," which of the many Israels, precisely, would the 
West have us recognize? Is it the Israel that militarily occupies land 
belonging to three of its neighbors, ignoring international law and 
scores of U.N. resolutions over decades? Is it the Israel that illegally 
settles its citizens on other people's land, seizes water sources and 
uproots olive trees? Is it the Israel that in 60 years has never 
acknowledged the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their farms and 
villages as the foundational act of its statehood and denies refugees 
their right to return?

Through bitter experience, when we hear demands for "recognition" of 
Israel as a precondition to dialogue, what we hear is a call for 
acquiescence in its crimes against us, validating the injustices that 
have been wrought in its name.

Our spirit to fight on is the legacy of collective suffering: With tens 
of thousands dead or wounded by decades of the "peace process," you 
cannot find a family in Palestine -- Muslim or Christian, Hamas, Fatah, 
PFLP or Islamic Jihad -- without a son or daughter killed, injured, 
jailed or tortured, or which does not count itself or its kin among the 
millions of refugees living in U.N. camps.

Hamas is not a handful of leaders. Israel may kill all of the current 
leadership in this round of violence, including me, and its organic, 
social infrastructure will not go away. We are, simply put, a homegrown 
national liberation resistance movement, with millions of people who 
support our struggle for freedom and justice.

President-elect Obama spoke courageously in his campaign for a policy of 
open dialogue, absent preconditions, with those deemed inimical to U.S. 
interests, and we were listening. One former U.S. president -- a true 
peacemaker -- has dared to visit with us and hear our side of this 
struggle, while offering us no shortage of criticism. It has been a 
refreshing exchange. Now is the time for the next U.S. president to do 
the same.

No American leader has ever visited a Palestinian refugee camp anywhere, 
much less in Gaza -- a startling fact, considering the central role 
America has played in our people's narrative. None has dared to look our 
refugees in their faces and experience their suffering directly.

In observance of the storied tradition of Arab hospitality to guests, 
and anticipating that day when an American president fulfills his 
promise of change, we extend the invitation now, and we will put the 
kettle on.

Mousa Abu Marzook is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the 
Islamic Resistance Movement

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Thorstad" <binesi at gvtel.com>
To: "Michael Karadjis" <mkaradjis at theplanet.net.au>
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 10:20 PM
Subject: [Marxism] Hamas statement


>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/06/gaza-israel-hamas
>
>  This brutality will never break our will to be free
>
>    For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it
>    repeatedly from the start
>    <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/khalidmishal>
>
>    * Khalid Mish'al <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/khalidmishal>
>    * The Guardian, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian> Tuesday 6
>      January 2009
>
> For 18 months my people in Gaza have been under siege, incarcerated
> inside the world's biggest prison, sealed off from land, air and sea,
> caged and starved, denied even medication for our sick. After the slow
> death policy came the bombardment. In this most densely populated of
> places, nothing has been spared Israel's warplanes, from government
> buildings to homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and markets. More than
> 540 have been killed and thousands permanently maimed. A third are 
> women
> and children. Whole families have been massacred, some while they 
> slept.
>