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The
experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They
are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called
"what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed
space like battery hens."
These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove the
prisoners' usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the
outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood
by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of goods and
produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and hospital supplies;
do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end; prevent, for years, the
entry of relatives, professionals, friends and others, and allow
thousands of people - the sick, heads of families, professionals,
children - to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of the Gaza Strip's
only entry/exit.
Steal hundreds of millions of dollars (customs and tax revenues
collected by Israel that belong to the Palestinian treasury), so as to
force the nonpayment of the already low salaries of most government
employees for months; present the firing of homemade Qassam rockets as a
strategic threat that can only be stopped by harming women, children and
the old; fire on crowded residential neighborhoods from the air and the
ground; destroy orchards, groves and fields.
Dispatch planes to frighten the population with sonic booms; destroy the
new power plant and force the residents of the closed-off Strip to live
without electricity for most of the day for a period of four months,
which will most likely turn into a full year - in other words, a year
without refrigeration, electric fans, television, lights to study and
read by; force them to get by without a regular supply of water, which
is dependent on the electricity supply.
It is the good old Israeli experiment called "put them into a pressure
cooker and see what happens," and this is one of the reasons why this is
not an internal Palestinian matter.
The success of the experiment can be seen in the miasma of desperation
that hangs over the Gaza Strip, and in the clan feuding that erupts
almost daily there, even more than in the battles between Fatah and
Hamas militants. One can only wonder that the feuding is not more
frequent, and that some bonds of internal solidarity have been
maintained, which saves people from hunger.
In contrast to the feuding between clans, Sunday's battles in Gaza and
campaigns of destruction and intimidation, mainly in West Bank cities,
were not the result of a momentary loss of control. They are generally
viewed as battles between two militias, each of which represents one
half of the population, but they were initiated by groups within Fatah
to put a few more nails into the coffin of the elected leadership.
The security forces of the Palestinian Authority - in other words, of
Fatah, or in still other words, the ones that Mahmoud Abbas is in charge
of - are hiding behind the genuine distress and protests of public
employees who have not been receiving regular salaries. And they are
doing so despite the fact that everyone knows that the failure to pay
salaries is not a managerial failure, but is above all due to Israeli
policy. These forces were dispatched in order to sow organized anarchy,
as taught in the school of Yasser Arafat.
And why is this, too, an Israeli matter? Because those who dispatched
these militants have a shared interest with Israel in regressing to a
situation in which the Palestinian leadership collaborates with the
appearance of holding peace talks, while Israel continues its occupation
and the international community sends hush money in the form of salaries
for the Palestinian public sector.
And there is another reason why this is also an internal Israeli issue:
Whatever the outcome, the Palestinian feuding and the risk of civil war
directly affect about 20 percent of Israeli citizens, the Arabs. They
affect the Arabs, and also those segments of the Israeli public that
have not forgotten that Israel will remain the occupying and ruling
force over the Palestinians as long as the goal of establishing a
Palestinian state in all of the territories occupied in 1967 is not
realized.
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