Johann Hari

Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or colour or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterised at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful." You can criticise Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists – and they are trying to give it the force of law.

Let's look at how this is being imposed in three parts of the world I have reported from: Israel/Palestine, Ethiopia, and Central America. Everyone now knows the Israeli navy committed a machine-gun massacre on a ship in international waters that was carrying humanitarian aid for the blockaded people of Gaza, who Israeli officials joke they have "put on a diet". The boat was armed with Holocaust survivors, Nobel Peace Laureates, food, medicine, cement to rebuild bombed-out homes, and a couple of metal bars that were grabbed at when armed gunmen illegally boarded the boat. Several of the photos released by the IDF "proving" there were other weapons there have already been exposed as old images that have been on the web for years. Some even still had tags on them identifying them as having been taken in 2003.

But how many people know that the Israeli government is slowly obstructing and silencing the organisations within Israel that are trying to get the country on to a saner and safer path? Israel has some of the most admirable peace campaigners in the world – people who remember the lessons of Jewish history and so document every abuse against human rights their government commits. But they are now facing – as Daniel Sokatch, the director of the pro-peace New Israel Fund, puts it – "a co-ordinated effort to stifle dissent and shut down the human rights community in Israel".

It began a year ago. The Israeli government and military refused to co-operate with the UN's investigation into the war on Gaza, but the Israeli human rights groups did. When it was published, authored by a Jewish judge, it proved to be a meticulous and accurate documentation of what happened: it rightly also condemned Hamas's war crime of indiscriminately firing rockets at Israeli civilians. But rather than face up to what their leaders had done, many Israelis decided to attack the messenger by declaring the report's criticisms were down to the "fifth columnists" who had "collaborated" with the UN.

The feverish protests – depicting the human rights groups' leaders as horned demons or Hamas flunkies – focused on one fact: they receive some of their funding from European governments. The Israeli government announced this was an "unacceptable infringement" on "Israel's autonomy." At a Knesset hearing, one of the human rights groups' foremost critics demanded to know: "What right do they have to criticise the Israeli government?"

A new law is being passed that would strip any group receiving a shekel from other governments of their tax-empt status, and require them by law to describe themselves as paid agents of a foreign government every time they made a public statement. Their leaders have been arrested and detained on several occasions. Some Israeli politicians are calling for further restrictions still. There is, of course, a comical double standard here: the Israeli settler-right is drenched in money from the US, but there is no suggestion of restricting them.

But this argument – why should outsiders be allowed to criticise us? – is being used more and more as a reason for governments and groups to thwart human rights campaigns. In Ethiopia, the government of Meles Zenawi passed a law last year requiring all human rights groups to receive 90 per cent of their funding from within the country itself. It's cleverer than a ban – it sounds less authoritarian – but it has the same effect. As I saw earlier this year, the organisations that were rescuing little girls from having their vaginas hacked out, or being kidnapped and forced into life-long servitude to a "husband" they didn't want, have had to lay off almost all their staff. And there was nobody left to monitor Meles' claim to have won 99.6 per cent of the vote in the presidential election last week.

Half a world away, in Honduras, the same arguments are appearing, with the same motives. A year ago, President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and forced out of the country by a far-right military clique after making the mistake of mildly redistributing the elite's wealth to the poor. Fake elections were then held, boycotted by more than half of the population. Now the members of the peaceful National Front of Popular Resistance are being mysteriously murdered across the country, along with the journalists who try to document these crimes.

They are people like Claudia Brizuela, a left-wing talkshow host, who was shot in the face in front of her two kids, aged two and eight. A Honduran government spokesman laughed when asked about this and suggested the Resistance are killing their own members "to cause trouble." The critics of these new death squads are being described as "agents" of Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, foreign governments with "no right" to talk about Honduras.

These arguments crop up in more unexpected places. Whenever I write articles supporting the rights of Muslim women or African gays or Iranian trade unionists, I get a pepper-spray of critics claiming I am being "imperialist". It's not "your culture". You're not Muslim, or African or Iranian. Stick to your own kind. These arguments usually come from people who consider themselves to be liberal, and would be astonished to discover they are using the same arguments as the Israeli right and the Honduran junta.

But this view exaggerates cultural differences. When delegates from all over the world came together in the wake of the Holocaust to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they thought there would be a massive and irreconcilable row about how to define them. It didn't happen. People everywhere, it turned out, want the same basic rights – and in every culture, there remain thugs who will try to take those rights away.

The differences between cultures are less significant than what we share. No human being wants to be tortured. No human being wants to be starved. No human being wants to be imprisoned without trial or reason. Even in cultures where these acts are normalised by some, the victims still scream and beg for it to stop. In the moment the torture begins, or the cell door slams shut, the cultural difference disappears, and the basic human desire for dignity and safety is all that remains. It is universal. It is never the "culture" of a torture victim to want the torture to continue.

So who are we to talk about Israel or Ethiopia or Honduras? We are humans, like them. Just as people there can – and should – oppose our Government's crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should oppose their governments' crimes against innocent people. It's called solidarity. It's one of the few things that can help the people of Gaza, or the women of Ethiopia, or the dissidents of Honduras now. Instead of sealing ourselves away behind cultural borders, we need more ships carrying hope to suffering strangers.

Are we witnessing an anti-1979 -- a democratic uprising against the Ayatollahs by the grandchildren of the revolution? On the streets of Tehran, many of the massed millions are chanting: "We will die - but count our votes." The religious police are trying to teargas and truncheon this cry into submission, with the possibility of a Tehran Tiananmen hanging in the city's smog. But for today, the secret policemen are in panic, and the Ayatollahs are in retreat.

The Iranian Revolution was, from its first gasps, a marriage between two incompatible urges: theocracy, and democracy. Only now are they two finally unravelling. The Shah - the torturing dictator installed, armed and adored by the C.I.A. - was overthrown by a chasm-wide coalition stretching from communists to Islamists. My parents lived in Iran at that time, and they remember the raw hatred of the Shah that was felt by bearded Mullahs and hijab-free feminists alike. Almost everybody rose up in 1979.

But once the Shah was toppled, one wing of the revolution hijacked it. The Grand Ayatollah Khomeini installed himself as the Supreme Ruler, and started killing off the democratic wing of the revolution. But splinters of democracy remained in the constitution, like shards of glass after an explosion. Alongside the theocrats, there was an elected President and Parliament. For thirty years, the clerics have smothered these institutions, blocking most candidates from running, and - on the rare occasion when a reformist gets through - preventing him from changing much.

But now that system has over-reached by blatantly falsifying the election results in order to keep their preferred candidate in power. The official results show Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh winning by huge margins in the strongholds of the opposition - Tehran and Tabriz. It's as if George Bush in 2000 claimed to have won not only in Palm Beach County but also in Massachusetts and San Francisco. As soon as the polls closed, Ahmadinejadh said he had won by 64 percent - precisely the amount that was later 'counted.' Either he has superhuman powers of prediction, or he had a role in the result.

Inside Iran, shifting power from the clerics to the people would free millions of women. Today, a woman's testimony is worth half a man's in court. A woman can only inherit half as much as her brother. A woman invariably loses her children in a divorce case, and while she can be dumped in a second by her husband, if she wants a split, it can take up to a decade. The late surge to the reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi was driven in large part by women enthused by his wife's call for an end to this vicious misogyny.

But what about outside Iran? This uprising could avert the disastrous war between Israel and Iran that was looking increasingly probable until today. The leaderships of the two non-Arab countries in the Middle East have increasingly resembled each other as they embark on a long, dark tango towards bombing. With Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman on one side and Ayatollah Khameini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the other, both countries are led by paranoid strongmen who are traumatised by their country's histories and scrambled by a political strain of post-traumatic stress disorder.

We can't understand the mindset that is driving both sides - and could be about to change - unless we delve into the past.

The current Iranian leaders' pursuit of enriched uranium is a response to a long history, too often scrubbed from Western textbooks. By the 1950s, Iran had developed a thriving democracy, and its people decided - rationally, correctly - to take control of its own oil and use the profits for its own people. The governments of the West ruled that this was unacceptable: it's our oil under their soil, dummy. So they toppled the democracy and installed a dictator. From 1953 to 1979, this dictator was paid by the Americans, Brits and friends to suppress the Iranian population and keep the petrol pumping. Khameini is one of the many people he jailed and tortured.

When the Iranians rejected "our good friend", we paid for Saddam Hussein to attack their country using chemical weapons. Ahmadinejad saw some of this mass slaughter - death toll: one million - as a young volunteer. That's why they feel nervous when they see US bases encircling them from Turkey to Afghanistan to Iraq. And that's why they want at least nuclear power and perhaps (although there are some doubts, even in the C.I.A.) nuclear weapons. We mustn't offer a second of excuses - but we should understand why they are acting this way.

Meanwhile, Israel - with its own memory of its people being subject to near-annihilation in the gas chambers of Europe - sees something different. When they watch Ahmadinejad inviting a jamboree of Jew-haters to Tehran for a deranged Holocaust denial conference, or hear his massed supporters chant for "death to Israel", they begin to suspect that Ahmadinejad would use these weapons if he had them, and therefore they must bomb to stop him.

There were, thankfully, always a number of flaws with this theory. If Ahmadinejad and Khameini (whose finger would be on the button) are so determined to kill the Jews that they are prepared to kill themselves and everyone they know in a nuclear holocaust, why are the 30,000 Jews living in Iran alive and well? Wouldn't they start there? Hasn't Ahmadinejad's disgusting Holocaust denial been attacked within Iran - by the man who probably just won the election? And if Israel bombed the more than 40 sites where Iran's nuclear programme is spread across the country, wouldn't they just kill many of the people marching against Ahamdinejad today? Wouldn't this create support for a bigger, bolder nuclear programme tomorrow by vindicating the fears that Iran is left vulnerable to attack without the bomb?

Yet it's not hard to see how each side has talked itself into a paranoia they can't back down from. Khameini and Ahmadinejad won't let international inspectors in to see their full programme, much less control it, pointing out that the CIA used information gathered by inspectors in Iraq to know where to bomb. Netanyahu, in turn, has convinced himself that Ahmadinejad is an incarnation of the genocidal anti-Semitism that stalked Europe down the centuries. His rhetoric becomes as crazed as Ahmadinejad's. When asked how he sees Iran, he replied: "Remember Amalek." The Amalekites are the primordial enemies of the Jews in the Torah. In 1 Samuel 15, God says, "Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

Irrational fear and tribal-religious manias are now driving both sides - and until this week, a violent show-down looked ever-more-likely.

But the uprising in Iran offers a radically different route. If the Iranian political system can be made to bend to the will of the Iranian people, we will see there is a peaceful solution that has been waiting for us all along. The most detailed study of Iranian views - carried out by the independent Centre for Public Opinion - found that 94 percent of Iranians want nuclear power, and 52 percent want the nuclear bomb. But there's a crucial clause. More than 70 percent agree that if the US and EU offer a peace package where they guarantee there will be no invasion and instead bring aid and investment, they will let inspectors closely monitor their nuclear power programs and renounce nuclear weapons for good.

This is a way out of the ratchet of fear. It averts a bombing campaign that would spread another bush-fire of mutual loathing through the world, and forestalls the risk of an endless Gazan Missile Crisis at the heart of the Middle East. It's not inconceivable that a deal could be struck with a weakened Ahmadinejad still in power, but it would be far more likely under a reformist with the people at his back.

But how can the Iranian people get there? It's plain what kind of Iran they want to build: some 70 percent of them want every position of power in their political system, including the Supreme Ayatollah, to be directly elected. They don't just want a rerun of this election: they want to expose the entire corrupt gerontocracy to election. The Islamic Republic would be dramatically reformed from within, without the wrenching risks of abolishing the entire system and starting again.

The Mullahs won't go quietly. They may go down fighting. But the demographics ensure Ahmadinejad's side will lose in the long-term. Another 70 percent of Iranians are under the age of thirty, and the vast majority are growing up in the cities, linked via Twitter and Facebook to a world beyond. They have developed huge subcultures of bloggers and rappers expressing their rage at the "morality police" who monitor their behaviour at every turn. While the hardcore Islamist constituency - the old and the rural - shrivels, the reformist constituency is swelling.

There's only so long you can suppress an angry, wired population much younger than you. IPods beat i-slamism in the end. But will they prevail before another Middle Eastern war born of irrational fear begins?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

For months, the opponents of Operation Cast Lead – the assault on Gaza that killed 1,434 Palestinians – have been told we are “dupes for Islamic fundamentalists”, or even anti-Semitic. The defenders of Israel’s war claimed that you could only believe the reports that Israeli troops were scrawling “death to Arabs” on the walls, deliberately firing on civilians and trashing olive groves, or using the chemical weapon white phosphorous that burns to the bone, if you were infected with the old European virus of Jew-hatred.

Now at a meeting in Israel covered by Ha'aretz, the very people who fought that war – loyal and proud Jews, conscious of their best traditions – have confirmed we were simply describing reality. One Israeli Defence Force squad leader says of the orders he was given to target civilians: “I call it murder”. As he put it: “In the end the directive was to go into a house, switch on loudspeakers and tell them ‘you have five minutes to run away and whoever doesn’t will be killed.’” In a densely-crowded civilian city, there are all sorts of people who cannot run away: the elderly, the disabled, the pregnant, the terrified. This soldier was told to kill them.

He is not alone. Anybody who has reported from the Occupied Territories has witnessed a culture of racist contempt for ordinary Palestinian civilians. They are treated as suspects simply for walking around their own home-towns, or trying to sell their own produce. This is not a few bad apples: it is endemic to the nature of occupation, blockade and repeated assault.

Yet there is a swelling movement of young Israelis who are speaking out – and refusing to kill on occupied land. It’s a strikingly brave move in a country that is drifting to the right. Ehud Olmert, Israel’s out-going Prime Minister, has publicly bragged that Israel’s response to attack “will naturally be disproportionate”, just as he boasted about the 2006 war in Lebanon: “Half of Lebanon was destroyed - is that a loss?”

None of this had to happen. On the eve of the attack, Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, said that the way to stop rocket attacks on Israel was to draw Hamas, the elected Palestinian government, into negotiation and compromise – but “Israel, for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas.”

Instead, Israel launched an attack on civilians that her own soldiers are ashamed of. It can only increase hatred – and make the fair division of the land between Palestinians and Israelis recede even further onto the horizon.

Israel is about to make a misjudgment as disastrous -- and deadly -- as the attack on Gaza. In a few days, it looks likely to re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister once again.

This is a man calling for the violent re-occupation of Gaza to "liquidate" its elected government. This is a man who says he will "naturally grow" the West Bank settlements. This is a man who says he will "never" negotiate over Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights, or control of the West Bank water supply. This is a man who says establishing a Palestinian state would leave Israel with "an existential threat and a public relations nightmare reminiscent of 1938 Czechoslovakia." This is a man who Yitzhak Rabin's widow says helped to incite his murder.

The political beneficiaries of Operation Cast Lead have been Israel's hard-right. The opinion poll numbers have surged for Netanyahu's Likud and for the even more extreme Avigdor Lieberman, a Russian immigrant was openly advocates the ethnic cleansing of Arabs. They say the only problem with the 23-day bombing of Gaza -- killing 410 children, and hugely strengthening Hamas -- is that it didn't go far enough.

The world needs to urgently look at these individuals and ask how this came to pass.

Everybody agrees that the key to understanding Netanyahu lies with his father, Benzion. He is a distinguished scholar of medieval history who believes the world is eternally and ineradicably riddled with genocidal anti-Semitism. When he arrived in British Mandate Palestine, he declared that the majority of Jews there were naïve and idealistic. They had to immediately seize the entire Biblical land of Israel -- taking all of the West Bank and stretching right into present-day Jordan. There could be no compromise, ever, with the Arabs, who only understand force. The man he calls his mentor, Abba Ahimeir, described himself proudly as "a fascist."

Today, Benzion's son routinely compares dealing with the Palestinians to dealing with Nazis. He can only understand their anger as a resurfacing of Europe's irrational, genocidal hate. He insists they have no right to a share of the land because they "stole" it -- in the year 636 AD. He writes: "It was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews... twelve hundred years ago."

Accordingly, Netanyahu rubbishes every peace initiative offered by Israel. His reaction to Yitzhak Rabin's decision to sign the mild and moderate Oslo accords with Yassir Arafat reveals the depth of his opposition to compromise. He warmly addressed crowds which chanted "Rabin is a Nazi" and "through blood and fire, Rabin shall expire." He called the Prime Minister "a traitor", shortly before Rabin was murdered by a Jewish fundamentalist who agreed.

In order to justify his opposition to all compromise to the Obama administration, Netanyahu has adopted a neat distraction-idea. He says he wants "economic peace" with the Palestinians, developing their economy, rather the political process. But how can anything develop amidst the rubble, blockade and roadblocks he has in mind? This is a piece of spin to sugar-coat the on-going occupation.

The other person who has surged ahead in the polls -- and looks likely to be Netanyahu's coalition partner -- is Avigdor Liberman, a Russian ex-nightclub bouncer who was once arrested for attacking a boy who he suspected of insulting his son. Lieberman grew up in the Soviet system -- and he retains a Soviet mindset. His party, Yisrael Beytenu (Israel, Our Home) has campaigned claiming that Israel's two million Arab citizens are "a danger to the country", to be dispensed with, in part, by ethnic cleansing. Lieberman wanted to bus thousands of released Palestinian prisoners to the Dead Sea and drown them.

Today, he has moderated his stance and merely wants to "transfer" many hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs -- inevitably by force -- to the scraps of remaining land that will be labeled Palestine after Israel has annexed the major illegal settlement blocks. If your name's not on the list, you're not staying in.

At times, he says his model for how to deal with the Palestinians is Cyprus in the 1970s, where the mixed Turkish and Greek populations were separated out at gunpoint. "The final result was better," he sighs. "Minorities are the biggest problem in the world." He would like to begin these racist expulsions with a simple, swift move: executing Israeli Arab members of the Knesset. Since they have spoken to the democratically elected Palestinian leadership, they are "traitors", Lieberman argues. They should be dealt with "like Hamas."

At other times, Lieberman shifts analogy, and says the correct model for dealing with Gaza and the West Bank should be to copy Vladimir Putin's approach to Chechnya in the 1990s. One third of the civilian population died.

Perhaps even more depressing than the rise of these political thugs is the flat and flat-lining response from the other parties. Both Kadima and Labour militantly defend the blockade and bombing of Gaza, not least because their leaders -- Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak -- led the charge in cabinet. Even Barak has picked up the comparison to Putin and started approvingly quoting the new Russia Tsar. The brave pro-peace parties like Meeretz are shunted far to the margins of the debate.

How did this happen? It is essential to remember that Israelis didn't end up in the Middle East out of a wicked desire to colonise and kill, as some people now gleefully claim. They are there because they were fleeing genocidal Jew-hatred. That doesn't justify a single crime against a single Palestinian -- but if we forget this, and the unimaginably vast trauma that lies behind it, we cannot understand what is happening now.

Over the past few months, I keep returning to an extraordinary essay written by the great Israel novellist Amos Oz in 1982. The Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin had compared the Palestinian leadership to Adolf Hitler, so Oz wrote: "You display an urge to resurrect Hitler from the dead so you may kill him over and over again each day... Like many Jews, I feel sorry I feel sorry I didn't kill Hitler with my bare hands. But there is not, and there never will be, any healing for the open wound. Tens of thousands of dead Arabs will not heal that wound. Because, Mr Begin, Adolf Hitler is dead. He is not hiding in Nabatiyah, in Sidon, or in Beirut. He is dead and burned to ashes."

Israeli society consists, Oz says, of "a bunch of half-hysterical refugees and survivors". The two thousand year trauma of the blood libel, the Inquisition, the pogroms, Auschwitz and Chelmno and the Gulag Archipelago, have produced a distorted vision, where every shriek of pain directed at Israel can sound like the rumble beginning in the massed crowds at Nuremberg.

This means that Israel is missing opportunities for peace. Even much of Hamas -- an Islamist party I passionately oppose -- is amenable to a long-term ceasefire along the 1967 borders. That isn't my opinion; it is the view of Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet. He told the Israeli cabinet before the bombing of Gaza that Hamas would restore the ceasefire if Israel would only end the blockade of the Strip and declare a ceasefire on the West Bank. Instead, they bombed, and the offer died.

The former head of Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, says that Hamas "will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original goals" if only Israel will begin the path of compromise. This would drain support for the really implacable rejectionists like Osama Bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, and make it easier to build the international coalitions needed to hold them back.

Instead, too many Israelis -- imprisoned by their history -- seem determined to choose the opposite path: of Netanyahu and Lieberman and ramming an endless alienating boot onto the throat of the Palestinians. It doesn't have to be like this. We can only say to them with Amos Oz, as urgently as we can: Adolf Hitler is not hiding in Gaza City, or Beit Hanoun, or Hebron. Adolf Hitler is dead.

Israele sta per compiere un errore di giudizio tanto disastroso e mortale quanto l'attacco a Gaza. Sembra che tra pochi giorni Israele potrebbe eleggere ancora una volta Benjamin Netanyahu alla carica di primo ministro.

Questo è un uomo che chiede la violenta rioccupazione di Gaza per "liquidarne" il governo eletto. Questo è un uomo che afferma che farà "crescere naturalmente" gli insediamenti in Cisgiordania. Questo è un uomo che afferma che non negozierà "mai" su Gerusalemme, sulle alture del Golan o sul controllo delle fonti d'acqua della Cisgiordania.

Questo è un uomo che afferma che la creazione di uno Stato palestinese lascerebbe Israele "con una minaccia alla propria esistenza e un incubo delle pubbliche relazioni che ricorda la Cecoslovacchia del 1938". Questo è un uomo che la vedova di Yitzhak Rabin accusa di avere aiutato a creare un clima di odio che ha portato al suo omicidio.

A seguire: "Netanyahu convincerà Obama alla guerra con l'Iran" (Press TV).

Il beneficiario politico dell'"Operazione Piombo Fuso" è stato l'estrema destra israeliana. I sondaggi sono cresciuti per il Likud di Netanyahu e per il persino più estremista Avigdor Lieberman. Essi affermano che l'unico problema dei 23 giorni di bombardamento di Gaza, con l'uccisione di 410 bambini e un enorme rafforzamento dell'appoggio ad Hamas, è il non essere andati abbastanza avanti. Il mondo deve urgentemente guardare a questi individui e chiedersi come si è potuto accettare ciò.

La chiave per comprendere Netanyahu sta in suo padre, Benzion. Egli è un noto studioso di storia medievale che ritiene che il mondo sia eternamente infestato da un antisemitismo genocida impossibile da sradicare. Quando egli arrivò nella Palestina del mandato britannico dichiarò che la maggioranza degli ebrei che erano lì erano ingenui e i idealisti. Essi avrebbero dovuto immediatamente appropriarsi dell'intera terra della Israele biblica, conquistando tutta la Cisgiordania arrivando sino a dentro i territori dell'attuale Giordania. Non ci sarebbe mai potuto essere alcun compromesso con gli arabi, che comprendono solo l'uso della forza. L'uomo che egli definiva suo mentore, Abba Ahimeir, descriveva se stesso con orgoglio come "un fascista".

Oggi il figlio di Benzion paragona comunemente il trattare con i palestinesi al trattare con i nazisti. Egli può solo comprendere la loro rabbia come un risorgere dell'odio irrazionale e assassino dell'Europa. Egli insiste che i palestinesi non hanno diritto di condividere questa terra perché essi l'hanno rubata nel 636 d.C. Coerentemente Netanyahu getta nella spazzatura ogni iniziativa di pace offerta da Israele. La sua reazione alla decisione di Yitzhak Rabin di firmare i moderati e modesti accordi di Oslo con Yasser Arafat rivela la profondità della sua opposizione al compromesso. Egli si rivolse con calore a masse che cantavano "Rabin è un nazista" e " nel sangue e nel fuoco Rabin morirà" ["through blood and fire, Rabin shall expire"]. Egli definì l'ex primo ministro "un traditore" poco prima che Rabin venisse ucciso da un fondamentalista ebreo che la pensava allo stesso modo.

L'altra persona che è cresciuta nei sondaggi - e sembra sarà il partner nella coalizione di Netanyahu - è Avigdor Lieberman, un ex buttafuori di nightclub che afferma che il modello per trattare i palestinesi dovrebbe essere il bombardamento della Cecenia a opera di Vladimir Putin nel 1990 che causò la morte di un terzo dell'intera popolazione. Egli vuole che i partiti politici votati dagli arabi israeliani siano messi fuorilegge, affermando seccamente che dovrebbero essere trattati "come Hamas".

Forse ancora più deprimente della loro crescita è la piatta e accondiscendente risposta degli altri partiti. Tanto Kadima che il partito Laburista hanno aggressivamente difeso l'embargo e il bombardamento di Gaza, non da ultimo perché i loro leader, Tzipi Livni e Ehud Barak, guidavano il governo. Persino Barak ha ripreso il paragone a Putin e ha iniziato a citare con approvazione il nuovo zar di Russia. Coraggiosi partiti in favore della pace come Meeretz sono relegati ai margini del dibattito.

Come è potuto accadere ciò? E' essenziale ricordare che gli israeliani non sono finiti in Medioriente per un malvagio desiderio di colonizzare e uccidere, come affermano allegramente alcuni. Essi sono lì perché scappavano da un antisemitismo genocida. Ciò non giustifica un solo crimine commesso contro un singolo palestinese, ma se dimentichiamo questo trauma inimmaginabile che vi è dietro, non possiamo comprendere ciò che sta accadendo ora.

Negli scorsi mesi sono ritornato spesso a uno straordinario articolo scritto dal grande romanziere israeliano Amos Oz nel 1982. Il primo ministro del Likud Menachem Begin aveva paragonato la leadership palestinese ad Adolf Hitler, perciò Oz scrisse: " mostrate il bisogno di far risorgere Hitler dei morti in modo da poterlo uccidere più e più volte ogni giorno... Come molti ebrei mi dispiace non aver potuto uccidere Hitler con le mie mani. Ma non c'è, e non ci sarà mai, una cura per questa ferita aperta. Decine di migliaia di arabi morti non cureranno tale ferita. Perché, signor Begin, Adolf Hitler è morto. Non si nasconde a Nabatiyah, a Sidone o a Beirut. È morto e in cenere".

La società israeliana consiste, afferma Oz, di "un pugno di rifugiati e sopravvissuti mezzo isterici". Il trauma bimillenario della calunnia del sangue, dell'inquisizione, dei pogrom, di Auschwitz, Chelmno e dell'arcipelago Gulag hanno prodotto una visione distorta in cui ogni grido di dolore diretto verso Israele può suonare come il tuono che ebbe inizio nelle folle ammassate a Norimberga.

Ciò significa che Israele sta perdendo delle opportunità per la pace. Persino Hamas, un partito islamista a cui mi oppongo fortemente, è aperto ad un lungo cessate il fuoco sui confini del 1967. Questa non è la mia opinione; è il parere di Yuval Diskin, l'attuale capo del servizio di sicurezza israeliano Shin Bet. Egli ha detto al governo israeliano, prima del bombardamento di Gaza, che Hamas avrebbe ristabilito il cessate il fuoco se Israele avesse solo posto fine all'embargo alla Striscia e dichiarato un cessate il fuoco in Cisgiordania. Invece hanno bombardato, e l'offerta è morta.

L'ex capo del Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, ha detto che Hamas "dovrà adottare un percorso che non potrebbe portare lontano dai loro scopi originali" se solo Israele inizierà il cammino del compromesso. Ciò toglierebbe appoggio ai membri del fronte del rifiuto, come Osama Bin Laden e Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, e renderebbe più facile costruire coalizioni internazionali.

Invece troppi israeliani, imprigionati dalla loro storia, sembrano determinati a scegliere il cammino opposto: quello di Netanyahu e Lieberman e dello spingere uno stivale sempre più alienante sulla gola dei palestinesi. Non dovrebbe essere così. Possiamo solo dire loro, con Amos Oz, con quanta più fretta possiamo: Adolf Hitler non si sta nascondendo a Gaza city o a Beit Hanoun, o Hebron. Adolf Hitler è morto.

Johann Hari è un giornalista del London Independent. Egli ha scritto dall'Iraq, da Israele-Palestina, Congo, Repubblica Centroafricana, Venezuela, Perù e Stati Uniti, i suoi pezzi giornalistici sono apparsi in pubblicazioni di tutto il mondo.

Le monde n’est seulement le spectateur d’un crime commis par le gouvernement israélien dans la bande de Gaza. Nous le voyons également se nuire à lui-même. Aujourd’hui, demain, et chaque jour jusqu’à ce que cesse cette violence punitive, les jeunes de la bande de Gaza seront encore plus emplis de haine, et plus déterminés à combattre, avec des pierres, des attentats suicides ou des roquettes. Les dirigeants israéliens se sont convaincus que plus on frappe durement les Palestiniens, plus doux ils deviendront. Mais lorsque tout ceci sera terminé, la rage contre les Israéliens se sera endurcie, et les compromis devront encore attendre, abandonnés en déshérence sur les bas côtés de la route de l’histoire.

Pour comprendre à quel point il est effrayant de vivre à Gaza aujourd’hui, il faut avoir séjourné sur cette petite parcelle de terre bétonnée le long de la Méditerranée et y avoir ressenti la claustrophobie. La bande de Gaza est plus petite que l’île de Wight, mais elle est surpeuplée, avec 1,5 millions de personnes qui ne peuvent jamais la quitter. Ils vivent leur vie les uns sur les autres, sans emploi et affamés, dans de grands immeubles délabrés. Des étages supérieurs, on peut souvent voir les frontières de leur monde : la Méditerranée, Israël et les fils de fer barbelé. Quand les bombes commencent à tomber - comme c’est le cas maintenant, avec plus de violence meurtrière qu’à aucun autre moment depuis 1967 - il n’y a nulle part où se cacher.

Une autre guerre va maintenant débuter. Elle portera sur l’histoire de cette guerre. Le gouvernement israélien déclare : « Nous nous sommes retirés de la bande de Gaza en 2005 et, en retour, nous avons eu le Hamas et une pluie de roquettes Qassam sur nos villes. Seize civils ont été assassinés. Combien d’autres vies devons-nous sacrifier ? » Il s’agit d’un récit plausible, et il comporte des fragments de vérité, mais il est aussi rempli de trous. Si on veut comprendre la réalité et mettre réellement un terme aux tirs de roquettes, il est nécessaire de revenir en arrière de quelques années et d’analyser la préparation de cette guerre sérénité.

Le gouvernement israélien s’est en effet retiré de la bande de Gaza en 2005 - afin d’être en mesure d’intensifier le contrôle de la Cisjordanie. Dov Weisglass, le principal conseiller d’Ariel Sharon avait été sans équivoque à ce sujet, expliquant : « Le désengagement, c’est du formol, en réalité. Il fournit la quantité de formol qui est nécessaire pour qu’il n’y ait pas de processus politique avec les Palestiniens ... l’ensemble de ce paquet que l’on appelle l’Etat palestinien a été retiré de notre ordre du jour indéfiniment. » [1]

Les Palestiniens ordinaires ont été horrifiés par ces paroles, et par la corruption de leurs dirigeants du Fatah, de sorte qu’ils ont voté pour le Hamas. Cela n’aurait certainement pas été mon choix - un parti islamiste est contraire à toutes mes convictions - mais nous devons être honnêtes. Le scrutin était libre et démocratique, et il n’exprimait pas un rejet de la solution des deux États. Le sondage le plus détaillé sur l’opinion des Palestiniens, réalisé par l’Université du Maryland, a révélé que 72% veulent une solution à deux États sur les frontières de 1967, alors que moins de 20% veulent récupérer l’ensemble de la Palestine historique. Ce qui explique que, en partie pour réponse à cette attente, le Hamas ait offert à Israël une longue, longue trêve et une acceptation de facto des deux Etats, à la seule condition qu’Israël retourne dans ses frontières légales.

Plutôt que de saisir cette occasion et de tester la sincérité du Hamas, le gouvernement israélien a réagi en punissant toute la population civile. Il a annoncé un blocus de la bande de Gaza afin de faire « pression » sur son peuple pour qu’il infirme le résultat du processus démocratique. Les Israéliens ont encerclé la bande de Gaza et refusé de laisser quiconque ou quoi que ce soit en sortir. Ils ont laissé entré un peu de nourriture, de carburant et de médicaments - mais pas suffisamment pour survivre. M. Weisglass avait alors déclaré que les habitants de Gaza avaient été « mis au régime ». Selon Oxfam, seuls 137 camions de vivres ont été autorisés à pénétrer dans la bande de Gaza le mois dernier pour nourrir 1,5 millions de personnes. Les Nations Unies indiquent que la pauvreté y a atteint un « niveau sans précédent ». Lors de mon dernier séjour dans la bande de Gaza assiégée, j’ai vu les hôpitaux refuser des malades parce qu’ils étaient à court de médicament et de matériel. J’ai rencontré des enfants souffrant de la faim chancelant dans les rues, fouillant les déchets à la recherche de nourriture.

C’est dans ce contexte - celui d’un châtiment collectif visant à renverser une démocratie - que certaines forces au sein de la bande de Gaza ont fait quelque chose d’immoral : ils ont tiré des roquettes Qassam à l’aveuglette sur les villes israéliennes. Ces roquettes ont tué 16 citoyens israéliens. C’est ignoble : prendre pour cible des civils est toujours un meurtre. Mais il a de l’hypocrisie de la part du gouvernement israélien quand il affirme se préoccuper de la sécurité des civils alors qu’il a pratiqué une politique consistant à terroriser des civils.

L’Amérique et les gouvernements européens réagissent avec une partialité qui ne tient pas compte de ces réalités. Ils déclarent qu’on ne peut s’attendre à voir Israël négocier sous les tire de roquettes, mais ils exigent que les Palestiniens le fassent alors que la bande de Gaza est en état de siège et que se poursuit l’occupation militaire violente de la Cisjordanie.

Avant que cela ne soit définitivement oublié, il convient de rappeler que la semaine dernière, le Hamas avait offert un cessez-le-feu en échange d’un compromis simple et réalisable. N’utilisons pas mes mots pour le dire. Selon la presse israélienne, Yuval Diskin, l’actuel chef du service de sécurité israélien Shin Bet, « a déclaré au Conseil des Ministres israélien [le 23 Décembre] que le Hamas est intéressé dans la poursuite de la trêve, mais veut améliorer ses conditions. » M. Diskin a expliqué que le Hamas demandait deux choses : la fin du blocus, et un cessez-le-feu israélien en Cisjordanie. Le Conseil des Ministres - saisi par la fièvre électorale et désireux d’apparaître intransigeant - a rejeté ces termes.

Le cœur du problème a été énoncé sans ambages par Ephraim Halevy, l’ancien chef du Mossad. Il a déclaré que bien que des militants du Hamas - comme nombre d’israéliens d’extrême-droite - rêvent de chasser leurs adversaires, « ils ont reconnu que cet objectif idéologique n’est pas atteignable et ne le sera pas dans un avenir prévisible. » Au lieu de cela, « ils sont prêts et disposés à envisager la création d’un Etat palestinien dans les frontières provisoires de 1967. » Ils sont conscients que cela signifie qu’ils « vont devoir adopter une voie qui pourrait les amener loin de leurs objectifs initiaux » - et vers une paix à long terme basée sur le compromis.

Le front du refus [2] des deux camps - de l’iranien Mahmoud Ahmadinejad d’Iran à l’israélien Bibi Netanyahou - serait alors marginalisés. C’est la seule voie qui peut encore conduire à la paix mais c’est celle que le gouvernement israélien se refuse à emprunter. M. Halevy, explique : « Israël, pour des raisons qui lui sont propres, n’a pas voulu transformer le cessez-le-feu en l’amorce d’un processus diplomatique avec le Hamas. »

Pourquoi Israël agit-il de cette façon ? Le gouvernement israélien veut la paix, mais seulement une paix imposée selon ses propres termes, fondée sur l’acceptation de la défaite par les Palestiniens. Cela signifie que les Israéliens peuvent conserver des portions de la Cisjordanie sur « leur » côté du mur. Cela veut dire qu’ils gardent les plus grandes des colonies de peuplement et le contrôle de l’approvisionnement en eau. Et cela signifie une Palestine divisée, avec la responsabilité sur Gaza confiée à l’Egypte, et une Cisjordanie séparée et isolée. Les négociations constituent une menace pour ce projet : elles nécessiteraient pour Israël de renoncer à plus que ce qu’il ne veut accorder. Mais une paix imposée ne sera pas une paix : elle ne mettra pas fin aux tirs de roquettes ou à la rage des palestiniens. Pour obtenir une sécurité réelle, Israël devra engager le dialogue et trouver un compromis avec le peuple qu’il soumet au blocus et bombarde aujourd’hui.

Les flammes qui brûlent Gaza pourraient être éteintes si l’on écoutait les mots de l’écrivain israélien Larry Derfner : « la guerre menée par Israël contre la bande de Gaza doit être la plus disproportionnée sur terre ... Si le but est d’y mettre fin, ou au moins de commencer à y mettre fin, la balle n’est pas dans le camp du Hamas - elle est dans le nôtre. »

The world isn’t just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment-beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide-vests or rockets. Israel’s leaders have convinced themselves the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.

To understand how frightening it is to be a Gazan this morning, you need to have stood in that small slab of concrete by the Mediterranean and smelled the claustrophobia. The Gaza Strip is smaller than the Isle of Wight, but it is crammed with 1.5 million people who can never leave. They live out their lives on top of each other in vast sagging tower blocks, jobless and hungry. From the top floor, you can often see the borders of their world: the Mediterranean Sea, and the Israeli barbed wire. When bombs begin to fall – as are do now with more deadly force than on any day since 1967 – there is nowhere to hide.

There will now be a war over the story of this war. The Israeli government says: we withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and in return we got Hamas and Qassam rockets being rained on our cities. Some 16 civilians have been murdered. How many more are we supposed to sacrifice? It is a plausible narrative, and there are shards of truth in it – but it is also filled with holes. If we want to understand the reality and really stop the rockets, we need to rewind a few years, and view the runway to this war dispassionately.

The Israeli government did indeed withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – in order to be able to intensify control of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon’s senior advisor Dov Weisglass was unequivocal about this, explaining: “The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians… Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.”

Ordinary Palestinians were horrified by this, and by the fetid corruption of their own Fatah leaders – so they voted for Hamas. It certainly wouldn’t have been my choice – an Islamist party is antithetical to all my convictions – but we have to be honest. It was a free and democratic election, and it was not a rejection of a two-state solution. The most detailed polling of Palestinians, by the University of Maryland, found that 72 percent want a two-state solution on the 1967 borders, while fewer than 20 percent want to reclaim the whole of historic Palestine. So, partly in response to this pressure, Hamas offered Israel a long ceasefire and a de facto acceptance of two states, if only Israel would return to its legal borders.

Rather than seize this opportunity and test their sincerity, the Israeli government reacted by punishing the entire civilian population. They announced they were blockading the Gaza Strip in order to “pressure” its people to reverse the democratic process. They surrounded the Strip and refused to let anyone or anything out. They let in a small trickle of food, fuel and medicine – but not enough for survival.

Weisglass quipped the Gazans were being “put on a diet”. According to Oxfam, this November only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza this November – to feed 1.5 million people. The UN says poverty has reached an “unprecedented level.” When I was last in besieged Gaza, I saw hospitals turning away the sick because their machinery and medicine was running out. I met hungry children stumbling around the streets, scavenging for food.

It was in this context – under collective punishment designed to topple a democracy – that some forces within Gaza did something immoral: they fired Qassam rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities. These rockets have killed 16 ordinary Israeli citizens. This is abhorrent: targeting civilians is always murder. But it is hypocritical for the Israeli government to claim now to speak out for the safety of civilians when they have been terrorising civilians as a matter of state policy.

European and American governments are responding with a lop-sidedness that ignores these realities. They say that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate under rocket-fire, but they demand the Palestinians do so under siege in Gaza and violent military occupation in the West Bank.

Before it falls down the memory hole, we should remember that last week, Hamas offered a ceasefire in return for basic and achievable compromises. Don’t take my word for it. According to the Israeli press, Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security services Shin Bet, “told the Israeli cabinet [on the 23rd] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms.” Diskin explained Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. The cabinet – high with election-fever, and eager to appear tough – rejected these terms.

The core of the situation has been starkly laid out by Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad. He says that while Hamas – like much of the Israeli right – dreams of driving their opponents away, “they have recognized this ideological goal is not attainable, and will not be in the foreseeable future.” Instead, “they are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967.” They are aware this means they “will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original goals” – and towards a long-term peace based on compromise. The rejectionists on both sides – from Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh to Bibi Netanyahu – would then be marginalised. It is the only path that could yet end in peace – but it is the Israeli government who refused to choose it. Halevy explains: “Israel, for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas.”

Why would Israel act this way? The Israeli government wants peace, but only one imposed on its own terms, based on the acceptance of defeat by the Palestinians. It means they can keep the slabs of the West Bank on ‘their’ side of the wall. It means they keep the largest settlements, and control of the water supply. And it means a divided Palestine, with responsibility for Gaza hived off to Egypt, and the broken-up West Bank standing alone. Negotiations threaten this vision: they would require Israel to give up more than it wants to. But an imposed peace will be no peace at all: it will not stop the rockets or the rage. For real safety, Israel will have to talk to the people it is blockading and bombing today – and compromise with them.

The sound of Gaza burning should be drowned out by the words of the Israeli writer Larry Derfner. He says: “Israel’s war with Gaza has to be the most one-sided on earth…. If the point is to end it, or at least begin to end it, the ball is not in Hamas’ court – it’s in ours.”

Esta manhã (29), amanhã de manhã e todas as manhãs, até que termine essa matança de palestinos, o ódio a Israel só aumentará, cada dia haverá mais ódio e mais os palestinos lutarão, com pedras, com coletes explosivos, com foguetes, com palavras. Os líderes israelenses crêem que quanto mais massacrem os palestinos, mais os amansarão. Já se foram esses tempos de medo, entre os palestinos. O ódio a Israel, hoje, lá, é duro, impenetrável. E os sentimentos mais primitivos, mais basais, de quem só aprendeu que viver é sobreviver em guerra, lá estarão esperando sempre, à beira da história, brutais.

Para entender o quanto é terrível ser palestino na manhã de hoje, é preciso ter estado lá, numa estreita faixa de terra à beira do Mediterrâneo, e ter experimentado na pele aquela claustrofobia quase insuportável. A Faixa de Gaza é menor que a ilha Wight. Mas lá vivem 1,5 milhão de pessoas que jamais podem sair de lá. Vivem amontoados uns sobre os outros, sem trabalho e com fome, em imensos prédios de quartos muito pequenos. Da laje superior dos prédios, vêem-se todos os limites daquele mundo: o Mediterrâneo e a cerca de arame farpado dos israelenses. Quando começam os bombardeios – como hoje, mais violentos do que nunca, desde 1967 –, não há onde se abrigar.

Começa agora outra guerra, em que se disputa o significado desses ataques de Israel, em 2008. O governo israelense diz: "Nos retiramos de Gaza em 2005 e, em troca, ganhamos o Hamás e os foguetes Qassam que destroem nossas cidades. 16 civis israelenses morreram. Quantos mais serão sacrificados?" É uma narrativa plausível, com vestígios de verdade. Mas com muitos buracos. Para entender o que realmente está acontecendo e conseguir que os foguetes parem, é preciso voltar um pouco, alguns anos, e analisar melhor os prolegômenos da guerra de hoje.

É verdade que Israel retirou-se da Faixa de Gaza em 2005 – para intensificar o controle sobre a Cisjordânia. O principal conselheiro de Ariel Sharon, Dov Weisglass, disse claramente: "A retirada [de Gaza] é o anestésico. Anestesiará a situação, o suficiente para que não haja processo político ou discussão política com os palestinos. Apagamos da agenda, por longo tempo, toda e qualquer discussão sobre o pacote chamado "Estado da Palestina"."

Os palestinenses comuns ficaram horrorizados. Mais horrorizados ainda, pela fétida corrupção dos líderes de sua própria Fatah. E então votaram no Hamás. Eu não votaria no Hamás – jamais votaria em partido político com fundamento religioso –, mas... não sejamos hipócritas. As eleições foram democráticas, livres e perfeitas e não implicaram rejeição à Solução dos Dois Estados. A melhor pesquisa que se conhece, sobre tendências de opinião entre os palestinenses, feita pela University of Maryland, constatou que 72% dos palestinenses são favoráveis à Solução dos Dois Estados, conforme às fronteiras de 1967; e apenas 20% votariam pelo fim de Israel. Então, parcialmente por efeito dessa pressão popular, o Hamás ofereceu a Israel um longo cessar-fogo e aceitou, na prática, a Solução dos Dois Estados. Bastaria que Israel cumprisse o seu dever legal de manter-se dentro de suas fronteiras legais.

Em vez de colher essa oportunidade e de testar as reais intenções do Hamás, o governo de Israel reagiu brutalmente – e puniu, com genocídio, toda a população civil de Gaza. Anunciou o bloqueio da Faixa de Gaza, para "pressionar" os palestinos a revogar o resultado das urnas. Sitiaram os palestinenses dentro da Faixa de Gaza. Vedaram completamente qualquer possibilidade de contato com o mundo exterior. Racionaram comida, combustível, remédios – para impedir que sobrevivessem. Nas palavras de Weisglass, os palestinenses de Gaza estavam sendo postos "em dieta". A Oxfam denunciou que só foram autorizados a entrar em Gaza 137 caminhões com alimentos, em dezembro. Para alimentar 1,5 milhão de pessoas. A ONU e já declarou repetidas vezes, que a miséria em Gaza já alcançou "níveis sem precedentes".

Na última vez que estive em Gaza, já sob sítio dos israelenses, vi hospitais mandando doentes de volta para casa, porque não havia nem remédios nem aparelhos para atendê-los. Vi crianças revirando o lixo, pelas ruas, à procura de comida.

Nesse contexto – sob sentença de morte coletiva, sob ataque genocida, urdido para gerar efeitos de golpe de Estado e derrubar um governo democraticamente eleito –, então, alguns grupos dentro de Gaza adotaram solução imoral: puseram-se a bombardear, com foguetes Qassam, de quintal, indiscriminadamente, cidades israelenses. Nesses ataques, mataram 16 cidadãos israelenses. É crime. Matar sempre é crime. Mas é hipocrisia que, hoje, o governo israelense fale de defender a segurança de seus cidadãos, depois de ter passado anos assassinando civis. Depois de ter feito, do assassinato, a única política de Estado, em Israel.

Os governos dos EUA e alguns governos europeus têm fingido que não sabem disso. Dizem que não se pode exigir que Israel negocie com o Hamás, enquanto o Hamás não suspender os ataques com foguetes Qassam. Mas exigem que a Palestina negocie, apesar do sítio, apesar do bloqueio, apesar da brutal ocupação militar na Cisjordânia.

Antes de que tudo se apague no abismo dos esquecimentos construídos, lembremos que, semana passada, o Hamás propôs um cessar-fogo, em troca de alguns compromissos básicos e aceitáveis para Israel. Não precisam acreditar só em mim.

A imprensa em Israel noticiou que Yuval Diskin, atual chefe do Shin Bet, serviço interno de segurança de Israel, "informou ao governo israelense [dia 23/12] que o Hamás está interessado em manter a trégua, com apenas pequenas modificações nos termos do acordo." Diskin explicou que o Hamás desejava duas coisas: o fim do bloqueio de Gaza e que Israel parasse com os ataques na Cisjordânia. O gabinete – acometido de febre eleitoral e interessado em mostrar-se 'durão' aos eleitores – rejeitou tudo.

O núcleo duro da situação foi bem claramente exposto por Ephraim Halevy, ex-chefe do Mossad. Diz que, embora os militantes do Hamás – como boa parte da direita israelense – sonhem com varrer do mundo os adversários políticos, "eles já perceberam que esse objetivo ideológico não é viável e não será viável no futuro próximo." Então, "estão prontos a aceitar um Estado da Palestina, nos limites das fronteiras de 1967." Os militantes do Hamás sabem que isso significa "que terão de adotar um caminho que provavelmente os afastará de seus objetivos iniciais" – e levará a uma paz estável, sob acordo difícil de romper por qualquer dos dois lados.

Os 'do contra", dos dois lados – de Máhmude Ahmadinejad do Iran, a Bibi Netanyahu, de Israel – ficariam marginalizados. É a única via possível que ainda pode levar a paz. E é a única via que não interessa ao atual governo de Israel. Halevy explica bem: "Por razões que só interessam ao atual governo de Israel, não interessaria a Israel aceitar o cessar-fogo e convertê-lo em início de um processo de negociação diplomática com o Hamás."

Por quê? O governo de Israel quer a paz, mas só se for a paz imposta por Israel, nas condições que Israel determine e que sempre implicarão que os palestinos sejam definidos como derrotados. Assim, Israel poderá manter, do "seu" lado do muro, os cadeados que fecham a Cisjordânia. Assim, Israel poderá controlar as maiores colônias e o suprimento de água. Assim, a Palestina será dividida (e caberá ao Egito a responsabilidade sobre Gaza) e a Cisjordânia, com a espinha dorsal partida, ficará isolada. Qualquer tipo de negociação cria riscos para o sucesso desse 'plano': Israel sempre terá de ceder mais do que deseja ceder.

Ao mesmo tempo, qualquer paz imposta deixará de ser confiável: e continuarão a chover sobre Israel os foguetes da fome que gera ódio.

Se quer obter real segurança para os israelenses, o governo de Israel, mais dia menos dia, será obrigado a negociar com os palestinos que hoje Israel está matando; terá de obter deles alguma solidariedade e alguma compreensão. E Israel dependerá disso, para continuar existindo.

O som dos incêndios de Gaza pode ser silenciado pelas palavras de um escritor israelense, Larry Derfner. Diz ele: "A guerra entre Israel e Gaza é guerra inventada por Israel. A decisão de pôr fim à guerra não cabe ao Hamás. Cabe a nós. Cabe a Israel."

This is the story of two debates that have been unfolding in rival nations, in rival tongues, on a skinny patch of land in the Levant. In Israel, Kadima – the main governing party – has been deciding who should be its new leader. In Palestine, the population has been mooting a dramatic shift in their struggle for liberation. Soon, these debates are destined to collide – in either blood or peace.

The Israeli debate had an air of willed evasion. The military's blockade of Gaza – reducing it to rubble just a short drive from hi-tech Tel Aviv – was barely discussed. The candidates seemed to be carefully avoiding taking a position on anything. One Israeli newspaper noted: "Ask Tzipi Livni what time it is, and she will reply, after carefully examining Israel's position in relation to the global time issue and the international date line, she has a very definite position, but isn't willing to specify it to the media."

It's a sign of how desensitised Israel has become to the violence committed in its name that the potential indictment for war crimes of Livni's main rival, Shaul Mofaz, was barely an issue. It is alleged that when he was the military chief of staff in 2001, he ordered his troops to fulfil a "daily quota" of killing 70 Palestinians a day, and there are calls for him to face prosecution. He came within 431 votes of winning the election.

From the wispy clouds of this contest, what has emerged? In theory, the winner Livni should be in a strong position to understand nationalist "terrorists" who have planted bombs on buses and in cafés – because she was raised by them. Her father was the Military Director of the Irgun, the underground Jewish militia that spent the 1930s and 40s targeting the British occupying forces and Arab civilians who were trying to prevent the creation of the state of Israel. Livni was brought up to revere their tales of blowing up marketplaces, cafés and hotels; she proudly defends them to this day.

How would Livni's parents have responded to mass punishment – blockades, checkpoints, bullets? Would they shrug and surrender? The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, wrote that every British attempt to "break our backs... only made us stronger and more determined". The same is happening with Palestinian nationalists today. Stripped of a state, they are fighting for one – and every Israeli attack makes them more radical and enraged.

But does Livni see the parallel? In the abstract, she advocates a two-state solution – but in Israel she has been dubbed "Ms. Not-Right-Now" because she always says she believes in compromising for peace but "not right now." Her husband said she decided to become a politician because of her "scathing" disapproval of the Oslo accords, signed exactly 15 years ago. She reiterated this during the campaign.

But Oslo was rigged in Israel's favour: while it lasted, the number of Jewish fundamentalist settlers on Palestinian land nearly doubled, and Palestinian movement was harshly curtailed. It is a myth that the Palestinians were offered a real two-state solution and rejected it. Even Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's Foreign Minister at the time, says: "If I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well." If even this was too much for Livni, what practical peace can she achieve? This is the debate too many Israelis dodged this summer; they chose instead to block their ears, and ascribe the thud of rockets hitting their outskirts to raw evil.

This is where the parallel Palestinian debate needs to be heard above the Separation Wall. For decades, the demands of the Palestinian leadership – and the Israeli peace camp – have focused on the division of the land between Israeli and Palestinian states. There is still in principle a slender majority supporting this on both sides. But after 15 years of stillborn promises, that vision is rotting. Unless there is a swift shift, the two-state vision will be supplanted – by a vision of a "binational" one-state solution.

Several leading Palestinians – including the late Edward Said, the former Prime Minister Ahmed Queri, and Sari Nusseibeh – have begun to outline this idea. In one of those strange whirls on the roundabout of history, they are actually reviving an old idea pioneered by Zionist left-wingers. Back in the 1920s, a small number of Jewish socialists and liberals like Martin Buber tried to negotiate one big shared state with the Palestinians. Although they found some Palestinian interlocutors, these early binationalists were slapped down by both communities. Today their idea is being dug out of its ditch of despair.

The Palestinians would stop asking for a free enclave of their own, and start demanding full legal equality in one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Equipped with this demand, they would no longer appear to the world as a fragmented minority, but – all added together – as a majority in Israel/Palestine ruled over by a racially-defined minority. It would look even more like South Africa Redux. Israel would then be incapable of marshalling international coalitions against possible threats from Iran or elsewhere: it would be alone, and anathemised.

The Middle East conflict would shift from being a tricky-but-soluble crisis to an insoluble civil war. Michael Neumann – the author of The Case Against Israel – warns: "One-staters apparently believe that Israel will give up the reason for its existence and at the same time expose itself not to the risk but to the certainty of being 'swamped by Arabs'. This in turn would indicate a willingness to accede to anything an 'Arab' majority might enact. Can anyone seriously imagine this? Will millions of Jews just leave if the majority says it should? Will they agree to crushing compensation payments?" No. They will fight – and this time, there will be no space for compromise between the competing visions.

The window of opportunity for a two-state peace is closing. Before it jams shut, the Israelis need to hear the plea coming through the checkpoints. Divide the land. Divide it now. Divide it properly. Or we will all end up battling forever – over nothing but soil soaked in blood and cordite.

Aux États-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne, on assiste à une campagne de diffamation contre quiconque essaie de décrire la difficile situation du peuple palestinien. Il s¹agit d¹une tentative d¹intimidation et de censure qui, malheureusement, fonctionne assez bien. Les porte-paroles autoproclamés d¹Israël n¹ont aucun scrupule à attaquer comme judéophobes des Juifs progressistes, des rabbins et même des survivants de la Shoah.

Mon propre cas n¹est pas spécialement important, mais il illustre bien la façon plus générale dont ce processus d¹intimidation opère. Mon travail de reporter m¹a amené à m¹infiltrer parmi les activistes de la mosquée [jihadiste] de Finsbury Park et dans le milieu des négationnistes néo-nazis afin de mettre en lumière la haine anti-juive qui y règne. Lorsque je suis intervenu sur la chaîne Islam Channel pour dénoncer l¹anti-sémitisme des islamistes, j¹ai reçu une série de menaces de morts accompagnée de messages me traitant d¹« adorateur des Juifs », de « cochon de pédé sioniste » et autres nom d¹oiseaux.

Mais attendez, ce n¹est pas fini. J¹ai aussi fait des reportages à Gaza et dans les territoires occupés. La semaine dernière, j¹ai écrit un article qui décrivait la façon dont les eaux usées ­ et non retraitées ­ des colonies israéliennes illégales étaient reversées sur les terres des Palestiniens, contaminant leurs réservoirs. Cette information n¹est pas contestable : elle a été bien documentée par les Amis de la Terre et j¹en ai moi-même constaté la véracité de mes propres yeux.

La réaction ? On n¹a pratiquement pas essayé de contester les fait que j¹exposais. En revanche, certains des auteurs et des groupes « pro-israéliens » les plus connus ‹ y compris les ONG spécialisés dans la critique des médias Honest Reporting et Camera ‹ ont déclaré que j¹étais un raciste anti-juif assimilable à Joseph Goebbels et Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Melanie Phillips a même fait un lien entre l¹agression au couteau contre deux Juifs au nord de Londres et des articles comme les miens. La rédaction de The Independent a été inondée par une avalanche de courriels réclamant mon licenciement.

Toute tentative de décrire de façon objective la situation des Palestiniens se heurte à la même réaction. Si vous parlez de la contamination des terres palestiniennes par les eaux d¹égout des implantations juives, l¹ONG Honest Reporting vous accusera de ressusciter le mythe antisémite des Juifs qui « empoisonnent les puits ». Si vous interviewez une femme dont le bébé est mort en 2002 parce qu¹elle a été arrêtée en pleine phase d¹accouchement par des soldats israéliens à un poste de contrôle dans les territoires occupés, Honest Reporting vous reprochera de ne pas avoir expliqué la « véritable cause » de ce drame, à savoir l¹élection de HamasŠ en 2006 ! Et c¹est constamment la même chose.

David Landau, ancien éditeur du quotidien Ha¹aretz décrit le comportement de ces groupes comme une forme de « maccarthysme émergent ». Les principaux responsables de ce maccarthysme défendent des positions extrémistes tout à fait personnelles qui les situent largement à droite de la plupart des Israéliens. Alan Dershowitz et Melanie Phillips sont deux de ces personnalités très en vue qui attaquent quiconque se déclare en désaccord avec la droite israélienne. Dershowitz est avocat, professeur à Harvard et auteur de The Case For Israel (Plaidoyer pour Israël). Il considère le nettoyage ethnique comme un détail sans grande importance : « Les solutions politiques exigent souvent des déplacements de population, et ces déplacements ne sont pas toujours volontaires.[Š] il s¹agit là d¹un problème de cinquième ordre (fifth-rate issue) analogue sous bien des aspects à ce qui se passe dans certaines opérations de rénovation urbaine de grande ampleur. » Le plus souvent, à peine une personnalité américaine de premier plan adopte-t-elle sur Israël une position plus à gauche que la sienne, que Dershowitz se répand dans les médias pour l¹accuser d¹antisémitisme et de racisme.

La journaliste Melanie Phillips joue un rôle analogue en Grande-Bretagne. L¹année dernière, un collectif intitulé Independent Jewish Voices s¹est formé et a publié une déclaration d¹intention affirmant que « les Palestiniens et les Israéliens jouissent d¹un même droit à la paix et sécurité. » Parmi les signataires, on comptait diverses personnalités juives britanniques comme le cinéaste Mike Leigh, le comédien Stephen Fry et le rabbin David Goldberg. Phillips s¹empressa de baptiser le groupe « Jews For Genocide » (Juifs favorables au génocide), déclarant qu¹ils « encourageaient » les « assassins » de Juifs. D¹où viennent de telles insanités ? Toujours d¹après Phillips, les Palestiniens sont un peuple « artificiel » qui mérite une punition collective parce qu¹il s¹agit d¹une « population terroriste ». Elle estime que si, « pris individuellement, les Palestiniens méritent éventuellement la compassion, leur projet national équivaut à une forme de négationnisme ». Honest Reporting mentionne Phillips comme un modèle de journalisme fiable.

Ces individus dispensent l¹accusation d¹antisémitisme avec une telle facilité que, si l¹on s¹en tenait à leurs critères, une majorité de Juifs israéliens pourraient être accusés d¹arborer des tendances antisémites. Dershowitz a ainsi déclaré que la décision de Jimmy Carter de dialoguer avec le gouvernement élu de Hamas « frisait l¹antisémitisme. » Un sondage publié par Ha¹aretz le mois dernier démontre que 64 % des Israéliens souhaitent que leur gouvernement prenne langue avec Hamas.

En tant que président des États-Unis, Jimmy Carter a démontré son engagement aux côtés d¹Israël. Il a apporté à ce pays une aide beaucoup plus massive qu¹à n¹importe quelle autre nation et a promu le seul accord de paix avec un régime arabe dont l¹État juif ait jamais bénéficié. Il est également désireux de voir se créer un état palestinien viable et sûr aux côtés d¹Israël, c¹est pourquoi il a publié l¹année dernière un livre intitulée Palestine : Peace Not apartheid (Palestine : la paix, pas l¹apartheid). Cet ouvrage se contente d¹exploiter de façon assez modérée et factuelle les rapports sur la question rédigés par les principales organisations de défense des droits de l¹homme. Il n¹y a là rien qu¹on ne puisse lire tous les jours dans la presse israélienne établie. La comparaison que fait Carter entre la vie dans les territoires occupés (et non pas en Israël même) et l¹Afrique du Sud de l¹apartheid n¹a rien de nouveau. Les territoires occupés sont gouvernés au service des intérêts d¹une petite minorité juive ; ils sont sillonnés de routes destinés exclusivement aux colons juif et dont les Palestiniens sont bannis. D¹après l¹organisation de défense des droits de l¹homme israélienne B¹tselem, cette situation « présente une similarité frappante avec le régime raciste de l¹apartheid ». Mais, pour la simple raison qu¹il a fait écho à ces réalités aux États-Unis, Carter a été abondamment traité de « raciste ». Plusieurs universités ont même refusé de laisser l¹ancien président s¹adresser à leurs étudiants.

Ces batailles de campus sont souvent couronnées de succès. Norman Finkelstein est un politologue américain dont les deux parents ont survécu au ghetto de Varsovie et aux camps de concentration nazis. Ils y ont perdu tous les membres de leur famille. Finkelstein s¹est fait connaître pour avoir démasqué un ouvrage intitulé From Time Immemorial (Depuis la nuit des temps), de Joan Peters, qui expliquait que la Palestine était pratiquement vide quand les colons sionistes sont arrivés et que les prétendus Palestiniens étaient pour l¹essentiel des imposteurs provenant des régions limitrophes qui ont immigré sur place pour exploiter la situation. Finkelstein démontra que Peters avait falsifié les statistiques et grossièrement manipulé les sources. Dès cette époque, il fut traité d¹antisémite par les laudateurs du livre de Peters. Mais, il y a deux ans, quand Finkelstein révéla qu¹Alan Dershowitz avait repris sans la citer des passages entiers de l¹ouvrage mensonger de Peters dans son propre livre The Case For Israël, les choses ont commencé à empirer. Dershowitz fit campagne pour empêcher Finkelstein d¹être titularisé comme professeur à l¹université où il enseignait. Il alla même jusqu¹à déclarer que la mère de Finkelstein ‹ qui a survécu à Maïdanek et à deux camps de travail forcé ‹ avait collaboré avec les nazis. Cette campagne de diffamation atteignit son but. La titularisation de Finkelstein fut refusée par l¹université De Paul pour la seule raison qu¹il avait dit la vérité

L¹hystérie croissante des Dershowitz, des Phillips ou des groupes comme Honest Reporting ne serait-elle pas due au fait qu¹ils sentent bien qu¹ils sont en train de perdre la bataille des arguments ? Les Juifs progressistes ‹ qui sont la majorité ‹ sont en train de créer des organisations susceptibles de rivaliser avec celles de la droite dure, auxquelles adhèrent Dershowitz et Cie. Ils décident de s¹engager parce qu¹ils sont convaincus que cette campagne de diabolisation porte préjudice à tout le monde. Elle porte préjudice aux Palestiniens parce qu¹elle empêche que leur sort soit débattu de façon honnête. Elle porte préjudice aux Israéliens, parce qu¹elle stimule leur vaine fuite en avant sur le chemin de l¹agression. Et elle porte préjudice aux Juifs de la diaspora parce qu¹elle rend de plus en plus difficile de combattre le véritable antisémitisme.

Il est temps de regarder les instigateurs de cette chasse aux sorcières droit dans les yeux et de leur répéter les propos émis en 1954 par l¹avocat Joseph Welch dans son interpellation du sénateur Joseph McCarthy : « Cela suffit, maintenant. Est-ce que vous êtes encore capable d¹un minimum de décence ? Vous reste-t-il un minimum de décence ? »

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is now nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, and now even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage is being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements onto Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile ‘pro-Israel’ writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and CAMERA – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to accurately describe the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, ‘Honest Reporting’ claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, ‘Honest Reporting’ will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of ‘The Case For Israel.’ He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary… It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population.” She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Honest Reporting quotes Phillips frequently as their model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 percent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several leading Universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus-battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called ‘From Time Immemorial’ by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book ‘The Case For Israel’, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis.

The campaign worked. Finkelstein – a distinguished scholar, lauded by some of the leading figures in Holocaust historiography – was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and ‘Honest Reporting’ becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism – which is growing: my Jewish nephews go to a school with bomb-proof windows – harder to deal with.

To respond to this new McCarthyism, we need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

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POSTSCRIPT: In my column today [insert link], I talk about how an organisation called ‘Honest Reporting’ orchestrates barrages of complaints against writers who criticise the Israeli government. I thought it might be interesting to give readers a taster of what these e-mails are like. Don’t read them if you are offended by swearing and references to child molestation.

Hundreds have asked a variant of “why do you never criticise Muslims or Arabs?” I always e-mail back with links to dozens of articles in which I have vehemently criticised Islamic fundamentalists and the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and for which I have been widely (and stupidly) accused of “Islamophobia.” So far, one has written back to acknowledge they were wrong. The rest either go silent, or change the subject.

To be fair, a handful of the e-mails have been polite and rational, and I’ve had an interesting if heated exchange with those readers. But the vast majority are, I’m afraid, like the following three.

(To give some context, in the article they are responding to I described the raw sewage I’ve seen pumped out from Israeli settlements on the West Bank at the Palestinians and how it smells.)

Ivan Stux from ivanstux@hotmail.com writes: “When I pass male homosexuals on the street, I sometimes can smell a distinctive pungent scent of shit emanating from them. Might it be that the smell of shit you are sensing as you describe in your article comes from your own behind or mouth, or both, because you forgot to wash after you have been copulated by a man? Does that make you a dirty M.F. (as in male fucked)?”

Somebody who doesn’t give their name e-mails from southernwolf@gmail.com to say: “When I think of 'Hari' I smell shit. You aren't good enough to write about Israel, Jew hater. Long after the so called "Palestinians" have faded into the shithole of history where they belong Israel will remain, proud and strong. By then Jew haters like you will have another "cause".”

John Norman from jdnorman@btopenworld.com writes: “Surely, it's your own smell that you smell when you write about Israel. After all, a fat faggot like yourself cant smell of anything else. It must have been your Swiss-nazi Dad that fucked you up the arse when you were a kid and fucked yr tiny brain box to bits. How you were awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism must remain an unexplained enigma for decades to come.”

I’ll spare you the hundreds more along the same lines.

A website that monitors Honest Reporting has gone through some of their more blatant lies about me here.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: In my column yesterday [insert link], I talked about the McCarthyite smearing that can descend on you if you criticise the actions of the Israeli government. I didn’t have space there to discuss this useful example. In a recent article discussing Israel’s 60th birthday I tried to summarise the historical evidence as best I understand it about what happened in 1948. I cited the abundant historical evidence that David Ben-Gurion – Israel’s first Prime Minister – supported ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. ‘Honest Reporting’ [http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/The_Stench_Spreads_Johann_Haris_Stinking_Op-Ed.asp] and Melanie Phillips [http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/645986/the-war-against-the-jews-19.thtml] argued this was false and a malicious lie.

When you hit your sixtieth birthday, most of you will guzzle down your Hormone Replacement Therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover. She will look in the mirror and think – ach, I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I’m still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face.

I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer’s, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes. She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality.

But I can’t do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer Dr Bassam Said Nadi explained to me: “Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn’t act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time…” He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six percent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting “the wrong way”, the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine month old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre for Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5 million cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing “a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions.”

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded sixty years ago with a promise to be “a light unto the nations” end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened sixty years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to systematically slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land.” I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. It is a swirling Jewish metropolis on the Mediterranean, a buzzing hive of ideas where you can be a mensch, a nebach or a meshugeneh with a tan.

But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews.
When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else’s country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, wrote in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – “a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres.” In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins.

The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the thirty million stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn’t we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only forty years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 percent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tend to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don’t have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora’s desires. They found that only ten percent - around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain.

But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a fourteen year old girl. Perhaps Hamas’ proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the ’67 borders; but isn’t it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next sixty years.

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This week, the Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz will decide whether to tighten to slow strangulation of an entire people. Since the democratically elected Hamas government took power in the Gaza Strip in June, the 1.5 million people who live in that cramped and crumbling open prison on the Mediterranean have been collectively punished by being choked off from the world. Surrounded by gun-toting soldiers and razor-wire, nothing goes out of Gaza, and almost nothing goes in.

The result? The factories are shuttered. Some 85 percent of the people have no work. Virtually all the essential building projects – including repairs to the sewage system – have stopped, because there is no concrete. The price of flour has soared by 80 percent. The banks have almost run out of money. The charity Save the Children say that malnutrition – once confined to the worst refugee camps – is now rippling out into the general population.

And then a new form of punishment was thought of. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak decided to turn out the lights. Some 60 percent of Gaza’s power supply comes from Israel – so Barak decided to halt it. Food rotted in freezers. Work in hospitals stuttered to a halt. Israel’s message seemed to be: Let there be darkness.

This plan was halted when a slew of brave Israeli human rights organisations appealed to the Attorney General, claiming the black-outs were illegal. He is currently mulling it over. But he refuses to stop the overall blockade, and he has waved through plans to choke off Gaza’s supply of diesel – necessary to run ambulances and the few remaining sparks of economic activity.

The Israeli government claims it has to engage in this mass collective punishment because Qassam rockets are being fired from Gaza at the nearby Israeli civilian city of Sderot. But the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has shown that these rockets are actually being fired in retaliation for Israeli attacks against Gaza’s civilians. He writes: “Anyone who takes an honest look at the progression of events during the past two months will discover that the Qassams have a context: They are almost always fired after an IDF [Israeli Defence Force] assassination operation, and there have been many of these. The question of who started it is not a childish question in this context. The IDF has returned to liquidations, and in a big way. And in their wake there has been an increase in Qassam firings.”

Once this is pointed out, the Israeli government shifts to a different rationale. They say their goal is to put pressure on the Palestinian people, so they realise their folly and get rid of Hamas. But imagine if the surrounding Arab countries had decided to punish Israel for electing Ariel Sharon and Olmert by encircling Israel with tanks and barbed wire, shooting anyone who tried to get out, and bringing the Israeli economy to utter ruin. Would the Israeli people have shrugged, expelled Sharon, and elected the peace party Me’retz? Of course not. They would have turned to whichever hardline party promised to fight back with the biggest guns and the loudest rockets. The Palestinians are simply doing the same.

Whenever I try to explain this, I think of a 19 year-old girl called Mirsat Massoud. I went to her home in Jaballya refugee camp in Gaza last winter. She wasn’t there: she had blown herself up a few weeks before, and I wanted to understand why. As their remaining children scampered around us, her parents explained that Mirsat had lived all her life in this bashed-up, broken-down camp, and she had never left the claustrophobic cramp of Gaza.

Her mother Hijam told me that as a small girl, Mirsat would wake up to the sound of Apache helicopters above the camp. When she was ten she saw Israeli soldiers shoot up a family in their car. “She was nervous all the time,” Hijam said. But she didn’t fall for extremism, at first. She joined Fatah, and campaigned for Mahmoud Abbas to become President. But Mirsat was shocked to see Abbas being so blatantly humiliated: he offered Israel negotiations and compromise, and in return Sharon snubbed him. She felt it as her own humiliation. She began to be drawn towards Hamas, and as the attacks in Gaza became more extreme, so did she.

On the morning she blew herself up – taking a clutch of Israeli soldiers with her – Mirsat’s father Amin found her watching the television at 4am and crying. He explains, “She just kept saying, ‘Now they are firing at schoolchildren.’ She kept repeating it again and again. She was very distressed.” A schoolbus carrying 20 nursery schoolkids through Beit Lahia had been hit by an IDF shell. Their teacher was killed in front of them, the blood splattering over the kids. Two teenagers walking to school on the street were also blasted to pieces. “I think that is what tipped her over the edge,” her father says. “She became a martyr that afternoon.”

Mirsat’s mother tries to offer all the standard-issue bravado about how she is “proud” of her daughter’s actions. So I ask if she would like her other children to be suicide-bombers. Reflexively, without thinking, she clutches the son who is at her heels, hard. “No,” she whispers.

The harder Israel beats Gaza, the harder its people become. Even the right-wing Jerusalem Post – one of the cheerleaders for the current strategy of strangulation – admitted this week, “There is no doubt that Hamas [is] now stronger than it has ever been.” This programme of collective punishment is a gift to Hamas, and the even more extreme organisations to their right. Punish moderates, you get radicals. Punish radicals, you get extreme radicals.

There is another way. End the collective punishment, and engage with the Gazan people’s elected representatives. Invite Hamas to the Annapolis ‘peace’ summit in Maryland next month. Talk. I loathe Hamas – but it is the elected government, and it is making Israel a decent offer. Haniyeh has talked privately about a twenty or even forty-year hudna (cease-fire), provided Israel withdraws to the legal 1967 borders. Forty years is a very long time. If they have a four-decade stretch of economic development, without being terrorized by Israel, how likely is it the Palestinian people will want to pursue war to reclaim the rest of historical Palestine in 2047? They barely want it today-, as you can tell from the fact that all their elected leaders are prepared – in practice – to accept a two-state solution, here, now, if only Israel would too.

As I left her home, Mirsat’s father peered at me very closely and said: “I want my daughter to be the last suicide-bomber. But when our children grow up like this –” he waved his hand across the refugee camp – “how can she be?” If next week the Attorney General decides to plunge a new generation of Palestinian children into darkness, he will ensure that more Israeli civilians die, far onto the bloody horizon.

You can send comments on this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to j.hari -at- independent.co.uk

You can read my other articles about Israel/Palestine, including on-the-ground reporting, here.

The enemies of the Palestinian people have been presenting the political chaos of the past week as evidence that they are premodern savages, capable only of building a Mogadishu on the Mediterranean. But on Wednesday afternoon, as bullets pierced the claustrophobia and concrete of Gaza City, the real voice of the Palestinian people echoed out, for a fleeting moment.

Thousands of protestors - mostly women - took to the streets. They called not for shariah law or Qassam rockets against Israeli cities, but for peace. Amal Hellis, a 35 year old mother of two, said: "I am not afraid. I will die to save my family and to save Palestine." Her eldest son Medhat is a member of Fatah; her youngest son Refaat belongs to Hamas. When the marchers reached the Al Ghifary tower near the beachfront, they were fired on by gunmen - but they did not run away. The old women and their granddaughters stood in the crossfire, waving Palestinian flags and singing 'Give Peace A Chance'.

Hamas gunmen fired above; Fatah fighters threatened them on the ground. The women surrounded the Fatah man, forcing him with nothing but plain moral pressure to lower his rifle. Only when one of the protestors was caught in the chest by a sniper did they finally disperse.

These protestors speak for a majority of Palestinians. In the most recent poll of them conducted by
the internationally respected Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PSPSP), 63 percent supported full recognition of Israel in return for a proper Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. These supporters of a negotiated peace include, crucially, a majority of Hamas voters.

This means there is actually a bigger pro-peace constituency in Palestine than in Israel, where Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharanot polling just found that 58 percent of Israelis now reject the idea of trading land for peace, because they think the Palestinians are irrevocably committed to destroying them.

The current crackle of civil war is not evidence that the Palestinians are war-addicted people incapable of self-government, as the Israeli right claims with a smirk. It is evidence of what happens to human beings when they are rammed into a pressure cooker and the temperature is slowly ramped up.

When I was last in Gaza a few months ago, the borders of Palestine had been hermetically sealed by the world for months, because they voted in a free and open election for a party - Hamas - we do not like. One-and-a-half million people were locked into a tiny space no bigger than the Isle of Wight. Nothing went in; nothing went out. The hospitals were on the brink of collapse, because if a piece of equipment broke, they could not get new parts. Almost everyone was out of work, because they couldn't sell to the world a few miles away. Dov Weisglass, one of the Israeli architects of this policy, joked that he was "putting the Palestinians on a diet." The "diet" caused a 15 percent increase in infant mortality - a polite term for dead babies.

In this situation, any people, anywhere, would begin to turn on each other. As the Palestinian foreign minister Ziad Abu Amr puts it: "If you have two brothers put into a cage and deprive them of the basic essential needs for life, they will fight."

On top of this, the outside world, and especially the Israeli government, has actually discouraged and humiliated the Palestinians moderates. When he took charge in 2005, the Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas made it plain he would offer huge compromises to Israel in return for a state. Ariel Sharon offered him a few lifted roadblocks in return.

The message to the Palestinians was clear: electing pragmatists will get you nothing. So the next year in desperation they elected Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist organisation whose constitution includes statements plagiarised from the nakedly anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Regular readers will know that I loathe Hamas - but I have to acknowledge that, upon election, their leaders undeniably behaved in a pragmatic way. They did not start introducing the savagery of sharia law, or oppressing women. Instead, they observed the unilateral truce with Israel, until a string of especially heinous Israeli attacks on Gazan civilians. They offered a hudna (ceasefire) that would last a generation. They gave up staging suicide-murders against Israeli civilians. They even said they would respect all previous agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority - a de facto concession that they would recognize Israel.

And in return? They received nothing but abuse - and a determined attempt to dislodge them from power, by boycott and, more slowly, by bullet. The US and Israel began arming an especially authoritarian wing of Fatah, headed by Mohammed Dahlan, with the plain intention of him toppling Hamas sooner or later. The Washington-based architect of this policy is deputy national secutiy advisor Elliot Abrahms, a man who in the 1980s illegally armed the openly fascist Contra militias in an attempt to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He was eventually jailed for his crimes. By denying them power through a legitimate election, and arming their enemies for a future liquidation, they virtually guaranteed Hamas would seize power.

Why is the Israeli government, backed by the Bush administration and more tepidly the European Union, doing this? There are a range of possible explanations. The first - associated with the former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and the current Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman - is the belief that the Palestinians will only compromise once they have been totally defeated by overwhelming force. They reckon that if the Palestinians are throttled for long enough, sooner or later they will cower, beg for mercy, and accept Israeli terms.

The second potential explanation is that the Bush administration sees this as part of a proxy war with Iran for control of the Middle East. As the Americans arm Fatah, the Ahmadinejadhians arm Hamas, each trying to gain hegemony over a strategically valuable chunk of land. This would make Gaza a kind of Nicaragua in black robes.

The third - and most disturbing - explanation is that the Israeli government is deliberately thwarting potential peace partners, because they do not want to embark on a negotiation that would mean they had to give up the settlements of the West Bank. Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and disillusioned Irgun fighter, says: "There has always been a tendency in Israel to prefer expansion and settlement to compromise and peace. Our government has worked for years to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal. Now, when it seems this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory."

There is still a way out of this. It is simple, and it should have happened a year ago: Israel must negotiate with Hamas. They are offering a long, long ceasefire. The Arab states are even - in a startling offer from Saudi Arabia, brushed aside by Ehud Olmert - offering full recognition and normalisation of Israel in the region, if only Israel returns to its legal borders. Perhaps they are lying. Perhaps it is a trick. But it is the only game-plan in town that offers even the chance of a happy ending.

But Israel seems determined not to take this chance. Ehud Barak, the new Defence Minister, is briefing that he will bomb Gaza yet again, and within weeks. In alliance with Mahmoud Abbas, he is proposing to actually intensify the blockade of the Gaza Strip for a few weeks, to "pressure" Hamas.

The Israeli government is clinging to the belief that the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer their leaders will become. This mentality created the current collapse. It will only drag the Middle East further and further away from the sane voices of women like Amal Hellis, singing songs of peace.

You can read more of my articles about Israel/Palestine here, and an interesting comment on this article by Shuggy here.

You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

When I was in the bullet-pocked, rocket-rocked Gaza Strip last month, I could feel the Palestinian political ground fracturing beneath my feet. The rival political parties Hamas and Fatah were tooling up for a civil war, in their weapons dumps and in their minds. The dull cruelty of killing the other side's children had begun. Even the two leading campuses in Gaza - the Islamic University (Hamas) and Al Azhar (Fatah) - were firebombed just after I visited them, their status as inviolate oases of peace suddenly burned away. Locked in their box by the Israeli army, starved of resources by the international blockade, the Palestinians were turning on each other.

If Palestine turns into a Somalia-replica, it will obviously be a catastrophe for the sallow children of Palestine, who have already been so strangled by the four decade-long Israeli occupation and the current international boycott that more than half of them will go to bed hungry and traumatised tonight. But it will also be a catastrophe for Israel. At the moment, Hamas and Fatah could - in the context of a peace deal - ensure between them that there is all quiet on the Qassam Front: an end to missile attacks on civilians in Israeli cities. But if Gaza dissolves into civil war with a hundred different warring centres of authority, this slips off the table. Every side will instead demonstrate its machismo by firing into Israel. Nobody will be able to stop them.

So you would expect Israel - and all decent people - to welcome the Mecca agreement smelted in Saudi Arabia over the past fortnight. Hamas and Fatah have agreed to join together in a national unity government. This is partly to stem the sectarian killings, and partly a desperate attempt to end the international sanctions imposed on Palestine since last year the population democratically voted "the wrong way" in electing Hamas. The world has been demanding a unity government under Mahmoud Abbas ever since - and now we've got one.

The response? The US and Israel are doing everything they can to break it apart. Even the European Union is insisting the sanctions that shuttered Palestinian hospitals and schools will stay. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Condolleeza Rice has "remonstrated" with Mahmoud Abbas "in a bad temper" for signing the agreement, leaving Abbas to splutter that the US is "pushing the Palestinian people towards civil war."

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, says it is not enough that Hamas has pledged to "respect" all the agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority, including implicitly the recognition of Israel's right to exist within the 1967 borders. No: Olmert demands more. Even though Israel is imposing violent occupation on them, he wants the Palestinians to pre-emptively disarm and renounce all violence, even that offered in self-defence. (It's like demanding in 1992 that Sinn Fein recognize the Royal Ulster Constabulary, hand over their guns and pledge alleigance to the Queen, or all talks are off).

What Palestinian government could do this? Yet the world is backing this impossible Israeli hurdle. "Israel cannot negotiate with a government that has extremist components which deny Israel's right to exist", says German chancellor Angela Merkel. Why doesn't she mention that the Israeli government has extremist components who deny Palestine's right to exist - not least Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who openly advocates ethnic cleansing and the drowning of Palestinian prisoners? Why doesn't she mention that Israel is physically preventing Palestine's right to exist as we speak, by occupying the West Bank?

There are many decent Israelis who can see that this behaviour is disastrous. Israel's former chief of military intelligence, General Shlomo Gazit, calls these conditions "ridiculous, or an excuse not to negotiate." He explains, "We must negotiate on concrete problems, not declarative issues. I am in favour of starting negotiations today... Why should Palestinians stop fighting against us when they know we are unwilling to make an agreement?"

There are three potential motives for Israel's behaviour. The first is a lingering belief that if they resist Hamas, they will get a softer, gentler Palestinian leadership. This seems implausible, since when they actually had this softer, gentler leadership under Mahmoud Abbas, they shunned and humiliated him too. The second is incompetence. The third is more disturbing. Is this stoking of a civil war in Gaza an attempt to legitimize holding onto the West Bank? We withdraw, and see what happens! This is a bizarre misreading of Israel's own self-interest - but it may be the the government's nonetheless.

If the signiatories to the Mecca agreement can't show real progress on the ground to their followers, it will collapse. Already Abbas is being attacked within Fatah, and Hamas is being savaged by the Islamic Army. This weekend, five people died in fights between clans allied to the different sides.

The US government is fast-forwarding this failure. It seems they view the rise of Hamas not as an internal Palestinian issue, but as another round of gun-fire in the show-down between the US and Iran. They see Hamas as Iranian puppets, and Amhmadinejadh as the demon puppet-master. This is largely mythical: if Iran had never existed, Hamas would still have won the election, and would still be fighting. But the Bush administration, soaked as ever in delusion, seems to be prepared to turn Gaza into the site of a proxy-war between superpowers - like Nicaragua circa 1985, only with more beards and less saltza.

Today, a glistening opportunity to avert a Palestinian civil war is being kicked into the trash by 'the international community' with a glib, finger-wagging sneer.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to j.hari@independent.co.uk

This is a French translation of my report on the suffering of pregnant Palestinian women on the West Bank, published in Le Monde:

Dans deux jours, un tiers de l’humanité se rassemblera pour fêter les douleurs de l’enfantement d’une réfugiée palestinienne à Bethléem – mais deux millénaires plus tard, une autre mère dans une autre étable glorifiée dans cette ville jonchée de décombres et verrouillée, essaie de ne pas hurler.

Fadia Jemal est une femme de 27 ans à laquelle manquent des dents, avec un sourire las et faible. « Qu’est-ce qui arriverait si la Vierge Marie arrivait à Bethléem aujourd’hui ? Elle endurerait ce que j’ai enduré, » dit-elle.

Fadia serre fort un trousseau de clés, se frottant fort la peau ( ??? digging hard into her skin) tandis qu’elle décrit à l’aide de phrases coupées et irrégulières ce qui est arrivé. « Il était 17h quand j’ai commencé à ressentir les contractions, » dit-elle. Elle se sentait déjà nerveuse au sujet de la naissance – sa première, et des jumeaux – elle a donc dit à son mari d’attraper son sac pour l’hôpital et de l’y conduire directement en voiture.

Ils se sont arrêtés pour prendre sa sœur et sa mère et se mirent en route pour l’hôpital Hussein, à vingt minutes de là. Mais la route avait été bloquée par des soldats israéliens, qui ont dit que personne n’était autorisé à passer jusqu’au lendemain matin. « Bien sûr, nous leur avons dit que nous ne pouvions pas attendre jusqu’au matin. Je saignais fort sur le siège arrière. Un des soldats regarda le sang et se mit à rire. Je me réveille encore la nuit en entendant ce rire. Cela avait été un tel choc pour moi. Je ne comprenais pas. »

Sa famille supplia les soldats de les laisser passer, mais ils ne se sont pas laissés fléchir. Et ainsi, à 1h du matin, sur le siège arrière à côté d’un checkpoint inamical, sans médecin ni infirmières, Fadia a mis au monde un tout petit garçon appelé Mahmoud et une toute petite fille appelée Mariam. « Je ne me souviens de rien d’autre avant de m’éveiller à l’hôpital, dit-elle maintenant. Pendant deux jours, sa famille lui a caché la mort de Mahmoud, et les docteurs ont dit qu’ils auraient certainement pu lui sauver la vie en le plaçant dans un incubateur.

“Maintenant Mariam est arrivée à l’âge où elle me demande où est son frère, » dit Fadia. « Elle veut savoir ce qui lui est arrivé. Mais comment le lui expliquer ? » Elle regarde le sol. Parfois, la nuit, je crie, je crie. Dans les années qui ont suivi, elle a encore été enceinte quatre fois, mais elle n’arrête pas d’avoir des fausses couches. « Je ne pouvais pas supporter d’avoir un autre bébé. J’étais convaincue que la même chose m’arriverait de nouveau. » explique-t-elle. « Quand je vois des soldats (israéliens) je me demande chaque fois – qu’est-ce que mon bébé a fait à Israël ? »

Depuis l’accouchement de Fadia, en 2002, les Nations Unies confirment qu’un total de 36 bébés sont morts parce que leur mère avait été retenue pendant le travail à un check-point israélien. Dans tout Bethléem – dans toute la Cisjordanie – il y a des femmes dont la grossesse est perturbée ou pire, par l’occupation militaire de leur pays.

A Safit, de l’autre côté de la Cisjordanie, Jamilla Alahad Naim, 29 ans, attend le premier examen médical de ses cinq mois de grossesse. « « J’ai peur tout le temps, » dit-elle. « J’ai peur pour mon bébé parce que je ne dispose que d’un traitement médical minimum et que je ne peux pas me permettre une alimentation convenable…Je sais que je donnerai naissance à la maison sans aide, comme j’ai fait avec Mohammed (son dernier enfant). J’ai trop peur d’aller à l’hôpital parce qu’il y a deux check-point sur le chemin et je sais que si on est retenu par les soldats, la mère ou le bébé peuvent mourir là dans le froid. Mais donner naissance à domicile est aussi très dangereux. »

Hindia Abu Nabah – qui est une infirmière inflexible de 31 ans à la clinique Al Zawya dans le district de Salfit – dit que c’est un « cauchemar » d’être enceinte en Cisjordanie aujourd’hui. « Récemment, deux de nos patientes enceintes ont été intoxiquées par du gaz lacrymogène dans leurs maisons…Les femmes n’arrivaient pas à respirer et sont entrée au travail prématurément. Le temps d’arriver et les bébés étaient arrivés, mort-nés. »

Beaucoup des problèmes médicaux qui touchent les femmes enceintes sont plus courants que les peurs les plus sombres de Jamilla : 30% des Palestiniennes enceintes souffrent d’anémie, un manque de globules rouges. La pauvreté extrême provoquée par le siège et le boycott international actuel semblent être des facteurs clés. Les docteurs ici mettent en garde farouchement que du fait de l’évaporation des revenus des Palestiniens ordinaires, ils mangent plus de d’aliments de base et peu de protéines – une recette pour l’anémie. Il y a certains indices, ajoutent-ils, que les femmes donnent la meilleure nourriture à leurs maris et leurs enfants, subsistant par des nerfs (de viande) et des restes. L’anémie soumet les femmes à un plus grand risque de saignements importants et de contracter une infection pendant la portée.

Plus tôt cette année, les conditions déjà médiocres pour les femmes enceintes en Cisjordanie se sont écroulées. Suite à l’élection du Hamas, le monde a empêché le financement de l’Autorité palestinienne, qui soudain se trouva incapable de payer ses médecins et ses infirmières. Après quelques mois, le personnel médical se mit en grève, refusant de s’occuper d’autre chose que des cas d’urgence. Pendant plus de trois mois, les pavillons de maternité de Cisjordanie étaient vides et renvoyaient. Les lits étaient faits parfaitement, attendant des patientes qui ne pouvaient venir.

Pendant tout ce temps, on n’a pas distribué de vitamines, pas d’échographies, pas de détections d’anomalies congénitales. Imaginez que le Service National de Santé ait simplement fait ses paquets et s’était arrêté un jour pour ne rouvrir que 12 semaines plus tard et vous aurez la dimension de l’échelle du désastre médical.

Quelques femmes étaient suffisamment riches pour aller dans l’un des rares hôpitaux privés dispersés en Cisjordanie. Mais la majorité ne l’était pas. Et ainsi à cause du boycott international des Palestiniens, chaque hôpital a signalé une augmentation invisible et non rapportée de naissances à domicile en Cisjordanie.

J’ai rencontré le Dr Hamdan Hamdan, qui dirige les services de maternité de l’hôpital Hussein à Bethléem, faisant les cents pas dans un pavillon vide, fumant une cigarette après l’autre. « Ce pavillon est généralement plein, » dit-il. « Les femmes qui devraient être dans cet hôpital – que leur arrive-t-il ? »

Elles ont donné naissance dans des conditions étonnamment similaires à celles subies par Marie, il y a deux mille ans. Elles ont donné naissance à leur bébé sans docteur, sans matériel stérilisé, sans soutien en cas de complications. On les a boycottées jusqu’à les renvoyer à l’Age de la pierre. La grève a pris fin ce mois-ci après que l’AP ait réuni des fonds dans les pays arabes – mais les effets de l’arrêt des services de maternité ne deviennent clairs que maintenant. Hindia Abu Nabah dit: “Il y a un lien évident entre la détérioration de la situation de santé et le boycott international »

Au milieu de cette horreur, une organisation charitable a continué à soutenir les femmes palestiniennes enceintes même quand les services de santé s’écroulèrent. « Merlin » - une des trois organisations de charité soutenue par l’Appel Chrétien indépendant – a mis sur pied deux équipes mobiles, avec un gynécologue full time et un pédiatre, pour apporter des services médicaux aux parties de Cisjordanie coupées par l’occupation israélienne.

Elles fournissent des techniciens de laboratoire et des machines ultrasons – les fruits du 21e siècle.

J’ai voyagé avec l’équipe dans la région de Salfit – marquée par les déversements d’eaux usées non traitées que les colonies israéliennes font couler sur des terres palestiniennes – pour voir des femmes et des enfants s’agglutiner désespérément autour d’eux, cherchant de l’aide. Au milieu des femmes nerveuses et les nuées d’enfants mal en point, Rahme Jima, 29 ans, est assise avec les mains convenablement pliées sur les genoux. Elle est dans le dernier mois de sa grossesse, et ceci est la première fois qu’elle voit un médecin depuis la conception.

« L’hôpital le plus proche est à Naplouse et nous ne pouvons pas nous permettre le transport pour y aller, en passant tous les check-points, » dit-elle, révélant qu’elle a l’intention - en désespoir de cause – de donner naissance à domicile. Même si elle avait l’argent, elle dit qu’elle est « trop effrayée d’être retenue au check-point et forcée de donner naissance là ». Elle soupire et ajoute : « Je serai tellement soulagée d’être enfin examinée par un docteur, je me suis fait tant de soucis. » Mais quand elle revient de l’examen médical, elle dit « J’ai de l’anémie, et ils m’ont donné des suppléments de fer, » fournis par Merlin. Elle ne peut pas se permettre de manger convenablement ; elle vit avec son mari et quatre enfants dans une chambre de la maison de sa belle-mère, et son mari, Joseph, est chômeur depuis que son permis pour passer les check-points est expiré. « Le docteur a dit que j’aurais dû être examinée bien plus tôt dans ma grossesse. Mon bébé naîtra probablement trop petit. »

Tous ces problèmes qui affectent ces Maries du 21e siècle s’affichent dans la clinique Merlin. Une mère terrifiée, terrorisée après l’autre se présentent ici aux spécialistes, et quittent en empoignant des paquets d’acide folique, de calcium, de fer et de médicaments. Le Dr Bassam Said Nadi, le responsable médical pour cette région, dit: “Je remercie Merlin pour les soins spécialisés qu’ils ont fournis. Il n’y a pas longtemps, nous n’avions même pas d’essence dans nos voitures. Avec d’autres organisations, ils nous aident à survivre dans cette période terrible de l’histoire de notre pays. »

Merlin ne peut maintenir ces cliniques mobiles qu’avec votre aide. S’appuyant contre le chambranle de sa clinique vide, Hindia Abu Nabah dit : « Dites à vos lecteurs que nous avons besoin de leur aide. Il n’y a pas de fœtus Hamas ou OLP. Ils ne méritent pas d’être punis. Je ne pourrais pas supporter de regarder dans les yeux une autre femme anémique et lui dire que son bébé aura un poids insuffisant ou sera malformé et n’avoir pas les suppléments de fer à lui donner. Je suis incapable de retourner à cette situation. J’en suis incapable. »

[This year, the Independent's charity appeal is for two NGOs doing brilliant work in Gaza and the West Bank: the Welfare Association, and Merlin. I've been out there to see their work, and this is the last in this series of articles]

To get to Berdale – a tiny village of 2000 Palestinians sunk in the Jordan Valley – you have to drive through miles upon miles of barren hills populated only by stray shepherds and herds of goats. You must spend hours locked in the checkpoint check-mate, waiting for Israeli soldiers to let you through. But as you finally approach this rickety collection of houses and fields, a notice a jarring visual contrast. Out on the Jordanian side of the valley – just a few miles away – there are neat glistening rows of greenhouses and lush trees. Here, on the Palestinian side, under Israeli military occupation, the sickly trees mix with rubble and dust.

Ashraf Sawafta, a sad, slow-talking 67-year-old farmer, explains why. "Life has been made impossible for us here in Berdale by the occupation,” he says. In the past few years, the occupying forces have slashed back Berdale‘s water supply, cutting it from 240,000 litres a year to 140,000. As a result the wells have dried up, and they can't irrigate most of their fields.

Ashraf looks out over his parched fields and says even this is not their greatest problem. The Israeli forces have made it almost impossible to for farmers here to sell their produce – typically cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, maize and beans. They have sliced the West Bank into a string of Bantustans, cutting Berdale off from all the nearby cities. To get to Hebron or Nablus - the nearest markets - these farmers have to pass at least four military checkpoints. At each one they have to unload their goods, brusing them, and risk being turned back at any time. Ashraf says, "If I’m really lucky and I get though, it takes a whole day and most of it has rotted in the sun."

The poverty they have caused has bitten so deeply into Berdale that they have been forced into a fresh humiliation. Seven kilometres away, there is a Palestinian village calls Ain al Bedia. In the 1970s, a great chunk of land was stolen from the inhabitants and an illegal Israeli settlement called Mechola was built there.

Today, the residents of Berdale are so poor they are sending their children to work all night - from 6pm to 6am - in grinding conditions on the land stolen from their friends, for the grand total of five pounds a shift. Hamed Fareed Suwarta is a quiet 12 year old who likes reading spy novels. "I love James Bond", he says softly. But at 6pm he is despatched to sort dates at the settlement for twelve hours. "We are allowed one fifteen minute break," he says, "and if you fall asleep, you are fired." He is not allowed to sit down, and he is not allowed to go to the toilet except in his break. (Several children independently report being treated in the same way). "I have to do this to support my family. I have a brother at university. We all have to work to get him through,” he says.

Some 80 miles away, another agricultural village is drying up. Salah Tahir Khadoumi is a 42 year old farmer who stands, staring at the immense wire-and-concrete wall that has been built by the Israeli military right through his land. Two years ago, bulldozers arrived here in Yassid village in Nablus province to construct the 'security fence'. They ripped up over 30 acres of olive trees. "It has been a nightmare," he says now. "My citrus fruit greenhouses are on the other side. This gate" - he points - "is the only way to get through, and the opening hours seem to be random. I need to tend the plants twice a day. Sometimes it only opens once a week. Last year they didn't open it for a month, and by the time I got through all my plants had died. "

The Welfare Association have been offering hard, practical help so these farmers can survive. In Berdale, they have paid for the farmers to shift to growing dates. They keep much longer - if you can't sell them today, you can sell them next month - and their palm trees need far less water. An acre of the only fruit brings in $300 a month. An acre of dates brings in $2000. The farmers themselves could never have afforded the initial capital outlay of buying the trees, which are $60 each - but not their lives are on track to be transformed once the trees begin to bear fruit in three years. In Yassid, they have been helping to replant the olive trees and providing plastic for new greenhouses.

Mr Khadoumi proudly shows me a Welfare Association palm tree. “The Welfare Association have stood by us. At times like this, you need friends,” he says. "We only want to be independent and live freely, with normal lives - like your readers. Like the rest of the world." The tree is already sprouting small green leaves - and little shoots of hope.

To plant more of these trees, go to http://www.justgiving.com/process/whitelabel/?_WhiteLabelId=1214

[This year, one of the Independent's Christmas Appeal charities is the Welfare Association, who work with Palestinians. I have been out in Gaza and the West Bank to see their work. This is the fourth despatch:]

Dr Haitham al-Hassan is smoking his tenth cigarette of our meeting and drinking the blackest of black coffee. “We are in a desperate position,” he says. “One day we can’t do catheterisation because we have run out of tubes. The next day we can’t do X-rays because we have run out of film. Some 60 percent of my budget has disappeared in the past year.” But Dr Hassan is not a doctor in the third world of the Occupied Territories. This is Jerusalem, currently part of first-world Israel. He is the director of the Moqassed Hospital, the largest medical centre for sick Palestinians, and he is struggling to stop his service falling apart.

We are walking briskly now through an empty General Surgery ward, the lights dulled, the beds fresh and waiting for patients who are stuck in agony outside. “This ward has been closed for a year. We can’t afford to keep it open,” he says, shaking his head. The majority of patients who make it to the Moqassed are Palestinians from the West Bank who need the specialist treatment they can only receive here. The Palestinian Authority (PA) usually pays for their care, but since the democratic election of Hamas earlier this year, the PA’s funds have been frozen by the outside world.

“We have lost half a million dollars a month,” Dr Hassan says. “But at the same time, our number of patients has massively increased because the boycott has brought the medical services on the West Bank to the brink of collapse. We have an increased burden and slashed resources – a disastrous combination. Although we are still functioning – it’s horrible to say this in a newspaper, but I have to – the quality of our care is deteriorating.”

As we walk into the next ward, we step over dozens of people sleeping in a corridor on the floor under thin blankets. They cannot go back and forth every day from their homes on the West Bank because of the Israeli checkpoints, so if they want to visit their sick relatives, they are stuck here. “This is a big problem for the hospital,” he says. “We have to bring them blankets and pillows at night. It’s hard to clean, it’s over-crowded. We are half-hospital, half-refugee camp.” The floor-sleepers are nervous, because the Israeli army periodically raids the hospital looking for people who are here without a permit.

At every step, there is evidence of a hospital stuttering to a halt. A nurse explains they have run out of sterilized gowns for the operating room. “We have to resterilize and resterilize the same gowns,” she says. “That means we have to wait two hours in between each operation while the gowns are sterilised. We are losing a huge amount of operating time.”

The consequences of military occupation lie bleeding in every ward. In intensive care, we find a patient who was mangled in a car crash. He has five fractures, an open wound with a torn artery, and extensive internal bleeding. His accident happened just twenty minutes’ away on the West Bank – but he was detained at the Israeli checkpoints for three hours. “This means his kidney has been damaged, his lung was seriously damaged,” Dr Hassan says, reading through the medical notes. The patient had to be transferred to a new ambulance at the checkpoint, “which is why he has dead muscles. This man will be disabled all his life because he had to wait so long for treatment.”

It is, the doctor adds, “an everyday occurrence” here for patients to be seriously injured or die because they have been held at checkpoints. “With an urgent case, especially when a person is bleeding, a half-hour delay can kill. So imagine what a three hour delay or more, which is very common, is doing.” He believes this is a deliberate strategy by the Israeli government. “Clearly, one of the aims of the Israeli occupation is to isolate the Palestinians from Jerusalem and force them to open medical centres on the West Bank,” he says. “It’s part of a very slow, very long-term policy to discourage Palestinians from coming to Jerusalem.”

For three months this year, the staff at the Moqassed Hospital went without any pay. In October, Dr Hassan took out a huge bank loan – at commercial rates of interest – because many of his staff were so impoverished they couldn’t afford to bus fare to work any more. But he is stuck in a cruel spiral where as his funds dry up, his costs expand. “We cannot afford to buy drugs in bulk any more,” he says, “so we have to buy piece by piece, which is 30 percent more expensive.”

He explains this as we enter the neo-natal unit, the only place where Palestinian babies weighing less than 600 grams can be treated. A tiny little person who could fit into my hand is silently kicking the air from her incubator. “Is she a terrorist?” Dr Hassan asks under his breath. This ward has only been able to stay open, he explains, because the hospital is receiving financial support from the Belgian government, the Islamic Fund in Morocco – and the Welfare Association, one of the Independent’s Christmas charities. We wander around for a silent five minutes, looking at unimaginably small people who are being kept alive in incubators bought by them.

“The Welfare Association has rescued us,” Dr Hassan says as he watches a mini-baby scheduled for cardiac surgery the next day. “They oversaw a project that improved the administrative capacity of the six Palestinian hospitals here in East Jerusalem, which means we have saved a fortune we can now use on patients.” They have bought equipment that is keeping people alive all over the hospital. They pay for the doctors here to receive specialist training. “But yes, we need more help,” the doctor says. “We are victims of terrorism. This occupation is a form of terrorism.” For every Palestinian who resists this occupation by blowing up innocent Israelis, there are hundreds like Dr Hassan who resist it by saving innocent life. It is these, the courageous Palestinians who fight every day in defence of life, who need your help today.

POSTSCRIPT: To donate to help this doctor and others like him, go to http://www.justgiving.com/process/whitelabel/?_WhiteLabelId=1214

There is a fanatical pressure group in the US called 'Honest Reorting' who believe they are pro-Israeli. In fact, they are advocate a course of action - endless occupation of Palestinian lands, and military aggression - that is profoundly endangering Israel's existence in the long-term.

They have printed an astonishingly dishonest reaction to my recent Bethlehem article. You can read it at:

http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/Bethlehem_-_Abusing_the_Christmas_Story.asp

You can read a factual rebuttal of them at:

http://dishonestreporting.blogspot.com/2006/12/dec-25-media-critique-bethlehem-abusing.html

Worse, a supposedly reputable newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, printed an equally egregious misrepresentation of the article I wrote about how Israel's rejection of democratically elected Palestinian governments as "too extreme" simply produces movements that are more extreme still.

Caroline Glick, in her Post column (unfortnately not on line), summarises my view as follows:

"[Writers like this] assume that Palestinian society will never be anything but a jihadist society."

This is simply a flat-out lie. In the article, I say precisely the opposite:

"There is still – still – a majority in Palestine for peaceful coexistence with Israel, with 67 percent supporting the Hamas proposal for a 40-year hudna." I stress repeatedly that a clear majority of Palestinians oppose jihadism and Talibanism.

Glick continues:

"Although Hari clearly shares this defeatist view he inadvertently demonstrated that it is wrong and counterproductive. Hari quoted 29-year-old Basa Abu-Jased whose Internet cafe in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp was firebombed by jihadists. Abu-Jased expressed his despair and frustration at the emerging Islamist state in Gaza saying 'Of course women are frightened now. Even as a man I am really frightened! I used to sit on the street and talk to women. Now I won't do it. You don't know what's going to happen.'

What Abu-Jased and his friends need most desperately is for someone to offer them the opportunity to support something other than competing terrorist organizations."

As Glick must know if she has even basic reading comprehension skills, the point I was making was precisely that Abu-Jased and the people of Gaza desperately need an alternative to growing fundamentalism - and every single Gazan liberal I met (literally every single one) agreed that the best way to choke off fundamentalism was to end the Israeli occupation. (If you think the occupation of Gaza has ended, you should check out the new report by B'tselem showing that deaths have trebled there in the past year). They all believed that the savagery of the occupation was radicalising a minority of the population, making them think constantly about death and making the arguments of the most deranged groups seem more appealing.

For Glick to use the words of these people to argue for more and longer Israeli occupation - as she does - is one of the most repellent pieces of journalistic misrepresentation I have ever read.

Oh, and another example of outright lies from supposedly pro-Israel groups, this time by Joseph Farrah, can be read at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53560

He summarizes my Bethlehem story (which has been authenticated by the United Nations and Israeli human rights group B'tselem) by saying it is about "an Arab woman who claims she was stopped from entering Israel to deliver her twins and forced to go 20 minutes in another direction to an Arab hospital."

This can only be deliberate deception. Look back at my story. Fadia Jemal was +not+ trying to get to an Israeli hospital; she was trying to get to a Palestinian hospital in Bethlehem, from her home very nearby. She was +not+ 'stopped from entering Israel'; she was stopped from going to one part of the West Bank to another. (At no point did she even consider entering Israel; she would not have been allowed in without prior and elaborate permission, as anybody who knows anything about life in the Occupied Territories knows).

She was +not+ 'forced to go 20 minutes in another direction to an Arab hospital'. She was held for hours at a checkpoint that was preventing her from leaving her village and going to any hospital at all. This caused her baby to die.

Farrah's summary is a tissue of lies, from beginning to end. And he accuses me of writing "the worst form of propaganda"!

The wall of distortion you confront when trying to honestly describe life in the Occupied Territories shouldn't shock me, I suppose. But I didn't expect the lies to be quite so blatant.

Tomorrow, a third of humanity will huddle to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl. Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27 year old with a weary, watery smile. "What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured," she says. Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly in her hand, digging hard into her skin, as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened to her on the night of 25th May 2002.

"It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on," she says. She was already nervous about the birth - her first, and twins - so she told her husband to grab her hospital-bag and get her straight into the car. They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital twenty minutes away - but they found the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who explained that nobody was allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't understand."

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they wouldn't relent. So at 1am, on the backseat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital," she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and the doctors said they could "certainly" have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

"Now Mariam is at an age when she asks me where her brother is," Fadia says. "She wants to know what happened to him. But how do I explain it?" She looks down. "Sometimes at night I scream and scream." In the years since, she has been pregnant four times, but she keeps miscarrying. "I couldn't bear to make another baby. I was convinced the same thing would happen to me again," she explains. "When I see the [Israeli] soldiers I imagine I have a gun to kill them all. I know that's not the answer, but I keep thinking - what did my baby do to Israel?"

Since Fadia's delivery, the UN confirms 36 babies have died because their mothers were detained during labour at Israeli checkpoints. But all across Bethlehem - all across the West Bank - there are women whose pregnancies are being disturbed, or worse, by the 39-year old military occupation of their land.

In Salfit, a town on the other side of the West Bank, another 29 year old mother, Jamilla Alahad Naim, is waiting for the first medical checkup of her five-month pregnancy. “I am frightened all the time," she says. "I am frightened for my baby because I have had very little medical treatment and I cannot afford good food… I know I will give birth at home with no help, like I did with Mohammed [her last child]. I am too frightened to go to hospital because there are two checkpoints between our home [and there] and I know if you are detained by the soldiers, the mother or the baby can die out there in the cold. But giving birth at home is very dangerous too."

Many of the medical problems afflicting pregnant women here are more mundane than Jamilla's darkest fears. Some 60 percent of pregnant Palestinians are suffering from anaemia, a form of iron deficiency. Nobody knows why it is so prevalent, although the extreme poverty caused by the siege and now the international boycott seems to be a key factor. The doctors here warn grimly that as an ordinary Palestinian’s income evaporates, they eat more staples and fewer proteins – a recipe for anaemia. There is some evidence, they add, that women are giving the best food to their husbands and children, and subsisting on gristle and scraps.

Naim Kawkab, a 29 year old pregnant with her fifth child, has just been diagnosed with the condition. “Now I know why I feel permanently exhausted,” she explains. “In the mornings I can’t wake up, and when I force myself to stand up I get very dizzy and feel like I’m going to fall over. It’s very frightening.” Mrs Kawkab is at increased risk of haemorrhage and sepsis during childbirth, and some studies suggest the child’s intelligence may be stunted by his mother’s mineral deficiencies. “It’s terrible to know these things,” she says. “I don’t have the money to change my diet. What should I do?”

The extreme fear and stress of living under occupation is also – the gynacologist Dr Jamil Alzeer-Eyn warns – harming Palestinian foetuses before they even enter the world. “When a mother is so disturbed, it increases the chances of problems with the child,” he says. “It is not uncommon here to receive mothers who are so frightened and stressed they become psychotic. They become convinced the soliders are coming for them or their children will be harmed. We have unusually high numbers of this, because the situation is so extreme."

But then, earlier this year, conditions for pregnant women on the West Bank – already poor – fell off a cliff. Following the democratic election of Hamas, the world choked off funding for the Palestinian Authority. As a result, the PA suddenly found itself unable to pay its doctors and nurses. After months of trundling on with almost no salary at all, the medical staff felt obliged to go on strike, refusing to take anything but emergency cases. For more than six months, the maternity wards of the West Bank were empty and echoing. Beds lay, perfectly made, waiting for patients who could not come.

In all this time, there were no vitamins handed out, no ultrasound scans, no detection of congenital abnormalities – in short, no care for pregnant women unless they began to miscarry or had a hellishly complicated birth. Imagine if the NHS simply packed up and stopped one day and did not reopen for half a year, and you get a sense of the scale of the medical disaster.

Some women were wealthy enough to go to the few private hospitals scattered across the West Bank. The Bethlehem Medical Centre, director Ibrahim Shakarneh says, "The people sell their jewellery, their furniture, anything they might own, to pay for hospital treatment. But many people don't have anything to sell."

The result? Because of the international anti-democratic boycott of the Palestinians, every hospital warns there has been an unseen, unreported epidemic of home births on the West Bank. I found Dr Hamdan Hamdan – the head of maternity services at Hussein Hospital, Bethlehem – pacing around an empty ward, chain-smoking. “This ward is usually full,” he said. “We hate to strike, but what can we do? For the first time in my life I am in debt. Many of my nurses cannot even afford the fare to get to the hospital. They cannot afford to feed their children. Please do not call us the third world. We are the seventeeth world – the eighteenth is Somalia.” He laughs bitterly, then adds with a frown, “But the women who should be in this hospital – what is happening to them? Where have they gone?”

They have been reduced to giving birth in startlingly similar conditions to those suffered by Mary two thousand years ago. They have delivered their babies with no doctors, no sterilised equipment, no back-up if there are complications. They have been boycotted back into the stone age.

Maha Fanoun, a sickly 22 year old who lives in the hills surrounding Bethlehem, does not want to talk about it. But after some prompting she will describe how, four months ago, she was too poor to afford the nearby private hospital – “so I had my son in my living room. There was only an old woman who lives nearby to deliver the child. My son is, thank God, healthy, but I have never been more scared. It was the most terrible experience I have ever gone through.”

The strike finally ended earlier this month after the PA managed to raise funds from Muslim countries – but the effects of stopping maternity services are only now becoming clear. The nurse Hindia Abu Nabah says bluntly, “We are starting to see terrible problems as a result. We know there are a lot more babies with congenital deformities that would have been picked up and dealt with in the first trimester. There will be a generation of seriously disabled and mentally enfeebled Palestinian babies as a result of the international boycott."

But amidst this horror, one charity has been supporting pregnant Palestinian women even as their medical services fell apart. Merlin has set up two mobile clinics - with a fully-trained, full-time gynaecologist and a paediatrician – to take specialist services to the parts of the West Bank cut off from medical services by the Israeli occupation. They provide lab technicians and ultrasound machines – the fruits of the twenty-first century.

I travelled with the clinic to the Salfit region – scarred by Israeli settlements pumping out raw sewage onto Palestinian land – to see women and children desperately congregating around them seeking help.

Amidst the dozens of nervous women and swarms of sickly kids, Rahme Jima, a strained 29-year-old woman, is sitting with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She is in the last month of her pregnancy, and this is the first time she has seen a doctor since she conceived. "The nearest hospital is in Nablus, and we can't afford to pay for the transport to get there through all the checkpoints," she says, revealing she is planning – in despair – to give birth at home. Even if she had the cash, she says she is “too frightened of being detained at the checkpoint and being forced to give birth there. You have to weigh up the risks.” She sighs and adds, “I will be so relieved to finally be seen by a doctor, I have been so worried.”

But when she comes out from seeing the doctor, she is pensive. Mrs Jima says, “The doctor says I have severe anaemia, and they have given me iron supplements,” supplied by Merlin. She knows why this has happened. She can’t afford to eat well; she lives with her husband and her four children in a small room in her mother-in-law’s house, and her husband Joseph has been unemployed ever since the boycott began. “The doctor says I should have been seen much earlier in my pregnancy. Now because the anaemia has gone on so long my baby will probably be too small.”

All the problems afflicting these twenty-first century Marys traipse into Merlin’s clinic. One terrified, terrorised mother after another presents herself to the specialists here, and leaves clutching free packs of folic acid, calcium, iron and medicine. Dr Bassam Said Nadi, the Senior Medical Officer for this area, says, “I thank Merlin for the specialist care they have brought. Not long ago, we didn't even have petrol in our cars. Along side other organisations who care about ordinary people in times of need, they are helping us survive this terrible period in our country's history.”

But Merlin can only maintain these mobile clinics with your help. Leaning in the doorway of her bare clinic, the nurse Hindia Abu Nabah says, her fists closed tight, “Tell your readers we need their help. There are no Hamas or Fatah foetuses. They don’t deserve to be punished. I couldn’t stand to look another anaemic woman in the eye and tell her that her baby will be underweight or malformed and we don’t have any iron supplements to give her. I can’t go back to that. I can’t.”

To donate money to help these women, go to news.independent.co.uk/appeals/indy_appeal/

POSTSCRIPT: A couple of hard-right organisations have posted this article (with my e-mail address) to their mailing lists - the most famous of which is ironically called 'Honest Reporting', and promotes anything but. So I have been flooded with charming messages like this, from J. McDowell:

"Every time I read some stupid son of a bitch from the UK like you spout off, I think God for July 4th, 1776. You stupid son of a bitch, Mary was not a damn idiot and ragheaded, murderous bitch wandering around looking for a place to have a child. You limey bastard, screw you and all the ragheaded and murderous bastards on the planet. There is no such thing as Palestinians. The are a bunch of misplaced, murderous bastards that Egypt will take. Jordan will not take. Syria will not take. Iran will not take. Why Oh brilliant and pompous bastard?"

You can reply to this man at jmcdowell4@triad.rr.com

There are hundreds and hundreds of them, but just reply to this one - it will make me feel better.

If you have a strong stomach, you can also check out the comments on this article at 'Dhimmi Watch' at dhimmiwatch.org/

My favourites are: ""'What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?," she would be raped by some muslim for ramadan"

and

"When the Independent started its special seasonal Palestine appeal a few days ago, I thought they should just call it "Kill a Jew for Christmas" and have done with it."

Lovely. And a happy Christmas to you too.

I am sitting in a poky bedroom somewhere in Gaza City – I’m not allowed to know where – and opposite me is a huge beaming picture of Osama Bin Laden, with the smoke from a burning World Trade Centre forming a black halo around his head. He is surrounded by a gaggle of jihadi-angels: some Chechen fighters, Abu Musba al-Zarqawi, and our own tube-bomber, the Yorkshireman Mohammed Sidiqh Khan. “Would you like to see our weapons?” a masked jihadi says cheerfully, before thrusting a grenade into my hand.

I have come to see what Israel will confront in a generation if – as now looks certain after this weekend – they never, never deal with the democratically elected Hamas government but instead resolve to break it.

Coining one of the dullest clichés about the Middle East, Abba Eban, one of Israel’s longest-serving foreign ministers, famously claimed “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. Precisely the opposite is the case. As the Fatah President Abu Mazen tried desperately this Saturday to dislodge Hamas by calling for early elections, we need to remember a stark truth. Every time the Israeli government rejects a Palestinian leader because he is too hard-line, they do not get a cuddly Gandhian moderate in his place. They get somebody more hard-line still.

Yassir Arafat endorsed a two-state solution, but couldn’t accept a forever-and-always string of Bantustans bisected by Israeli settler-only roads as his half of the deal – so they rocketed and shelled the old man’s compound until he died. Many Israelis now look back on Arafat with near-nostalgia. Today the Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh says he can never accept Israel’s existence. But he is offering a 40 year-long hudna (ceasfire) – provided Israel withdraws to the internationally recognised 1967 borders, as they should anyway under international law. Haniyeh is offering to kick all the tough issues down the road until 2046, and build two peacefully co-existing states, with no mutual violence. His track-record of keeping his word on ceasefires is strong: in the current short hudna, Hamas has held its fire even as Fatah fires a few Qassam missiles.

But the governments of America, Europe and Israel are snubbing this deal too. They say Haniyeh has to recognise Israel totally, and today. Until he does, his people will be “put on a diet”, in the words of one Israeli government advisor. I have seen what this means: hospitals shut and shuttered across the West Bank, with women left to give birth at home like pre-modern peasants. The yellowish hue of malnutrition on children’s faces. The empty and echoing schools. Tony Blair has been at the forefront of this programme to force Hamas to concede, and is in the Middle East to promote it further. For him, the onus is on the Palestinians living under military occupation to justify why they should be freed – rather than on the people who have been oppressing them on their own land for 39 years to explain why it should continue.

The result of breaking the democratic will of the Palestinian people will not be greater softness on their part. No. It will create more men like Abu Ahmad (a nom de guerre), who last week I sat with in the shadow of Bin Laden in a corner of Gaza.

“I want to kill and kill and kill again. I want to be a killing machine until, inshallah [God willing], I become a martyr,” he said, staring at me intensely. He is 27 – my age – and murderous. He has just described how he slashed the throats of four female Israeli soldiers in an illegal settlement in 2002, and he chuckled as he described how they cried for their mothers. “All the Jews have to be killed,” he says. The children? The women? “I prefer to kill soldiers, but they must all be killed in time. Soldiers first.” The Holocaust did not happen, he says, “but it should have.”

These crazed young men – the ‘troops’ of Islamic Jihad – are the children of the first Intifadah. They saw their parents peacefully protest, and the Israeli troops be ordered to “break their bones” as punishment. Abu Hamza, a sober, severe 26 year old, explains he first joined Islamic Jihad when he was ten – a year after he took his first Israeli bullet in the skull. He had been throwing stones and setting fire to old tires in the street when it happened, and he became a local celebrity as the first child victim of the violence. “I was so proud,” he says. He invites me to feel the scar on the back of his head. “Yes,” he says with a smile, “we have been growing in popularity over the past few years. Very much.”

All over Gaza and the West Bank, the assault on Hamas is creating groups like this to their right, deranged little pockets that will only swell if Hamas is totally humiliated. At the moment they are small, speaking – as Hamas did a generation ago – for only a small fraction of Palestinians. But for how long? Last week I tried to trace the footsteps of a new streak of Islamist fanaticism that has jutted suddenly into Gaza over the past month. A group calling itself ‘Swords of Islam’ has started blowing up internet cafés – a symbol of extra-Koranic knowledge and cosmpolitan connection to the world. They have issued Talibanist threats warning that women who do not wear the hijab will be “burned”, and that the internet is a “Zionist plot” to keep people away from “their religious duties.”

In a bombed-out café named Montada Donajoun in the Jaballiya refugee camp, I spoke to the terrified owner. Basa Abu-Jased, 29, said, “Of course women are frightened now. [Even as a man] I am really frightened! I used to sit on the street and talk to women. Now I won’t do it. You don’t know what’s going to happen.” Almost everybody on the street was too frightened to speculate about who these people are; one woman suggested they were “maniacs who had returned from fighting in Iraq”, but then hurried away.

It took a very long time to rouse the Palestinians to violence and produce these pathologies. Between 1967 and 1982 – as 200,000 Palestinians were expelled and more than a third of their remaining land was stolen by fanatical settlers – just 282 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. But Israeli policies have virtually guaranteed a tip towards great violence and forms of madness. Every time the Palestinians have peacefully protested or negotiated, they have been choked further.

There is still – still – a majority in Palestine for peaceful coexistence with Israel, with 67 percent supporting the Hamas proposal for a 40-year hudna. But if their democratic will is treated with contempt by humiliating Hamas, this historical window will close. Every year the occupation goes on, more deranged people like Abu Ahmad are smelted. “I love Osama Bin Laden,” he said to me as we parted, slapping me on the back. “I love killing.”

You can send comments on this article just for me to j.hari +at+ independent.co.uk or for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk

[Apologies that the website has been down for a few days. This was due to a technical reason I cannot even begin to comprehend - something to do with 'servers', and that's the limit of my tecchie-talk. Anyway, this year, the Independent's charity appeal is for two NGOs doing brilliant work in Gaza and the West Bank: the Welfare Association, and Merlin. I've been out there to see their work, and this is the second of a series of articles.]

There are many things you expect to find in the cratered, cramped heart of Gaza City, but a group of proto-Germaine Greers and Betty Freidans would be low on the list. Yet I am sitting under a lush green tree with a group of tough old ladies at the heart of the feminist hub they have built here – and where hundreds of Gazan women are flocking to find freedom.

In 1989, the women’s rights campaigner Um Ahmad returned to her native Gaza after decades working for women’s organisations across the world. She explains, “I was determined to do something about the fact that women were in a much worse position here than even in other Arab countries.” She found that Palestinian women were trapped in a pincer movement of oppression, between the savage Israeli occupation and a suffocatingly patriarchal Palestinian tradition. She knew there was only one way to free these women – by getting them jobs and hard earning power.

Her proposal to establish a women’s rights organisation providing jobs for women was refused by the Israeli occupying authorities, stamped as unacceptable. Ahmad refused to let this stop her. Risking interrogation and imprisonment, she went ahead and set up a network for women to make jams and foods in their homes and to sell them on. Occupied and sexist Gaza was a place where the Women’s Institute was revolutionary, and jam-making an illegal act of subversion.

After four years, Ahmad’s organisation was finally legalized. Today – thanks to the Welfare Association – it has a permenant base. She is sitting with me in the courtyard, watching women calmly sip coffee and read from print-outs they have made at the internet terminals here. If you shut out the endless car-horns – the tinnitus of the most congested land-mass in the world – and the simulated explosions of the Israeli sonic booms, this is as close to tranquil as Gaza City gets.

“At the moment, women are suffering most from the occupation and economic collapse,” she explains. “When the husband is out of work and at home all the time, he starts picking on his wife. For a lot of men, being unemployed and humiliated by the Israelis makes them show they are still in control somewhere – over their wives and children. Often violence breaks out.”

Ahmad’s priority was to give women a chance to earn money and achieve independence. That’s why she set up a women’s-only, non-profit factory, and today as she walks along its floor with me, the thirty women are engaging in the usual factory-floor banter while working their machines. They all in turn have a story of how this centre changed their lives.

Leila is a 40 year-old sewing machinist, and as she steps away from her machine she explains, “I used to live on food and money subsidies from a local charity. I was stuck at home, very poor, staring at the walls and thinking ‘What am I doing with my life?’ Then one day a charity worker told me I was intelligent and I could be a producer, not just a passive recipient – and he put me in touch with this charity. Now I am the one who supports my husband and my seven children.” She laughs with a mixture of surprise and glee. “I am convinced that sitting at home waiting for donations is bad. Going out, fulfilling yourself, being independent – that is good. I want all women to be able to do this.”

Fatima is a bubbly 18 year old who works on the knitting machines. She has always wanted to be a teacher of deaf children, but her parents couldn’t afford to send her to university – so she is paying her own way as a student while working here. “It’s an amazing feeling, to be able to stand on your own feet, to be an independent woman,” she says. Working at the next machine is Imam, a 39 year old woman who was abandoned by her husband and left to look after her six children alone. “I was stuck in a terrible corner,” she says. “Then I found this place and they gave me training. When I started earning I could leave the humiliation of my mother-in-law’s house and get our own room. Now I look after my own kids in dignity.”

The Welfare Association helps to pay for these women to manufacture school uniforms for the poverty-racked children of Palestine, and to maintain a bakery. It helped to build the Cultural Centre next door, where women can read, browse the web and take their traumatised children to play. (They always draw tanks and bombs, the librarian tells me with a sad smile.)

Looking out at all she has built up, Ahmad says, “The most noticeable thing is that when women first join our society, they don’t speak a lot. They are silent, because that’s how they have been taught to be. But after a while they start to express their views, and soon they are drawn out of their silence. They want to go on the computers, browse the internet, see the world out there. It’s like a person who has been locked in a room; then you offer them a window and they want to see more and more.”

Ahmad wants to employ more women and open more windows – but she needs your money to do it. “When you help a Palestinian woman, you help all her children,” she says. “When you free a Palestinian woman, you help to free Palestine.”

To donate money to help these women, go to http://www.justgiving.com/process/whitelabel/?_WhiteLabelId=1214

Every time I come to Gaza – this clogged, cramped collection of palm trees and bomb craters on the Mediterranean – it is crumbling and collapsing a little more.

As you wander the streets, you find rusting old cars are being slowly replaced by rickety horse-drawn carts, with women and children clinging to the back like refugees fleeing the nineteenth century. The refugee camps themselves are sagging into the earth, with nobody bothering to rebuild the bombed-out homes since they expect them to be blown up again any time. There are open fires on street-corners as people try to dispose of a nine-month long build-up of rotting rubbish. This is just another result of the American and European choking-off of funds for the Palestinians since they democratically elected Hamas: there is no money to pay the bin-men.

Gaudy and grim, with the sea-air mixing with clouds of dust, Gaza looks oddly like Blackpool after a nuclear war.

The Israeli government claims the 38-year occupation here ended when they finally withdrew the illegal settlements built here by religious fanatics. This is a lie.

As the heroic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy explains, “Without anyone paying attention, the Gaza Strip has become the most closed-off strip of land in the world – after North Korea.” The Israeli army has been ordered to seal the borders of Gaza since June, making it almost impossible to get anyone – or anything – in or out. Some 1.5 million people are now locked in an area the size of the Isle of Wight, and their lives consist of excruciating boredom punctuated occassionally by moments of raw terror.

They increasingly fear that, like animals trapped in a tiny cage, they will turn on each other. There have been portents of a Palestinian civil war ever since the Hamas victory, and while I have been stumbling around Gaza they seem to be multiplying. This weekend, three children of a Fatah intellgience officer – aged 7, 8 and 9 – were gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Yesterday, a Hamas judge was shot in retaliation. The idea of a unity government between the factions seems to have joined them in the grave.

So will the molten misery of Gaza now be multiplied by a civil war – and what would it be about? The leaders of Hamas and Fatah claim vehemently they do not want a civil war and will do all they can to avoid it, but I wanted to get beyond their carefully constructed sentences and speak to their supporters on the ground.

Most people on the streets believe it will not happen. “We are all Palestinians,” they insist. Almost everyone explains that in an individual family it is very common to find supporters of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad. “Will brother kill brother?” asks Abu Ahmad, a 25 year old student, sceptically. I am relieved – but then I also remember Iraqis saying the same thing to me four years ago, pointing proudly to the huge number of Sunni-Shia intermarriages. One of the many awful lessons of Iraq is that it only takes a determined few to start a civil war: if their attacks are gruesome enough – like targetting the other side’s kids – they will crowbar open sectarian divisions, even where a great majority wants peaceful co-existence.

The tribal lineaments of a civil war are visible in the most unexpected places. Just as Fatah filled the government machine with its lackeys, now Hamas is trying to slowly replace them with its own. In the hospitals, many doctors are known as Hamas or Fatah-installed, as if there was a distinctively Hamas model of haematology or a Fatah school of pediatrics. One Senior Medical Officer – Dr Bassam Said Nadi – explains, “We have two camps and two administrations, and it’s very easy to get lost between the two. The bureaucracy is doubled and when Hamas and Fatah don’t agree it’s hard to do anything. To be frank, it is causing real problems in the hospitals.”

But does this bifurcated state make a drift to civil war inevitable? Mahmoud Ajrami, an independent-minded Marxist analyst at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tells me, “The only reason a civil war hasn’t broken out already here is because Fatah is so weak.” He believes Fatah has a vested interest in avoiding civil war because they would obviously lose: while Hamas can bring 100,000 onto the streets easily, as I saw last Thursday, Fatah can barely muster a few hundred. It was always a Yassir Arafat-shaped party, and without his iconic status in the eyes of the Palestinian people, it has deflated like a failed souffle. Hamas, he reckons, doesn’t think a nasty civil war against such a feeble opponent is worth it.

When I ask people what a civil war would be about, their answers are unclear. Nobody mentions the division that seems to be most prominent to outsiders: the question of recognising the existence of Israel within the 1967 borders. In theory, Fatah recognises Israel, while Hamas refuses to. But in practice, Fatah is the only group still firing a few Qassam rockets into Israel during the official ceasefire, while Hamas has offered a forty-year hudna (ceasefire) if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders. To Palestinians, the differences on Israel have, it seems, blurred to near-zero – even though America and Europe consider them significant enough to justify the strangulation of Gaza.

No, the few reasons offered here for are different. Nidal Sheikh Eid, the head of the Hamas student wing and an IT student, says, “Our difference with Fatah is over the questions of Islam and shariah. We believe in an Islamic environment with Islamic law, while Fatah is” – he spits these words – “a secular party.” He adds that his interpretation of shariah does not include the “terrible” oppression of women that was seen in Afghanistan, but it does include punishments like chopping off the hands of theives. Abdul Haqim Awad, the head of Fatah’s student movement guarded by bullet proof vest-wearing bodyguards, agrees this is the main point of division. “They want to impose sharia law, like the Taliban,” he says. “We want secularism.”

But this debate does not seem very alive to most of the Palestinians on the streets. Almost all looked blank when I asked about it and muttered platitudes about Islam. To them, the biggest difference between Fatah and Hamas is corruption. One non-aligned nurse – speaking on condition of anonymity – says that in her hospital under Fatah, if you had an underweight baby you had to have connections with the ministry or pay a fat bribe to get your child into an incubator. “Now, that has ended,” she says.

From the wrecked refugee camps of Gaza – braced for more Israeli terror – there seem to be no good reasons and no clear cry for yet more war. But will the people’s shaky voices be heard over the sound of militias clashing?

[This year, the Independent's charity appeal is for two NGOs doing brilliant work in Gaza and the West Bank: the Welfare Association, and Merlin. I've been out there to see their work, and this is the first of a series of articles.]

Dr Hassan Deed Suleiman is staring anxiously at the three rickety pieces of machinery that stand between him and a meltdown in Gaza's hospital network. "We do not have back-ups for any of the essential components of our largest blood bank," he says, shaking his head. "If – when – one of them breaks, we will not be able to do proper blood transfusions in most of Gaza. The flow of blood to our hospitals will stop. The effects will be terrible. People will die."

Suleiman is the director of Shifa Blood Bank, which supplies 60 percent of the blood needed by sick Gazans, for everything from caesarian sections to bomb victims to haemophiliacs. He is speaking over the low, unhealthy hum of three battered old pieces of equipment: the refrigerator that freezes it until it can be processed, the refrigerated centrifuge that separates blood into its components, and the incubator that keeps the resulting platelets warm. "All of these machines have been switched on and in continuous use since 1996," he says. "How much longer can they last?"

Gaza's blood banks have been crumbling for years. The Israeli seige made it extremely hard to get new machine parts into this congested strip of land, where one and a half million people live trapped. Then the international boycott – after the democratic election of Hamas – dried up the dribble of international funds that used to make it through, making it hard for the Shifa Blood Bank to buy even simple blood bags and testing kits.

Today, Dr Suleiman warns, "During the Beit Hanoun crisis [this autumn], we ran out of Hepatitis C testing kits for a time. If things carry on deteriorating like this, soon we will have to make a terrible choice. Do we stop screening the blood for diseases like HIV and Hepatitis, or do we stop putting out blood altogether? Either way, it is a humanitarian crime."

Five minutes' drive away – in Nasser Pediatric Hospital – there is a ward full of children who will pay when this day comes. Five year old Qusay Issa is sitting at the entrance with a malignant tumour in his stomach and a large smiling Tweetie Pie over his shoulder. He scratches his shaved head and picks distractedly at his stripy socks. He is undergoing chemotherapy, his doctor tells me, and needs regular blood transfusions.

In the nearest bed, eight year old Osan al-Galazin is lying exhausted after four hours hooked up to the blood supply. He is a haemophiliac and, his mother Basma explains, "Yesterday he fell while he was playing so he is bleeding a lot. If there is no blood bank, my son will continuously bleed and bleed until he dies. My family are sick with worry."

Blood has long been a bleak symbol of Palestinian life, and now it is becoming another in its long list of crises. To most Westerners, the notion of a Palestinian blood-sacrifice brings to mind a vision of a suicide-killer – but in fact, Palestine has an unusally strong tradition of blood donation. Dr Randa Khoudary, the director of Blood Banks and Laboratories at the Ministry of Health, says, "After an Israeli attack we invariably get a huge flood of blood donors at the hospitals. It is something even very poor people can do to show solidarity. But we have to turn away hundreds of people, because we do not have the physical capacity to store much blood."

And the ability to gather and store blood is not only haeommoraghing away in the blood banks. The Central Blood Bank Society collects a third of the blood for Gaza's limited storage facilities – and its offices are currently being repossessed, its electricity cut off, and its staff left unpaid. Standing outside its offices in despair, Bassim Shaban, the chief of the laboratory here, says, "We are very deep in debt. We owe $150,000 because we have not been receiving the donations we need, and the Palestinian Authority has no money to bail us out because of the international boycott."

His offices in Kharnounis and Rafah have already been sold off to the highest bidder. When the power supply was cut off, the collected blood quickly warmed and went bad. The society's mobile blood collection unit – with proper, safe medical equipment – is rusting in the garage, its engine long-since dead. Instead they have to collect blood from the back of an old van, like medical Delboys. "It is not safe," Shabban says. "It is not safe."

Back in the Shifa Blood Bank, Dr Suleiman laughs at the idea he needs your blood-money. "But it is true," he adds. "This blood bank desperately needs to be replaced. Blood is not an optional add-on to the functioning of our health system. It is a necessity." It is the life-blood, I say, and he laughs again, but sadly. "We have enough problems with blood in Gaza. We do not need this too."

To donate money to rescue Gaza's blood service, go to http://www.justgiving.com/process/whitelabel/?_WhiteLabelId=1214

When Jorg Haider's far-right Freedom Party joined the governing coalition in Austria in 2000, the world offered a collective retch and moved to isolate the country. In the past fortnight, a startlingly similar far-right politician named Avigdor Lieberman has joined the governing coalition in Israel - in the lofty position of Deputy Prime Minister - but the world's gagging reflex has yet to respond.

Lieberman is an ex-nightclub bouncer, once arrested for attacking a boy who he suspected of insulting his son. His party, Yisrael Beytenu (Israel, Our Home), has campaigned on two ugly issues. The first is the claim that Israel's two million Arab citizens are "a danger to the country", to be dispensed with, in part, by ethnic cleansing. Lieberman wanted to bus thousands of released Palestinian prisoners to the Dead Sea and drown them.

Today, he has moderated his stance and merely wants to "transfer" many hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs - inevitably by force - to the scraps of remaining land that will be labelled Palestine after Israel has annexed the major illegal settlement blocks. If your name's not on the list, you're not staying in.

His model is Cyprus in the 1970s, where the mixed Turkish and Greek populations were separated out at gunpoint. "The final result was better," he sighs. "Minorities are the biggest problem in the world." He would like to begin these racist expulsions with a simple, swift move: executing Israeli Arab members of the Knesset. Since they have spoken to the democratically elected Palestinian leadership, they are "traitors", Lieberman argues.

His second issue has been an attempt to streamline and centralise power into the hands of one Strong Man. Lieberman grew up in the Soviet Union. His support base is overwhelmingly among the one million Jews who emigrated to Israel after the fall of Communism. Much as they despised Soviet anti-Semitism, many have imbibed Soviet habits of mind and do not see why faffing about with coalitions and supreme courts should be allowed to get in the way of the Great Leader vanquishing the Great Enemy.

It is important to stress that Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, says he rejects Lieberman's views, and will not carry out his policies. But he has placed Lieberman in charge of the largest single issue in Israeli politics - how to respond to Iran's imminent nuclear bomb. We already know his views on this: Lieberman was calling for bombing of Iran as long ago as 2001, and says Israel is "on the frontline of the clash of religions".

The silence that has greeted Lieberman's appointment is a bleak sign of how far Israel has drifted to the right. In the 1980s, a fascist called Rabbi Meir Kahane emerged calling for a Lieberman-style "pure Jewish state" that was "cleansed of Arab contaminants" and "stripped of liberal democratic illusions". He was execrated by everyone and banned by the Supreme Court from sitting in the Knesset even as a fringe member. Yet today, only a handful of heroic Israelis have spoken out at the appointment of Lieberman to the deputy premiership. One Labour cabinet minister - one - resigned, saying it would be a betrayal of everything the Jews have learned to sit alongside "a racist".

It is revealing that ethnic cleansing would re-emerge as a mainstream issue in Israel politics now, as the country undergoes a national nervous breakdown. This summer, in the sands of Lebanon, Israel effectively lost a war for the first time. (In his testimony before a Knesset committee last month, Olmert was reduced to defiantly bragging, "Half of Lebanon was destroyed - is that a loss?"). The country's political class is on life support just as surely as Ariel Sharon, with the President facing rape charges and Olmert facing a battery of corruption allegations.

In the midst of all this, a national taboo has melted away. Anybody who studies the history with open eyes can now see that ethnic cleansing of Palestine's indigenous population was Israel's original sin, a prerequisite for the state to come into existence. Today the Israeli people feel their existence is threatened once more, so they are returning in their minds - via Lieberman - to those birth crimes in the search for solutions.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father, wrote in 1937, "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral ... The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war." The brave Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, documents in detail how Ben Gurion's plan was carried out, village by village, town by town, in 1948. The Jewish soldiers who carried out this crime were often still emaciated from the Nazi concentration camps, trying desperately to convince themselves that these totally innocent Arab peasants were somehow akin to Nazis - that Adolf Hitler was hiding in Ramallah, or Bethlehem, or Nablus.

Lieberman's argument is, in essence, that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 did not go far enough. Yes, 800,000 were driven out - but almost as many were left behind, a "fifth column" within Israel, who must now be dealt with.

The best symbol of how Israeli thinking has cracked and reverted to an earlier, base impulse is the historian Benny Morris, who I met up with last time he was in London. In the 1980s, Morris became a hero to the Israeli and international left because he was the first man brave enough to pore into the declassified Israeli military archives from the 1940s and show how Israel's founders carried out the expulsion of the Palestinians.

But then at the height of the second intifada, he gave an interview in which he said he had been misunderstood all these years. All this time he was talking about ethnic cleansing, he didn't mean it was a bad thing. No - "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands," he said. It would have been "much better" if they had driven out all the Arabs, he declared.

The ugliest strains in Israeli political thought are rising to the surface. There have always been some anti-democratic forces in the country - Sharon considered mounting a military coup in 1967, for example. There have always been ethnic cleansers, from Ben Gurion to the politicians who today authorise the blowing up of "unpermitted" Arab (never Jewish) houses in East Jerusalem, a process I have witnessed myself.

But Avigdor Lieberman is a logo for all this at its most extreme, and today he is only a few bullets away from the Premiership. For the sake of the Palestinians, for the sake of Israel itself, now is the time for the world to jolt Israel, just as we jolted Austria back from its dark dance with the far right. But given how muted the world's reaction has been to the collective punishment of Gaza and the destruction of Lebanon, what are the odds of that?

As Israeli forces killed more than 300 civilians and drove half a million people from their homes in the name of stamping out “terrorism”, a small, sour historical irony passed unnoticed last week in Jerusalem. The veterans of another “terrorist” organisation gathered, right under the nose of the Israeli forces, to celebrate the slaughter of 91 people, including 28 Brits, in a hotel. It fondly recalled planting bombs that blew up civilians on buses, in marketplaces and cafés, introducing these tactics to the Middle East tango. It looked back on rounding up the population of an entire village – 251 men, women and children – and shooting them all. It even marked the memory of kidnapping the other side’s soliders and holding them for weeks – before hanging them by the neck until they were dead.

So has this “terrorist” organisation been punished with aerial bombardment from the Israeli Defence Force? Not quite. The group was called the Irgun, and it was made up of Jewish nationalists whose children now comprise the Israeli establishment. Through the 1930s and 1940s, it planted bombs across Palestine, targeting both British soldiers and Palestinian civilians. It had two goals: to drive the British imperialists out, and to terrorise the Palestinian population into unconditionally accepting the creation of Israel. Ehud Olmert, Israel’s ‘war on terror’ Prime Minister, can scarcely condemn them. He spent the first three years of his life living in one of their terror training camps while his parents worked as their gun-runners. Tzipi Livni, the Israel foreign minister widely tipped as a future PM, is the daughter of the Irgun’s director of military operations, a mastermind of civilian-slaughter.

While the war in Lebanon went super-nova last week, the remaining Irgun fighters unveiled a plaque marking the 60th anniversary of their decision to blow up the King David Hotel. Of course, the Irgun had some good motives to remember alongside its racist ones. Throughout the 1940s, the British authorities refused to allow more than a tiny dribble of Jewish refugees from the Nazi genocide in Europe to reach safety in Palestine, because they feared it would “imbalance” the Middle East situation. Better, they implicitly argued, to leave them to be herded into concentration camps and choke on Zyklon B. So as well as murdering Palestinians, the Irgun fought for the right to asylum for victims of the Nazis – one of the many cruel ambiguities of history in the Middle East.

The Irgun is not simply an old story. If only they could see it clearly, it could help the Israeli political class to understand the new story burning into history across Israel’s borders. If only Olmert, Livni and the wider Israeli public could remember their own family’s history of ‘terrorism’, they would be able to see how futile their own current military campaigns against ‘terrorists’ in Gaza and Lebanon are. When Jewish people were deprived of a state, a section of their population took up arms and fought for one – often with terrible tactics. Some of them even dreamed lunatic dreams of ethnic cleansing. The Palestinian people are in exactly the same position today, stoked and supported by Hamas and Hezbollah.

Three summers ago, I sat in a cool, bare flat in Gaza City and met a string of young men who were training to become suicide-murderers. They dreamed of taking out as many Jews as possible, and their deranged hatred had been born during the First Intifada, when as children they watched their parents stage a peaceful protest against Israeli occupation. Yitzhak Rabin responded by ordering the Israeli army to “break their bones”, and they saw their mothers being clubbed to the ground, and their homes destroyed.

As I spoke to these young men who were marinated in rage, I was struck by how familiar their words sounded. I had just been reading ‘The Revolt’, the memoirs of Menachem Begin, the Irgun commander who went on to become the first Likud Prime Minister of Israel. He wrote, “Blood brought our revolt to life. Only when you are prepared to stand up to Zeus himself in order to bring fire to humanity can you achieve the fire-revolution.” The suicide-murderers said to me, “We will create Palestine in blood and fire. The Jews only understand blood and fire.” Both scoffed at the “terrorist” label and insisted they killed only to free their people.

Olmert and Livni need to ask themselves – how would their parents, determined terror-fighters, have responded to the aerial bombardment Israel is inflicting this week? How would they have reacted to their people being driven from their homes, their children being incinerated, their economies destroyed? Would they have lost hope, given up and gone to settle somewhere else? In his book, Begin insists that every assault from the British forces to “break the back” of the Irgun “only made us stronger and more determined.” Does the Israeli government imagine the fighters in Lebanon and Gaza are any different? The last invasion of Lebanon created Hezbollah. What new strains of Islamist madness will be smelted by Israeli bombs this week?

The Irgun did not stop blowing up Arab civilians because they were crushed by British gunships and Apache helicopters. They stopped because the world gave them a slab of what they wanted. Not everything – the Irgun wanted all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Gaza and the West Bank, but they settled for a state of their own within more limited borders. This compromise led to a non-violent stalemate, and it would have continued indefinitely had the disastrous conquest of Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 war not unexpectedly revived the right-wing fantasy of a Greater Israel.

This old story has lessons for us still. Hamas and Hezbollah cannot be silenced by military means. Their current stash of rockets might be blown up this year, but the renewed ferocity of their hatred will guarantee they are rebuilt next year and all the more ready to use them. They will not watch passively as their children are reduced to near-African levels of malnutrition, as has happened in Gaza, or while the kill-rate is ten-to-one against them, as in Lebanon. They will only ever be silenced by giving them something – not everything – of what they want. Both have agreed that if there is a real two-state solution along the 1967 border, they will not fire at Israel proper again. It is an obvious compromise, and the only moral option left. They want all of the land, ethnically cleansed of their enemies, just as Olmert and Livni’s parents did sixty years ago. But they will settle for less.

Yet the Israeli government has not chosen this route – of de-escalation and negotiation, towards two states for two peoples on the one slim patch of land they are condemned to share. Instead it has chosen war. As a result, sixty years from now, Lebanese and Palestinian fighters will be proudly gathering in Gaza City and Beirut to unveil plaques to the “terrorists” who killed and died fighting Israel this week. At this rate, with the Middle East veering ever-further from the only sane solution, the historical irony will still be missed.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article for publication can be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

Comments just for me can be sent to johann *-at-* johannhari.com

Lenin once said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.” As decades pass in the Middle East this week, does anybody still believe this is about saving three Israeli soldiers – a piece of Hollywood schmaltz called ‘Saving Corporal Shalit’ and its two sequels? Are Beirut, Haifa and Gaza City burning for them?

Only a dwindling band of people now believe this, the official pretext for the twin-set of wars Israel is fighting on its Northern and Southern fronts. If it had been true, there was an obvious solution short of war – swapping prisoners. Israel is currently holding 8200 Palestinian fighters, as well as at least three Lebanese fighters who were seized in Lebanon itself during the long eighteen years when Israel was occupying its entire Southern region. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have said the Israeli soliders will head home as soon as there is a fair swap.

This is such a wacky left-wing idea that it was pursued by Ariel Sharon just two years ago, when he gave Hezbollah 429 prisoners in exchange for an Israeli businessman and three corpses. The people who scoff at this proposal now are implicitly saying that Sharon was a flower-power hippie – one of the few insults he never earned in his long life.

The opponents of a prisoner-swap also warn gravely that it would fire the starting gun for an open season on Israeli soldiers, with dozens being snatched. But previous prisoner-swaps have not been followed by a spate of kidnappings; indeed, they have led to a period of calm.

So what is the real reason for the bombing of Lebanon, forcing (so far) half a million people from their homes? The most obvious is a desire to permanently remove the Hezbollah militia from its place nestling on Israel’s borders, where it has amassed 13,000 rockets. This was a grievance just waiting for a casus belli.

But is this aim of disarming Hezbollah reasonable? The Islamic fundamentalist group is indeed revolting. In their early days Hezbollah imposed a savage code of ‘Islamic behaviour’ on the Muslims of South Lebanon, imprisoning women in their homes and murdering gays. Since then, they have endorsed the suicide-murder of Israeli children as they sit in pizzerias, and even in 1994 bombed a synagogue in Buenos Aries, Argentina, killing 85 civilians totally unconnected to this conflict.

Yet if being ideologically repugnant, snatching fighters and owning rockets were a reason for a war, then Lebanon would have an even greater right to invade Israel. After all, it holds their snatched fighters, owns far more than 13,000 rockets (some nuclear) and has a history of invading their territory and committing mass slaughter on dishonest pretexts. One Israeli general demanded this week, “How long can we live with a knife to our throats?” But in reality the far bigger knife belongs to Israel. Are they really saying the right to self-defence and a buffer-zone of security belongs to them alone?

Hezbollah is at its core a self-defence organisation, however ugly, and its recent operations have been limited largely to this function. It was formed to expel Israeli troops who mounted an unprovoked invasion of Lebanon in 1982 in order to crush the Palestinian groups operating there. By the time the Israeli forces finally left in 2000, they had killed 17,000 Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees. Since the end of the occupation, Hezbollah had only fired across the border once, until Israel began its aerial bombardment last week. It was when the Israelis blew up Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, outraging the world. (It is also worth remembering that half a million people in Lebanon get their drinking water from tanks provided by Hezbollah. At least 100,000 people depend on the hospitals and health clinics they run.)

There was always a way for Israel to put Hezbollah’s rockets beyond use without a single innocent Lebanese child being bombed. Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has been asked repeatedly if he would accept a two-state solution. He always replies that he will never sabotage “an internal Palestinian matter,” and that if Israeli and Palestinian leaders negotiate a settlement both sides can accept, Hezbollah’s missiles will never be used across the border again. Hezbollah will be reduced to a local Lebanese problem. Revolting though he is, Nasrallah has always kept his word on these matters: he even explained to Sharon back in 2004 that at some point in the future he would kidnap more soldiers in a bid to reclaim the remaining fighters Sharon clung onto.

But a real negotiated two-state solution is precisely what Olmert does not want. Here we get to the central reason Olmert has chosen a violent non-solution to Hezbollah over a peaceful authentic solution. Uri Avnery, the great veteran Israeli peace campaigner, explains, “[In Israel] we have an ongoing, partly hidden debate about what’s really the main thing – achieve peace or create a bigger Israel? The people in power today still believe that a greater Israel is more important. They got away from the idea that all of the country of Palestine should become Israel, but they would still like to annex significant parts of the West Bank. That’s their priority. As long as this is a priority, not only do these people not want peace, but they think peace is a bad thing.” Peace would create momentum towards negotiations with the Palestinians’ democratically elected leaders – and that cannot be allowed to happen.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has just published a long, authoritative study of Olmert’s motives, drawing on sources very close to the Prime Minister. It reveals Olmert has another consideration, of which "he is not speaking [in public]. He wants to set a precedent for the convergence plan in the West Bank, to show that Israel won’t accept terror from beyond the fence after it withdraws.”

He knows the deal he plans to impose on the West Bank will be unacceptable to Palestinians - not just Islamic Jihad, but the vast majority. He has been proposing to seize strategically valuable chunks of the West Bank by annexing them to Israel since as long ago as 1978, after all, and now has the cover of a unilateral 'peace plan'. So he is trying to pre-emptively terrify them now so they will not dare fight back.

So here it is, the kernel of emotional truth behind this war. Its clearest expression can be found in the speeches of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, figure-head for the right-wing of Zionism, the man Olmert was raised to revere. Talking of the Arabs in 1923, Jabotinsky insisted, “A living people makes enormous concessions… only when there is no hope left.” That is the true purpose of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon – to ensure, at last, there is no hope left for the Arabs.

But the Palestinians and Lebanese will not slump away. They will become gripped with a nihilistic hate, and long after Ehud Olmert is nothing more than a skeleton and a statue, the hate will still burn. Does he imagine this is good for the children of Israel?

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article for publication in the Independent can be sent to letters@independent.co.uk

Comments just for me can be sent to johann@NOSPAMjohannhari.com

Please, spare me deranged anti-Semitic/anti-Muslim conspiracy theories though; I just delete them.

If you have never been there, it’s hard to give a sense of the cramped claustrophobia of Gaza. It is a tiny patch of land squeezed between the sea and the local superpower, where 1.4 million people live locked in fear and never leave. I couldn’t find anybody my age who had ever been beyond Gaza in the rotting refugee camps and concrete slabs of poverty that fill the Strip. They were stuck in their little sand-and-concrete hole, smaller than the Isle of Wight, dreaming angry dreams of Jerusalem; the rest of the world seems to them unimaginably far away. Their world begins and ends with the beaches to one side - now unusable because of Israeli attacks - and the tanks to the other.

Over the past three weeks, as so often before, the entire population of Gaza has been subject to collective punishment. The civilian population is woken in the night by “sonic booms”, sudden deafening noise-explosions caused by Israeli planes that everyone assumes, for a terrible moment, are bombs being dropped on them. The civilian population is being starved. Although 14 percent of their children were already suffering from levels of malnutrition that match sub-Saharan Africa, food supplies into Gaza are being restricted. Dov Weisglass, an advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, refers to this with a chuckle as “putting the Palestinians on a diet.” And the civilian population is being bombed. In the week we were grieving for the slaughtered of 7/7, the same number of Palestinians have been blown up, many of them women and children in their own homes.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz gave a small snapshot of what this looks like for Gazans. Last Thursday morning, Illan as-Siam was sitting at home with his wife and three children when an Israeli tank smashed into their garden. Armed soldiers out and, aiming guns at the children, they announced they were turning the house into a temporary military base. They were forbidden from even going to the toilet. When they cracked and let the crying 11 year old go, he was accompanied at gunpoint.

What are they being punished for, these 1.4 million people? What has happened that makes Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, say, "I want no one to sleep at night in Gaza. I want them to know what it feels like"? The vast majority, of course, have done nothing. More than half the population of Gaza are children. Among the adults, 67 percent want a two-state solution with Israel and an end to attacks on Israeli civilians.

But “they” – everyone, innocent or guilty – are being ostensibly punished for three reasons. The first is that an Israeli soldier has been kidnapped. He is the only Israeli being detained by the Palestinians. By contrast, the Israelis are currently holding 8200 Palestinian fighters, 800 of them Guanatnomo-style, without charge and indefinitely. Some of these people were involved in attacks upon the Israeli civilian population and deserve to be severely punished – but the vast majority were simply resisting violent occupying troops within Gaza and the West Bank.

The second public reason is that, against the will of the majority, a tiny number of Palestinians are firing Qassam rockets at Israel from Gaza. Thirteen Israeli civilians have ever died in this way – in contrast to the 238 Palestinians killed from the air since the Israeli ‘disengagement’ from Gaza. If the Israelis are entitled to bomb in response, what are the Palestinians entitled to do? The current firing of rockets only began after Israeli forces broke their promise to provide Gazans with a safe passage to the West Bank, declared economic war on their elected leadership, and struck at the Islamic University in Gaza.

The final public reason is that the Palestinians chose – in free, open elections – to elect Hamas. I dislike Hamas intensely. It is an organization that loathes women’s rights, believes in the execution of homosexuals, and defends the deliberate targeting of Jewish children. But the Palestinian people did not give them a mandate on that basis. They gave Hamas a mandate to eradicate the fetid corruption of Fatah, and they made it clear that they expect Hamas to pursue any real path to peace that came along.

That’s why last month, when the Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas threatened to use his remaining powers to hold a referendum on accepting Israel’s existence over the heads of Hamas, the Islamist organisation quickly backed down. They made clear signals that they would accept peace with Israel after all.

But here we come to the real reason for the assault the world - including, very publicly, Kofi Anan - is watching in disbelief. Most people would expect any Israeli government to celebrate the news that even the radical wing of the Palestinians were poised to accept Israel’s existence. But once Hamas makes this commitment, there is no longer any excuse to refuse serious peace negotiations – and that was never part of the Sharon-Kadima plan, inherited and followed to the letter by Olmert.

We need to look at the origins of the Kadima approach to understand what is happening in Gaza. Ariel Sharon did not have a Damscene conversion to the cause of Palestinian self-determination in his seventies, after a lifetime of trying to crush it. He simply realised that unless the borders of Israel were quickly redrawn, the higher Arab birth-rate was going to soon produce an Arab majority living between the River and the Sea under Israeli rule. This would leave Israel with a choice: either become an Apartheid state and lose even American support, or be voted out of existence. Sharon chose to steer away from this by redrawing the country’s boundaries unilaterally to ensure a Jewish majority, on his own terms and in his own way. This would allow him to seize the choicest morsels of the West Bank – including the major settlements and the all-important water supplies – and leave the Palestinians with barren scraps like Gaza.

The only thing that could obstruct this plan is the arrival of a Palestinian “partner for peace”, somebody the world could demand Israel negotiate with. Inevitably, any negotiations would require Olmert to give up some of the areas he is currently planning to seize. Sharon had already snubbed Mahmoud Abbas when he offered just this back in 2002, concocting an excuse about him not disarming the militias quickly enough. (If Abbas had done what Sharon demanded, he would be dead now). Over the past three weeks, confronted with the possibility that even Hamas would negotiate, Olmert has continued Sharon’s strategy. He has tried to choke off any possible partner by invading Gaza and attempting to stoke yet further Palestinian radicalisation.

The last three weeks have not been primarily about an Israeli soldier, a slew of rockets, or Hamas. They are about the determination of the Israeli government to unilaterally seize chunks of the West Bank, and to refuse to negotiate, any time, any place, anywhere.

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You can e-mail comments just for me to johann@NOSPAMjohannhari.com

I still remember the picture. A settler child in his early teens kicks a Palestinian woman, while his parents watch, laughing. I was in Hebron, and the Palestinian residents were showing me the random scraps of evidence they were hoarding in the hope that someone, somewhere in the world would care. It had been hard to get through to talk to them for most of the year, 180,000 Palestinians are locked away by the Israeli army so that the 450 racist, rag-head-hating settlers who choose to live in the heart of the West Bank can move around freely. If the Palestinians break the ‘curfew’ and step out, they are shot. The residents are given an hour a day to scramble for food, the local economy is dead, and the children have been reduced to sub-Saharan levels of malnutrition.

So when I saw the news footage this weekend of the racist Hebron settlers being cleared out of a clutter of Palestinian homes they had illegally seized, I was tempted to hope. When I look at the speech just delivered by Ehud Olmert, the new Israeli Prime Minister, which makes it clear he will abandon some of the wildest, cruellest settlement blocks including Hebron, I want to smile. The Palestinian people of Hebron will at last be free from this tyranny, and part of a free and democratic Palestinian state – won’t they?

The reality is more complex, and more bleak. Olmert’s plans are still impressionistic, but in his clouds of rhetoric, some shapes are becoming clear. He has said he will negotiate with the Palestinian leader Abu Mazen, but he will open with the non-negotiable, talk-to-the hand position that Israel will never, never renounce the tastiest chunks of Palestinian land stolen since 1967. The settlements of Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim and Gush Etzion will remain, troops will stay in the Jordan Valley, and there will be no return to the Green Line. The right of return – even for a symbolic few – will not happen. The bulk of the West Bank’s water supplies will remain with Israel. And if the negotiations break down within two years – as Olmert’s own left-wing wife predicts they will given the unreasonableness of this starting position – then Olmert will simply impose his own borders.

As the pro-Olmert Mideast Mirror reassured its readers this week, “The sum total of the Olmert plan is to reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians in the territories, but it’s not to give up control over the West Bank even as Israel evacuates as much as 90 percent of it. Troops would remain in the territory.” This has not been lost on the Palestinians. Mustafa Barghouti warns that Olmert’s plans “would mean a continuation of occupation and a continuation of conflict – and that would be as bad for the Israelis as for us.” Even as my friends in Hebron were set free, the straight-jacket would tightly constrain Palestine itself, with its borders and its water still controlled by Israel.

Yet still Olmert’s plan is being presented as “generous”, as all Israeli offers invariably are. This is only true if you see the problem entirely from the Israeli point of view. Since the Israelis want to give up nothing, withdrawing from a few scraps of the West Bank – and leaving the Palestinians with around 13 percent of historical Palestine – is generous from their perspective. But if you look at from the perspective of what the Palestinians are entitled to under international law, the picture is very different. The Palestinians can legally demand a return of all refugees and their descendants ethnically cleansed in 1948, an immediate and unconditional withdrawal to the 1967 borders, and full compensation for their years of horror. It is the Palestinians who are being generous by offering to negotiate on all of these basic legal rights.

It will be a tragedy for Israel if Ehud Olmert’s government does not move towards a real peace deal on the model of Taba and the Geneva Accords – especially since the country may be about to face the biggest existential threat it has ever known. Some day in the next decade, a fanatical Holocaust-denying anti-Semite who believes Israel should be “wiped from the map” is almost certainly going to have a nuclear weapon pointed straight at Tel Aviv.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, does not want the 1967 borders. If we are to take him at his word, he wants the Dachau borders, a radiation-soaked elimination of the Jews from the face of the Middle East. He says the Jews should go back to Germany, the country where they (weren’t) herded into gas chambers. If they won’t go, they might need a little nuclear nudge. He seems to believe the solution to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and their dispossession ever since is to commit a genocide against their oppressors now. I believe there is only a small risk that Ahmadinejad is crazy enough to act on his words – but that’s still a small risk of a very big bomb.

The UN Security Council meeting today cannot stop this looming West Bank Missile Crisis, and it looks very unlikely that anybody else can either. Ahmadinejad has stockpiled enough resources to sit out three years of horrifying Iraq-style sanctions – probably long enough to tool up. Military options are even less feasible. Even if the US and Israel knew where Iran’s dispersed and hidden nuclear sites were, even if they had the moral authority to take them out with their own nuclear weapons in tow, Ahmadinejad has the world over an oil barrel. With rising oil prices already causing political pain in the US, is any President going to risk $100-a-barrel prices and a global recession? I doubt it.

Invasion would be even more absurd. A fat majority of Iranians support Ahmadinejad in his desire for nuclear weapons – one of his few popular policies. There’s a simple reason. Iran is a country that has been chopped and changed from the outside by anti-democratic forces for over fifty years. By the early 1950s, the Iranians had a democratically elected parliament and (along with Israel) the most sophisticated democratic society in the Middle East. But then the Iranian people chose to nationalise their own oil fields, to ensure the profits flowed into their own Exchequer rather than into the bank accounts of foreign multinationals. This was intolerable to the US government. President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to liquidate Iran’s democracy and install – at the end of a barrel – an anti-democratic dictator, ‘Shah’ Reza Pahlavi.

My family lived for a time under the Shah. While he and his secret police lived in abundant luxury, Teheran – a sprawling city of seven million people – did not even have a sewage system. Eventually, there was a broad-based revolution against this dictatorship, but it was swiftly hijacked by crazed Islamic fundamentalists who imposed another dictatorship with only a few slivers of cosmetic democracy let in the mix. The Iranian people are frantically afraid of an external intervention because half-a-century ago, an external intervention set their country on a course that has led to unimaginable misery. Unless somebody is proposing to invade and install a another dictatorship that would ignore this impulse – a horrifying idea – then the Iranian nukes are going to come. (The only rational solution to reduce the global nuclear danger – a round of phased multilateral disarmament in line with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – is clearly not going to happen, alas).

So Israel is about to need all the friends it can get in an indefinite nuclear stand-off with a man who believes the Jews should be slaughtered in their millions. That will be the time when pressure from the US and the EU will be essential. But how forthcoming will this support be if Israel continues with a policy of unilateral theft of Palestinian land and water resources, leaving the Palestinians with a glorified Native American reservation in the centre of the West Bank? If Israel does not act now to make itself morally defensible, it may find itself no longer practically defensible – and soon.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article can be sent for publication in the Independent at letters@independent.co.uk

Comments for me can be sent to johann@johannhari.com