28 Comments. Add your own...

• 1. elias | January 24th, 2009 at 1:10 am

  …perhaps the word they use to express defeat is victory Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…(a tribute to dorris day)

• 2. Rima | January 24th, 2009 at 1:55 am

  N
  Just remember when the Palestinians get kicked out of Lebanon how they all had the sign of victory: tnein Ahweh please …Even Nadia Loutfi had the sign up!

  It does not matter what I think I am it is who I am that really matters!

• 3. ZEHLEWI | January 24th, 2009 at 3:04 am

  The sad thing to be added in this catasrophy is Hamas blindness regarding the behaviors of Syria and Iran.These two regimes were the main supporters for Hamas,in arming,funding and covering,and as it has become clear to everyone that once the war breakes out,these two regimes will do nothing but organizing demonstrations in their capitals to reinforce Hamas resistance…pathetic

  The main strategic failure that hamas has commited is the moment they believed that what happened in Lebanon ( july 2006 ) could be done similarly in Gaza.The result was more and more failure on both political & military levels.

  The winner out of this battle is the PLO in Ramallah…

  One funny thing about Arabs and Lebanese ( Al moumana3a wa al Sumoud part of them ) is the way they were hitting on Mubarak’s head all the time,but in fact Hamas ONLY way out from this catsrophy was Egypt ! And they know that ! And I believe what has been achieved secretly has been done by Egptian intelligences along with the agreement of Hamas delegations !

• 4. elias | January 24th, 2009 at 4:18 am

  …& the looser iiis : palestine & israel people..

• 5. soul of sydney | January 24th, 2009 at 5:54 am

  nice post, thanks for sharing, your on the money with this one

• 6. ZEHLEWI | January 24th, 2009 at 7:24 am

  But the people of both sides elected the leaders and supported their plans…

• 7. ja3far | January 24th, 2009 at 8:36 am

  N…. i will tell you a little story…
  in 1948, as the news of the zionist rapes and massacres arrived to the arrab vilages… the famous saying among them was: al 3ared wala al arred ( i.e. keep the honour and forget the land).. they fled their land giving it to the israelie and lived with no honour nor land..

  in 1967 .. when the israeli invaded gaza.. the arab were thinking , al hayet aghla min al areed .. i.e. life is more valuable then the land.. since then they lived in an occupied land with no life nor land….

  in 2009 .. the israeli attacked gaza again.. their agenda and plans were clear for those who want to know them… the palestinians learned the lesson after 60 years.. your land is more valuable then your honour and your life … they fought like no one fought before … with so little they had…

  you tell me they lost a lot, you tell me the destruction is big .. i agree .. but finally after 60 years they were able to deserve their land.. with that they won back their life and honour… that is their great victory…

  i heard a funny ” strategist ” ( and they are so many these days you know ) talking that the life of a human is more valuable then the land or the country…

  we do cry and weep every single sole that was killed by those barbarian.. but a country is never made by begging on the doors of the embassies

  have a good day

• 8. Lello | January 24th, 2009 at 8:37 am

  Anyone interested
  i got URL’s to download WALTZ WITH BACHIR FOR FREE :D:D

  Salam Rife2

• 9. THERESINIA | January 24th, 2009 at 1:09 pm

  Was the outcome more hate, more violence, more revenge? Then Hamas reached its objective: radicalization of the masses.

  If their objective was to destroy Israel: they failed (because they will soon be deprived of any arms smuggling and hence of bombing Israel).

  If their objective was to win more support in the Arab world: they failed.

  If their objective was to help their people reach a better life: they failed.

  Poor palestinians who have to suffer from the Israelis and from their own crazy leaders.

• 10. elias | January 24th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

  ZEHLEWI

  …yes, u’r right…very saddely right.

• 11. paul | January 24th, 2009 at 1:44 pm

  congratulations Hamas w3a2bel kil sine.

• 12. Delta | January 24th, 2009 at 8:55 pm

  ya habibe khalas hamas won la2ano he said so

• 13. Delta | January 24th, 2009 at 8:59 pm

  Rima

  hahahhahahahhahahahahhahahaahha

• 14. Patrick | January 24th, 2009 at 9:06 pm

  ja3far,

  in case you forgot, it was the arabs who started the wars in all three wars you mentioned… 48, 67, gaza dec 2008/jan 2009.

  if you want israel to stop kicking your ass, stop pulling down your pants and bending over…

• 15. ja3far | January 24th, 2009 at 9:16 pm

  patrick .. i didnt know u have a good sense of humour … and very well informed of the history too… i bet you can predict the future as much as you are good with history … let us wait and see…

  u know i was scared to u around with bush gone… the blog would not have been the same without you

• 16. Patrick | January 24th, 2009 at 9:47 pm

  ja3far,

  believe me, we know what future you are pushing for..

• 17. paul | January 24th, 2009 at 9:53 pm

  Hamas-tactics.blogspot.com

  Current Google AdSense on Lebanese-forces site.

  boukra bijinno 3almanar.

• 18. ja3far | January 24th, 2009 at 10:22 pm

  Patrick … ma bissou7 ila al sa7ee7 … try to figure out what do that mean

• 19. Amir in Tel Aviv | January 25th, 2009 at 12:58 am

  It wasn’t Israel intention to win over Hamas.

  You can defeat fascist movements by
  (1) fighting till the last soldier, till the last fascist
  leader, in the last bunker, in the heart of the
  fascist capital (Berlin ‘45) or (2) By dropping 2
  large bombs (Hiroshima, Nagasaki ‘46).

  If you’re not willing to do that, it takes patience,
  coz those fascist movements tend to consume themselves eventually.

  It was operation “make them pay, and deter them”,
  Cast Lead.

• 20. elias | January 25th, 2009 at 1:15 am

  Amir

  so u think u can win…:D

• 21. othello | January 25th, 2009 at 1:41 am

  Theressina…their only goal, like any other radical movement, is to stay in power and control the maximum number of people…besides this…NIENTE..

  in appearance, groups like HAMAS are fighting for their land…but one does not have to be Einstein to figure out after all those years of vain deaths that this is not the right path…

  look at what they achieved: today, anywhere in the world, you say Palestinian, first image you get is TERRORIST…thus, by cleverly using groups like HAMAS, Israel was able to gain world sympathy and turn the general opinion in its favor…

  everyone knows how strong the Israeli lobby is…the palestinian people should have learned their lesson well throughout these years that radicalism will get them nowhere but to massacres like this…

  had they worked hard on improving their image, on lobbying, on campaigning, they would have surely achieved the miracle of reclaiming their land.

  I will cite as an example the Lebanese Resistance and I mean the original resistance, that formed by the Lebanese Front…

  We suffered the unsufferable in a time when the entire world had sold us out from america to the arabs…yet you never saw an LFer or a Kataeb guy hijack a plane…

  you never saw us planting bombs in syrian embassies or kidnapping their diplomats…

  we played it clean…we fought them hard ON OUR LAND and outside we lobbied and campaigned until we got what we wanted in 2005.

  the entire world is about perception…its about the image you give of yourself…

  sadly, radical groups today are giving a very bad image of whatever cause they are serving and its the people that suffer…

  in the name of Islam, they committed the most atrocious crimes to the extent that this religion is today associated WHEREVER you go with terror and radicalism…

  sad but so very true.

• 22. Patrick | January 25th, 2009 at 2:39 am

  ja3far,

  winta, you understand the words of jesus?

  لا تعطوا ما هو مقدس للكلاب

• 23. Fuziyad | January 25th, 2009 at 6:20 am

  Amir ya zaké…you have succeeded in yr war….yr objective was in no way to weaken hamas, hamas is yr best friend. The israeli state is built on the idea that your neighbors want to eat you and that you can’t make peace with the pals…Without that you would be fighting each other between sefarade and ashkenaze…

  Israel war was on fatah as they might head to a peace you don’t want…yes you won, you strenghthened hamas and weakened fatah which was yr goal…

  3ezrayel yi ichkon…

• 24. Free Palestine | January 25th, 2009 at 6:54 am

  Victory over civilians ? Victory over kids ? Victory over what ?

  Patrick

  Try to make sense next time you open your mouth.

• 25. Free Palestine | January 25th, 2009 at 6:58 am

  Othello

  Where did you hide during the civil war ?? Was it between the civilians or not ?? Wala ken 3dkun manati2 3sskariyeh ?

  You died like rats hiding behind civilians on many fronts. Go ask the junblatists about your left villages.

• 26. Doccc1559 | January 25th, 2009 at 7:59 am

  The Gaza offensive has succeeded in punishing the Palestinians but not in making Israel more secure.

  Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Ham_as. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win.

  The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

  But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

  The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”

  What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.

  Let’s begin with Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. The conventional wisdom is that Israel was serious about making peace with the Palestinians and that its leaders hoped the exit from Gaza would be a major step toward creating a viable Palestinian state. According to the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman, Israel was giving the Palestinians an opportunity to “build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the Mediterranean,” and if they did so, it would “fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.”

  This is pure fiction. Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner where they hate to be.”

  Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

  In January 2006, five months after the Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing, and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.

  To make matters worse, the national unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into Gaza.

  Israel rejected that offer and with American backing set out to foment a civil war between Fatah and Hamas that would wreck the national unity government and put Fatah in charge. The plan backfired when Hamas drove Fatah out of Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge there and the more pliant Fatah in control of the West Bank. Israel then tightened the screws on the blockade around Gaza, causing even greater hardship and suffering among the Palestinians living there.

  Hamas responded by continuing to fire rockets and mortars into Israel, while emphasizing that they still sought a long-term ceasefire, perhaps lasting ten years or more. This was not a noble gesture on Hamas’s part: they sought a ceasefire because the balance of power heavily favored Israel. The Israelis had no interest in a ceasefire and merely intensified the economic pressure on Gaza. But in the late spring of 2008, pressure from Israelis living under the rocket attacks led the government to agree to a six-month ceasefire starting on June 19. That agreement, which formally ended on Dec. 19, immediately preceded the present war, which began on Dec. 27.

  The official Israeli position blames Hamas for undermining the ceasefire. This view is widely accepted in the United States, but it is not true. Israeli leaders disliked the ceasefire from the start, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the IDF to begin preparing for the present war while the ceasefire was being negotiated in June 2008. Furthermore, Dan Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, reports that Jerusalem began to prepare the propaganda campaign to sell the present war months before the conflict began. For its part, Hamas drastically reduced the number of missile attacks during the first five months of the ceasefire. A total of two rockets were fired into Israel during September and October, none by Hamas.

  How did Israel behave during this same period? It continued arresting and assassinating Palestinians on the West Bank, and it continued the deadly blockade that was slowly strangling Gaza. Then on Nov. 4, as Americans voted for a new president, Israel attacked a tunnel inside Gaza and killed six Palestinians. It was the first major violation of the ceasefire, and the Palestinians—who had been “careful to maintain the ceasefire,” according to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center—responded by resuming rocket attacks. The calm that had prevailed since June vanished as Israel ratcheted up the blockade and its attacks into Gaza and the Palestinians hurled more rockets at Israel. It is worth noting that not a single Israeli was killed by Palestinian missiles between Nov. 4 and the launching of the war on Dec. 27.

  As the violence increased, Hamas made clear that it had no interest in extending the ceasefire beyond Dec. 19, which is hardly surprising, since it had not worked as intended. In mid-December, however, Hamas informed Israel that it was still willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire if it included an end to the arrests and assassinations as well as the lifting of the blockade. But the Israelis, having used the ceasefire to prepare for war against Hamas, rejected this overture. The bombing of Gaza commenced eight days after the failed ceasefire formally ended.

  If Israel wanted to stop missile attacks from Gaza, it could have done so by arranging a long-term ceasefire with Hamas. And if Israel were genuinely interested in creating a viable Palestinian state, it could have worked with the national unity government to implement a meaningful ceasefire and change Hamas’s thinking about a two-state solution. But Israel has a different agenda: it is determined to employ the Iron Wall strategy to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless subjects of a Greater Israel.

  This brutal policy is clearly reflected in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War. Israel and its supporters claim that the IDF is going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, in some cases taking risks that put Israeli soldiers in jeopardy. Hardly. One reason to doubt these claims is that Israel refuses to allow reporters into the war zone: it does not want the world to see what its soldiers and bombs are doing inside Gaza. At the same time, Israel has launched a massive propaganda campaign to put a positive spin on the horror stories that do emerge.

  The best evidence, however, that Israel is deliberately seeking to punish the broader population in Gaza is the death and destruction the IDF has wrought on that small piece of real estate. Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 4,000. Over half of the casualties are civilians, and many are children. The IDF’s opening salvo on Dec. 27 took place as children were leaving school, and one of its primary targets that day was a large group of graduating police cadets, who hardly qualified as terrorists. In what Ehud Barak called “an all-out war against Hamas,” Israel has targeted a university, schools, mosques, homes, apartment buildings, government offices, and even ambulances. A senior Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, explained the logic behind Israel’s expansive target set: “There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel.” In other words, everyone is a terrorist and everything is a legitimate target.

  Israelis tend to be blunt, and they occasionally say what they are really doing. After the IDF killed 40 Palestinian civilians in a UN school on Jan. 6, Ha’aretz reported that “senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.” One officer explained, “For us, being cautious means being aggressive. From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock.”

  One might accept that Israel is waging “a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians,” as Ha’aretz put it in an editorial, but argue that it will eventually achieve its war aims and the rest of the world will quickly forget the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza.

  This is wishful thinking. For starters, Israel is unlikely to stop the rocket fire for any appreciable period of time unless it agrees to open Gaza’s borders and stop arresting and killing Palestinians. Israelis talk about cutting off the supply of rockets and mortars into Gaza, but weapons will continue to come in via secret tunnels and ships that sneak through Israel’s naval blockade. It will also be impossible to police all of the goods sent into Gaza through legitimate channels.

  Israel could try to conquer all of Gaza and lock the place down. That would probably stop the rocket attacks if Israel deployed a large enough force. But then the IDF would be bogged down in a costly occupation against a deeply hostile population. They would eventually have to leave, and the rocket fire would resume. And if Israel fails to stop the rocket fire and keep it stopped, as seems likely, its deterrent will be diminished, not strengthened.

  More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger.

  But even if the unexpected happens and the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will become an apartheid state. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said, Israel will “face a South African-style struggle” if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own. “As soon as that happens,” he argued, “the state of Israel is finished.” Yet Olmert has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and create a viable Palestinian state, relying instead on the Iron Wall strategy to deal with the Palestinians.

  There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

  The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term future at risk.

  John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

• 27. ja3far | January 25th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

  Patrick… i do understand and fully i agree… i hope i will not be too Disobedient when i write the below for u to read, with the eyes, but never with the heart .. hopping any way:

  ثُمَّ رَجَعْتُ وَرَأَيْتُ كُلَّ الْمَظَالِمِ الَّتِي تُجْرَى تَحْتَ الشَّمْسِ: فَهُوَذَا دُمُوعُ الْمَظْلُومِينَ وَلاَ مُعَزّ لَهُمْ، وَمِنْ يَدِ ظَالِمِيهِمْ قَهْرٌ، أَمَّا هُمْ فَلاَ مُعَزّ لَهُمْ.

  اقْضُوا فِي الصَّبَاحِ عَدْلاً، وَأَنْقِذُوا الْمَغْصُوبَ مِنْ يَدِ الظَّالِمِ، لِئَلاَّ يَخْرُجَ كَنَارٍ غَضَبِي فَيُحْرِقَ وَلَيْسَ مَنْ يُطْفِئُ، مِنْ أَجْلِ شَرِّ أَعْمَالِكُمْ،

  i know very well were i stand … i know very well were you stand …

• 28. othello | January 25th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

  free palestine…

  I see you to have been bit by the docc bug hehe welcome…must be a masochistic trait in you guys…you keep coming for more…

  I repeat, we might have been outgunned and outnumbered during the war and yes we did suffer some losses but WE NEVER USED IT AS AN EXCUSE TO KILL INNOCENT CIVILIANS IN TERROR ACTS.

  can you deny that your leaders, ALL YOUR LEADERS contributed to getting you where you are now?????????????????

  i wont dive to your level of discussion for most probably you are an airhead like docc…fa I will leave it at this…

  keep shoveling your falsifications and your pseudo history left and right…you are only proving your emptiness.

  cheers

• 29. ili | January 26th, 2009 at 11:04 am

  that pic is fucken scary… nobody wants his ass around when this shit is fallen…
  Sahtein Hamas,

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