As Israel’s genocidal aggression increases in Gaza, the lie of who broke the cease-fire is spun over and over across the world. Of course, the lie is manufactured in Tel Aviv, but the silence of the Arab bourgeoisie, especially Egypt, has the same credibility as the confessions of a liar.
On November 4 2008 Israel launched an incursion into Gaza and broke the cease-fire, killing six Palestinian anti-occupation fighters. The aim of this attack was not to stop rockets being fired into Israel as it now claims (and what Egypt’s government endorse with its silence); rockets were silent for some time then. As for Israel, it planned this war for months (you can see it here www.haaretz.com) , having collected intelligence of Hamas’s movements and constructing a replica of Gaza city in the Negev Desert where it prepared its slaughter machine for what is now all but an indiscriminate act of collective terror against the Gazan people. It must, however, be asked: what kind of cease-fire is this that rubbishes the key requirement of the cease-fire in the Gaza Strip (the opening of border crossings)? Locking the one and a half million people into an area like Gaza, blocking steady flow of supplies from land, sea and air IS an act of war and is nominally a flouting of the cease-fire. So, before the lie proper was spun with not-clever words, Israel already paralysed life in Gaza.
It is a lie that Hamas broke the already broken cease-fire. And those who get their political education from the news rooms of the BBC and Fox News happily spread this lie, adding new twists to its illogical functioning. When Israel broke the cease-fire on November 4, it was assisted in its genocidal actions by Egypt, who, cynically, tightened the border crossings even further. Egypt’s claims that it cannot reopen the Rafah crossings without observers from the EU and the Palestinian Authority is nonsense. Was Egypt a signatory to this agreement? No. Is this agreement still in force? No. It collapsed a year after it was reached and was never renewed. Egypt’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza is linked to its bitter hatred for Hamas who is politically close to Mubarak’s largest opposition party in Egypt. It makes sense then to keep the Rafah crossing sealed and to isolate Hamas.
Egypt’s collaboration in the Rafah border strangulation is therefore in keeping with its lack of countering Israel’s lie that Hamas broke the cease-fire. It knew about the impending Israeli attack on Gaza, for why else did it pull its security from the Rafah crossing before the attack, sealed the border two days before the first air strikes from Israel and refused all aid into Gaza? There are people who piously wish not to say who did what, when and why in this attrocious war on Gaza. I have no track with this nonsense. The role of the Arab bourgeoisie in the war on Gaza will be dealt with by the people in the different countries, but foremost of these must be the government of Hosni Mubarak.
Condoleezza Rice was correct when she said her morality is the same as Tzipi Livni’s (this followed the press conference on January 16 2009 and the so-called “memorandum of understanding” that aims to prevent Hamas from rearming). It is the same bourgeois morality that breeds the lie factory in Israel’s propaganda machinery. Let no one be fooled by this apparent abstract appeal to norms. It is a necessary tool in aide of class deception, the same deception Israel employs in this lie that Hamas broke the cease-fire agreement and became the pretext for this war.
Israel, in its shameful acts of genocide on the people of Gaza, has falsified the origins of the breaking of the cease-fire in order to falsify the basis of its extermination campaign in Gaza. The Israeli working class and its allies across the region will learn, in time to come, that they have to join hands and do away with this shameful, blood-thirsty government and its Company of Silent accomplices, putting in their place a federation of governments in the Middle East that will reorganise society on the basis of human need. There is no middle road, lies or not.
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