Israel, USA and other Western leaders are pressuring Hamas to accept cease-fire, but despite mounting casualties and powerful opponent, Hamas is refusing to accept cease-fire.

Hamas is a brain child of Israel, who helped to create it so that an extremist Muslim organization  would be counterbalance to the secular PLO, which was showing signs of success.  

Israel took Gaza from Egypt and West Bank from Jordan in 1967 War. In 1973 Israel issued a license to Sheikh Ahmed Yasin, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, to set up charity and religious organization in occupied territories called Mujama Al-Islamiya. With the support of Gulf States and Israeli Military, it prospered and developed vast network of clinics, schools and other welfare outlets. In 1987, with the blessing of Israel, it created a political wing Hamas. In the beginning Hamas leaders have regular contacts with the Israeli military.

Hamas started to show signs of independence and begin to get involved in violent resistance activities. Israel started to get worried, but Israel still considered Hamas useful to weaken PLO and divide Palestinian loyalties. But soon Hamas was becoming a powerful monstrous foe and blowing up on Israel’s face-just like America and West created Mujahedeen in Afghanistan who turned around and became self-created monster for the West.

Israel jailed Sheikh Yasin and later killed him with a missile. Hamas won elections in Gaza strip and Israel has been fighting Hamas for the last twenty years. PLO has no choice and it gradually moved away from secular ideology.  The current president, Mahmmod Abbas, is indirectly endorsing status quo and does not want much upheaval, which suits Israel well.

 Hamas’s alliances with Iran, Syria , and Muslim Brotherhood  ex-President  , Mr. Morsi,  started to come back to haunt it. Egypt’s President General Sissi closed all the tunnels and borders to Egypt and it hit Hamas economically and militarily.

Hamas financially broke and unable to pay salaries of its 43000 civil employees, agreed to merge with PLO on the terms dictated by PLO. Israel did not like this merger of enemies and started to undermine it. It blocked the payments of salaries and loosening of any border restrictions as per merger agreement. Despite the merger with PLO, Hamas and Gaza residents were still suffering with scant daily living necessities and civil employees working without pay. Qatar offered to pay the salary of all the civil employees, but it was blocked by the USA on the grounds that it is against American Law to pay to terrorist organization.

James Baldwin writes in one of his article that, the most dangerous thing a society can do is to create a human being who has nothing more to lose-one will do it, you don’t need ten. The most precious possession of a human being is his/her dignity. Hamas and Gaza residents were cornered and have nothing more to lose. I do not think Hamas will accept cease fire unless it’s economic and border restriction conditions are met. The Israel and its Western backers have over-played  their hand and are now in a rush to get ceasefire and return to status quo-a charade of endless negotiations while  settlements are expanding.

What will happen after current episode? The two state solutions is a fantasy which has no relation to reality on the ground. The West Bank is immersed with settlements and Gaza strip is separated from West Bank with Israel in between. In reality there can be only one state-either Israel or Palestine.  As the facts on the ground dictate, Palestinian cannot have a state, by default and by reality on ground; it can be only Israeli state. Sooner the Palestinians realize it, the better it is. They should abandon two state solutions, accept the Israeli state and demand equal citizenship rights. At some point, they may  even have a majority in Israel; and they may be even in better condition than a Palestinian state in Gaza and West Bank choked by Israel all around it. 

Fayyaz Sheikh

References;     

Kenan Malik

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/the-monster-that-israel-helped-create/

Nathan Thrall

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/opinion/gaza-and-israel-the-road-to-war-paved-by-the-west.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

NDTV
16 May 2014

The promise, and peril, of Modi’s mandate

Siddharth Varadarajan

If the struggle of Narendra Modi for power is the struggle of forgetting over memory, his victory represents a collective leap towards an uncertain future.

Mr Modi’s remarkable election campaign may have been fuelled by unprecedented sums of money and magnified by the logic of the first-past-the-post system — which converted a 12 percentage point difference in vote share with the Congress into a 600 per cent difference in seats – but it has helped him banish, for all intents and purposes, the lingering shadows of a darker past.

Troubling questions about his record that were met earlier with menacing silence or anger, but never answers, can no longer be asked. With the absolute majority Mr Modi has now delivered for the BJP, a new ledger of accounts has been opened. Any audit of his record will henceforth be on his own terms.

Narendra Damodar Modi asked the electorate for 272+ seats and they have given it to him. He asked voters for a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ – an India free of the Congress – and they have handed it to him. So reviled was the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government and so terrible its record of governance that the party has justifiably suffered the worst defeat in its 129-year history.

The ‘Modi Wave’ left nearly 60 per cent of the electorate cold and failed to make a major dent in those states where regional parties still enjoy a high degree of credibility with voters like Tamil Nadu, Odisha and West Bengal but it has wrecked the Congress everywhere. The wave swept through Uttar Pradesh, where it also managed to draw away voters from the Bahujan Samaj Party if not from the Samajwadi Party, and of course Bihar too.

With the Congress winning less than 55 seats, the 16th Lok Sabha will not have an Official Opposition or a formal Leader of the Opposition. Ever reluctant to shoulder responsibilities in a competitive environment, Rahul Gandhi is once again off the hook. But the question of an effective opposition so essential for democracy is not merely a formal one.

Taken together, MPs from national parties like Congress, the Left and the Aam Aadmi Party will barely add up to 60.

Regional parties like the AIADMK, the TRS and the Biju Janata Dal, which are non-ideological, or the Trinamool Congress, which veers towards populism but is essentially Bengal-centric, are unlikely to show much interest in, let alone challenge, the Modi government on a large number of crucial areas of policymaking.

http://svaradarajan.com/2014/05/16/the-promise-and-peril-of-modis-mandate/

Posted By F. Sheikh

The nations of the world, claimed Lord Salisbury in a speech to the Primrose League at the Albert Hall in 1898, were divided into the ‘living’ and the ‘dying’. The ‘living’ were the ‘white’ nations – the European powers, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ‘dying’ comprised the rest of the world. ‘The living nations’, Salisbury claimed, ‘will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’ and from this ‘the seeds and causes of conflict among civilized nations will speedily appear’. The partition of the globe ‘may introduce causes of fatal difference between the great nations whose mighty armies stand opposed threatening each other’.

Less than twenty years after Salisbury gave his speech, the mighty armies of the great nations did indeed stand opposed threatening each other, and bringing calamity upon a generation. Virtually from the moment that the ‘lamps went out all over Europe’, in Sir Edward Grey’s evocative phrase, there has been much debate – too much debate – about why they did so and who snuffed them out, not least in this, the centenary year of the First World War.

At the heart of the global imperialist network stood not Germany but Britain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the dominant world power, already with an unmatched empire, a powerhouse of an economy, unparalleled naval power and unsurpassed political influence. Britain’s pre-eminence in all these areas was, however, also being challenged in an unprecedented fashion, by the old powers, such as France, Belgium and Russia, by the new power of the USA, and, most ominously, by the newest power of all in Germany.

The rivalries first manifested themselves outside Europe, as the newer powers tried to create their own empires and Britain sought to maintain its supremacy. There was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, from Africa to the Pacific, a frenzy of land-grabbing. ‘Towards the end of the nineteenth century’, the historian Ronald Hyam observes in his book Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914, ‘European politicians felt themselves living in an era of world delimitation, “a partition of the world” as Rosebery called it, from which, as Elgin (when viceroy of India) agreed, Britain could not stand aside because of her “mission as pioneers of civilization”’.

Between 1874 and 1902, Britain alone added 4,750,000 square miles and 90 million people to her Empire, ranging from numerous little Pacific Islands to Baluchistan, from Upper Burma to vast swathes of Africa. Britain, the Times declared, must continue expanding her empire because she could not afford ‘to allow any section even of the Dark Continent to believe that our imperial prestige is on the wane’.

Behind imperialist expansion lay venomous racism. ‘What signify these dark races to us?’, asked Robert Knox, Britain’s leading racial scientist, in his 1850 book The Races of Men. ‘Destined by the nature of their race to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence, it matters little how their extinction is brought about.’ Half a century later, the future American president Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his four-volume tome The Winning of the West that all must appreciate the ‘race importance’ of the struggle between whites and the ‘scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of wild beasts’. The elimination of the inferior races would, he insisted, be ‘for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind’, adding that it was ‘idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality that apply between stable and cultured communities’. Here was the grim, genocidal reality of Salisbury’s distinction between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ nations and the true meaning of the ‘encroachment’ of the one upon the other.

If racial ideology justified imperialist expansion and, indeed, genocide, the very fact of empire seemed to confirm the reality of race. ‘What is Empire but the preponderance of race’, as the Liberal imperialist and Prime Minister Lord Roseberry asked. Even the anti-imperialist Gilbert Murray accepted that ‘There is in this world a hierarchy of races’, those that will ‘direct and rule the world’ and the ‘lower breeds of men’ who will have to perform ‘the lower work of the world’. ‘The brown, black and yellow races of the world’, the Times insisted in 1910, ‘had to accept that ‘inequality is inevitable’ because of ‘the facts of race’.

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/the-forgotten-roots-of-the-first-world-war/

 Posted By F. Sheikh