Category: War

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Why Gaza not Sri Lanka?

The fighting in Sri Lanka’s civil war has intensified again. This is the war that has killed 70,000 and displaced hundreds of thousands. The war with the ceasefire that failed in 2007-2008. The war in a Commonwealth country. The war with its roots in the British legacy. The war with the internationally brokered ceasefires and peacekeepers and observers.  The war with the complex confusing history and only shades of grey.

The war that we don’t see on the news.

New Zealand has more than 7,000 people who identified as Sri Lankan in the 2006 census, while only 1,599 identified as “Israeli/Jewish/Hebrew” and 2,607 who identified as Arab (and not a subset – we don’t ask for Palestinian).

We exported NZ$168 million of goods to Sri Lanka in the 2004-5 year. To Israel the value was NZ$16.85 million in 2007.

Sri Lanka is closer, more people in New Zealand identify their cultural heritage as Sri Lankan, and we have more trade ties with it. Yet Gaza dominates the news and the bombing and shooting and civilian deaths in Sri Lanka go unremarked.

I happened to be in Sri Lanka when the the war stepped up in 2007. I was check pointed and searched and patted down more times than I can count, I had conversations with Sinhalese and Tamil, with parents, grandparents, children, soldiers and police. I saw guns and fighter planes and armoured vehicles and sandbags – and vegetable gardens and elephants and children playing in the sea.

I write about Sri Lanka because I know about its war, but there are others we are ignoring too. What is it about their victims that make them not worth our time?

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The Rationale of Hamas Rocket Attacks

There is much argument about who started the latest Gaza conflict. Many believe that the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel were the precipitating event, and that Israel has the right to respond. Perhaps that is true. Many question why, during a supposed truce, Hamas would have continued to stage rocket attacks on Israeli territory. The reason, in my view, was both tactical and strategic.

Hamas demands the illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land be withdrawn before any durable peace can be achieved. It believes that it has the right to armed resistance against illegal occupation of its land. Israel demands that the rocket attacks stop before talks on a land-for-peace swap can begin. Hamas militants believe that to cease their attacks will be a tacit surrender to Israeli demands. They also believe that stopping the attacks are a sign of acquiescence on the terms of  any deal. Thus the rocket attacks are designed to frame any discussions in a way that is favourable to Palestinian interests. They are, in a word, part of a “moderate-militant” negotiating strategy by which the attacks are designed to give Hamas’s political wing more room to maneuver when negotiating the terms of any land-for peace agreement. Anyone familiar with negotiations understands the principle: you drive a hard bargain and settle for something less. In this instance the bargain being driven has an armed edge.

There is more to the picture. The reason that rocket attacks are used is that since 2006 no successful suicide bombing attacks have been carried out in Israel (although many have been thwarted). Given the heavily fortified nature of the border, rocket attacks are the only way to make the militant point. Moreover, the point is not only being made to the Israeli authorities. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, being made to the Hamas moderates who make up the bulk of its political wing, and who are the potential negotiators on the Gazian side (since Fattah represents the Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank). Thus the rocket attacks served episodic notice of militant conviction on two fronts, internal and external, with the internal message to the political wing being “sell us out at your peril.”

Regardless of whether this explanation of the rationale behind the rocket attacks is correct or not, one thing is now clear: the rocketeers seriously underestimated Israel’s determination to eradicate Hamas’s militant wing while allowing its political moderates to live to negotiate anther day ( I elaborate on this and some other aspects of  the conflict over at www.scoop.co.nz in an essay titled “Who Benefits from the Gaza conflict?”). That process is now taking place.