A short history of Israel breaking ceasefires w/Max Blumenthal

Donald Trump claimed credit for a historic diplomatic achievement when he secured a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas this October 11, but is peace possible with a state that exists in a perpetual state of war?

Just over a week later, on October 19, Israel accused Hamas of flagrantly violating the brand new ceasefire agreement by killing several of its soldiers operating in Rafah. Hamas has stringently denied any responsibility for the attack, which took place in a depopulated, destroyed area fully occupied by Israel, and just a day after the Trump administration weirdly warned that Hamas was planning to break the ceasefire by attacking “Palestinian civilians.”

Israel responded to the supposed violation with a wave of airstrikes that slaughtered scores of civilians in the Gaza Strip, and by refusing to allow aid into the besieged enclave.

Meanwhile, an unnamed Pentagon official revealed to media outlets that the Trump administration knew that Hamas had not attacked Israeli soldiers in Rafah, and that they had been killed when their vehicles ran over an old IED.

Today, Netanyahu seems desperate for a pretext to resume the war, and he’s under mounting pressure to do so from the fanatical elements holding together his narrow coalition.

This is a familiar story that is as old as the self-proclaimed Jewish state. Indeed, Israel has violated almost every single ceasefire since 1948, flaunting its contempt for international law and even US diplomacy in order to seize territory and consolidate the ethnosupremacist regime it imposes on it.

In 1955, seven years after the establishment of the state of Israel through a campaign of ethnic cleansing, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, orchestrated Operation Black Arrow, attacking an Egyptian military barracks inside the Gaza Strip and killing 38 soldiers, shattering the 1949 armistice agreement with Egypt

A year later, Israel violated the armistice again when it invaded Egypt in a failed attempt to provoke the great European powers to restore control over the Suez Canal and topple Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser. It was only thanks to the efforts of the US President, Dwight Eisenhower, that the naked imperial plot failed.

Israel attacked Egypt again in 1967, destroying the country’s air force in a matter of hours on the bogus grounds that it was pre-empting an imminent Egyptian invasion. But Israel’s leadership knew Nasser had no intention of attacking. As Menachem Begin later admitted, “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

During that same period of time, Israel staged an elaborate provocation to justify its assault on Syria and illegal occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.

As Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister during the Six Day war, revealed years later:

“We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot.

And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.'"

In 1973, after Israel suffered a bloody nose at the hands of the Egyptian military, it attempted to destroy the post-war armistice by launching a surprise attack which surrounded the Egyptian Third Army. This move placed the US and Soviet Union at nuclear loggerheads, with the Soviets threatening to intervene to defend Egypt and the US issuing a Defcon III alert.

Declassified documents showed that US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had given the Israelis a green light for the attack, telling then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, You won't get violent protests from Washington if something happens during the night, while I'm flying.

In 1982, following the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon on a phony pretext, Israel violated a US-brokered agreement which saw PLO fighters evacuated under Multinational protection from Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. Then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon exploited the opportunity, dispatching Israel’s Phalangist proxies to invade the Sabra and Shatila camp and carry out the repugnant massacre that left over 3000 dead, mostly of them women and children.

Following the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 1996, Israel assassinated a key Hamas figure, Yahya Ayyash by dispatching a local collaborator to hand him a cellphone rigged with explosives. The killing shattered a ceasefire with resistance factions in Gaza, and triggered a wave of retaliatory suicide bombings which helped secure the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister months later.

Next, in 2002, just as a ceasefire was about to go into effect, and months after the Arab League accepted a peace initiative with Israel, the Israeli military bombed a multi-family apartment bloc in Gaza City to assassinate Saleh Shehadeh, leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas. The killing was so brazen, leaving over 15 dead including 8 children, that President George W. Bush was left “furious,” and his administration joined the UK, France and the UN in forcefully condemning it. As usual, Israel’s actions escalated the violence and fueled the Second Intifada.

In 2008, three years after Israel placed the Gaza Strip under siege, it shattered another ceasefire with the elected government of Hamas, and set the stage for a series of wars that led to the current, ongoing genocide.

I’d probably need several hours and several intravenous infusions of caffeine to recapitulate the full list of Israeli ceasefire violations and diplomatic treachery leading up to the present crisis, but I think you get the point. This is not a normal country capable of acting within the bounds of treaties or international law. It is a psychotic political formation with a nuclear armed military that only understands force.

And in Washington, there’s no will to challenge it. Which means Donald Trump’s signature peace initiative could be the next casualty of Israeli aggression.

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