The sound of a ladder to climb down

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Maybe it was the heat of battle for public opinion (though it is difficult to tell if it is international public opinion or domestic public opinion that most interests Israeli policymakers and policy explainers) that made the Israelis see a Qassam missile in the video showing some UN paramedics loading an ambulance. Any observer could see that the long narrow object carried with one hand by one man had flapping straps, and was being handled with ease by one man, and was not one of the heavy rockets that have been hitting Sderot almost daily for the past year, killing four people including two toddlers last week.

But while Israel insisted they had finally found proof of UNRWA’s perfidy, UNRWA boss Peter Hansen insisted that the long slender object in the video was a stretcher. For 48 hours, the Israeli version dominated the press, with no questioning of its veracity. But in the last 24 hours, the Hansen version has been backed up by a ‘reconstruction’ for the TV cameras performed by the very same paramedics seen in the fuzzy black and white video shot from above by an unmanned plane.

And today, a headline in Haaretz summed up the situation as of this morning: ‘In the army, they are not ruling out the possibility that the object in the video was not a Qassam.’ In any case, a UN investigator was on his way to look into the Israeli allegations, which already least night were being amended by Foreign Ministry spokesmen who said there is other documentary evidence of UNRWA ‘complicity’ with the Palestinians. The video showing the alleged Qassam was meanwhile removed from the army’s web site.

The goddess loves -- Mixed media on paper, 50x70 cm by Silvia Rosenberg

nyway, Israeli public relations spokesmen had a new cause this morning: After Yasser Arafat commented last week, after the funeral of the two Ethiopian toddlers killed by a Qassam, that the Qassams only make noise and are harmless, he reiterated today in an interview with an Arab newspaper that Israel is using uranium as a weapon to neuter Palestinian men. His proof: Israel refuses to allow international inspectors into the country to examine the allegations.

Arafat’s allegations from the past – that there never was a Temple on the Temple Mount, that the Shin Bet was responsible for several key suicide bombings as well as the assassination of Minister Rehavam Ze’evi, and other conspiratorial views of the events – have always served as confirmation for many Israelis that the Palestinian leader is not merely untrustworthy, but something worse, delusional and therefore it is impossible to do business with him. But in another interview, he said he would give up all his powers as president of the Palestinian state – once that state is established.

And on the seventh day of Operation Days of Penitence, Amos Gilad, the head of the political-security department in the Defense Ministry and Shaul Mofaz’s most influential advisor, was heading a small security delegation to a meeting with Egyptian counterparts in Rafah, to discuss post-disengagement security arrangements, including ways the Egyptians plan to stop arms, drugs, and other smuggling via tunnels under the so-called Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt in the southern part of the Strip. If the Egyptians are able to satisfy Israeli concerns on that front, Israel apparently will be ready to quit the southern border area of the Strip as part of its disengagement. Just this morning, a teenage Palestinian girls was shot dead near the Rafah crossing by Israeli troops when she began approaching them and they suspected she might be a suicide bomber.

Meanwhile, Israeli businessman Eyal Ehrlch, who first came up with the idea of a hudna between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, envisioning Israeli President Moshe Katsav heading a delegation of Israeli VIPs to the Palestinian Legislative Council in a traditional Arab ceremony for a truce between warring clans, is trying to organize a meeting between the mayor of Sderot and the mayor of Gaza’s Beit Hanoun, which is where most of the Qassams are fired from. PA National; Security Advisor Jibril Rajoub is said to be involved in the effort to arrange the meeting for a ‘hudna’ between Sderot and Beit Hanoun.

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation