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Article Excerpt
The significance of the mass breakout from Gaza is still sinking in among all those affected, including the Palestinians themselves (the people, their legitimate government in Gaza and the quisling leadership in Ramallah), Israel, the United States, the European Union and the Arab governments that have supported the 'international community' in its strenuous efforts to put the Hamas government to death over the past two years. The so-called Quartet (the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia) reneged on their pledge to respect the outcome of elections held in January 2006 as soon as the results showed that Hamas was in and Fatah was out. Of its contributions to Middle East peace, Alvaro de Sotelo, the UN Secretary-General's delegate to the 'peace process', has written damningly: 'Whatever the Quartet was at the inception, let us be frank with ourselves: today, as a practical matter, the Quartet is pretty much a group of friends of the US--and the US doesn't feel the need to consult closely with the Quartet except when it suits it'. Indeed, the 'peace process', de Sotelo observes, 'has become strategically subservient to US policy', which means, too, subservient to Israeli policy. As long as this continues, for the next five years, the next ten or the next fifty, there can be no 'peace' process worthy of the name.
On 14 May Israel will celebrate its 60th birthday. For Palestinians everywhere this will naturally be a day of mourning. Gaza, home now to 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them not native Gazans but refugees or the descendants of refugees expelled from other parts of Palestine in 1948, has certainly taken its share of the punishment in these six decades. In the 1950s, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion launched one savage raid after another into Gaza in the hope of luring Egypt's President Nasser into a conflict in which he could be brought...
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