By IRNA,
London : British author and broadcaster Alan Hart has castigated the Israeli policy of collective punishment against the Palestinians in Gaza but warned that it will prove to be counterproductive.
“Everything Israel has done since its creation has been counter- productive,” said Hart, who is a specialist on the Middle East.
“All the siege will do is to only reinforce the Gazans’ determination,” he said.
The former Middle East chief correspondent for Independent Television News said that the Israeli basic strategy was to try to “make life so miserable for them that they will blame hamas and return to supporting Fatah.”
“They are trying to break the will of the people of Gaza. They are trying to separate them from Hamas,” he said in an interview with IRNA.
Hart suggested that the all the 1.5 million residents of Gaza could do was to “go on resisting and demand a minimum amount of justice.” The alternative, he was to surrender but that they “not going to do that.”
The broadcaster also previously worked as a former BBC Panorama presenter but more recently he spent five years researching his two- volume 2005 book on Zionism, which he has described as a “complete re- write of the entire history” of the Middle East conflict.
He also said that he was not surprised that Egypt had been an accomplice in the intensification of the humanitarian siege by closing Rafah crossing, describing President Hosni Mubarak as an “American puppet” and “one of worst leaders in Arab world.”
Hart said that he had been originally optimistic about US president-elect Barack Obama, when he said that he wanted to “replace fear with hope” after the policy of the Bush administration being based upon invoking fear, particularly against Muslims.
But following some of Obama’s appointment, he is “now very gloomy” and that it “looks like he is going to be a prisoner of the Zionist lobby.”
Although there was a counter-argument that he understands that the Palestinian problem has to be solved as the “cancer of international affairs,” the broadcaster said that “on the basis of past history he was pessimistic.”
“Israel is unique as it is allowed to do whatever it likes,” he said.
“There were two rules for all nations except Israel and one just for Israel,” he told IRNA.
Hart believe that there was nothing the Palestinians could do as they had been “abandoned by the world.”
To change this, he suggested that the international community could start by forcing Israel to respect international law, UN resolutions and other norms.