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Fmr. Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami: "It Was Wrong" For Israel to Invade Gaza

Israeli forces have invaded the Gaza Strip for the first time since withdrawing ten months ago. Israel says it's launched the raid to recover captured soldier Gilad Shalit. Shalit was captured in a Palestinian operation on Sunday. The raid began after Israel rejected Shalit's captors demand for the release of all Palestinian females and Palestinians below the age of eighteen in Israeli prisons. Israel opened the attack with a series of air strikes on three bridges and Gaza's main power station. The attack left the power station in flames and knocked out electricity in most of Gaza City. Palestinian militants have reportedly taken up defensive positions around Gaza - setting the stage for a potential firefight with the invading soldiers.

The strikes came just hours after officials close to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Hamas had agreed on a document to implicitly recognize Israel within its June 1967 borders. Hamas leaders later denied this is the case. Hamas lawmaker Salah al-Bardaweel explained: "We said we accept a state [in territory occupied] in 1967 - but we did not say we accept two states." The deal follows weeks of negotiations between Fatah and Hamas leaders over the terms of a unity government. Palestinians hope the agreement will bring an end to the crippling international aid freeze imposed since Hamas swept to power in elections earlier this year.

• Ali Abunimah, a writer, speaker and founder of the website Electronic Intifada. He is author of the book "One Country: A Bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse" which will be published by Metropolitan Books this Fall. He joins on the line from Amman, Jordan.
• Shlomo Ben-Ami, has held a number of positions within the Israeli government, including Foreign Minister, Minister of Public Security and Member of Parliament. His latest book is "Scars of Wars, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy." He speaks to us from Madrid, Spain, where he is currently Vice-President of the Toledo Peace Center.
• Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician and community activist in northern Gaza. She was at the hospital that received many of the victims of Friday's bombing. She runs a blog titled "From Gaza, With Love"

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined on the telephone from Spain by Shlomo Ben-Ami. He's the former Foreign Minister of Israel and a former member of the Israeli Knesset. He wrote the book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. We're also joined on the line by Ali Abunimah, founder of Electronic Intifada, electronicintifada.net, speaking to us from Jordan. Ali Abunimah, can you talk about the latest news?

ALI ABUNIMAH: Yes. Good morning, Amy. I’m here in Amman, Jordan, and watching the situation very closely. And it reminds me of the eulogy that Rabbi Yakov Perin gave for Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli settler who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994. He said, “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” And this kind of racism is clearly on display in the Israeli reaction to the capture of its soldier in the Gaza Strip by the Palestinian resistance. In fact, last week here in Amman, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said explicitly that the lives of Israeli Jews are more important than the lives of Palestinians.

And we see that reflected also in the world reaction. Is it not astonishing that the entire world knows the name and face of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, while the hundreds of Palestinian children held in Israel's dungeons, not to mention 10,000 adult prisoners, thousands held without charge and trial, abducted from their homes in the middle of the night by Israeli occupation forces, remain nameless and faceless before a silent world?

And I want to say that it's very deeply painful to me as a Palestinian that while Palestinians in Gaza are demonstrating, the families of prisoners are demonstrating to urge the resistance not to release the soldier until their prisoners and hostages held by Israel are released, that the Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas rushed to condemn the legitimate conventional military operation carried out by the resistance and rushed to send his security forces to hunt for the captured soldier on Israel's behalf, when never once in history has he deployed his forces to protect and defend his own people against Israel's daily massacres. It's becoming unavoidable to many Palestinians, if not most, that Abbas is engaged in open collaboration with the occupation.

And a final point, that as far as Israel is concerned, it is rapidly becoming a failed state, unable to learn any lessons from its past. It's now repeating in Gaza and the West Bank all the mistakes of its invasion and occupation of Lebanon. And I believe that if it doesn't drastically and dramatically change course, it will self-destruct within a decade, perhaps taking everyone else in the region with it. It has become an apartheid pariah state, and its leaders are deluded in thinking that they can bludgeon the indigenous Palestinian population, who are now the majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, into submission and servitude.

I call on brave Israelis to understand the lessons, which brave white South Africans understood, and to engage in a voluntary process with Palestinians of dismantling completely, starting today, the system of racist laws, walls and settler colonies that are imprisoning both people in perpetual and endless and escalating bloodshed. It needs to stop now.

AMY GOODMAN: Ali Abunimah speaking to us from Amman. Let's turn to the former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. Your response?

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Response to what?

AMY GOODMAN: To what Ali Abunimah just said?

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: No, no. I’m not going to respond to that. If you have any particular question with regard to this operation, with regard to the abduction, with regard of the political situation on the ground -- I’m not going to go into that wider analysis about South Africa and what have you.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't you start with what is happening right now?

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Well, what seems to me that is happening right now is that Israel is trying to change the equation that was established by those who took the soldier as hostage. Their equation was one of releasing the soldier for prisoners in Israeli jails, and Israel seems that the present government is not ready for that, although previous governments did negotiate and Rabin negotiated. Even Sharon negotiated to exchange prisoners. This government doesn't seem to be politically confident enough to negotiate, and therefore, they want to change the equation to one that means that we will withdraw from Gaza or we’ll stop -- we’ll interrupt this incursion if the soldier is released.

Is this going to work? I’m not sure it is going to work. I am afraid that these kind of operations tend to have a dynamic that one knows how they start, one doesn't really know how they end. I hope it doesn't end in the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, in the collapse of Abu Mazen, and the rest of it, because the situation is difficult enough without this modicum of stability and legitimacy that is given by the current president and the prime minister is destroyed. So I really expect that things will be controlled in some way.