Gaza-Is-Egypt

As the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the Murdoch press can always be relied upon to push an unabashed USraeli imperial agenda.

Take this, for example, from John Lyons, The Australian's Middle East correspondent*: "At best, the Israeli ground invasion will provide short-term relief from Hamas rockets. But a long term solution is desperately needed. Perhaps the only answer is for the international community to convince neighbouring Egypt to take control of Gaza... Gaza being forced to become part of Egypt - to abandon its weapons and link with the Egyptian economy - is perhaps the only sustainable hope for this tiny, tragic slip of land." (Close combat: conflict enters danger zone, 5/1/09) That's right, forget all about a Palestinian state, forget all about Palestinian national rights ("The UN is not the solution," asserts Lyons), Israel needs some "relief" from the blowback consequent on its own criminal behaviour as Gaza's serial raider/invader (55, 56, 67, o6, 08, 09), occupier (56-57, 67-05), and jailer (05-09), so "the only sustainable hope" for Palestinians in Gaza is to become - Egyptians!

[*Lyons recently succeeded the unlamented Martin Chulov, who now appears to be working for the UK Guardian. Of Lyons, Nick Cater, editor of The Weekend Australian, said in a letter to The Australian Jewish News (28/9/07) that he "is one of the most experienced and accomplished journalists in Australia." Enough said.]

Lyons is faithfully channelling US neocon John Bolton (former US ambassador to the UN 2005-2006 & senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute), on the desirability of a so-called three-state solution to Israel's Palestine problem: "War in the Gaza Strip demonstrates yet again that the current governance paradigm for the Palestinian people has failed," writes Bolton, "Terrorists financed and supplied by Iran control Gaza; the Palestinian Authority is broken, probably irretrievably; and economic development is stalled in Gaza and the West Bank... Let's start by recognizing that trying to create a Palestinian Authority from the old PLO has failed and that any two-state solution based on the PA is stillborn. Hamas has killed the idea... Instead we should look to a 'three-state' approach, where Gaza is returned to Egyptian control and the West Bank in some configuration reverts to Jordanian sovereignty... Without a larger Egyptian role, Gaza will not, and perhaps cannot, achieve the minimal stability necessary for economic development. Moreover, connecting Gaza to a real economy, rather than a fictional 'Palestinian economy', is the quickest concrete way to improve the lives of Gaza's ordinary citizens." (The three-state option, washingtonpost.com, 5/1/09)

The fact is that the US-financed and supplied terror state Israel, with its metastisizing terrorist infrastructure in the occupied West Bank, never seriously entertained the prospect of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state. Moreover, to pretend, as Lyons and Bolton do, that said terror state, currently engaged in both the economic strangulation of Gaza and the razing of its civic institutions, is not the key impediment to the formation of a "real economy" there, is simply howling bloody nonsense.

We're all familiar with the old Zionist propaganda Palestine-is-Jordan trope. Now it looks like we've got another to deal with: Gaza-is-Egypt. Is there no end to Zionist creativity?

Postscript: Lyons is at it again in today's Australian: "Two men hold the key to halting the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza - French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak... The main card Mr Sarkozy can play is to pressure Mr Assad to force Hamas... to change its behaviour in Gaza... The second card he can play is to convince Mr Mubarak that Egypt embraces Gaza, at least economically, by allowing trade, and using labour from Gaza for its businesses to try to lift the living standards of Gaza." (Sarkozy & Barak hold key) Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what this "distinguished journalist" means by his final clause?

This Lyons is a worry on another score. Israel's Daleks in Gaza are wading through the blood of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children, yet Lyon's front page report (Hamas terror: every Jewish child now a target) manages to make Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud Az-Zahhar's "bloodcurdling" warning that the Israelis "have legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine" the real story. Bizarre!