There’s an editorial in today’s El País about Gaza and Israel’s policy towards it that offers a nice mix of rank prejudice and preconceptions masquerading as analysis.

The inability of the Palestinians to gain access to the products necessary to rebuild their homes and infrastructure destroyed during the bombardments [that occurred during Operation Cast Lead] proves that, contrary to the official Israeli discourse, there was never an Israeli withdrawal, in the strict sense, from Gaza. There was just a change in the way of managing the occupation. Now it’s not being carried out by way of settlements and military posts inside the territory but by the conversion of a small slice of territory where a million and a half people live badly into a ghetto controlled from the outside.

Now Israel’s policy towards Gaza in recent years is open to criticism from any number of angles, that’s clear. And there’s also no doubt that while keeping building materials out of the Strip denies Hamas the opportunity to construct fortifications it also leads to civilian suffering. Now couldn’t that, or something similar, or something harsher, have been said without using the word “ghetto”?  Of course it could. What, then, does the article gain from it? How does it clarify the viewpoint of the newspaper? It shows that for El País the Jews of Israel are the new Nazis.

Note also that Israel is seen as all knowing, all seeing and treacherous; its policy choices make reality rather than attempt to influence it. Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005 not because it was sick of the occupation, not because it had had the phrase “Land for Peace” ringing in its ears from the well-intentioned of the world for decades previously, not because it wanted to concentrate on colonizing the West Bank; no, none of these. It withdrew because it wanted to continue the occupation by other means and turn Gaza into a Holocaust theme park with the Palestinians playing the role of the Jews. The Hamas coup, the rising crescendo of rocket fire and the international opprobrium heaped on it for Cast Lead are just noises off and the shufflings of bit part players in the great Zionist scheme.

The editorial goes on to say that,

The toughness of Netanyahu’s policy seeks to undermine the power of Hamas which has returned to struggling against the Israeli army by launching homemade rockets and receiving aerial bombardments in the south of the territory in return.

This is the bit where it loses touch with reality. Netanyahu isn’t seeking to undermine the power of Hamas, he’s seeking to keep the power of Hamas to terrorize Israelis at the low ebb where it was placed by the last government’s military campaign in December 2008 and January 2009. While the odd rocket is still being fired, Israeli civilians in the south of the country haven’t had such a tranquil time in years. Operation Cast  Lead, in effect, turned Hamas into Israel’s border patrol. Of course this may not last, there may be bad things to come, but you’d think the editorial writer of a major newspaper could at least consider what’s actually happening on the ground before setting out their paper’s view, if for no other reason than to better wrap its prejudices in a modest cloak of facts.