The Gaza war maybe over - for now. The reality is that the fighting will resume for one reason - Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestine.

Hamas has agreed to follow Israel into a truce and only on condition that the occupation forces withdraw from Gaza and re-open all borders that have been closed since 2006. Otherwise, Hamas will resume hostilities and probably has every right to do so. In saying this, I acknowledge that the movement is an Islamic fundamentalist one as I pointed out in a previous blog. However, it still legitimately won what were the third only free and democratic elections held for the Palestinian Authority legislature and presidency in January 2006.

There were a number of countries that did not respect the outcome, even though they are the supposed champions of world liberty and democracy, namely, the United State, Britain and Israel. As a result, Israel (with the support of its American and British allies) came down hard and sought to collectively punish the people of Gaza and the West Bank for voting the wrong way, in much the same way as the Nazis collectively punished the Jewish people for the assassination of a German diplomat during the Kristallnacht ('Night of Smashing Glass') progrom in 1938.

Israel made the Palestinian people pay for their electoral rejection of the western-backed Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) by sealing the borders to both Gaza and the West Bank, effectively imposing an economic and military blockade on the occupied territories. These actions caused a humanitarian crisis throughout Palestine as Israel sought to manipulate tensions between Hamas and the PLO with the declared intention of seeing Hamas ejected from government, thereby undermining the democratic mandate awarded by the Palestinian people. This was the case as both main Palestinian political groups formed a national unity government that was gravely disapproved of by both Israel and the US.

In mid-2007, internal tensions between both Hamas and Fatah led to a brief but bloody civil war in Palestine that resulted in the effective political division of the country. Fatah triumphed in the West Bank while in Gaza the Hamas military wing seized control. The result of this bloody stalemate was that the economic blockade of the West Bank was largely lifted by Israel while it continued to hold the people of Gaza hostage not only for their continued loyalty to Hamas but also in order to pressure Hamas to release an Israeli soldier they captured (and still hold to this day).

This collective punishment of the Gazan people was what prompted Hamas to strike back at Israel as, after all, the imposition of a blockade is tantamount to a declaration of war under international law. Even though the spiritually inspired jihadists of Hamas cannot be compared to the secular, leftist-backed liberation movements that fought against US-backed imperialism in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, they still enjoy mass popular backing within Gaza and probably even moreso as a result of Israel's renewed blitzkrieg on the enclave. This is part of an historical trend whereby aggressor nations may think that they can reduce civilian morale through attacking non-combatants directly and thereby reduce popular support for the regime being targeted when in fact the opposite reaction occurs as was the case when e.g., the Nazi regime in Germany did not immediately crumble when Allied air raids were launched against German cities and vice versa as to how the Churchill Government did not succumb to the German blitz on London during the Second World War.

The refusal to accede to this great lesson of history may prove to be Israel's achilles heel in the long term. It is now transparent from the reports being filed from Gaza that much of the territory has been literally shelled and bombed into the ground with a disproportionate number of Palestinians dead, injured and homeless. This compares to the Israeli toll which numbers only a handful of casualties. Compounding matters, there is the possibility that Israel has committed war crimes against Gazans in that they have attacked United Nations facilities including two schools where hundreds of children were sheltering with their families; that they have denied immediate access to medical treatment for the injured and dying; and also their destruction of a Red Cross humanitarian supplies store housing much needed food and medical aid.

For all these reasons, Gaza has paid the price - and a horrendous one at that. This has all been for one reason - both Israel's and the West's desire to see the Palestinian people denied their full democratic rights so that if statehood does come, it will not be in full, as the ideal would be to make Palestine not a sovereign and proud Arab state living alongside Israel as an equal member of the international community but a client state whose land will be criss-crossed with illegal colonial settlements.

This is not what justice demands and Israel must now listen to its critics and play to the best side of Jewish humanitarianism by acknowledging its crimes, stopping its wars and forge a true and fair peace with its Arab neighbours and one which crucially acknowledges the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people.