Crisis in Gaza

Violence in the Middle East has surged since the end of February. Coverage in the western media over the past week has concentrated heavily on the killing of eight Israeli students in Jerusalem, claimed by a previously unknown group, and the approval of that attack by Hamas spokesmen. It was cowardly and vicious for the gun-men to open fire on unarmed civilians, and it was both lousy and stupid of Hamas to praise the killings. But that can’t be allowed to conceal the fact that Palestinian civilians have been overwhelmingly the victims of the recent violence. Neither should it obscure the responsibility of the Israeli government, which has launched a murderous assault on Gaza and created the conditions that made the latest out-break of violence almost inevitable.

After more than fifty civilian deaths, it should be reasonable to expect that supporters of Israel would be maintaining a discreet silence, or even throwing the odd word of criticism in the direction of Ehud Olmert’s government. Instead, we find them queuing up to assure whoever is listening that the sole responsibility for the killings in Gaza lies with Hamas: the Israeli state deserves only praise for its conduct.

Take this fairly typical argument from David Hirsh, a British sociologist active in the ‘Engage’ group (whose mission is to provide a bogus left-wing gloss for the policies of the Israeli state and whose main activity has been campaigning against the boycott of Israel): ‘Israel is engaged in a military attack on a military force. The Hamas forces embed themselves among civilians. Given this truth, and given the fact that Israel has decided to go to war with Hamas, the fact that 50% of those killed by Israel in this conflict are fighters, actually attests to the lengths that Israeli forces go to avoid killing civilians. In this respect they are not like Hamas, who set out to kill civilians.’

In 2003, thirty Israeli helicopter and fighter pilots refused to carry on bombing Palestinian cities, prompting their dismissal from the country’s air force. One of them explained the thinking behind their refusal in a way that cuts through all the sanitizing rhetoric of self-styled ‘Friends of Israel’ in the West: ‘You don’t have to be a genius to know that the destruction from a one-tonne bomb is massive, so someone up there made a decision to drop it knowing it would kill innocent people. Someone took the decision to kill innocent people. This is us being terrorists.’

The build-up to the crisis

The best way to undermine the excuses for state terrorism being hawked around the western media is to dismantle the narrative of recent history that has been constructed to justify Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza. The starting-point, of course, has to be the much-trumpeted Israeli withdrawal from the Strip in 2005. According to the Israeli government and its supporters, this was a bold move to advance the peace process that should have been reciprocated by Palestinian generosity. Instead, Gaza became a launching-pad for rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, forcing Olmert to send the army back in until those attacks stop. As the prime minister said recently: "One thing should be clear: If there is no Qassam fire on Israel, there will be no Israeli attack on Gaza. We do not rise in the morning and think about how to attack Gaza."

If you want to know what the thinking behind the Gaza pull-out actually was, you need only consider the words of Dov Weisglass, adviser to Ariel Sharon during the crucial period. As he told an Israeli newspaper:

‘The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians … the significance is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.’

That clear, unambiguous statement meshes very well with the actions of the Israeli government during and after the withdrawal from Gaza. In the West Bank, settlements have continued to expand, in defiance of the ‘road map’ and international law. Gaza itself has been turned into an open-air prison – its borders are controlled by Israel and its Egyptian ally, who have the power to seal off the enclave from the outside world whenever they please.

They exercised that power when Hamas staged its armed take-over in Gaza last year. Evidence that came to light while the latest round of brutal Israeli attacks was taking place puts that take-over in a very revealing light. Documents obtained by the US magazine Vanity Fair show that the US government did everything in its power to sabotage the formation of a power-sharing government involving both Hamas and Fatah. The Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas was given the following order by Washington’s representative in Jerusalem:

‘Hamas should be given a clear choice, with a clear deadline . . . they either accept a new government that meets the Quartet principles, or they reject it. The consequences of Hamas's decision should also be clear: if Hamas does not agree within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.’

The US government began cultivating Fatah’s security chief Muhammad Dahlan, hoping to use the men under his command to crush Hamas. Arab dictatorships allied to Washington were recruited to send weapons to Dahlan’s forces, with Israeli approval. Hamas always presented their own seizure of power in Gaza as a pre-emptive move – the latest evidence would appear to confirm that claim.

A sign of what Hamas might have experienced under a Washington-backed ‘emergency’ government came last month when Majd Al-Barghouti, a member of the party from a village near Ramallah, was arrested by the Fatah intelligence services. Prison inmates held in the same detention centre maintain that he was tortured for eight successive days before dying. According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly:

The 3 conditions

What were the celebrated ‘Quartet principles’ that Washington insisted Hamas must adopt? We’ve heard them trotted out in the media on countless occasions since the elections of 2006, and they comprise the following demands:

1) Hamas must recognize the state of Israel

2) Hamas must renounce violence

3) Hamas must respect existing peace agreements

All three demands are calculated to sound reasonable in sound-bite form: but closer inspection reveals them to be nothing short of outrageous. Let’s take them one by one. Hamas, we are told, must ‘recognise the state of Israel’. But which state of Israel might that be? Israel has never defined its borders, never said ‘thus far and no further’. As the Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh told the Washington Post after his party’s electoral victory: ‘Which Israel should we recognize? The Israel of 1917; the Israel of 1936; the Israel of 1948; the Israel of 1956; or the Israel of 1967? Which borders and which Israel? Israel has to recognize first the Palestinian state and its borders and then we will know what we are talking about.’

This insistence that Hamas recognize Israel is all the more disgraceful because it is not matched by any similar pressure on Israel to recognize a meaningful Palestinian state. At a bare minimum, this would mean a full Israeli withdrawal from the territory of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (including East Jerusalem), with all the army bases and settlements dismantled and the new Palestinian state granted full control over its borders and resources. This is the bottom-line for any ‘two-state’ solution to the conflict.

In fact, there is no reason why Palestinians should limit themselves to that goal – the UN partition resolution of 1947 would be a fairer starting-point, since it divided historic Palestine on a roughly equal basis. Any reversion to the borders which existed before 1967 would still leave Israel with over three quarters of historic Palestine under its jurisdiction. Ghassan Al-Khatib, a former Labour minister in the Palestinian Authority, urged the Fatah leadership to adopt the 1947 borders as their base-line during last year’s Annapolis negotiations, while recognizing that it was unlikely to happen: ‘Our negotiators, like our leadership, give priority to political realities often at the expense of legal principles. This is why the negotiations are not going to be conducted according to the rule of international law. They think it is difficult to revert to the past and that the international community would reject such a step on our part.’

Let’s grant for a moment, though, that a two-state settlement based on the 1967 borders would be a fair resolution of the conflict. According to Amos Malka, the head of Israeli military intelligence between 1998 and 2001, his agency was sure that Yasir Arafat would have accepted such a deal: ‘We assumed that it is possible to reach agreement with Arafat under the following conditions: a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty on the Temple Mount; 97% of the West Bank plus exchanges of territory in the ration of 1:1 with respect to the remaining territory; some kind of formula that includes the acknowledgement of Israel’s responsibility for the refugee problem and a willingness to accept 20,000 – 30,000 refugees.’ But Arafat was never offered that deal, and it hasn’t been put on the table for Mahmoud Abbas either.

Instead, Israeli governments from Ehud Barak to Ehud Olmert have claimed to accept the idea of a two-state solution, while insisting that large chunks of the West Bank must remain under Israeli control in the frame-work of any such solution. The most they are willing to grant to any would-be Palestinian state are a handful of enclaves cut off from each other – a sick parody of an independent state, with less than half the territory of the West Bank under its control.

The Israeli government and its partisans tend to blur the lines between concepts that should be kept distinct – as if a failure to ‘recognise the state of Israel’ in the way they insist was the equivalent of denying the right of Jews to live in the Middle East at all. This is a deliberate distortion, but one that is made easier by the presence of ugly anti-Jewish statements in the Hamas charter. Hamas leaders have put across mixed messages about the type of accommodation they could accept, one day saying they would sign a long-term truce based on the 1967 borders, on other occasions insisting that they will continue fighting until the Israeli state is destroyed.

Last October the Guardian journalist Clancy Chassay had dinner with senior Hamas leaders in Gaza and heard their conflicting views about the basis for a settlement. According to one, ‘Switzerland is the model. They killed each other for 200 years and now they live together peacefully. We believe there is a historical precedent for friendship between Jews and Muslims.’ According to Chassay, his host argued for a bi-national state, ‘enthusing over the potential for a state made up of localised cantons of control where all citizens would hold a common passport but would have to respect the individual laws and governance of each canton.’

The other leader took a more hard-line position: ‘With all due respect to my friend, the Palestinian people will never accept it. We need a single democracy on our terms. The Jews can live as individuals in a Palestinian state protected by our laws.’ Jewish citizens of present-day Israel would have reason to be wary of any such outcome – how could they be sure their rights would be protected by laws over which they had little or no influence? But the idea of a bi-national state divided into cantons would offer real guarantees against persecution and discrimination.

If the Israeli elites were really concerned about the long-term security of their people, they would be testing the Hamas leadership, making peace offers that recognized the democratic rights of the Palestinian people and challenging Hamas to reciprocate by renouncing any racist fantasy of ‘driving the Jews into the sea’. There would be two likely outcomes to such a move by the Israeli government – either Hamas would move in the right direction (perhaps splitting with more extreme currents within its own ranks), or its support in Gaza and the West Bank would begin to shrivel up and die.

The Islamist party has not won support because a large number of Palestinians are unwilling to limit their ambitions to a fully independent state in the West Bank and Gaza and would rather continue the struggle until Israel is eliminated altogether. Hamas won the 2006 elections because Fatah continued to participate in the charade of negotiations long after the Israeli government had made clear its unwillingness to withdraw from the whole of the occupied territories. This refusal has been made possible by the unwavering support of Israel’s western sponsors for its colonial policies.

That brings us to the second demand – that Hamas must ‘renounce violence’. The wording of this demand is not accidental – we are not being told that Hamas must renounce terrorism, the deliberate targeting of unarmed civilians, as a means of applying pressure on the Israeli state. This would be a perfectly reasonable demand - just as long as Israel was obliged to do the same. Rather, Hamas are being ordered to renounce all forms of armed resistance to the military occupation of Palestinian land.

The European Union carried the hypocrisy of this position to dazzling extents last year when they issued a statement sternly informing the Hamas leadership that ‘violence is incompatible with democracy’, as if democracy already existed for the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, violence may not be compatible with democracy, but occupation certainly is.

Needless to say, this is not a position that would have been accepted by EU members like France, Poland or Greece during the Second World War (or for that matter by the United States when its demand for independence was answered with violent repression by the British empire). The Israeli occupation is itself a form of violence – it would collapse overnight if the IDF was withdrawn from the occupied territories. Armed resistance to that occupation is totally legitimate, as long as it takes care to distinguish between soldiers and civilians.

Finally, we have the third stipulation of the ‘international community’ – Hamas must ‘respect existing peace agreements’. Not so long ago, there was a treaty signed between the Israeli government of Yitzak Rabin and the PLO leadership, generally known as the Oslo agreement. Since 1996, every Israeli government has been led by a man opposed to that deal: Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon and Olmert. No pressure was ever applied to these Israeli leaders to abide by Oslo’s conditions. If the Hamas leadership has drawn the conclusion that Oslo (or any subsequent deal agreed between Fatah and Israel) does not offer a genuine path-way towards independence, it is their right to say so and act accordingly.

Essentially, the three demands boil down to one simple diktat. Hamas must follow the same course as Fatah, and do exactly what Yasir Arafat did between 1988 and 1993 – renounce all means of applying pressure on the Israeli state, give up all the vital negotiating cards in advance, and hope that Washington will push Israel enough to make Palestinian independence a reality. That strategy proved to be a disastrous failure in the 1990s, and it would be criminally stupid for Hamas to adopt it today.

Conflict over Gaza

The arguments under-pinning the position of the Israeli government soon begin to crumble when they are subjected to detailed scrutiny. The pull-out from Gaza was not the first move in a process of full withdrawal from occupied Palestinian land – it was intended to make such a withdrawal unnecessary. The failure of the Hamas leadership to accept the ‘Quartet principles’ is not proof of irresponsible extremism on their part – it is just plain common sense. And the Hamas take-over in Gaza last year was a response to preparations for a Fatah coup – a coup that was nurtured by Washington, Israel and the Arab dictatorships.

In the piece referred to at the beginning of this article, David Hirsh makes another familiar claim: ‘The idea that the rockets would stop after Israel withdraws from occupied territory is evidently moonshine, given that the rocket attacks come from territory from which Israel has recently withdrawn.’ But Israel has not granted Gaza independence – the Strip remains under an Israeli blockade (with the complicity of the Egyptian regime), and has been repeatedly attacked by the IDF over the past two years, with hundreds of civilian casualties.

The only solid argument that can be made against the rocket attacks launched from Gaza is based on a simple principle – that it is wrong to attack civilian targets, no matter how great the provocation. It’s a lot easier to make this argument if you are a westerner who doesn’t have to endure the brutal aggression of the Israeli state week after week, month after month, year after year. Under those conditions, the urge to hit back and share the pain is bound to be extremely strong. But that urge won’t bring the Palestinians any further along the road to national liberation – the suicide bombings of the second intifada may have satisfied a desire for revenge, but they did little or nothing to undermine the occupation.

It is utterly hypocritical, though, for Israel and its backers to condemn Palestinian attacks on civilians. Not only because the Israeli elites have never hesitated to kill Palestinian civilians, but also because their response is equally vicious when the Palestinian resistance takes care to make the distinction between civilian and military targets. When Hamas and Hezbullah took Israeli soldiers captive in 2006, Ehud Olmert ordered a murderous series of assaults that claimed hundreds of civilian lives in Gaza and Lebanon.

After the massacre of Israeli students last week, the Guardian’s columnist Seth Freedman reacted with fury to the Hamas statement welcoming the attack: ‘For all of Israel's faults, no minister would ever make similarly obscene statements in the wake of such an attack were it to be perpetrated by the IDF against innocents … if the elected government of the Palestinians backs wholesale slaughter of this kind against Israelis, then it's no wonder that in return the Israelis give carte blanche to their leaders to do as they will in the name of defending them from further attack.’

Two obvious points come to mind after reading that. First of all, it may be true that no Israeli minister would issue a gloating statement after the IDF killed Palestinian or Lebanese civilians – they would probably offer some hypocritical expressions of regret for the ‘unfortunate tragedy’, murmuring something about ‘collateral damage’ and placing the blame for the deaths firmly on Israel’s enemies. Should we really admire them for their hypocrisy? If Israeli government ministers order their army to attack civilian targets in Gaza or southern Lebanon, knowing full well what the consequences will be, then lie through their teeth when speaking to the western media and pretend that the killings were a tragic accident – does that really make them morally superior to Hamas?

Secondly, it must seem bizarre from a Palestinian perspective to hear that Israeli citizens will now, finally, give their leaders ‘carte blanche’ to ‘do as they will’ – what on earth had they been doing for the week leading up to the Jerusalem attack? Giving out food packages and first-aid kits to hungry orphans? The elected government of the Israelis has carried out wholesale slaughter against Palestinians, on a scale dwarfing the Jerusalem massacre, repeatedly since 2000. An old biblical saying about motes and beams is painfully relevant here.

Freedman also referred to the ‘existential threat’ facing the citizens of Israel. We hear a lot about this feeling, and it would be wrong to dismiss it altogether. But it is far more important to consider the sense of ‘existential threat’ among Palestinians, who have neither their own state, nor the most powerful army in the Middle East, nor a formidable arsenal of nuclear war-heads, nor the backing of the world’s only super-power. How threatened must they feel as they watch the Israeli army bull-doze its way through the Gaza Strip, leaving piles of bodies in its wake, while the so-called ‘international community’ wrings its hands and condones the brutal aggression?

A road to peace?

Nothing will come from the meaningless talks being sponsored by Washington that will relieve the oppression of the Palestinian people. For a brief moment, Mahmoud Abbas recognised popular anger at the violence in Gaza and said he would not return to the talks until there was a cease-fire. But within hours, Condoleezza Rice had whipped him into line. The current Fatah leadership shows no sign of being willing to defy American pressure and take a principled stand in defence of its people.

According to some reports, they are even complicit in the imprisonment of Fatah leaders who want to break out of the current strait-jacket. Mohammed Nazzal, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told Al-Jazeera last month that Abbas had asked Israel to remove the name of Marwan Al-Barghouti from any list of prisoners to be exchanged for Israeli POWs. Barghouti is seen as a potential rival for the leadership of Fatah, and is respected by Hamas and others as a committed Palestinian nationalist who might guide his party in a new direction given the chance. Nazzal’s claim seems plausible, when we consider all the other evidence that the Fatah old guard is willing to betray the aspirations of the Palestinians people in order to shore up its own privileges.

Aluf Benn, the diplomatic editor of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, recently summed up the thinking of Israel’s political class when considering whether or not they should deal with Hamas: ‘The government is reluctant to reverse its course, forgo its efforts to isolate and bring down Hamas, and admit its strategic failure and weakness. Olmert fears that by recognizing Hamas, Israel will be practically dismissing the president, Mahmoud Abbas, and what remains of the Palestinian moderate camp.’

The demise of Abbas and his allies might be mourned by the Israeli and US governments, but it would be a small price to pay for a just peace settlement. There will be no resolution of the conflict as long as the fantasy that it is possible to ignore and exclude Hamas (and other Palestinian groups that reject the bankrupt strategy of Abbas) persists in Tel Aviv and Washington. The slogan ‘no justice, no peace’ is as true today as it ever was. Anyone who cares about the long-term future of the peoples of the Middle East, Jew or Arab, should be opposing the disastrous aggression of the Israeli state, which will ensure years or even decades of further blood-shed if it is not stopped soon.