Gaza's fragile ceasefire threatened by border clashes as Hamas weakens
Palestinian militants challenge an Islamist movement sidelined from Kerry talks, and enfeebled by tunnel closures and blockade
Ian Black in Gaza City The Guardian, Friday 21 February 2014 21.40 AEST
Israel says 43 missiles have been fired from Gaza so far this, and on Monday troops dismantled a 20kg bomb buried near Khan Yunis. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA
In a safe house reached by a circuitous route, he and other members of the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) are flaunting their weapons and defiance at a time when the truce with Israel .. http://www.theguardian.com/world/israel .. is looking fragile. Under his balaclava, another man's eyes flicker as he registers the sound of a drone hovering above – an ominous reminder of their enemy's reach. "There are planes in the sky," he warns. A hurried consultation follows over the squad's radio.
The alarm is understandable. On Thursday last week, Israeli soldiers shot dead a Palestinian in the exclusion zone close to the border fence. Three other men were injured. The next day the PRC's Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades fired two Grad missiles into Israeli territory in response to what they called "the crimes of the occupation". Three days later Israeli troops dismantled a 20kg bomb buried near Khan Yunis.
"Our target bank is always ready," says Abu Saad. "We are well prepared." Israel says 43 missiles have been fired from Gaza this year so far. Few have caused any damage or injuries.
Hamas .. http://www.theguardian.com/world/hamas , the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip, is committed to the agreement that ended Israel's last big offensive, in late 2012. "Israel follows a policy of collective punishment but we are concerned to keep the situation calm and under control," says Ghazi Hamad, its deputy foreign minister. "We are not interested in any kind of confrontation. But if we were not in control there would be many more missiles."
Islamic Jihad, a smaller faction backed by Iran, also respects the ceasefire. Israel says it is committed to it, too, but Palestinians and others complain that the Israelis have failed to significantly ease restrictions on movement and access into the border enclave, and carry out raids at will. "We are committed to a ceasefire as long as the occupation is," says Abu Saad. "But Hamas is a government. Their interests are not the same as ours. Should we ask for their permission to attack when Israel violates the agreement?"
Militarily it is an unequal struggle. Israel controls almost all Gaza's land borders, its airspace and coastline. Drone strikes, helped by collaborators on the ground, have killed hundreds of Palestinians. The most recent target, Abdullah Kharti, was injured while riding a motorbike, apparently surviving only because he was not carrying a mobile phone, which would have provided a signal to guide a missile. Kharti was described by the Israeli army as a "global jihad" activist. "That's simply propaganda by the occupation," says Abu Saad. "They are trying to damage the Palestinian cause."
Abu Saad Abu Saad belongs to the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committee in Gaza.
Gaza's streets are plastered with posters of "martyrs". One of the oldest is of Fathi Shikaki, the founder of Islamic Jihad, who was gunned down in Malta in 1995 by agents from the Mossad. Many commemorate Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader involved in the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Assassinations disrupt and divide. Four different Islamist groups, two of them close to Hamas, shelter under the PRC's umbrella.
If the military balance is overwhelmingly in Israel's favour, few expect political change any time soon. Gaza, often described as the elephant in the room, is not being discussed in the Kerry talks. Hamas opposes the negotiations being conducted by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, but its tone is surprisingly emollient nonetheless. "I believe we should give Abbas the benefit of the doubt," says Ahmed Youssef, who runs the Bayt al-Hikma thinktank. "He is a shrewd politician."
Hamas is in a bad way. Israel maintains pressure through the blockade, but Gaza's lifeline from Egypt has been severed since the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, last July. The effect, admits one senior figure, has been catastrophic. The closure of the tunnels under the border near Rafah has led to a shortage of weapons and, more importantly, cash and goods. The salaries of 40,000 government employees still need to be paid. Many of Gaza's 1.8 million people are suffering as food prices have skyrocketed, and electricity is available for only a few hours a day. The lack of raw materials has paralysed construction. Unemployment is 38%, crime is on the rise and it is hard to leave when Israel's Erez border post is closed to most and the Rafah crossing to Egypt open for just a few days a month. Begging is rife. "Its a deliberate attempt to force us to surrender," says Nafez Azzam, of Islamic Jihad.
"The Israelis do allow some things in, to show to the media," says Youssef. "They try to keep us on a diet. They will not let us become like Somalia, but they need to keep us busy worrying about food and electricity and sewage and shortages – not about politics and the struggle with Israel, not about the refugees and our long-range objectives."
Efforts at reconciliation between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah movement – opposed by Israel and the US – have not achieved much. Hanan Ashrawi, of the PLO executive committee, believes that Hamas "has to be part of the Palestinian political system" but blames Israel and Egypt for blocking a rapprochement.
It may take the collapse of current US diplomatic efforts to force the rival Palestinian camps to bury their differences. The Gaza Islamists appear to be banking on that. Agreement by Abbas would be political suicide, says Bassem Naim, an adviser to the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh.
Hamad says: "Abbas has promised that he will consult all Palestinian factions. But my prediction is that there will be no deal. Sooner or later, Kerry will fail, unless he looks at the roots of the conflict."
Hamas and Israel are both hoping to avoid escalation. "Hamas has no illusions," says a senior Israeli official. "They understand that there are rules of the game and that there is zero tolerance for any breach of the ceasefire."
But Abu Saad and his men are players too – and they may be less concerned about the consequences.
Mr. Netanyahu believes that he can avoid agreeing to a viable Palestinian state, in the face of fierce international criticism, because he is certain that America’s heartland, as opposed to its liberal elites, is tied to Israel on ideological and theological grounds. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=97933048
Housing sits on the development at Ma'aleh Adumim, an Israeli settlement on the West Bank, Dec.16, 2009. Photo by Bloomberg
Rejectionism is embedded in Israel's most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone.
By Gideon Levy | Jul. 4, 2014 | 2:31 PM
Israel does not want peace. There is nothing I have ever written that I would be happier to be proved wrong about. But the evidence is piling up. In fact, it can be said that Israel has never wanted peace – a just peace, that is, one based on a just compromise for both sides. It’s true that the routine greeting in Hebrew is Shalom (peace) – shalom when one leaves and shalom when one arrives. And, at the drop of a hat, almost every Israeli will say he wants peace, of course he does. But he’s not referring to the kind of peace that will bring about the justice without which there is no peace and there will be no peace. Israelis want peace, not justice, certainly not anything based on universal values. Thus, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Not only is there no peace: In recent years, Israel has moved away from even the aspiration to make peace. It has despaired utterly of it. Peace has disappeared from the Israeli agenda, its place taken by the collective anxieties that are systematically implanted, and by personal, private matters that now take precedence over all else.
The Israeli longing for peace seemingly died about a decade ago, after the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000, the dissemination of the lie that there is no Palestinian partner for peace, and, of course, the horrific blood-soaked period of the second intifada. But the truth is that even before that, Israel never really wanted peace. Israel has never, not for a minute, treated the Palestinians as human beings with equal rights. It has never viewed their distress as understandable human and national distress.
The Israeli peace camp, too – if ever there was such a thing – also died a lingering death amid the harrowing scenes of the second intifada and the no-partner lie. All that remained were a handful of organizations that were as determined and devoted as they were ineffectual in the face of the delegitimization campaigns mounted against them. Israel, therefore, was left with its rejectionist stance.
The single most overwhelming item of evidence of Israel’s rejection of peace is, of course, the settlements project. From the dawn of its existence, there has never been a more reliable or more precise litmus test for Israel’s true intentions than this particular enterprise. In plain words: The builders of settlements want to consolidate the occupation, and those who want to consolidate the occupation do not want peace. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.
On the assumption that Israel’s decisions are rational, it is impossible to accept construction in the territories and the aspiration to peace as mutually coexisting. Every act of building in the settlements, every mobile home and every balcony, conveys rejection. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace through the Oslo Accords, it would at least have stopped the construction in the settlements at its own initiative. That this did not happen proves that Oslo was fraudulent, or at best the chronicle of a failure foretold. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace at Taba, at Camp David, at Sharm el-Sheikh, in Washington or in Jerusalem, its first move should have been to end all construction in the territories. Unconditionally. Without a quid pro quo. The fact that Israel did not is proof that it did not want a just peace.
But the settlements were only a touchstone of Israel’s intentions. Its rejectionism is embedded far more deeply – in its DNA, its bloodstream, its raison d’être, its most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone. There, at the deepest level, is entrenched the value of “am sgula” – God’s “treasured people” – and “God chose us.” In practice, this is translated to mean that, in this land, Jews are allowed to do what is forbidden to others. That is the point of departure, and there is no way to get from there to a just peace. There is no way to reach a just peace when the name of the game is the dehumanization of the Palestinians. No way to achieve peace when the demonization of the Palestinians is hammered into people’s heads day after day. Those who are convinced that every Palestinian is a suspicious person and that every Palestinian wants “to throw the Jews into the sea” will never make peace with the Palestinians. Most Israelis are convinced of the truth of both those statements.
In the past decade, the two peoples have been separated from each another. The average young Israeli will never meet his Palestinian peer, other than during his army service (and then only if he does his service in the territories). Nor will the average young Palestinian ever meet an Israeli his own age, other than the soldier who huffs and puffs at him at the checkpoint, or invades his home in the middle of the night, or in the person of the settler who usurps his land or torches his groves.
Consequently, the only encounter between the two people is between the occupiers, who are armed and violent, and the occupied, who are despairing and also turn to violence. Gone are the days when Palestinians worked in Israel and Israelis shopped in Palestine. Gone is the period of the half-normal and quarter-equal relations that existed for a few decades between the two peoples that share the same piece of territory. It is very easy, in this state of affairs, to incite and inflame the two peoples against one another, to spread fears and to instill new hatreds on top of those that already exist. This, too, is a sure recipe for non-peace.
So it was that a new Israeli yearning sprang up: the desire for separation: “They will be there and we will be here (and also there).” At a time when the majority of Palestinians – an assessment I allow myself to make after decades of covering the territories – still want coexistence, even if less and less, most Israelis want disengagement and separation, but without paying the price. The two-state vision has gained widespread adherence, but without any intention to implement it in practice. Most Israelis are in favor, but not now and maybe not even here. They have been trained to believe that there is no partner for peace – a Palestinian partner, that is – but that there is an Israeli partner.
Unfortunately, the truth is almost the reverse. The Palestinian non-partners no longer have any chance to prove that they are partners; the Israeli non-partners are convinced that they are interlocutors. So began the process in which Israeli conditions, obstacles and difficulties were heaped up, one more milestone in Israeli rejectionism. First came the demand for a cessation of terrorism; then the demand for a change of leadership (Yasser Arafat as a stumbling block); and after that Hamas became the hurdle. Now it’s the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Israel considers every step it takes – from mass political arrests to building in the territories – to be legitimate, whereas every Palestinian move is “unilateral.”
The only country on the planet with no borders is so far unwilling to delineate even the compromise borders it is ready to be satisfied with. Israel has not internalized the fact that, for the Palestinians, the borders of 1967 are the mother of all compromises, the red line of justice (or relative justice). For the Israelis, they are “suicide borders.” This is why the preservation of the status quo has become the true Israeli aim, the primary goal of Israeli policy, almost its be-all and end-all. The problem is that the existing situation cannot last forever. Historically, few nations have ever agreed to live under occupation without resistance. And the international community, too, is one day apt to utter a firm pronouncement on this state of affairs, with accompanying punitive measures. It follows that the Israeli goal is unrealistic.
Disconnected from reality, the majority of Israelis pursue their regular way of life. In their mind’s eye the world is always against them, and the areas of occupation on their doorstep are beyond their realm of interest. Anyone who dares criticize the occupation policy is branded an anti-Semite, every act of resistance is perceived as an existential threat. All international opposition to the occupation is read as the “delegitimizing” of Israel and as a provocation to the country’s very existence. The world’s seven billion people – most of whom are against the occupation – are wrong, and six million Israeli Jews – most of whom support the occupation – are right. That’s the reality in the eyes of the average Israeli.
Add to this the repression, the concealment and the obfuscation, and you have another explanation for the rejectionism: Why should anyone strive for peace as long as life in Israel is good, calm prevails and the reality is concealed? The only way the besieged Gaza Strip can remind people of its existence is by firing rockets, and the West Bank only gets onto the agenda these days when blood is shed there. Similarly, the viewpoint of the international community is only taken into account when it tries to impose boycotts and sanctions, which in their turn immediately generate a campaign of self-victimization studded with blunt – and at times also impertinent – historical accusations.
This, then, is the gloomy picture. It contains not a ray of hope. The change will not happen on its own, from within Israeli society, as long as that society continues to behave as it does. The Palestinians have made more than one mistake, but their mistakes are marginal. Basic justice is on their side, and basic rejectionism is the Israelis’ purview. The Israelis want occupation, not peace.
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