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I. The Last Waltz?
Repeating
behaviors that have produced catastrophic failures and expecting a
different result is insane; and when a person’s psychotic behavior
puts himself and those around him in immediate physical danger, the
responsibility of those who claim to be his friends is to restrain
him. But even as Waltz With Bashir shows in multiplexes
across the world as a grim reminder of the precedent for Israel’s
brutal march of folly in Gaza, the US (and the editors of the New
York Times and Washington Post) insist that there is a
sanity and rationality to sending one of the world’s most powerful
armies into a giant refugee camp to rend the flesh and crush the bones
of those who stand in its way — whether in defiance or by being
unlucky enough to have been born of the wrong tribe and be huddling in
the wrong place. By fighting its way to their citadel, they would have
us believe, Israel can destroy Hamas and usher in a golden age of
peace. Or, to borrow from the
casual callousness of Condi Rice
during the last such display of futile brutality, we are witnessing,
again, the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Israel failed in 2006,
just as in 2002 and 1982. This time, they tell us, will be different.
And then the horror unfolds, as it
always does — the hundreds of civilians accidentally massacred as they
cowered in what they were told were places of safety,
mocking Israel’s torrent of self congratulation
over its restraint and its brilliant intelligence
— and the hopelessly out-gunned enemy manages to survive, as he does
every time. And by surviving, grows stronger politically. No matter
how many are killed, the leaders targeted by Israel’s military are
endlessly regenerated in the fertile soil of grievance and resentment
born of the
circumstances Israel has created.
Circumstances it has created, but which it, and its most fervent
backers refuse to acknowledge, much less redress.
Arafat is dead and gone. So are Sheikh
Yassin, and Rantissi. And Abbas al-Musawi, and Imad Mughniyeh.
Israel’s ruthless efficiency at killing the leaders of Palestinian and
Lebanese resistance groups is second to none, and yet, no matter who
it kills, there are always thousands more, ready to declare, “I am
Spartacus”. That’s because those who step up to lead these
organizations are acting not out of personal ambition — leadership in
Hamas is a death sentence. The endless stream of Palestinians willing
to sacrifice themselves in the role, then, is a symptom of the
condition of their people. And Israel’s leaders know this. Asked when
running for Prime Minister a decade ago what he’d have done if he’d
been born Palestinian, Ehud Barak — the man directing the current
operation in Gaza —
answered bluntly,
“I’d have joined a terror organization.”
By the logic of his own
instinct on the campaign trail in 1999, Ehud Barak should know that
Operation Cast Lead in Gaza cannot succeed, except, perhaps, in
reviving his own political prospects. No matter how many leaders,
militants and ordinary civilians Israel kills in Gaza, Hamas — or
something like it — will survive.
Waltz With Bashir
— a movie that had to be made in Israel, I venture, because
questioning Israeli militarism would have been deemed “anti-Semitic”
in Hollywood — reminds us that, in 1982, Ariel Sharon led an invasion
of Lebanon supposedly aimed at stopping attacks on northern Israel,
advancing all the way to Beirut in order to crush the PLO. Sure, the
PLO was driven out of Beirut and exiled to Tunisia, but the Israelis
were forced within six years to begin negotiating with it because of
the uprising of the youth of the West Bank and Gaza. Lebanon in 1982
was a brutal and ultimately futile campaign that delivered only the
brutal images of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila around which the
movie centers.
Since 1982, of course,
Israel has laid siege to and bombed nearly every major Palestinian
city, killing and imprisoning thousands of Palestinians, blundering
into Lebanon again in 2006 and killing another thousand Lebanese,
repeatedly bombed Gaza and choked off its economy for much of the past
three years, and yet, nothing has changed: They have killed some 700
in Gaza now, and still the rockets come; regardless of the state of
its structures, Hamas is politically stronger on the Palestinian
street, while those Palestinian leaders who have cooperated with
Israel and the US are weaker and more discredited than ever. The
Israelis — and their backers in the American political establishment —
appear incapable of grasping that which is empirically obvious: Hamas
and its ilk grow stronger every time Israel seeks to eliminate them by
force.
II. Dangerous
Illusions and a War of Choice
“But what choice did
Israel have?” say those in its amen corner in the US. “No normal
society would tolerate rocket fire on its territory. Hamas left it no
option.”
Well, actually, as Jimmy Carter
explains from first-hand experience,
Israel had plenty of alternatives and chose to
ignore them, because
it remains locked into the failed US-backed policy of trying to
overturn the democratic verdict of the 2006 Palestinian election that
made Hamas the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority. The primary
Israeli-US-European strategy here (tacitly backed by Arab autocrats
from Mubarak to Mahmoud Abbas) has been to apply increasingly strict
economic sanctions, in the hope that choking off the chances of a
decent life for the 1.5 million people of Gaza would somehow force
them to reverse their political choice. Collective punishment, in
other words. So, even when Hamas observed a cease-fire between June
and November, Israel refused to open the border crossings. When the
exchange of fire began again on November 5 when Israel raided what it
said was a Hamas tunnel, Hamas escalated its rocket fire but made
clear that it would restore and extend the cease-fire if Israel agreed
to open the border crossings. Israel’s answer, Carter explains, was if
Hamas ceased firing, Israel would allow 15% of the normal traffic of
goods into Gaza. And it’s any surprise that Hamas was not prepared to
settle for just a 15% loosening of the economic stranglehold?
Hamas appeared to believe that creating
a crisis would force Israel to agree to new terms. Whether this was a
mistaken belief or not actually remains to be seen: If the truce that
ends Israel’s Operation Cast Lead leaves Hamas intact and includes the
lifting of the siege, it will claim vindication. Even now, Israeli
leaders continue to insist, idiotically, that Hamas cannot be allowed
to achieve any diplomatic gains as a result of any truce that must, of
necessity, require its diplomatic cooperation. Just as in 2006, the
Israelis have achieved the exact opposite political result to what
they intended: They have made it abundantly obvious, even to the
incoming US administration, that
the policy of trying to isolate Hamas
is spectacularly dysfunctional, and will have to be abandoned as a
matter of urgency.
Even as the realization
begins to dawn that their adversary, once again, will emerge
politically stronger from a military pummeling, the Israelis
contemplate one last bloody foray into the heart of Gaza City, hoping
that military action can weaken Hamas and force it to surrender to
Israel’s terms. Some American policymakers even cling to the fantasy
that they can reimpose the regime of the pliant Mahmoud Abbas on Gaza
— a pathetic fantasy, to be sure, because close observers of
Palestinian politics know that the only thing keeping Abbas in charge
of the West Bank, right now, is the presence of the Israeli Defense
Force, and it’s willingness to lock up his opponents. Conveniently,
for example, Abbas doesn’t have to deal with his own legislature,
which is dominated by Hamas, because Israel has locked up most of the
legislators. Mahmoud Abbas has allowed himself to be turned into a
Palestinian Petain, and even much of the rank and file of his own
Fatah party has turned against him. Not even the Israelis believe he
could control Gaza without them, and they are not inclined to stay.
If Hamas is not allowed to
govern in Gaza, chances are that nobody will govern in Gaza. It will
look more like Mogadishu than like the West Bank — a chaotic cauldron
run by rival warlords, with Hamas — no longer responsible for
governance — the most powerful political-military presence (although
al-Qaeda will fancy its chances of setting up shop if the Hamas
government is overthrown — Hamas is the greatest bulwark against Bin
Laden’s crowd gaining a foothold in Gaza).
III. Palestinian
Sovereignty
The other trope being
desperately worked by Israel’s cheering section is the idea that this
is simply another episode of a regional conflict between Israel and
its mortal foe, Iran. Hamas, we are told, by many media outlets that
ought to know better, is a “proxy of Iran”. This is simply not the
case, and sober regional analysts know it: Hamas is certainly
dependent on Iranian cash in Gaza, although those Western and Israeli
strategic geniuses who deprived it of all other sources of funding
ought not be surprised that Hamas turned for funds to those who would
offer them. No doubt it will take whatever military assistance it was
offered, too. But Hamas shares neither ideology nor the kind of
political relationship with Iran that Hizballah does, in Lebanon.
Hamas was the creation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, originally,
and its political decision making is entirely independent of Iran.
Syria is more politically influential over Hamas, of course, and Syria
is hardly a proxy of Iran despite their alliance — if it was, why
would the US be working so hard on a diplomatic strategy to break that
alliance? Moreover, the idea of Iran on some sort of path of
confrontation with Israel is something of a phantom. Sure, Ahmadinejad
loves to warn that Israel will disappear, but he, and his superior,
have long made clear that Iran has no intention of attacking Israel.
And you’d think that those who insist that Iran’s mullahs exist in
order to destroy Israel, even at the cost of their own survival (you
know, the argument that the iranians are so ideologically committed to
Israel’s destruction that normal deterrence policies won’t restrain
them) might want to answer this question: Why has Hizballah refrained
from firing its massive arsenal of rockets at Israel as it butchers
Palestinians in Gaza? Israel tells us they have the means, and there’s
no doubt they have the implacable rage. Could the answer be that this
Iranian proxy is being restrained by the pragmatic concern for its own
survival and progress in Lebanon? And if so, what does this tell us
about Iran? Then again, Iran is not especially relevant to the
conflict in Gaza.
Nor was the crisis there created by the
militancy of Hamas; instead, it’s the final bloody chapter in the
failed Bush Administration-Israeli strategy to overthrow Hamas. The
alternative to war, ignored by Israel but patently obvious, is simple:
It will have to negotiate with Hamas. (And spare me the “but Hamas
doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist” argument:
No Palestinian leader would, if offered the
chance to reverse history, allow Israel to have come into existence,
for the simple reason that Israel’s emergence was the Palestinian
Nakbah, the catastrophe that dispossessed them and made them refugees.
Israel started talking to the PLO long before its charter was revised
to allow for recognizing Israel; its leaders realized that Israel
could not be militarily defeated. Many in Hamas have come to the same
conclusion; Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, argues that
Hamas is moving towards acceptance of a Palestinian state in the 1967
borders. The Americans are simply going to have to let go of the idea
that they’re going to negotiate with a Palestinian leadership that
answers to them, as Mahmoud Abbas does, rather than one that answers
to the Palestinian public.)
As Oxford-based Israeli
historian Avi Shlaim writes:
Israel likes to portray
itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet
Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote
democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine
it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with
reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism.
Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in
building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the
possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair
elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority
brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to
recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas
is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU
shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas
government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax
revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a
significant part of the international community imposing economic
sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not
against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the
tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own
misfortunes. Israel’s propaganda machine persistently purveyed the
notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject
coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little
more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious
fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the
simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with
normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than
any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece
of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical
movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following
its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter,
it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state
solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity
government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with
Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that
included Hamas.
It continued to play the
old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In
the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to
weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat.
Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders
to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power.
Aggressive American
neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a
Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the
collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to
seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by
Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of
clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader
sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian
people, because the people had elected the party to power. The
declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the
pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel’s
terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza
are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to
derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
Shlaim introduces us to
the deeper flaw in the “no normal society would tolerate rocket fire”
reasoning: Israel, quite simply, is not a normal society. It is a
country without fixed legal borders, and the disputes over where those
borders should be drawn — the basic conflict not over religion or
ideology, but over land and power — is at the very epicenter of the
current clash in Gaza, and of Israel’s never-ending series of wars
with those around it.
One can only hope, with great fervor,
that Barak Obama has
heeded the wisdom of his foreign policy tutor
Brent Scowcroft, whose observations
about the folly of the Bush Administration backing Israel’s 2006
campaign against Hizballah apply as much to today’s offensive in Gaza:
“Hezbollah is not the source of the problem,” Scowcroft
wrote in the Washington Post.
“It is a derivative of the cause, which is the tragic conflict over
Palestine that began in 1948. The eastern shore of the Mediterranean
is in turmoil from end to end, a repetition of continuing conflicts in
one part or another since the abortive attempts of the United Nations
to create separate Israeli and Palestinian states in 1948.”
If that were true in
Lebanon, it’s even more so in Gaza. To understand everything from why
Hamas refuses to recognize the State of Israel; why it fights by means
both fair and terribly foul; and why it won Gaza by a landslide in the
2006 election; a good starting point is the demographic composition of
the strip — 80% of today’s Gazans are refugee families, who were
driven out of homes and off land they owned inside what is now Israel
in 1948, and forbidden by one of the founding laws of the State of
Israel from ever returning. Is it any surprise then that the basic
default position of Palestinian politics has always been to refrain
from “recognizing” Israel in the sense of simply abandoning their own
claims to homes and land stolen from them by Israel’s very creation.
Sure, Israel can say it won the war of 1948, and to the victor the
spoils. But what would Ehud Barak do if it had been his father or
grandfather who’d been forced off a farm in Ashkelon and now found
himself in the hellhole of Gaza? You already know his answer.
And that answer will
remain the same (even if Barak would never dream of admitting it any
longer) as long as justice and dignity is denied to the community that
gave rise to Hamas.
What Operation Cast Lead
has revealed in stark and brutal terms, is that Israel’s leadership is
incapable of transcending the dysfunctional patterns that lock it into
a morbid cycle that precludes Middle East stability. Israel is moving
steadily to the right politically — even when the center-left was in
power and negotiating with the Palestinians, settlements on occupied
land expanded at a steady clip; no Israeli government for the
foreseeable future is going to withdraw from the West Bank to the
Green Line. So, if the madness is to be stopped, Israel and the
Palestinians will have to be told where their borders are, as part of
an internationally enforced, fair settlement that gives the parties no
choice, and provides the Turkish troops to enforce it. But hey, I’m
not holding my breath.
[Source:
Rootless Cosmopolitan.]
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