By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Consequences Of The Israel/Hamas War

Yesterday Hamas official Osama Hamdan said that there is no need for new negotiations with Israel, amid Israeli media reports that there is an intention to renew Gaza truce talks.

Meanwhile, police use water cannon to disperse demonstrators calling for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Saturday, May 25, 2024

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it turned the tiny enclave into an open-air prison. Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023—the incessant bombardment of Gaza by land, sea, and air—turned this open-air prison into an open graveyard, a pile of rubble, and a desolate wasteland. António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), said in his address to the Security Council that the Hamas attack, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage, did not happen in a vacuum. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to fifty-six years of suffocating occupation,” he noted. He immediately added that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), said in his address to the Security Council that the Hamas attack, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage, did not happen in a vacuum. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to fifty-six years of suffocating occupation,” he noted. He immediately added that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, responded with a vicious personal attack on the secretary-general, claiming, falsely, that he accused Israel of blood libel, calling for his resignation, and topping it off with a call on members of the UN to stop funding the organization. Israeli antagonism to the UN and obstruction of its work is nothing new, but the contrast between the decency and humanity of the secretary-general and the rudeness and crudeness occasion. I propose to follow in the footsteps of the secretary-general by stating the obvious: the Israel-Hamas conflict did not begin on October 7. It has to be placed in its proper historical context. The Gaza Strip is the name given to the southern part of the coastal plain of Palestine, adjoining Egypt. It was part of Palestine during the British Mandate which ended in May 1948. Under the 1947 UN partition plan this area was to form part of the Palestinian Arab state but this state did not materialize. During the 1948 war for Palestine the Egyptian army captured this semi-desert strip. The 1949 Israeli-Egyptian Armistice Agreement left this area on the Egyptian side of the new international border. Egypt did not annex the territory but kept it under military rule, pending resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Strip is 25 miles long and 4 to 9 miles wide with a total area of 141 square miles. In the course of the 1948 war more than 200,000 Palestinian refugees were added to a population of around 80,000, creating a massive humanitarian problem. UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency) was set up to provide food, education, and health services to the refugees. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in the course of the Suez War of October–November 1956 but was forced by international pressure to vacate it in March 1957. A large number of civilians were killed, and atrocities were committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during its short-lived occupation of the territory in what was a foretaste of things to come.

In June 1967, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. In August 2005, Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip. Israeli spokespersons claimed that by withdrawing they gave the Gazans an opportunity to turn the enclave into the Singapore of the Middle East. This claim is utterly preposterous when compared with the grim reality, but it is quite typical of Israeli propaganda. The reality is that between 1967 and 2005, a classic colonial situation prevailed in the Gaza Strip. A few thousand Israeli settlers controlled 25 percent of the territory, 40 percent of the arable land, and the largest share of the desperately scarce water resources.

The Gaza Strip is not backward and impoverished because its residents are lazy but because Israel’s rapacious colonial regime did not give it a chance to flourish. Economic progress was thwarted by a deliberate Israeli strategy of “de-development.” Sara Roy, a Jewish scholar at Harvard, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is the leading expert on the Gaza Strip. She has written four books on Gaza (as well as a chapter in this volume). The first and ground-breaking book was called The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development. In this book she coined the term and formulated the pivotal concept of de-development. Her powerful thesis is that the dire state of Gaza is not the result of objective conditions but of a deliberate Israeli policy of keeping it under-developed and dependent. Despite considerable opposition from the scholarly community when she first introduced the concept, it has become widely used and part of the lexicon in political science and other disciplines. The book shows in detail the various measures by which Israel systematically thwarted the growth of industry in the Gaza Strip and exploited the enclave as a source of cheap labor as well as a market for its own goods.

There were three principal reasons for the decision of the right-wing Likud government, headed by Ariel Sharon, to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. One is that Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, launched attacks against Israel’s settlers and soldiers and, as a result, the price of occupying Gaza outstripped the benefits. The game was no longer worth the candle. A second aim of the move was to sabotage the Oslo peace process. As Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s chief of staff, explained in an interview with Ha’aretz on October 8, 2004:

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 … 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 third reason for disengagement had to do with demography. Palestinians have a higher birth rate than Israelis and this is perceived as a threat, a “demographic time bomb” as some Israelis call it. To preserve the slim Jewish majority in areas claimed by Israel, the Likud government decided to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza. By withdrawing from Gaza, it removed, or thought it removed, in one stroke, 1.4 million Palestinians from the overall demographic equation. Sharon claimed that by withdrawing from Gaza, his government was making a contribution toward peace with the Palestinians. But this was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken solely in what was considered to be the Israeli national interest. The nature of the move was revealed by its official name: “the unilateral disengagement from Gaza.” Disengagement from Gaza was not the prelude to further withdrawals from the West Bank and it most emphatically was not a contribution to peace. The houses that were abandoned in Gaza were demolished by bulldozers in what amounted to a scorched earth policy. The controlling consideration behind the move was to divert resources from Gaza in order to safeguard and consolidate the more significant Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

In the year after withdrawing its 8,000 settlers from Gaza, the Likud government introduced 12,000 new settlers into the West Bank. Today, there are over 700,000 settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The 2005 move was not coordinated with the Palestinian Authority (PA). The long-term aim of the Sharon government was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel. One step in this overall strategy was the disengagement from Gaza. The other step was the building of the so-called security barrier on the West Bank. The security barrier was in fact as much about land-grabbing as it was about security. It was said to be a temporary security measure, but it was intended to delineate the final borders of Greater Israel.

The two moves were anchored in a fundamental rejection of Palestinian national rights. They reflected a determination to prevent the Palestinians from ever achieving independence on their own land. Denying access between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was a means of obstructing a unified Palestinian struggle for independence. At the tactical level, withdrawing from Gaza enabled the Israeli Air Force to bomb the territory at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there.

Following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas moderated its program and turned to the ballot box as the road to power. Its 1988 Charter was antisemitic and called for a unitary Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. But in its platform for the January 2006 elections, it tacitly accepted Israel’s existence and lowered its sights to an independent Palestinian state along the 1967 lines. However, Hamas did not agree to sign a formal peace treaty with Israel, and it insisted on the right of return of the 1948 refugees, widely seen as a codeword for dismantling Israel as a Jewish state. Hamas won a clear victory in a fair and free election not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank as well. Having won an absolute majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, Hamas proceeded to form a government in accordance with customary democratic procedure. The Hamas victory came as an unpleasant surprise for Israel and its Western supporters. Israel refused to recognize the new government and resorted to economic warfare to undermine it. The United States (US) and European Union, to their eternal shame, followed Israel’s example in refusing to recognize the democratically elected government and joined Israel in economic warfare to undermine it.

For Israel and its Western supporters, Israel refused to recognize the new government and resorted to economic warfare to undermine it. The United States (US) and European Union, to their eternal shame, followed Israel’s example in refusing to recognize the democratically elected government and joined Israel in economic warfare to undermine it.

This is just one example, one example among many, of Western hypocrisy on Israel-Palestine. The Western leaders claim that they believe in democracy and that their objective around the world is democracy-promotion. They invaded Iraq in 2003 in the name of democracy and ended up by destroying the country and causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. The Western military interventions in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya also used democracy as a camouflage for imperial ambitions and all of them ended in dismal failure. Democracy needs to be built by the people from the ground up; it cannot be imposed by a foreign army from the barrel of a tank.

Palestine was a shining example of democracy in action. With the possible exception of Lebanon, it was the only genuine as opposed to sham democracy in the Arab world. Under the incredibly difficult conditions imposed by coercive military occupation, the Palestinians succeeded in building a democratic political system. The Palestinian people had spoken, but Israel and its Western allies refused to recognize the result of the election because the people had voted for the “wrong” party.

In March 2007, Hamas formed a national unity government with Fatah, the mainstream party that came second in the ballot box. It was a moderate government which consisted mainly of technocrats rather than politicians. Hamas invited its coalition partner to negotiate with Israel a long-term hudna, or truce. Much more significant than the offer of a long-term hudna was Hamas’s acceptance of a two-state settlement (with the implicit de facto recognition of Israel). This acceptance was already hinted at in the Cairo Declaration of 2005, the “Prisoners’ Document” of 2006, and the Mecca Accord between Hamas and Fatah of 2007. Hamas all but explicitly endorsed a two-state settlement and, as the then UN Middle East Envoy Álvaro de Soto observed, it could have evolved further—if only its overtures had not met with flat dismissal and rejection from Israel and its allies. Nevertheless, Hamas leaders continued to make it clear, in countless subsequent statements, that they would accept a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.

Not content with dismissing Hamas’s call for a hudna and its offer of negotiations for a two-state settlement, Israel entered into a plot to topple the national unity government and to oust Hamas from power. In 2008, a leak of memos from the Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations showed that Israel and the US armed and trained the security forces of President Mahmoud Abbas with the aim of overthrowing the unity government. Later, the “Palestine Papers,” a cache of 1,600 diplomatic documents leaked to Al Jazeera, provided more details. They revealed that a secret committee was formed called the Gaza Security Committee. It had four members: Israel, the United States, Fatah, and Egyptian intelligence. The aim of this committee was to isolate and weaken Hamas and to help Fatah stage a coup in order to recapture power.

Hamas decided to pre-empt the Fatah coup. It seized power violently in Gaza in June 2007. Since then, the two branches of the Palestinian national movement have been divided with Hamas ruling over the Gaza Strip from Gaza City and the Palestinian Authority, dominated by Fatah, governing the West Bank from Ramallah. The Palestinian Authority, funded mainly by the European Union and to a lesser extent by the United States, functions essentially as a sub-contractor for Israeli security. It is corrupt, incompetent, and impotent. As a result, it enjoys little legitimacy in the West Bank and even less in the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s response to the Hamas seizure of power was to intensify a blockade on Gaza. The US, United Kingdom (UK), and other European allies participated in this cruel blockade. The blockade has now been in force for seventeen years. It inflicts daily hardship on the inhabitants of the Strip. It involves Israeli control not only of the imports but also of all exports from Gaza, including agricultural goods. The blockade of Gaza is not only cruel and inhumane but plainly illegal. A blockade is a form of collective punishment which is explicitly proscribed by international law. And yet the international community has totally failed to hold Israel to account for this and the rest of its illegal actions. Israel denies that it is an occupying power of the Gaza Strip. However, the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all concluded that Israel remains in “effective occupation” despite its physical withdrawal because it continues to control access to the territory by land, sea, and air.

Having been denied the fruits of its electoral victory, Hamas resorted to the weapon of the weak, to what Israel calls terrorism, and this took the form of rocket attacks from Gaza on southern Israel. The IDF retaliated by bombing Gaza; a tit-for-tat ensued and the inevitable escalation of hostilities. In June 2008, Egypt brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The ceasefire worked remarkably well. In the six months before June, the average number of rockets fired on Israel was 179. In the following months, the average fell to three rockets a month. On November 4, 2008, the IDF launched a raid into Gaza, killed six Hamas fighters, and killed the ceasefire, leading to an immediate resumption of hostilities. Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire on its original terms, which included the easing of the blockade. Israel refused the offer and prepared to renew the fight. In general, Hamas has a much better record than Israel of observing ceasefires.

Israel launched its first major military offensive in Gaza on December 27, 2008, naming it Operation Cast Lead. The reason given for the attack was self-defense. Israel, like any other country, it was claimed, has the right to defend itself and to protect its citizens. In other words, Israel claimed the right to self-defense against the people it occupied and oppressed. However, if all Israel wanted was to protect its citizens, it did not have to resort to force. All it had to do was to follow Hamas’s good example and observe the ceasefire. Israel repeatedly invokes its right to self-defense but under international law, self-defense does not apply if you are an illegal military occupier.

Operation Cast Lead was also the first major Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, using the words “people of Gaza” deliberately. Israel claims that Hamas uses civilians as human shields and that this makes them legitimate military targets. In a crowded enclave, however, some Hamas command centers, tunnels, and weapons stores are inevitably located near civilian buildings. That is not the same as using civilians as human shields. Many of the Israeli claims that Hamas uses schools, hospitals, mosques, and UNRWA buildings as cover for its operations have turned out to be untrue. On the other hand, the claim that the IDF goes to great lengths to avoid hurting innocent civilians is flatly contradicted by the evidence. Its offensive inflicted very heavy casualties and massive damage to the civilian infrastructure. It established a pattern of regular incursions to hit Hamas, incursions that invariably rain down death and destruction on the civilian population.

 

 

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