Hurricane Gaza
By Yacov Ben
Efrat
04 October, 2005
Challenge
As a unilateral act, Israels disengagement
from the Gaza Strip raises basic questions for both sides in the conflict.
For Israel, there is the question of how to define its deed: Should
we declare that the occupation of Gaza is over? No less important
are the questions Palestinians are asking: Is this a victory?
If so, who should get credit?
Suppose that Israels
withdrawal had taken place in the context of an agreement with the Palestinian
Authority (PA). Then the two would have reached a single definition
for the status of the evacuated area. But because Israel acted alone,
it believes it has the right to decide. Its National Security Council
and Justice Ministry propose calling the withdrawal the end of
occupation. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Foreign Ministry
fear that this definition would expose them to demands that they un-occupy
the West Bank too. As an alternative, they opt for the phrase, the
end of Israeli responsibility. In the spirit of Oslo, they stress
that responsibility has passed to the PA.
Both conceptions
are inadequate. The fourth Hague Convention (1907) establishes that
occupation is over only when the occupying power stops controlling air,
sea and land. Israel is far from doing that. According to the Disengagement
Plan, it will continue to cruise Gazas airspace and territorial
waters. It demands that the Rafah Crossing between the Strip and Egypt,
while open to people, must be closed to shipments of goods; instead,
these are to cross through a terminal within Israeli territory, at Kerem
Shalom, so that Israel can supervise.
When Sharon prefers
to speak of an end to Israeli responsibility, he means,
above all, economic responsibility. He will discover, however, that
Gaza, for its part, cannot disengage. Gazans cannot survive without
access to jobs and export markets in Israel.
Israel, for the
moment, doesnt trouble itself about their fate. It prefers to
pluck the political fruits of Sharons courageous step.
He is today the darling of the Americans, the international community,
and even of the Israeli Left. Gideon Levi, for example, published an
op-ed piece in Haaretz on August 28 entitled, Sharon for Leader
of the Labor Party. In a play on an old Zionist saying, he began
with these words: A party without a leader seeks a leader without
a party. He closed with this: Ariel Sharon to head Labor?
Not a pleasant thought, but maybe not so terrible either, considering
the alternative (i.e., a victory for Binyamin Netanyahu as head
of the Likud). Gideon Levi is by no means alone.
In addition to
Ariel Sharon, another side seeks to pluck the political fruits of disengagement.
The Hamas leaders cultivate euphoria as they prepare to run for the
Palestinian parliament in January 2006. (It is their first election
bid.) The website of their al-Qassam Brigades has published the pictures
of the organizations senior military leaders. Among recent TV
interviews, one stood out: a talk with al-Qassam Commander Muhammad
Def, who has escaped Israeli assassination attempts several times. Asked
if Israels withdrawal was a result of PA political efforts or
armed resistance, Def replied: Everyone knows it resulted from
the constant opposition and the numerous sacrifices. We are well aware
that the agreements produced nothing
. Resistance, on the other
hand, produced more than just the retreat of the occupation to its pre-Intifada
positions. It produced the evacuation of all the settlements, and that
is unprecedented.
The words of Muhammad
Def and other Hamas leaders stand in clear contradiction to the organizations
recent actions. For if the armed struggle caused Israels departure
from Gaza, why not keep using so successful a method? Why emerge from
underground? Why not stay as before and liberate the West Bank too?
The Hamas leaders dont tell the whole story. Sharon withdrew from
Gaza because he had failed to gain a decisive strategic advantage. He
hoped to improve Israels cards by unilateral action. But Hamas
recent turn to political channels also derives from the lack of a decisive
strategic advantage. The success of its military actions is questionable:
they motivated Israel to strangle the Territories with the separation
barrier and the checkpoints, casting the Palestinians into ever deeper
poverty. Israel has assassinated the entire first line of the organizations
leaders. Now with its election bid, Hamas desperately needs a political
achievement and international recognition.
While Hamas engages
in dubious celebration, the PA frets. On the morning after the withdrawal,
Hisham Abed al-Razek of the PA said: I have no joy in my heart.
We are left in the prison of Gaza. Disengagement is an Israeli measure
intended to make the kids happy for a couple of days, no more than that.
The Israeli occupation surrounds us on every side: from the sea, the
air, the land and in the border crossings. It surrounds and it suffocates.
(Yediot Aharonot Sept. 12)
Bilal al-Hassan,
writing in Sharq al-Awsat on Sept. 4, holds that Sharon is no less extreme
than Binyamin Netanyahu. Sharon officially proclaims that Jerusalem
is outside any negotiations with the Palestinians. So too are the settlement
blocs around Jerusalem. He calls on the Palestinians to put down terrorism
in order to begin with the Road Map. But lets suppose that the
Palestinians were to accept Israeli logic. Suppose they were to pass
the test of squashing terrorism. What would Sharon give
in return? Hed give 42% of the land in the West Bank, divided
by Israeli settlements into three cantons, with a barrier separating
people from their farmlands. And then hed say: Establish
your state in these cantons! Is there a Palestinian leader somewhere
who would find such an offer enticing to the point of embarking
on a civil war?
Instead of civil
war, we are presently witnessing anarchy within the PA itself. At dawn
on September 7, more than a hundred commandos from the Popular Resistance
Committees in Gaza attacked the house of Musa Arafat, former Gaza Security
chief, dragging him out and executing him in the street. The Popular
Committees belong not to some rival organization like Hamas or Jihad,
but to the dominant faction in the PA: Fatah.
The irony is that
the supporters of disengagement whether on the Israeli side,
in the PA or in Hamas have deepened the conflict and trapped
the Palestinian people. Each has done so for its own reasons:
1. Israel. From
Israels viewpoint, disengagement from Gaza has given it the opportunity
to freeze the occupation in the West Bank and to get American support
for keeping its settlement blocs. It has managed to separate Gaza from
the West Bank, which it is walling off without prospect of a political
agreement. Not two days had passed after the withdrawal, when Defense
Minister Shaul Mofaz ruled that the government would commence to strengthen
the settlement blocs. This process, he said, was part of the change
in agenda following disengagement. (Haaretz Sept. 14)
Moreover, Israel
has announced the goal of eliminating the employment of Palestinians
on its territory by 2008. The official jobless rate in the Gaza Strip
and the West Bank is already 50%. According to a new report by Harvard
University, by 2010 the working-age population in the Strip will increase
to the point that 250,000 additional jobs will be needed. Claiming that
the Palestinians must now prove they can build an economy in Gaza, Israel
attempts to slough off responsibility for the systematic economic destruction
it wreaked for 38 years.
2. The Palestinian
Authority. By its willingness to take responsibility in the vacated
areas despite the lack of negotiations, the PA has itself to blame for
the weakened bargaining position in which it finds itself. It will be
responsible for the division that is about to take place between Gaza
and the West Bank: it should have insisted on a territorial connection.
More broadly, it will be responsible for the lack of development and
the continuing poverty of its people. America and Israel are already
making demands that the PA cannot fulfill. In the present circumstances,
it cannot take control of the Strip. If there isnt utter chaos,
control will pass to Hamas. This organization has proved itself as a
charitable institution for the Palestinian poor, but to govern a nation
is a different matter.
3. Hamas likes to
compare itself with Hizballah, which forced Israel to withdraw completely
from Lebanon. But when Israel pulled out of Lebanon, it really did end
the occupation there. Israel is far from ending the occupation of Gaza,
much less the West Bank. Moreover, the Israeli withdrawal deprived Hizballah
of its raison dêtre; ever since, the militia has had difficulty
justifying its retention of arms or, for that matter, its existence.
The Hizballah victory
was tactical. At the strategic level, the victory went to Israel: it
strengthened its (and Americas) Lebanese allies at the expense
of Syria and Iran. Hizballah today is forced to dicker about the conditions
for giving up its weapons. Israel goes on arming itself while winning
international approval because of its courageous steps in
Lebanon and Gaza.
It is not yet time,
then, to celebrate. The occupation isnt over. We stand before
a dangerous situation, in which Israels unilateral measures gain
support not only from America but Europe too. Recently we have seen
how unfettered capitalism embodied in an American president who
refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol can backfire on its proponents,
devastating Americas own Gulf Coast, and how little prepared or
capable Washington was. What can we expect then for the hurricane that
is brewing here, when 1.3 million people are mewed up in the worlds
most crowded ghetto? The anarchy in the Occupied Territories will spill
into Israel as a third Intifada. Israel is trying to forestall the danger
as do wealthy neighborhoods all over the world: by erecting a sophisticated
super-fence. But technical solutions will not prevail against the coming
Intifada of the Hungry.
This article was
published in Challenge 93. For a one-time-free-copy please write to
[email protected]
Visit: www.hanitzotz.com/challenge
High-tech fencing around the Strip
Alex Fishman, the military correspondent of Yediot Aharonot, reported
on September 16, 2005 about the futuristic barrier (unlike anything
in the world) that Israel is making for the Gaza Strip. It will
extend from the border to a distance of three to five kilometers within
Israeli territory. The Palestinians will see only two fences,
many mobile pillboxes, and a forest of antennas. Distant war-rooms
will observe all movement. They will be able to respond with gunfire
by remote control. Electronic devices will detect rocket-launchings
and enable immediate responses from the ground and air. Other devices
will detect tunneling. The entire area will be covered by a fine mesh
of sensors, enabling patrols to close in quickly on any patch of earth
in which the slightest suspicion of movement arises. Robots are also
planned. The intensity of this coverage is intended to compensate for
the lack of a substantial territorial buffer between the Strip and Israeli
towns. Most of the measures are due to be functioning within the next
few months.