The
Plot Against Gaza
By Jonathan Cook
19 January,
2009
Countercurrents.org
Nazareth:
Israel has justified its assault on Gaza as entirely defensive, intended
only to stop Hamas firing rockets on Israel’s southern communities.
Although that line has been repeated unwaveringly by officials since
Israel launched its attack on 27 December, it bears no basis to reality.
Rather, this is a war against the Palestinians of Gaza, and less directly
those in the West Bank, designed primarily to crush their political
rights and their hopes of statehood.
The most glaring evidence contradicting the Israeli casus belli is
the six-month ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that preceded the
invasion. True, Hamas began firing its rockets as soon as the truce
came to an end on 19 December, but Israel had offered plenty of provocation.
Not least it broke the ceasefire by staging a raid into Gaza on 4
November that killed six Hamas members. Even more significantly, it
maintained and tightened a blockade during the ceasefire period that
was starving Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants of food, medicine
and fuel. Hamas had expected the blockade lifted in return for an
end to the rockets.
A few days before Israel’s attack on Gaza, Yuval Diskin, the
head of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, noted
Hamas’ commitment to the ceasefire and its motives in restarting
the rocket fire. “Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining
the truce,” he told the cabinet. “It seeks to improve
its conditions – a removal of the blockade, receiving a commitment
from Israel that it won’t attack and extending the lull to the
Judea and Samaria area [the West Bank].” In other words, had
Israel wanted calm, it could have avoided invading Gaza simply by
renegotiating the truce on more reasonable terms.
Israel, however, had little interest in avoiding a confrontation with
Hamas, as events since the Islamic group’s takeover of Gaza
in early 2006 show.
It is widely agreed among the Israeli leadership that Hamas represents
a severe threat to Israel’s ambition to crush the Palestinians’
long-standing demands for a state in the West Bank and Gaza. Unike
Fatah, its chief Palestinian political rival, Hamas has refused to
collude with the Israeli occupation and has instead continued its
resistance operations. Although Hamas officially wants the return
of all the lands the Palestinians were dispossessed of in 1948, at
the establishment of Israel, it has shown signs of increasing pragmatism
since its election victory, as Diskin’s comments above highlight.
Hamas leaders have repeatedly suggested that a long-term, possibly
indefinite, truce with Israel is possible. Such a truce would amount
to recognition of Israel and remove most of the obstacles to the partition
of historic Palestine into two states: a Jewish state and a Palestinian
one.
Rather than engaging with Hamas and cultivating its moderate wing,
Israel has been preparing for an “all-out war”, as Ehud
Barak, the defence minister, has referred to the current offensive.
In fact, Barak began preparing the attack on Gaza at least six months
ago, as he has admitted, and probably much earlier.
Barak and the military stayed their hand in Gaza chiefly while other
strategies were tested. The most significant was an approach espoused
in the immediate wake of Hamas’ victory in 2006. Dov Weisglass,
former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s fixer in Washington, gave
it clearest expression. Israel’s policy, he said, would be “like
an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner,
but won’t die.”
John Wolfensohn, envoy to the Quartet of the United States, the United
Nations, Europe and Russia through most of 2005, has pointed out that
the US and Israel reneged on understandings controlling the border
crossings into Gaza from the moment of Israel’s disengagement
in summer 2005. In an interview with the Israeli media, he attributed
the rapid destruction of the Gazan economy to this policy. However,
although the blockade began when Fatah was still in charge of the
tiny enclave, the goal of Weisglass’ “diet” was
to intensify the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. The rationale
was that, by starving them, they could be both reduced to abject poverty
and encouraged to rise up and overthrow Hamas.
But it seems the Israeli army was far from convinced a “diet”
would produce the desired result and started devising a more aggressive
strategy. It was voiced last year by Israel’s deputy defence
minister, Matan Vilnai. He observed that, if Hamas continued firing
rockets into Israel (in an attempt, though he failed to mention it,
to break the blockade), the Palestinians “will bring upon themselves
a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
The Hebrew word “Shoah” has come to refer exclusively
to the Holocaust.
Though his disturbing comment was quickly disowned, Vilnai is no maverick.
He is a former major general in the army who maintains close ties
to the senior command. He is also a friend of his boss, Ehud Barak,
the Labor leader and Israel’s most decorated soldier. The reference
to the “shoah” offered a brief insight into the reasoning
behind a series of policies he and Barak began unveiling from summer
2007.
It was then that hopes of engineering an uprising against Hamas faded.
The diet regime had patently failed, as had a Fatah coup attempt underwritten
by the United States. Hamas struck a pre-emptive blow against Fatah,
forcing its leaders to flee to the West Bank. In retaliation the Israeli
government declared Gaza a “hostile entity”. Barak and
Vilnai used Gaza’s new status as the pretext for expanding the
blockade of food and medicines to include electricity, a policy that
was progressively tightened. At the same time they argued that Israel
should consider cutting off “all responsibility” for Gaza.
The intenton of Barak’s blockade, however, was different from
the Weisglass version. It was designed to soften up Gazan society,
including Hamas fighters, for Israel’s coming invasion.
Far from being threatened by the intensifying blockade, Hamas turned
it to its advantage. Although Israel controls two of the land borders
and patrols the coast, there is fourth short land border shared with
Egypt, close by the town of Rafah. There Gaza’s entrepreneurs
developed a network of smuggling tunnels that were soon commandeered
by Hamas. The tunnels ensured both that basic supplies continued to
get through, and that Hamas armed itself for the attack it expected
from Israel.
From March 2008 Barak and Vilnai began pushing their military strategy
harder. New political formulations agreed by the government suggested
the whole population of Gaza were to be considered complicit in Hamas
actions, and therefore liable for retaliatory military action. In
the words of the daily Jerusalem Post newspaper, Israeli policymakers
took the view that “it would be pointless for Israel to topple
Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas”.
At this point, Barak and Vilnai announced they were working on a way
to justify in law the army directing artillery fire and air strikes
at civilian neighbourhoods of Gaza, as has been occurring throughout
the current Gaza campaign. Vilnai, meanwhile, proposed declaring areas
of the tiny enclave “combat zones” in which the army would
have free rein and from which civilians would be expected to flee
– again a tactic that has been implemented over the past three
weeks.
Although Israel is determined to crush Hamas politically and militarily,
so far it has been loathe to topple it. Israel withdrew from Gaza
precisely because the demographic, military and economic costs of
directly policing its refugee camps were considered too high. It will
not be easily dragged back in.
Other options are either unpalatable or unfeasible. A Fatah government
riding in on the back of Israeli tanks would lack legitimacy, and
no regime at all – anarchy – risks loosing forces more
implacably opposed to a Jewish state than Hamas, including al-Qaeda.
Placing Gaza under a peacekeeping force faces other hurdles: not least,
the question of which countries would be prepared to take on such
a dangerous burden.
Instead Israel is planning to resort to its favourite diplomatic manoeuvre:
unilateralism. It wants a solution that passes over the heads of Hamas
and the Palestinians. Or as Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, put
it: “There is no intention here of creating a diplomatic agreement
with Hamas. We need diplomatic agreements against Hamas.” The
formula currently being sought for a ceasefire will face opposition
from Israel unless it helps achieve several goals.
Israel’s first is to seal off Gaza properly this time. Egypt,
although profoundly uncomfortable at having an Islamic group ruling
next door, is under too much domestic pressure to crack down on the
tunnelling. Israel therefore wants to bring in American and European
experts to do the job. They will ensure that the blockade cannot be
broken and that Hamas cannot rearm with the the help of outside actors
like Iran. At best, Hamas can hope to limp on as nominal ruler of
Gaza, on Israeli sufferance.
The second goal has been well articulated by the Harvard scholar Sara
Roy, who has been arguing for some time that Israel is, in her words,
“de-developing” Gaza. The blockade has been integral to
achieving that objective, and is the reason Israel wants it strengthened.
In the longer term, she believes, Gazans will come to be “seen
merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity
and therefore can have no political claims.”
In addition, Gazans living close to the enclave’s northern and
southern borders may be progressively “herded” into central
Gaza – as envisioned in Vilnai’s plan last year. That
process may already be under way, with Israeli leafletting campaigns
warning inhabitants of these areas to flee. Israel wants to empty
both the Rafah area, so that it can monitor more easily any attempts
at tunnelling, and the northern part because this is the location
of the rocket launches that are hitting major Israeli cities such
as Ashkelon and Ashdod and may one day reach Tel Aviv.
The third and related goal, as Barak and Vilnai proposed more than
a year ago, is to cut off all Israeli responsibility for Gaza -- though
not oversight of what is allowed in. Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian
analyst, believes that in this scenario Israel will insist that humanitarian
supplies into Gaza pass only through the Egyptian crossing, thereby
also undercutting Hamas’ role. Already Israel is preparing to
hand over responsibility for supplying Gaza’s electricity to
Egypt – a special plant is under construction close by in the
Sinai.
Slowly, the hope is, Gaza’s physical and political separation
from the West Bank will be cemented, with the enclave effectively
being seen as a province of Egypt. Its inhabitants will lose their
connection to the wider Palestinian people and eventually Cairo may
grow bold enough to crack down on Hamas as brutally as it does its
own Islamists.
The regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, meanwhile, will be further
isolated and weakened, improving Israel’s chances of forcing
it to sign a deal annexing East Jerusalem and large swaths of the
West Bank on which the Jewish settlements sit.
The fourth goal relates to wider regional issues. The chief obstacle
to the implementation of Israel’s plan is the growing power
of Iran and its possible pursuit of nuclear weapons. Israel’s
official concern – that Tehran wants to attack Israel –
is simple mischief-making. Rather Israel is worried that, if Iran
becomes a regional superpower, Israeli diktats in the Middle East
and in Washington will not go unchallenged.
In particular, a strong Iran will be able to aid Hizbullah and Hamas,
and further fan the flames of popular Muslim sentiment in favour of
a just settlement for the Palestinians. That could threaten Israel’s
plans for the annexation of much of the West Bank, and possibly win
the Palestinians statehood. None of this can be allowed to pass by
Israel.
It is therefore seeking to isolate Tehran, severing all ties between
it and Hamas, just as it earlier tried – and failed –
to do the same between Iran and Hizbullah. It wants the Palestinians
beholden instead to the “moderate” block in the Arab world,
meaning the Sunni dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia
that in turn depend on Washington for their security.
The prospects of Israel achieving all or even some of these goals
seems improbable. Too often Israeli meddling in its neighbours affairs
has ended in unintended consequences, or “blowback”. It
is a lesson Israel has been all too slow to learn.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest book is “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website
is www.jkcook.net.