Towards
A Geography Of Peace: Whither Gaza?
By Ilan Pappé
19 June 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
The
Gaza Strip is a little bit more than two percent of Palestine. This
small detail is never mentioned whenever the Strip is in the news nor
has it been mentioned in the present Western media coverage of the dramatic
events unfolding in Gaza in the last few weeks. Indeed it is such a
small part of the country that it never existed as a separate region
in the past. Gaza's history before the Zionization of Palestine was
not unique and it was always connected administratively and politically
to the rest of Palestine. It was until 1948 for all intents and purposes
an integral and natural part of the country. As one of Palestine?s principal
land and sea gates to the world, it tended to develop a more flexible
and cosmopolitan way of life; not dissimilar to other gateways societies
in the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era. This location near the
sea and on the Via Maris to Egypt and Lebanon brought with it prosperity
and stability until this life was disrupted and nearly destroyed by
the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.
In between 1948 and 1967,
Gaza became a huge refugee camp restricted severely by the respective
Israeli and Egyptian policies: both states disallowed any movement out
of the Strip. Living conditions were already harsh then as the victims
of the 1948 Israeli politics of dispossession doubled the number of
the inhabitants who lived there for centuries. On the eve of the Israeli
occupation in 1967, the catastrophic nature of this enforced demographic
transformation was evident all over the Strip. This once pastoral coastal
part of southern Palesine became within two decades one of the world's
densest areas of habitation; without any adequate economic infrastructure
to support it.
The first twenty years of
Israeli occupation at least allowed some movement outside an area that
was closed off as a war zone in the years 1948 to 1967. Tens of thousand
of Palestinians were permitted to join the Israeli labor market as unskilled
and underpaid workers. The price Israel demanded for this slavery market
was a total surrender of any national struggle or agenda. When this
was not complied with -- the 'gift' of laborers' movement was denied
and abolished. All these years leading to the Oslo accord in 1993 were
marked by an Israeli attempt to construct the Strip as an enclave, which
the Peace Camp hoped would be either autonomous or part of Egypt and
the Nationalist camp wished to include in the Greater Eretz Israel they
dreamed of establishing instead of Palestine.
The Oslo agreement enabled
the Israelis to reaffirm the Strip's status as a separate geo-political
entity -- not just outside of Palestine as a whole, but also cut apart
from the West Bank. Ostensibly, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
were under the Palestinian Authority but any human movement between
them depended on Israel's good will; a rare Israeli trait and which
almost disappeared when Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996. Moreover,
Israel held, as it still does today, the water and electricity infrastructure.
Since 1993 it used, or rather abused, this possession in order to ensure
on the one hand the well-being of the Jewish settler community there
and on the other in order to blackmail the Palestinian population into
submission and surrender. The people of the Gaza Strip thus vacillated
in the last sixty years between being internees, hostages or prisoners
in an impossible human space.
It is within this historical
context that we should view the violence raging today in Gaza and reject
the reference to the events there as a campaign in the 'war against
terror,' an instance of Islamic revivalism, a further proof for al-Qadia?s
expansionism, a seditious Iranian penetration into this part of the
world or another arena in the dreaded Clash of Civilizations (I picked
here only few out of many frequent adjectives used in the Western media
for describing the present crisis in Gaza). The origins of the mini
civil war in Gaza lie elsewhere. The recent history of the Strip, 60
years of dispossession, occupation and imprisonment produced inevitably
internal violence such as we are witnessing today as it produced other
unpleasant features of life lived under such impossible conditions.
In fact, it would be fair to say that the violence, and in particular
the internal violence, is far less than one would have expected given
the economic and social conditions created by the genocidal Israeli
policies in the last six years.
Power struggles among politicians,
who enjoy the support of military outfits, is indeed a nasty business
that victimizes the society as a whole. Part of what goes on in Gaza
is such a struggle between politicians who were democratically elected
and those who still find it hard to accept the verdict of the public.
But this is hardly the main struggle. What unfolds in Gaza is a battleground
between America's and Israel's local proxies -- most of whom are unintentionally
such proxies but none the less they dance to Israel's tune -- and those
who oppose it. The opposition that now took over Gaza did it alas in
a way that one would find very hard to condone or cheer. It is not the
Hamas' Palestinian vision that is worrying, but rather the means it
has chosen to achieve it that we hope would not be rooted or repeated.
To its credit one should openly say that the means used by Hamas are
part of an arsenal that enabled it in the past to be the only active
force that at least tried to stop the total destruction of Palestine;
the way it is used now is less credible and hopefully temporary.
But one cannot condemn the
means if one does not offer an alternative. Standing idle while the
American-Israeli vision of strangling the Strip to death, cleansing
half of the West bank from its indigenous population and threatening
the rest of the Palestinians -- inside Israel and in the other parts
of the West Bank -- with transfer, is not an option. It is tantamount
to "decent" people?s silence during the Holocaust.
We should not tire from mentioning
the alternative in the 21st century: BDS -- Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions -- as an emergency measure -- far more effective and far less
violent -- in opposing the present destruction of Palestine. And at
the same time talk openly, convincingly and efficiently, of creating
the geography of peace. A geography in which abnormal phenomena such
as the imprisonment of small portion of the land would disappear. There
will be no more, in the vision we should push forward, a human prison
camp called the Gaza strip where some armed inmates are easily pitted
against each other by a callous warden. Instead that area would return
to be an organic part of an Eastern Mediterranean country that has always
offered the best as a meeting point between East and West.
Never before, in the light
of the Gaza tragedy, has the twofold strategy of BDS and a one state
solution, shined so clearly as the only alternative forward. If any
of us are members in Palestine solidarity groups, Arab-Jewish dialogue
circles or part of civil society's effort to bring peace and reconciliation
to Palestine -- this is a time to put aside all the false strategies
of coexistence, road maps and two states solutions. They have been and
still are sweet music to the ears of the Israeli demolition team that
threatens to destroy what is left of Palestine. Beware especially of
Diet Zionists or Cloest Zionists, who recently joined the campaign,
in Britain and elsewhere against the BDS effort. Like those enlightened
pundits who used liberal organs in the United Kingdom, such as The Guardian,
to explain to us at length how dangerous is the proposed academic boycott
on Israel. They have never expended so much time, energy or words on
the occupation itself as they did in the service of the ethnic cleansing
of Palestine. UNISON, Britain?s large public service trade union, must
not be deterred by this backlash and it should follow these brave academics
who endorsed the debate on the boycott, as should Europe as a whole:
not only for the sake of Palestine and Israel, but also if it wishes
to bring a closure to the Holocaust chapter in its history.
And a final small portion
of food for thought. There are quite a few Jewish mothers and wives
in the Gaza Strip -- some sources within Gaza say up to 2000 -- married
to local Palestinians and parents to their children. There are many
more Jewish women who married Palestinians in the Palestine countryside.
An act of desegregation that both political elites find difficult to
admit, digest or acknowledge. If despite the colonization, occupation,
genocidal policies and dispossession such harmonies of love and affection
were possible, imagine what could happen if these criminal policies
and ideologies would disappear. When the Wall of Apartheid is removed
and the electric fences of Zionism dismantled -- Gaza will become once
more a symbol of Fernand Braudel's coastal society, able to fuse different
cultural horizons and offer a space for new life instead of the war
zone it has become in the last sixty years.
Ilan Pappe
is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of political
Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies
in Haifa. His books include, among others, The Making of the Arab-Israeli
Conflict (London and New York 1992), The Israel/Palestine Question (London
and New York 1999), A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003),
The Modern Middle East (London and New York 2005) and his latest, Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
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