Gaza's End-Game

Trevor Mostyn

An edited version of this article was published in The Tablet on 23 June 2007

DURING THE PERIOD OF THE MADRID peace talks of 1991 and the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, which formalised Palestinian recognition of Israel, a Jewish state on 78% of Mandate Palestine, I created a European Union media programme in Brussels. This brought Arab, Israeli and EU journalists and filmmakers together through co-productions and training. Taken by Ahmed, one of our radio trainees, to lunch with his family in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, I saw an old man, shrouded in a white bernous and sleeping on the clay ledge of an alley. “My father”, said Ahmed. The old man got up and greeted me with typical Palestinian grace. “He was once a rich farm in Ashkelon [in Israel] but we had to flee in 1952 and my father has lost all hope, all dignity, since then,” said Ahmed.
 
Ahmed’s father had waited too long but this was 1994 and there was now hope. Palestinians were about to have their independence. They had suddenly stopped talking about the Israeli occupation and showed little enthusiasm for Hamas, then a small group, let alone terrorism. They spoke to me about business, education, health and domestic issues. They grumbled about the new Palestinian Authority (PA), created out of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), as if it was already their sovereign government. The port from which they might export their fruit and vegetables (rather then let it linger and rot in Israeli customs) and the new airport being built, would open them to the world for this first time since Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, they told me.  The Japanese were considering a car plant in Gaza. The friendly Gazans could not have foreseen that a decade later they would be sealed into a prison of 1.5 million people and starved and bombed, with no hope of ever escaping their fate.

Back in the West Bank I spoke with Israeli film makers who agreed with me that Israel’s salvation lay in creating an economically viable and culturally vibrant, sovereign Palestinian state in the West bank and Gaza, the remaining 22% of Mandate Palestine. I discussed our support for Gazan television and our dream of a media renaissance in Gaza at three in the morning with Yasser Arafat in his beach villa. It seemed to me then that despite the flight of 70% of the Palestinian population during the 1948/49 war (the Nakba or Catastrophe to Palestinians; the War of Independence to Israelis), Palestine would now become a reasonably friendly neighbour, Israel would become the economic superpower in the Near East and groups in the region rejecting Israel’s right to exist would have nothing more to feed on.
 
Hamas enjoys a reputation for financial probity and welfare provision but its 1988 Charter – which moderates wish to amend -  calls for the nullification of Israel by Islam and claims that ‘the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf endowed to all Muslim generations until the day of resurrection.’ Apart from its acts of violence it has won notoriety in the West by subscribing in its charter to concepts contained in the fraudulent, anti-Semitic book, The Protocol of the Elders of Zion. ‘For the Zionist scheme has no limits’, says the Charter. ‘And after Palestine it will strive to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates.’ Nevertheless, article 31 states, ‘The Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] is a humanistic movement. It cares about human rights and is committed to Islam’s tolerance of the followers of other religions.’

When Hamas came to power last year it declared a hudna or truce with Israel and postponed the issue of recognition until the next generation but agreed to abide by agreements signed by the PA, such as UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 which themselves recognised Israel. Moderates held sway but still the movement was rejected by Israel and the West just as – a point often forgotten - they had rejected President Abbas and his Fatah government after Arafat’s death.  The Mecca agreement of this February brokering a national unity government between Fatah and Hamas also implicitly recognised Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 borders.

The PA was meant to last for five years from 1993 until the institutions of a sovereign state were functioning. In reality it was quickly co-opted into doing Israel’s bidding while huge Jewish settlements, connected by settlers-only roads, began to appear on the hilltops of the still occupied West Bank. Palestinians were constantly held up and bullied at checkpoints. Eventually a wall went up, supposedly to keep out suicide bombers but absorbing the aquifers and at least ten per cent of the West Bank, and cutting Palestinian farmers off from their farms. Access to Jerusalem, the historic centre, became inaccessible while towns like Bethlehem were encircled by the wall. Jewish settlements will soon have removed the Jordan Valley from access by Palestinians. The West Bank is a honeycomb of Palestinian bantustans while Gaza is entirely sealed in.
 
The PA achieved none of the liberties which the Oslo Accords had appeared to offer, and which the people expected. Feeling that they had been cheated by the occupying power in collaboration with their own government, ordinary Palestinians resisted by launching their second Intifada in 2000. Sparked off by Ariel Sharon’s publicity stunt of visiting Jerusalem’s Haram ash-Sharif (the Jewish Temple Mount) with hundreds of armed police, it was to be much fiercer than the stone-throwing Intifada which had led to the Accords. In 2002 Israel invaded the West Bank, smashing the Jenin refugee Camp, besieging the Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and imprisoning Yasser Arafat in his Muqatta'a compound in a two-year siege.

Eventually in 2004 he died of a mysterious illness in a Paris hospital. Many Palestinians felt he had compromised their liberties but the Israelis labelled him a terrorist when he failed to end the suicide bombings, which were in response to an increasingly throttling occupation. In order to undermine his Presidency, the international community ostracised him and encouraged political reforms which empowered the portfolio of prime minister, an irony given the fact that it has spent this year undermining Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, whom President Mahmoud Abbas has now sacked. After Hamas’s 2006 victory the international community backed Abbas against Haniyeh and Fatah against Hamas and fortified Fatah’s security apparatus run by Muhammad Dahlan, the CIA’s darling.
 
The elections of January 2006, leading to the formation of a Hamas government in March, were the freest and fairest the Arab world has  known – perhaps with the exception of the Algerian elections in 1990/91 which the army aborted with Western support when the Islamist FIS party was about to defeat the ruling FLN. The US and Britain took the lead in applying sanctions against Hamas until they renounced terrorism and recognised Israel’s right to exist. However, Israeli writers may themselves have the answer to Israel's real intentions. “Our government has worked for years to destroy Fatah”, said Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and Irgun fighter, “in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal of the settlements from Palestinian land.”

Meanwhile the leaked End of Mission Report by Alvaro de Soto, the UN’s Middle East envoy, in May said that the international boycott of the Palestinians after Hamas had won the elections had ‘devastating consequences’ for the Palestinian people, that Israel had adopted an ‘essentially rejectionist ‘ stance towards them and that the Quarter of negotiators – the US, the EU, Russia and the UN – had become a side-show’. But what was really shocking came from David Welch, US envoy to the Middle East, whom de Soto quotes as saying, a week before the Mecca agreement, how much “I like this violence” because “it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.”
 
After the Hamas electoral victory the US continued to fund and arm Fatah as if it, not Hamas, had won the election. The two-state solution that has been the common concept since 1993 now seems as far away as ever. The one-state solution espoused by the late Edwards Said and by Ghada Karmi in her new book Married to Another Man is an impossible dream at present. Hardliners have taken over Hamas and a Fatah-dominated West Bank and a Hamas-dominated Gaza will be a recipe for disaster. Like Iraq these will be failed states, a playground for the harshest elements such as Al-Qaeda. Only by giving the Palestinians hope of genuine sovereignty and economic viability can the region avoid great danger. Israel has nuclear weapons and a melt-down of its neighbours – Syria, Lebanon and Jordan are now highly vulnerable – could lead to one of the world’s great catastrophes, fulfilling the doom-laden prophecies of evangelical Christians such as the Jerusalem-based Christian Embassy, who share an opportunist interest with hard-line Zionists. 

© Trevor Mostyn 2007 - www.trevormostyn.com