Is Israel Losing Its War Against the Palestinians?

By Rachelle Marshall

Israeli infantry soldiers lie low in a wheat field near the Gaza border Feb. 25, during an alert over the planned “human chain” demonstration in Gaza. Fearing a mass penetration of Palestinians, Israel deployed some 6,500 troops to guard its border (AFP photo/Menahem Kahana).

The people of the Gaza Strip have taken their survival into their own hands and have shown that the power of ordinary people is more likely to shape the future than polished diplomatic formulas.—Joel Beinin, professor of Middle East History, Stanford University, Jan. 29, 2008.

I was ready to continue walking forever. It was a taste of freedom.—Fares Al-Ghail, Gaza resident, Salon, Jan. 29, 2008.

THE EXODUS of tens of thousands of Gazans into Egypt in January provided dramatic proof that Israel, with all its military might, is unable to crush the Palestinians’ spirit or dampen their desire for freedom. On Jan. 23 Hamas forces blew up the Rafah wall between Gaza and Egypt, an act of nonviolent resistance that enabled Gazans to leave their prison for the first time in nearly three years. Their freedom lasted only until Feb. 3, when Egypt closed the border in response to threats by the United States to withhold $100 million in aid. By then the crowds that for more than a week had streamed over the rubble of the wall to buy food and fuel had demonstrated beyond doubt that Israel’s effort to grind Palestinians into submission had failed.

Their victory, however brief, was all the greater because the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, routinely referred to as a “conflict,” is in fact a one-sided war, waged by a powerful government and army against a largely unarmed population. A war that from the beginning involved killings, mass arrests, the theft of land and water, and the destruction of homes and crops has steadily escalated.

When Hamas emerged the winner of Palestinian elections in January 2006, the United States and Israel rejected the results and declared a boycott of the new government. After Hamas put down an attempt by U.S.-backed Fatah forces to take control of Gaza’s security operations last summer, Israel imposed a siege on 1.5 million Gazans, cutting off supplies of all but the most basic food and medicines, and intensifying the bombing attacks that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and done billions of dollars worth of damage to Gaza’s agricultural land and infrastructure.

In the summer of 2006 Israel destroyed Gaza’s only power plant, forcing Gazans to rely for electricity on generators that run on diesel fuel. The shortage of diesel fuel is consequently affecting medical care as well as public health. “We have the choice to either cut electricity on babies in the maternity ward or stop operating rooms,” Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Gaza Health Ministry said. Gaza City was blacked out entirely in the midst of a January cold wave that brought snow and hail storms to that part of the Middle East.

On Jan. 20 Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the complete cut off of fuel supplies to Gaza, a ban that was lifted in early February when Israel resumed greatly reduced shipments. Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said, “The logic of this defies basic humanitarian standards,” and on Jan. 30 a group of Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to outlaw the fuel cuts, charging that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Israelis have made no secret of their aim to inflict enough suffering on Gaza civilians to force them to reject Hamas. Nevertheless, the Court denied the petition, saying that the harm done to civilians by Israel was “accidental,” whereas Hamas was a “brutal terrorist group” that deliberately targeted innocent people. The numbers reveal a different story. In 2006-07 Palestinian militants killed 26 Israelis. Israeli forces killed 816 Palestinians during the same period, including 141 children. In the past few months the army has killed more than 200 Palestinians. This does not include Gazans who have died because they were unable to obtain needed drugs or medical treatment.

On Feb. 4, after a week in which Israel killed more than 40 Palestinians, Hamas ended its three-year moratorium on attacks inside Israel and claimed credit for a suicide bombing in Dimona that killed an Israeli woman and wounded 11 others. Israel responded with even heavier air strikes and Barak announced that “we will hit the other side harder, until we solve the problem.”

Israel claims its actions are intended to stop the rocket attacks by Palestinian militants, but the rocketing became a problem only after Israel unleashed a wave of bombings and assassinations in Gaza immediately after the evacuation of Jewish settlers in 2005. The rocket attacks have continued as a form of retaliation for punitive actions by Israel. As Gaza correspondent Mohammed Omer reports, militants fired few if any rockets during the days that the border with Egypt was open. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could have stopped the attacks months ago by accepting Hamas’ repeated offers of a cease-fire. Instead he continues to insist that Hamas recognize Israel as a Jewish state and renounce violence before there can be a truce.

Barak has hinted that Israel is prepared to overthrow Hamas if the Palestinians won’t do it themselves, and several Israeli politicians are calling for the assassination of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. But according to Palestinian public opinion analyst Khalil Shikaki, the Israeli siege has resulted in increased support for Hamas and solidified their control of Gaza. It will be difficult for Israel, Egypt and the United States to avoid dealing with them.

Hamas leaders are in fact demanding only that Israel abide by international law. Since 1995 they have offered a long-term truce in return for Israel’s compliance with United Nations resolutions calling for Israel’s return to its 1967 borders and the return or just compensation of Palestinian refugees. In an interview published in the January-March issue of The Link, Hamas parliamentarian Khalid Tafesh explained Hamas’ willingness to coexist with Israel by saying that the Hamas charter, which views all of Palestine as an Islamic patrimony, can be revoked. “It is not the Qur’an,” he said, but “a historical document.”

Efforts Toward Unity


The father of six-month-old Mohammed Bourai holds his dead baby at the al-Shifa Hospital morgue in Gaza City, Feb. 27, 2008. The child was killed when an Israeli helicopter fired three missiles at the building housing the Interior Ministry, some 300 yards from the office of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh (AFP photo/Mahmud Hams).

Hamas has made persistent efforts to restore the unity government and end the divisions among Palestinians. When Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak invited Hamas’ political director Khaled Meshal and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to come to Cairo for talks in January, Meshal immediately accepted, pledging that the Hamas leadership “will seek to make the dialogue a success.” Abbas refused, insisting that Hamas first apologize for its “coup” in Gaza and return control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

Support for Israel’s hard-line positon is showing small but significant cracks, however. In early February Abbas’ spokesman said the president was willing to “try to work [with Hamas] toward a mutual ceasefire with Israel to stop the daily slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza” and ease the blockade. Olmert’s spokesman Mark Regev turned down the idea, reiterating Israel’s “zero-tolerance policy toward terrorism,” but in speeches the same week two retired Israeli generals, Giora Eiland and Shlomo Brom, proposed that Israel agree to at least a dialogue with Hamas. Eiland even suggested that Israel try to achieve “some kind of reasonable, stable understandings with Hamas.”

The two generals were among 12 retired army commanders who signed a letter to Barak in mid-February urging that Israel gradually dismantle the West Bank checkpoints. The letter maintains that the checkpoints obstruct the peace process by creating hatred and humiliation among Palestinians. “You have to understand that there is damage in having the Palestinian people with its back to the wall, not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, unable to improve their economy, unable to move from place to place,” Ilan Paz, one of the signers, said on Israel Radio. “This creates a reality that creates terror and we have to remember that.”

An Israeli author, Daniel Gavron, argued in a Feb. 11 op-ed column for The New York Times that Israel should concentrate its energy on seeking a solution both Palestinians and Israelis would accept. “What we should not be doing,” he wrote, “is besieging Gaza, killing and arresting dozens of Palestinians every month, and constructing walls and fences between us and our neighbors.”

Despite the cordial handshakes and pats on the back from Olmert and Bush, Abbas has been unable to get Israel to dismantle a single roadblock or remove one of the 105 unauthorized settler outposts in the West Bank. Olmert has repeatedly promised to take both actions, only to go back on his word. He made those promises again at the Annapolis Conference last November. Shortly after the conference ended, however, Haaretz reported that government officials were secretly planning to enlarge the outposts and turn them into permanent settlements. After first announcing and then suspending construction of 630 new apartments at the settlements of Har Homa and Ma’ale Adumim, Israel announced plans in February to build 1,120 new apartments for Jews in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

Broken promises are nothing new to Israeli prime ministers, of course. At Camp David in 1978 Menachem Begin promised President Jimmy Carter he would recognize the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” and observe a three-month settlement freeze. As soon as he returned to Jerusalem, Begin together with then-Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon launched an accelerated expansion of West Bank settlements designed to assure Israel’s permanent control of the West Bank. In signing the Oslo agreement in 1993 Yitzhak Rabin promised President Bill Clinton that Israel would create no new “facts on the ground”—then proceeded to double the number of settlers in the West Bank. In each case billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Israel continued to flow.

Israelis have long claimed that a return to the pre-1967 borders would endanger national security. But Israel’s unmatched military strength and the availability of airborne missiles make nonsense of this claim, as does the fact that civilian settlements would be useless as a first line of defense. The more credible explanation for Israel’s opposition is that Israel’s economy and standard of living are now dependent on the water acquifers that lie under the major West Bank settlements, and on the captive markets and cheap labor provided by the Palestinians.

No other motive explains why Israel has refused since 1967 to permit the Palestinians to establish banks or other credit institutions, restricted their access to water, and dumped subsidized Israeli produce into the West Bank and Gaza that Palestinian producers are unable to compete with. In 2007 one-fourth of fruit grown in Israel was sold in the occupied territories.

Control of Gaza’s borders, including its seacoast, is today more important to Israel than ever. During the mid-1990s, when Oslo still offered the hope of Palestinian independence, natural gas deposits discovered in the territorial waters off Gaza’s coast promised to be a major source of energy and income for the future state. Instead, Israel will benefit. Two Israeli corporate groups have petitioned the Supreme Court for an Israeli license to develop the deposits, despite international laws that forbid an occupying power from exploiting the resources of an occupied territory.

How Israel gets away with out-and-out theft can be explained at a glance. A picture in the Feb. 14 issue of the New York Review of Books shows Bush and Olmert standing shoulder to shoulder and grinning like cronies from ear to ear. They are holding each end of a soccer shirt saying “Israel” in large letters, with “G.W. Bush” underneath. The photo was taken in Jerusalem on Jan. 9, at the start of Bush’s Middle East “peace tour.” On Jan. 10 a headline in The New York Times read: “Bush Begins Mideast Peace Efforts Bonded With Olmert.”

The substance of the Times article was Bush’s “strong personal rapport” with Olmert. The New York Review article, by Israeli writer Amos Elon, described the growing Israeli settlements that encircle Palestinian cities, and the barrier wall winding through the West Bank that with its moat and patrol roads takes up more Palestinian land than the settlements. Both are illegal but have been tacitly endorsed by Bush.

Bush’s message while in Jerusalem was that the United States would exert no pressure on Israel during peace talks. “America cannot dictate the terms of what a [Palestinian] state will look like,” he said. “The only way to have lasting peace is for the two parties to come together and make the difficult decisions.We’ll help and we want to help.” It is a statement that deliberately ignores reality by pretending that a powerful nation and the people whose land and lives it controls can negotiate as equals.

Bush’s offer to “help” invites equal skepticism, given his support for Olmert’s peace terms. Bush has agreed that the large settlement blocs must remain part of Israel and that Palestinian refugees may not return to Israel. He talks of a future Palestinian state but ignores such facts as Israel’s control of 59 percent of the West Bank, including the fertile Jordan Valley and the settlements and highways that fracture Palestinian territory into separate enclaves. The truncated Palestinian “state” envisioned by Bush and the Israelis would lack any semblance of sovereignty. As long as Israel has Washington’s unconditional support, negotiations between Olmert and Abbas can continue till doomsday without changing these realities.

From Israel, Bush traveled on to Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, where his peace mission consisted of selling $20 billion worth of arms to friendly Arab states and insisting that Iran was still a nuclear threat, despite a National Intelligence Estimate that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. A high-ranking member of the Saudi court told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that “We don’t need America to dictate our enemies to us, especially when it’s our neighbor.”

Arab leaders may be understandably reluctant to regard Bush as an emissary of peace. His efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians have been half-hearted and one-sided; and his ongoing wars are causing massive destruction and bitter internal conflict in two Muslim countries. Despite the “surge,” 2007 was the most violent year of the war in Iraq. In Afghanistan six years after the U.S. invasion the Taliban is gaining ground and the fighting has spread to northwest Pakistan.

According to the new Army manual, the United States faces “an era of persistent conflict” in countries where “shaping the civil situation” will be vital. What the world needs far more is an America that refrains from military intervention, ends its support for Israel and other oppressive regimes, and demonstrates by example its commitment to human rights.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.