catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served
in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's
legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to
devastating conclusions
Avi Shlaim The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009
A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas
police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City.
Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza
is through understanding the historical context. Establishing
the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental
injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly
resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state.
On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign
secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible
for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly
unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this
judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the
people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in
this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in
the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of
the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I
utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the
Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very
little to do with security and everything to do with
territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater
Israel through permanent political, economic and military
control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has
been one of the most prolonged and brutal military
occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to
the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of
1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no
infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were
never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic
under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate
de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the
people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of
water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for
Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively
impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to
end their subordination to Israel and to establish the
economic underpinnings essential for real political
independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the
post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories
are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace.
They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the
symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers
numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local
residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory,
40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce
water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders,
the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty
and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still
subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the
strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful
precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for
political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon
staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing
all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they
had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement,
conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of
Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli
Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal
from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state
solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis
settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an
independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making
are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose
land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally
the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main
settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel.
Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal
with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further
Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral
Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my
view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a
fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity,
the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to
deny the Palestinian people any independent political
existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers
continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land,
sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air
prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed
unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by
flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise
the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a
sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire
history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side
and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long
history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes
to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the
handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the
only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible
exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair
elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian
Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel,
however, refused to recognise the democratically elected
government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a
terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising
and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it
down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal
situation thus developed with a significant part of the
international community imposing economic sanctions not
against the occupier but against the occupied, not against
the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims
were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda
machine persistently purveyed the notion that the
Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence
with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more
than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious
fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But
the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal
people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they
are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire
to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which
to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its
political programme following its rise to power. From the
ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move
towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In
March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity
government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire
with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a
government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between
rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had
supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the
secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel
began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to
overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture
power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in
the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their
meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national
unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza
in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the
culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with
the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a
war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the
people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of
the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure
until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms.
The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza
are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and
thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency.
A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the
lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking
for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top
brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow
to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their
reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in
Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also
count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes
and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of
his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting
all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at
the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and
issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of
Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of
Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power
between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who
is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David
and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a
small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily
armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort
to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the
shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity
overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as
the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this
conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and
confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to
the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and
Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against
Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt
brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused
by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological
impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection
from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the
right to act in self-defence but its response to the
pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The
figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the
withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire.
On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290
Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule
applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's
entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality
towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the
blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which,
in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of
the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any
exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005
accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities.
Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the
same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks
carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for
water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It
is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians
of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the
border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form
of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by
international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the
mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the
current war on Gaza, Israel established a National
Information Directorate. The core messages of this
directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire
agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its
population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost
care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors
have been remarkably successful in getting this message
across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the
rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that
broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4
November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not
just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow
of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against
their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians,
Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a
three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of
Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian
catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage
enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to
follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days
of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians
and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land
invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from
rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all
the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them,
they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their
rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and
martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the
conflict between the two communities. The problem with
Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most
elementary security to the other community. The only way for
Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but
through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its
readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish
state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50
years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it
spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on
the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four
decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it
has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of
leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international
law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises
terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for
political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three
criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim
is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours
but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of
the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like
everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and
mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
• Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the
University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel
and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life
in War and Peace
No comments:
Post a Comment