The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
by Avi Shlaim
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.
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.
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