Israel must negotiate with Hamas
The enemies of the Palestinian people have been presenting the political chaos of the past week as evidence that they are premodern savages, capable only of building a Mogadishu on the Mediterranean. But on Wednesday afternoon, as bullets pierced the claustrophobia and concrete of Gaza City, the real voice of the Palestinian people echoed out, for a fleeting moment.
Thousands of protestors - mostly women - took to the streets. They called not for shariah law or Qassam rockets against Israeli cities, but for peace. Amal Hellis, a 35 year old mother of two, said: "I am not afraid. I will die to save my family and to save Palestine." Her eldest son Medhat is a member of Fatah; her youngest son Refaat belongs to Hamas. When the marchers reached the Al Ghifary tower near the beachfront, they were fired on by gunmen - but they did not run away. The old women and their granddaughters stood in the crossfire, waving Palestinian flags and singing 'Give Peace A Chance'.
Hamas gunmen fired above; Fatah fighters threatened them on the ground. The women surrounded the Fatah man, forcing him with nothing but plain moral pressure to lower his rifle. Only when one of the protestors was caught in the chest by a sniper did they finally disperse.
These protestors speak for a majority of Palestinians. In the most recent poll of them conducted by
the internationally respected Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PSPSP), 63 percent supported full recognition of Israel in return for a proper Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. These supporters of a negotiated peace include, crucially, a majority of Hamas voters.
This means there is actually a bigger pro-peace constituency in Palestine than in Israel, where Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharanot polling just found that 58 percent of Israelis now reject the idea of trading land for peace, because they think the Palestinians are irrevocably committed to destroying them.
The current crackle of civil war is not evidence that the Palestinians are war-addicted people incapable of self-government, as the Israeli right claims with a smirk. It is evidence of what happens to human beings when they are rammed into a pressure cooker and the temperature is slowly ramped up.
When I was last in Gaza a few months ago, the borders of Palestine had been hermetically sealed by the world for months, because they voted in a free and open election for a party - Hamas - we do not like. One-and-a-half million people were locked into a tiny space no bigger than the Isle of Wight. Nothing went in; nothing went out. The hospitals were on the brink of collapse, because if a piece of equipment broke, they could not get new parts. Almost everyone was out of work, because they couldn't sell to the world a few miles away. Dov Weisglass, one of the Israeli architects of this policy, joked that he was "putting the Palestinians on a diet." The "diet" caused a 15 percent increase in infant mortality - a polite term for dead babies.
In this situation, any people, anywhere, would begin to turn on each other. As the Palestinian foreign minister Ziad Abu Amr puts it: "If you have two brothers put into a cage and deprive them of the basic essential needs for life, they will fight."
On top of this, the outside world, and especially the Israeli government, has actually discouraged and humiliated the Palestinians moderates. When he took charge in 2005, the Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas made it plain he would offer huge compromises to Israel in return for a state. Ariel Sharon offered him a few lifted roadblocks in return.
The message to the Palestinians was clear: electing pragmatists will get you nothing. So the next year in desperation they elected Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist organisation whose constitution includes statements plagiarised from the nakedly anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Regular readers will know that I loathe Hamas - but I have to acknowledge that, upon election, their leaders undeniably behaved in a pragmatic way. They did not start introducing the savagery of sharia law, or oppressing women. Instead, they observed the unilateral truce with Israel, until a string of especially heinous Israeli attacks on Gazan civilians. They offered a hudna (ceasefire) that would last a generation. They gave up staging suicide-murders against Israeli civilians. They even said they would respect all previous agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority - a de facto concession that they would recognize Israel.
And in return? They received nothing but abuse - and a determined attempt to dislodge them from power, by boycott and, more slowly, by bullet. The US and Israel began arming an especially authoritarian wing of Fatah, headed by Mohammed Dahlan, with the plain intention of him toppling Hamas sooner or later. The Washington-based architect of this policy is deputy national secutiy advisor Elliot Abrahms, a man who in the 1980s illegally armed the openly fascist Contra militias in an attempt to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He was eventually jailed for his crimes. By denying them power through a legitimate election, and arming their enemies for a future liquidation, they virtually guaranteed Hamas would seize power.
Why is the Israeli government, backed by the Bush administration and more tepidly the European Union, doing this? There are a range of possible explanations. The first - associated with the former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and the current Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman - is the belief that the Palestinians will only compromise once they have been totally defeated by overwhelming force. They reckon that if the Palestinians are throttled for long enough, sooner or later they will cower, beg for mercy, and accept Israeli terms.
The second potential explanation is that the Bush administration sees this as part of a proxy war with Iran for control of the Middle East. As the Americans arm Fatah, the Ahmadinejadhians arm Hamas, each trying to gain hegemony over a strategically valuable chunk of land. This would make Gaza a kind of Nicaragua in black robes.
The third - and most disturbing - explanation is that the Israeli government is deliberately thwarting potential peace partners, because they do not want to embark on a negotiation that would mean they had to give up the settlements of the West Bank. Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and disillusioned Irgun fighter, says: "There has always been a tendency in Israel to prefer expansion and settlement to compromise and peace. Our government has worked for years to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal. Now, when it seems this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory."
There is still a way out of this. It is simple, and it should have happened a year ago: Israel must negotiate with Hamas. They are offering a long, long ceasefire. The Arab states are even - in a startling offer from Saudi Arabia, brushed aside by Ehud Olmert - offering full recognition and normalisation of Israel in the region, if only Israel returns to its legal borders. Perhaps they are lying. Perhaps it is a trick. But it is the only game-plan in town that offers even the chance of a happy ending.
But Israel seems determined not to take this chance. Ehud Barak, the new Defence Minister, is briefing that he will bomb Gaza yet again, and within weeks. In alliance with Mahmoud Abbas, he is proposing to actually intensify the blockade of the Gaza Strip for a few weeks, to "pressure" Hamas.
The Israeli government is clinging to the belief that the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer their leaders will become. This mentality created the current collapse. It will only drag the Middle East further and further away from the sane voices of women like Amal Hellis, singing songs of peace.
You can read more of my articles about Israel/Palestine here, and an interesting comment on this article by Shuggy here.
You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com
