Anj — The siege of Gaza is going to lead to a violent escalation
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Anj — The siege of Gaza is going to lead to a violent escalationThe siege of Gaza is going to lead to a violent escalation
Far from helping settle the Middle East conflict, the US and Europe
are fuelling it with their contempt for democracy
Seumas Milne
Thursday November 1, 2007
The Guardian
There is, it seems, an unbridgeable gap between the western world’s
apparent recognition of the dangers of Palestinian suffering and its
commitment to do anything whatever to stop it. This week the
collective punishment of the people of Gaza reached a new level, as
Israel began to choke off essential fuel supplies to its one and a
half million people in retaliation for rockets fired by Palestinian
resistance groups. A plan to cut power supplies has only been put on
hold till the end of the week by the intervention of Israel’s attorney
general.
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Both moves come on top of the existing blockade of Gaza imposed by
Israel since last year’s election of Hamas and the confiscation of
hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes it is obliged to pass on as
part of previous agreements. And instead of being restrained by the US
or European Union, both have deepened the crisis by imposing their own
sanctions and withdrawing aid. The result has, inevitably, been
further huge increases in unemployment and poverty. But far from
discouraging rocket attacks, they have risen sharply – though the
ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths has been running at more than
30 to one, compared with four to one at the height of the intifada
five years ago.
The UN’s senior official in Gaza, Karen Koning-Abu Zayd, yesterday
branded Israel’s intensification of the Gaza siege as a violation of
international law: despite its withdrawal two years ago, Israel
continues to control all access to the Gaza Strip and remains the
occupying power both legally and practically. Not that the situation
is much better in the occupied West Bank. Despite the US and Israel’s
fatal backing for the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and his
emergency government of a non-existent state, Israeli demolitions,
land seizures, settlement expansion, assassinations, armed incursions,
segregated road-building and construction of the land-grabbing
separation wall continue apace in the territory where Abbas’s nominal
writ supposedly runs.
There are now 563 checkpoints in the West Bank, squeezing this already
constricted piece of land into apartheid-style cantons, and making
free movement or normal economic activity entirely impossible. All
this is in contravention of international law; much of it directly
violates UN security council resolutions, such as resolution 446
against Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. But, whereas
the occupied people face sanctions and international isolation, the
occupiers pay no penalty at all. On the contrary, they are aided and
armed to the hilt by the US and its allies.
Given the speed at which Israel continues to create facts on the
ground, it’s no surprise that even Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary
of state, warned a few days ago that the “window for a two-state
solution” could be closing. But it is of course her government that
has underpinned this takeover at every stage. And having preached
democracy as the salvation of the Middle East, the US and its allies
demonstrated what that meant in practice when it greeted the winners
of the Palestinian elections with a political and economic boycott.
Unless Hamas recognised Israel, renounced violence and signed up to
agreements it had always opposed, the western powers insisted, the
Palestinian electorate would be ignored. No such demands, needless to
say, have been made of Israel. The US and Israel then went one step
further, funding and arming a section of the defeated Fatah leadership
in an attempt to overthrow Hamas’s administration. When that failed,
the US encouraged Abbas to impose an unconstitutional administration
of his own and blocked any power-sharing with Hamas, which is the
precondition for Palestinian advance.
Instead, the US is gearing up for a peace conference in Annapolis,
Maryland, from which Hamas is excluded and which almost nobody
believes offers any prospect of real progress towards a settlement.
Its main appeal to the Bush administration is perhaps that it can be
seen to be doing something about the Israel-Palestine conflict at a
time when it needs to corral its Arab allies for the coming
confrontation with Iran. For the Palestinians, it’s maybe just as well
that the Israeli government is resistant to any timetable for
statehood – let alone serious negotiation on Jerusalem, refugees and
final borders – as any agreement that such a weak leadership could now
secure would not stand a chance of being accepted by its people.
Already, Hamas and the other non-Fatah Palestinian parties are
preparing to stage their own conference in Damascus to coincide with
the Annapolis jamboree. Their aim is to challenge the right of Abbas,
who has never had any of the legitimacy of Yasser Arafat, to represent
the Palestinian people in negotiations over its future. While they
were prepared to accept him as a negotiator for a national unity
government, there will be no acceptance of deals made by a figure many
Palestinians now regard as simply operating under US and Israeli licence.
Nor should there be any interest in such a setup for anyone who wants
to see a lasting settlement of the conflict. As in previous periods
when political progress has been blocked, there are clear signs that
pressures for a return to wider resistance are building up on the
Palestinian side. The head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service,
Yuval Diskin, said on Monday that he did not expect a new intifada if
Annapolis failed because the Palestinian public was “exhausted and
lacks leadership”. It’s true that any new upsurge in violence is
likely to be different from in the past. But Palestinians are also
well aware that it was the first intifada that led to the Oslo
agreement, for all its weaknesses, and the second intifada that
triggered Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza.
Hamas has mostly held back from armed action against Israel in the
past couple of years, though it has allowed attacks by others. That
may be about to change. This week Israel’s defence minister, Ehud
Barak, declared that “every passing day brings us closer to a broad
operation in Gaza”, while Hamas leader Ahmad Nimr told a rally that
the movement was now ready to “strike inside the heart of Israel, the
occupation entity” if Israel did not stop its killings in Gaza. Hamas
has a variety of options – including rocket attacks on Israeli cities
from the West Bank over the much-vaunted security barrier – that could
dramatically escalate the conflict. The wider international interest
in a just settlement could not be more obvious.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk