Noam Chomsky 10 September 2014. Posted in News
The latest
ceasefire will go the same way as other 'agreements' following Israel's
periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza: Hamas will observe it,
Israel will ignore it.
R Israel's
50 day assault on Gaza left a ghost city behind.
On August
26th, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) both accepted a ceasefire
agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians
dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind.
The agreement
calls for an end to military action by both Israel and Hamas, as well as an
easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.
This is,
however, just the most recent of a series of ceasefire agreements reached after
each of Israel's periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza.
Throughout this period, the terms of these agreements remain essentially the
same.
The regular
pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while
Hamas observes it -- as Israel has officially recognized -- until a sharp
increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer
brutality.
These
escalations, which amount to shooting fish in a pond, are called "mowing
the lawn" in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately
described as "removing the topsoil" by a senior US military officer,
appalled by the practices of the self-described "most moral army in the
world."
The first of
this series was the Agreement on Movement and Access Between Israel and the
Palestinian Authority in November 2005.
It called for "a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the
export of goods and the transit of people, continuous operation of crossings
between Israel and Gaza for the import/export of goods, and the transit of
people, reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank, bus and truck
convoys between the West Bank and Gaza, the building of a seaport in Gaza, [and
the] re-opening of the airport in Gaza" that Israeli bombing had
demolished.
That
agreement was reached shortly after Israel withdrew its settlers and military
forces from Gaza. The motive for the
disengagement was explained by Dov Weissglass, a confidant of then-Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, who was in charge of negotiating and implementing it.
"The
significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace
process," Weissglass informed the Israeli press. "And when you freeze
that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you
prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. Effectively,
this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has
been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and
permission. All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both
houses of Congress."
True enough.
"The
disengagement is actually formaldehyde," Weissglass added. "It
supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a
political process with the Palestinians."
Israeli hawks also recognized that instead of investing substantial
resources in maintaining a few thousand settlers in illegal communities in
devastated Gaza, it made more sense to transfer them to illegal subsidized
communities in areas of the West Bank that Israel intended to keep.
The
disengagement was depicted as a noble effort to pursue peace, but the reality
was quite different.
Israel never
relinquished control of Gaza and is, accordingly, recognized as the occupying
power by the United Nations, the US, and other states (Israel apart, of
course). In their comprehensive history
of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Israeli scholars Idith
Zertal and Akiva Eldar describe what actually happened when that country
disengaged: the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day
from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the
inhabitants pay every day." After the disengagement, "Israel left
behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present
nor a future. The settlements were
destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact
continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means
of its formidable military might."
Operations
Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense
Israel soon
had a pretext for violating the November Agreement more severely. In January
2006, the Palestinians committed a serious crime. They voted "the wrong way" in
carefully monitored free elections, placing the parliament in the hands of
Hamas. Israel and the United States
immediately imposed harsh sanctions, telling the world very clearly what they
mean by "democracy promotion." Europe, to its shame, went along as
well.
The US and
Israel soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable
elected government, a familiar procedure. When Hamas pre-empted the coup in
2007, the siege of Gaza became far more severe, along with regular Israeli
military attacks. Voting the wrong way
in a free election was bad enough, but preempting a US-planned military coup
proved to be an unpardonable offense.
A new
ceasefire agreement was reached in June 2008.
It again called for opening the border crossings to "allow the
transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza."
Israel formally agreed to this, but immediately announced that it would not
abide by the agreement and open the borders until Hamas released Gilad Shalit,
an Israeli soldier held by Hamas.
Israel itself
has a long history of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and
holding them for lengthy periods without credible charge, sometimes as
hostages. Of course, imprisoning
civilians on dubious charges, or none, is a regular practice in the territories
Israel controls. But the standard
western distinction between people and "unpeople" (in Orwell's useful
phrase) renders all this insignificant.
Israel not
only maintained the siege in violation of the June 2008 ceasefire agreement but
did so with extreme rigor, even preventing the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency, which cares for the huge number of official refugees in Gaza, from
replenishing its stocks.
On November
4th, while the media were focused on the US presidential election, Israeli
troops entered Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants. That elicited a Hamas missile response and an
exchange of fire. (All the deaths were
Palestinian.) In late December, Hamas
offered to renew the ceasefire. Israel
considered the offer, but rejected it, preferring instead to launch Operation
Cast Lead, a three-week incursion of the full power of the Israeli military
into the Gaza strip, resulting in shocking atrocities well documented by
international and Israeli human rights organizations.
On January 8,
2009, while Cast Lead was in full fury, the UN Security Council passed a
unanimous resolution (with the US abstaining) calling for "an immediate
ceasefire leading to a full Israeli withdrawal, unimpeded provision through
Gaza of food, fuel, and medical treatment, and intensified international
arrangements to prevent arms and ammunition smuggling."
A new
ceasefire agreement was indeed reached, but the terms, similar to the previous
ones, were again never observed and broke down completely with the next major
mowing-the-lawn episode in November 2012, Operation Pillar of Defense. What happened in the interim can be
illustrated by the casualty figures from January 2012 to the launching of that
operation: one Israeli was killed by fire from Gaza while 78 Palestinians were
killed by Israeli fire.
The first act
of Operation Pillar of Defense was the murder of Ahmed Jabari, a high official
of the military wing of Hamas. Aluf
Benn, editor-in-chief of Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz, described Jabari
as Israel's "subcontractor" in Gaza, who enforced relative quiet
there for more than five years. As
always, there was a pretext for the assassination, but the likely reason was
provided by Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin. He had been involved in direct negotiations
with Jabari for years and reported that, hours before he was assassinated,
Jabari "received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel,
which included mechanisms for maintaining the ceasefire in the case of a
flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip."
There is a
long record of Israeli actions designed to deter the threat of a diplomatic
settlement. After this exercise of
mowing the lawn, a ceasefire agreement was reached yet again. Repeating the now-standard terms, it called
for a cessation of military action by both sides and the effective ending of
the siege of Gaza with Israel "opening the crossings and facilitating the
movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting
residents' free movements and targeting residents in border areas."
What happened
next was reviewed by Nathan Thrall, senior Middle East analyst of the
International Crisis Group. Israeli
intelligence recognized that Hamas was observing the terms of the ceasefire.
"Israel,” Thrall wrote, “therefore saw little incentive in upholding its
end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made
regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting
scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen
from accessing the majority of Gaza's waters." In other words, the siege
never ended. "Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones inside Gaza [from
which Palestinians are barred, and which include a third or more of the strip’s
limited arable land] were reinstated.
Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit
permits to Israel and the West Bank."
Operation
Protective Edge
So matters
continued until April 2014, when an important event took place. The two major Palestinian groupings,
Gaza-based Hamas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank
signed a unity agreement. Hamas made
major concessions. The unity government contained none of its members or allies. In substantial measure, as Nathan Thrall
observes, Hamas turned over governance of Gaza to the PA. Several thousand PA security forces were sent
there and the PA placed its guards at borders and crossings, with no reciprocal
positions for Hamas in the West Bank security apparatus. Finally, the unity government accepted the
three conditions that Washington and the European Union had long demanded:
non-violence, adherence to past agreements, and the recognition of Israel.
Israel was
infuriated. Its government declared at
once that it would refuse to deal with the unity government and cancelled
negotiations. Its fury mounted when the
US, along with most of the world, signaled support for the unity government.
There are
good reasons why Israel opposes the unification of Palestinians. One is that the Hamas-Fatah conflict has
provided a useful pretext for refusing to engage in serious negotiations. How can one negotiate with a divided
entity? More significantly, for more
than 20 years, Israel has been committed to separating Gaza from the West Bank
in violation of the Oslo Accords it signed in 1993, which declare Gaza and the
West Bank to be an inseparable territorial unity.
A look at a
map explains the rationale. Separated
from Gaza, any West Bank enclaves left to Palestinians have no access to the
outside world. They are contained by two hostile powers, Israel and Jordan,
both close US allies -- and contrary to illusions, the US is very far from a
neutral "honest broker."
Furthermore,
Israel has been systematically taking over the Jordan Valley, driving out
Palestinians, establishing settlements, sinking wells, and otherwise ensuring
that the region -- about one-third of the West Bank, with much of its arable
land -- will ultimately be integrated into Israel along with the other regions
that country is taking over. Hence
remaining Palestinian cantons will be completely imprisoned. Unification with Gaza would interfere with
these plans, which trace back to the early days of the occupation and have had
steady support from the major political blocs, including figures usually
portrayed as doves like former president Shimon Peres, who was one of the
architects of settlement deep in the West Bank.
As usual, a
pretext was needed to move on to the next escalation. Such an occasion arose when three Israeli
boys from the settler community in the West Bank were brutally murdered. The Israeli government evidently quickly
realized that they were dead, but pretended otherwise, which provided the
opportunity to launch a "rescue operation" -- actually a rampage
primarily targeting Hamas. The Netanyahu
government has claimed from the start that it knew Hamas was responsible, but
has made no effort to present evidence.
One of
Israel's leading authorities on Hamas, Shlomi Eldar, reported almost at once that
the killers very likely came from a dissident clan in Hebron that has long been
a thorn in the side of the Hamas leadership.
He added, "I'm sure they didn't get any green light from the
leadership of Hamas, they just thought it was the right time to act."
The Israeli
police have since been searching for and arresting members of the clan, still
claiming, without evidence, that they are "Hamas terrorists." On
September 2nd, Haaretz reported that, after very intensive interrogations, the
Israeli security services concluded the abduction of the teenagers "was
carried out by an independent cell" with no known direct links to Hamas.
The 18-day
rampage by the Israeli Defense Forces succeeded in undermining the feared unity
government. According to Israeli military
sources, its soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335 affiliated with
Hamas, and killed six, while searching thousands of locations and confiscating
$350,000. Israel also conducted dozens
of attacks in Gaza, killing five Hamas members on July 7th.
Hamas finally
reacted with its first rockets in 18 months, Israeli officials reported,
providing Israel with the pretext to launch Operation Protective Edge on July
8th. The 50-day assault proved the most
extreme exercise in mowing the lawn -- so far.
Operation
[Still to Be Named]
Israel is in
a fine position today to reverse its decades-old policy of separating Gaza from
the West Bank in violation of its solemn agreements and to observe a major
ceasefire agreement for the first time.
At least temporarily, the threat of democracy in neighboring Egypt has
been diminished, and the brutal Egyptian military dictatorship of General Abdul
Fattah al-Sisi is a welcome ally for Israel in maintaining control over Gaza.
The
Palestinian unity government, as noted earlier, is placing the US-trained
forces of the Palestinian Authority in control of Gaza’s borders, and
governance may be shifting into the hands of the PA, which depends on Israel
for its survival, as well as for its finances.
Israel might feel that its takeover of Palestinian territory in the West
Bank has proceeded so far that there is little to fear from some limited form
of autonomy for the enclaves that remain to Palestinians.
There is also
some truth to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's observation: "Many
elements in the region understand today that, in the struggle in which they are
threatened, Israel is not an enemy but a partner."
Akiva Eldar,
Israel's leading diplomatic correspondent, adds, however, that "all those
‘many elements in the region’ also understand that there is no brave and
comprehensive diplomatic move on the horizon without an agreement on the
establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and a just,
agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem." That is not on Israel's
agenda, he points out, and is in fact in direct conflict with the 1999
electoral program of the governing Likud coalition, never rescinded, which
"flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the
Jordan river."
Some
knowledgeable Israeli commentators, notably columnist Danny Rubinstein, believe
that Israel is poised to reverse course and relax its stranglehold on Gaza.
We'll see.
The record of
these past years suggests otherwise and the first signs are not
auspicious. As Operation Protective Edge
ended, Israel announced its largest appropriation of West Bank land in 30
years, almost 1,000 acres. Israel Radio
reported that the takeover was in response to the killing of the three Jewish
teenagers by "Hamas militants." A Palestinian boy was burned to death
in retaliation for the murder, but no Israeli land was handed to Palestinians,
nor was there any reaction when an Israeli soldier murdered 10-year-old Khalil
Anati on a quiet street in a refugee camp near Hebron on August 10th, while the
most moral army in the world was smashing Gaza to bits, and then drove away in
his jeep as the child bled to death.
Anati was one
the 23 Palestinians (including three children) killed by Israeli occupation
forces in the West Bank during the Gaza onslaught, according to UN statistics,
along with more than 2,000 wounded, 38% by live fire. "None of those
killed were endangering soldiers' lives," Israeli journalist Gideon Levy
reported. To none of this is there any
reaction, just as there was no reaction while Israel killed, on average, more
than two Palestinian children a week for the past 14 years. Unpeople, after all.
It is
commonly claimed on all sides that, if the two-state settlement is dead as a
result of Israel's takeover of Palestinian lands, then the outcome will be one
state West of the Jordan. Some
Palestinians welcome this outcome, anticipating that they can then conduct a
civil rights struggle for equal rights on the model of South Africa under
apartheid. Many Israeli commentators
warn that the resulting "demographic problem" of more Arab than
Jewish births and diminishing Jewish immigration will undermine their hope for
a "democratic Jewish state."
But these
widespread beliefs are dubious.
The realistic
alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will continue to carry
forward the plans it has been implementing for years, taking over whatever is
of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian population
concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas it is integrating into
Israel. That should avoid the dreaded
"demographic problem."
The areas
being integrated into Israel include a vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem, the
area within the illegal "Separation Wall," corridors cutting through
the regions to the East, and will probably also encompass the Jordan
Valley. Gaza will likely remain under
its usual harsh siege, separated from the West Bank. And the Syrian Golan Heights -- like
Jerusalem, annexed in violation of Security Council orders -- will quietly
become part of Greater Israel. In the
meantime, West Bank Palestinians will be contained in unviable cantons, with
special accommodation for elites in standard neocolonial style.
These basic
policies have been underway since the 1967 conquest, following a principle
enunciated by then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli leaders
most sympathetic to the Palestinians. He
informed his cabinet colleagues that they should tell Palestinian refugees in
the West Bank, "We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs,
and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."
The
suggestion was natural within the overriding conception articulated in 1972 by
future president Haim Herzog: "I do not deny the Palestinians a place or
stand or opinion on every matter... But certainly I am not prepared to consider
them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the
hands of our nation for thousands of years.
For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner." Dayan also
called for Israel’s "permanent rule" ("memshelet keva")
over the occupied territories. When
Netanyahu expresses the same stand today, he is not breaking new ground.
Like other
states, Israel pleads "security" as justification for its aggressive
and violent actions. But knowledgeable
Israelis know better. Their recognition
of reality was articulated clearly in 1972 by Air Force Commander (and later
president) Ezer Weizmann. He explained
that there would be no security problem if Israel were to accept the
international call to withdraw from the territories it conquered in 1967, but
the country would not then be able to "exist according to the scale,
spirit, and quality she now embodies."
For a
century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily on the
pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground, which
the world was to ultimately come to accept.
It has been a highly successful policy.
There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as the United
States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological
support. For those concerned with the
rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than
working to change US policies, not an idle dream by any means.
Source: TomDespatch.com
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