Votes : 0

Gaza at a crossroads

Donald Macintyre - The Tablet - Fri, May 28th 2021

Gaza at a crossroads

A Palestinian woman returns to her destroyed home in Gaza after the truce
Photo: CNS/Retuers, Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Will the war between Hamas and the Israeli military provoke a deepening of an internecine conflict fuelled on both sides by religious and ideological extremism, or is there a glimmer of hope that it might it be a turning point towards a better future?

Two minor episodes within 48 hours of the ceasefire which last week ended Israel’s conflagration with Hamas illustrate the fork in the road to which the most devastating military onslaught on Gaza since 2014 has brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After most of the worshippers had quietly left Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque after Friday prayers, armed Israeli police clashed once again with stone-throwing young Palestinians who had remained outside on the plaza, raising their national flags and singing pro-Hamas songs. It still isn’t clear how the violence started, and it was much briefer than the confrontation which a fortnight earlier had helped to ignite 12 days of warfare, leaving 245 Gazan Palestinians and 12 Israelis dead. But when he failed to mention the Gaza casualties in his weekly homily, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein, had been shouted down by worshippers, who angrily accused him of being a stooge of the unpopular Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Then in Tel Aviv the next evening, several thousand peaceful demonstrators heard calls for cross-community partnership from speakers including Ayman Odeh, secular leader of the predominantly Arab Joint List party in the Knesset, and David Grossman, the country’s most celebrated living novelist, whose son was killed in the Second Lebanon War in 2006 during his military service. “We are the hostages of the various extremists,” Grossman told the demonstrators. He urged Israelis to recognise that “the time is over in which our power can force a reality that’s convenient for us and only for us”.

Will May 2021 lead to a deepening of an internecine conflict fuelled on both sides by religious and ideological extremism, or might it prove to have been a turning point towards a better future? Even to begin to answer that question, you have to consider what came before. The immediate trigger of the carnage was Hamas’ decision to fire the first of 4,000 rockets in response to what they saw as aggressive and discriminatory Israeli policing in and around the Al-Aqsa Mosque over the last weekend of Ramadan. Hamas was reportedly ready for ceasefire negotiations after 24 hours: it was as capable as anyone of calculating that a longer war would only serve the interests of Benjamin Netanyahu, who after March’s inconclusive election had faced being prised from power after 12 years as Israel’s prime minister.

Abbas had also stoked anger by calling off Palestinian elections planned for 22 May. The cancellation suited Abbas because two potentially popular breakaway parties from his Fatah movement threatened severely to reduce his – and, ironically Hamas’ – electoral support. True, Israel had handed Abbas a pretext for the cancellation by refusing to allow voting by Palestinians in East Jerusalem. To go ahead with the election in West Bank and Gaza alone would have been a symbolic surrender to Israel’s claim of sovereignty over the Arab sector of Jerusalem, which the rest of the world still wants to be the capital of a future Palestinian state. Washington’s greatest error in recent weeks may have been its failure to do as George W. Bush did in 2006, and push Israel into allowing elections to go ahead in East Jerusalem.

Hamas’ targeting of civilian Israelis, with the consequent deaths of 12 Israelis, cannot be justified legally or morally. The mantra “Israel has a right to defend itself” against such attacks, while familiar, is also true. But it is even harder to justify a disproportionate response which led to scores of civilian deaths as well as the levelling of high-rise buildings and the deliberate destruction of essential civilian infrastructure – especially in a small, overcrowded territory from which an imprisoned civilian population cannot flee.

The now routine claims of victory on both sides ring hollow. Netanyahu may have bought himself some political time, but that’s his ­benefit, not Israel’s. Israel has killed many Hamas militants and degraded many of its assets, which will require it to replace both over the next few years – until the next time. Hamas has probably increased its support, for now, especially among the young, projecting itself beyond Gaza by championing the rights of Palestinians in Jerusalem. But it has not persuaded Israel’s Prime Minister to ease the crippling 15-year siege of Gaza, or to lift the half-century-old occupation of the West Bank.

A major cause of the unrest in Jerusalem had been the protests by Palestinians (and left-wing Israelis) over the planned eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in inner East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district. Sheikh Jarrah (where the protests were inflamed by the counter-presence of Itamar Ben Gvir, the racist West Bank settler and Knesset member co-opted by Netanyahu into his would-be coalition) is an almost perfect microcosm of the wider occupation. Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim property that had been Jewish until the Arab-Israeli war of 1948; no such right exists for the descendants of the vastly greater number of Palestinians – around 750,000 – who fled or were forced from their homes in the same war.

But Sheikh Jarrah is also part of relentless settlement growth in both East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which settler leaders hope will bring the Israeli population in territory occupied since the 1967 Six Day War to around one million people, enjoying the full citizenship rights denied to their Palestinian neighbours – including the right to vote for the government that rules every aspect of their lives. The EU, if not President Trump, energetically argued against the formal annexation of parts of the West Bank. It has been far less energetic in trying to arrest the de facto annexation which is steadily creating Israel’s “one-state reality”, so crushing hopes for a two-state solution.

And yet something may be changing among US Democrats – and among younger American Jews. Cracks are appearing in the monolithic support from the US for Israeli policies. And the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict no longer matters looks like crumbling. The international community must bear much of the blame for the fact that this only happened because of horrific casualties.

Hamas has exploited the sense of daily oppression felt by most Palestinians. What, as the Palestinian ambassador in London Husam Zomlot was asked by Channel 4 News last week, did he imagine would be “the effect on peaceful negotiations of sending these rockets into Israel”? The problem with the question, apart from the Palestinians’ belief that they made their “historic compromise” as long ago as 1988, when Yasser Arafat promised to accept a state that would consist of 22 per cent of historic Palestine, is that under Netanyahu there has been virtually no prospect of meaningful negotiations. Indeed he has been widely accused in Israel of maintaining the separation of Gaza from the West Bank to preclude such negotiations, because Abbas represents only Palestinians in the West Bank. (One cause of the last round of violence in 2014 had been to sabotage a recon­ciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah which almost all Palestinians want.)
There were flurries of international hand-wringing about the plight of Palestinians after previous outbreaks of conflict. What may be different this time is that there are now significant new internal pressures on Israeli leaders. The Gaza firestorm evoked a strong reaction among Palestinians who are also Israeli citizens. The level of the internecine strife in Lod and other mixed towns was new and has alarmed the Israelis. And the one-day strikes and peaceful demonstrations critical of current Israeli policies or calling for Jewish and Arab coexistence and a solution to the conflict have gathered more widespread support than expected.

Many Palestinian Israelis are highly integrated into Israeli society – including in professions like medicine. But at the same time, many also have serious grievances, compounded by the 2018 nation state law, which contrary to Israel’s founding Declaration of Independence downgrades Arabic as a national language, identifies Jerusalem “complete and united” as the nation’s capital and specifies that the right to Jewish settlement – the law is silent on whether this applies to the occupied territories as well as Israel – is a “national value”. One grievance is the way far-right Jewish groups are allowed to assert their presence in predominantly Arab areas. Another is the police’s failure to control armed criminal gangs in some Arab communities. The May turmoil has shown that these grievances can help to push some Palestinian Israelis into co-identity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And they have the vote, making them, as 20 per cent of the popu­lation, a powerful electoral force – and potentially a decisive one.

In the fragile aftermath of this month’s war, Gaza could go in either of two directions. The dismally familiar one involves international pledges of funding for reconstruction, many of which will be unfulfilled, the continuation of unabated Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the rumb­ling on of an uneasy truce between Israel and Hamas … until war breaks out again. But there is a glimmer of hope of an alternative future. Israel and the international community could listen to what the eminent Israeli ­professor, Asher Susser, told a Tel Aviv University webinar last week has been a “wake-up call”. This would mean starting to reverse the “one-state reality” in the West Bank; lifting the Gaza siege; and addressing the discrimination felt by many Arabs in Israel. (Quoting the recent remark by Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right Religious Zionist Party and another potential coalition partner of Netanyahu’s, that “Arabs are citizens of Israel, for now, at least”, Susser invited his mainly Jewish audience in the US and Europe to imagine being told they were citizens of their home countries “for now at least”.)

Susser is surely right that efforts to return to the old top-down “peace process” are doomed for the foreseeable future. Drawn reluctantly into the conflict, US President Joe Biden should now focus on the advancement of all Palestinians to a measure of freedom, security and livelihood. Hamas’ influence grows in direct relation to the suppression of those rights. Israel – and the world – can be as tough on Hamas as it chooses; but it will not lead to peace unless it is also tough on the causes of Hamas.

Donald Macintyre was the Independent’s Jerusalem bureau chief for eight years between 2004 and 2012. He won the Next Century Foundation’s Peace through Media Award in 2011 and has previously been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism and for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. His books include Gaza: Preparing for Dawn (Oneworld Publications).

share :
tags icon tags :
comments icon Without comments

Comments

write comment
Please enter the letters as they are shown in the image above.