Prospects for Middle East Peace

CNI MEMBER HARRY SHAW'S ARTICLE ON GAZA AND THE PROSPECTS FOR A MIDDLE EAST PEACE PUBLISHED IN THE STAR DEMOCRAT FEBRUARY 11, 2009:

Part I: Gaza Realities

By Harry Shaw

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Rashid Khalidi, Professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, stated: "Nearly everything you have been led to believe about Gaza is wrong." Indeed! There is no more appropriate launching pad for an examination of the prospects for peace in the Middle East than Khalidi's charge. Israel has avoided deserved condemnation for its conduct of the Gaza War by hiding behind a screen of misinformation and falsifications of the true story and denying access to journalists who could witness and report the truth about Israel's brutal assault on the people of Gaza.

Part I: Gaza Realities, of this three part series, reviews the background to events in Gaza and the consequences of a war of grossly disproportionate casualties: over 1,300 Gazans dead, many women and children, and some 5,500 injured and wounded, along with several billions in damage to homes and public structures, at the cost of 13 Israeli lives, a few injured and wounded, and minor damage to buildings.

Israel justifies its war on Gaza as a response to rocket attacks and on the false claim that the Islamic Palestinian movement, Hamas, is primarily a terrorist organization, beyond the law, that seized power from the legitimate Palestinian Authority (PA) when Israel withdrew its settlers and occupying troops in 2005. It is not commonly known that after
the Israeli withdrawal but before the 2006 elections, James Wolfensohn, former World Bank president, was engaged to draw up plans to bolster the Gaza Strip's isolated economy. But his plan foundered, in part because it was sabotaged by the Bush administration official in charge. Concurrently, Secretary of State Rice and her staff schemed to manipulate the 2006 election to ensure a victory for the rival Fatah movement at a time of growing Hamas popularity.

When these American schemes backfired and Hamas won the democratic elections
to the Palestinian Legislative Council, taking control of the Gaza government,
Secretary of State Rice responded by banning all contact with "terrorist" Hamas and supported Israel's economic blockade of Gaza, which clearly violates Israel's Geneva
Convention responsibilities as an occupying power for the welfare of the civil population. Israel's siege of the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza was, and continues to be, a serious violation of international law.

Although Hamas is widely represented by the press [as] a terrorist organization, Tom Segev of the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, considers it "a genuine national and religious movement" that "cannot be bombed away." Israel and its supporters have long traded on Hamas rhetoric about destroying the Zionist state, as if a Palestine under Hamas control would be an existential threat to the strongest military power in the Middle East. As for Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel as a precondition to negotiations, it reflects a shrewd
understanding that "recognition" implies acceptance of borders which Israel declines to define while it continues to "create facts" on the West Bank that prejudice future
negotiations. Hamas insists on Israel's return to the 1967 borders and has offered to extend an Egyptian arranged truce for up to ten years if Israel accepts the 1967 borders.

Clearly, events in Gaza, including Israel's recent military assault there, are intimately
linked to the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict over the division of land and the terms of a two-state solution of that conflict. The ultimate purposes of the bombing and attempt to break Hamas's hold there are sensed by Gazans, like the Fatah member who character-
ized the Israeli attack as "War on the Palestinian state, not against a Party." Israel's Gaza War was not about Hamas rockets but about larger issues.

Israel has blamed Hamas for breaking a six-month ceasefire agreed to last June. But
Israel failed to honor its own commitment to ease the blockade it had imposed on Gaza since Hamas's 2006 election victory, a regime that has inflicted grievous harm on the people of Gaza: denial of electricity, fuel, medical supplies; serious sanitation problems, such as pollution of the water supply; economic collapse accompanied by widespread unemployment, malnutrition, and depression. The result: a humanitarian crisis of serious proportions.

When, in November, 2008, Israel violated the truce with an attack across the border that killed six Hamas people, Hamas resumed rocket attacks which Israel used as the pretext for a long-planned massive assault on Gaza, carefully timed to take place during the last days of the feckless Bush Administration and before the January 20 Inauguration. But it
might have been a different story if Israel had not been so determined to teach Hamas and the Palestinian people a lesson, instead following a different script as described by Brigadier General Shmuel Zakai, former commander of the IDF's Gaza Division, in a column by Roger Cohen in the January 15 New York Review:

We could have eased the siege over the Gaza Strip, in such a way that the Palestinians,
Hamas, would understand that holding fire served their interests. But when you create
a tahadiyeh [truce]. and the economic pressure on the Strip continues, it's obvious that
Hamas will try to reach an improved tahadiyeh, and their way to achieve this is re-
sumed Qassam fire.

We now know from Robert Pastor, who accompanied former president Jimmy Carter in a Dec, 14, 2008, meeting in Damascus with Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal that Hamas offered to resume the ceasefire in return for Israel's lifting the siege of Gaza and that Pastor promptly conveyed that offer to the Israeli military. There was no answer from the Israelis who launched the Gaza War two weeks later.

Part II of this series will examine how the situation in the West Bank is likely to affect prospects for Middle East peace.

Harry Shaw, PhD., has taught international law at the University of Virginia and George
Washington University. He lives near Easton.

Published February 11, 2009, by The Star Democrat, Easton, Maryland