Gaza Withdrawal: Will Israel ever recognize Palestine?

Land for peace?

The recent return of the Israeli army into Gaza, along with the capture of a number of Palestinian government officials who are now essentially Israeli hostages, shows quite clearly that Israel’s government is in total confusion. The predictable results of their foolish policies are now plain for all to see.

The roots of this crisis go back to last year when Ariel Sharon “unilaterally” withdrew from Gaza, pulling out Israel’s army and its settlers. He did this without any coordination with the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, and created a situation in which Hamas was able to take credit for the withdrawal by crowing about its violent “resistance” to Israel. Hamas did agree to a cease-fire with Israel, and stuck to it for the last year.

Because of the credibility it gained, and the corruption in the Fatah-led PA, Hamas was able to win the recent legislative elections and install a Hamas leader in the Prime Minister office, while Abbas remained President. In the anarchy that Gaza had become, Palestinian groups such as Islamic Jihad carried out rocket attacks on Israel, launching over 600 rockets since the Israeli withdrawal. These rockets are crude, with small warheads, and did very little actual damage. But they gave the Israelis a pretext to continue to attack Gaza, which they did with gusto, and culminated in the massacre of a Palestinian family picnicking on the beach a few weeks ago. This horrible act that Israel was directly responsible for ratcheted up the violence, and a Palestinian group responded by attacking an Israeli post within Israel, killing two soldiers and fatefully capturing one. The Palestinians now want to trade their prisoner for prisoners held by Israel, but Israel has responded by destroying the electricity and water supply to 600,000 Gazans. This is collective punishment and a war crime.

The situation is now one of complete policy quagmire for Israel. Does it continue to invade Gaza? Can it get out without making a deal with Hamas? How do any of its actions lead to recovery of its soldier? Israel claimed it would not talk to Hamas until it renounced violence, accepted previous agreements, and recognized Israel’s right to exist. But then why did Israel refuse to negotiate with Abbas all last year, when he had already done all of those things?

The answer is that Israel does not want peace. Well, technically speaking it does want peace, but on terms that it has come to realize are unacceptable to Palestinians. The primary goal of Israeli policy with respect to the West Bank and Gaza from its capture in 1967 till Rabin’s election in 1992 was the desire to fully annex those territories into Israel, but in such a way that did not change Israel’s Jewish majority. By 1992, which was several years after the first Intifida, the Labor (left-wing Zionist) Party in Israel had concluded that such a goal was impossible, and was now willing to part with a portion of the West Bank so that Israel could separate from the large Palestinian populations. The right-wing Likud Party still held out hope that the West Bank could be annexed eventually. In 2000, the Labor Party puts its cards on the table at Camp David, where it was clear that it wanted to get rid of the Palestinian people, but annex as much of the West Bank as possible (almost 20%). The map Barak proposed showed that Israel would not dismantle even one major settlement on the West Bank. The Palestinians correctly rejected this ridiculous offer (it was generous only in the minds of the Israelis, because it offered the Palestinians something other than perpetual subjugation).

By 2004, the Likud Party, now in power behind Ariel Sharon, had also finally conceded that the Palestinians could not simply be kept enslaved forever. But instead of trying to get the Palestinians to accept what Barak had offered by another attempt at negotiation, Sharon decided on just building a wall that accomplished the same thing. The Israeli wall is not a security fence, but a land-grab fence, whose primary purpose is to put as many settlements as possible within Israeli control, while fencing out the Palestinians from their own land. This is why the Israelis are not interested in negotiating peace, because such a negotiation would mean that the land theft would have to stop.

For real peace to be possible there needs to be two major changes on the Israeli side. First is that they need to recognize Palestine’s right to exist, which no Israeli government or major moderate or conservative American Jewish group has ever done, and second they need to realize that peace requires a return of the entire West Bank and a removal of every settlement and settler. They are illegal, they are a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and they were a mistake of Israeli and American policy. They have no legitimacy and no standing. They are the main impediment to peace and Israel and its supporters must come to terms with this.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has now boiled down to Israel’s desire to steal the land between the 1967 border and the current route of Israel’s land-grab fence. When Israelis give up this attitude of greed, this morally bankrupt notion that what is mine is mine and what is yours is to be negotiated, and this contempt for the Palestinians as a people, then and only then will there be peace.

Dr. Nayyer Ali is a member of the board of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.