[JPN Commentary: Much attention
has been focused on Sharon's motives leading to the current butchery in Gaza, as
well as to the interview given by Dov Weisglass to Ha'aretz a couple of weeks
ago (underlining, among other things, US role in backing Sharon).
There
has not been, though, a whole lot of commentary regarding the various forces
jockeying for power on the Palestinian side. The article below, by Mouin
Rabbani, goes some distance to fill this gap. - R.G.]
Gaza's Wars of Perception
By Mouin
Rabbani
Middle East Report Online
14 October 2004
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero101404.html
(Mouin
Rabbani is senior Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group and a
contributing editor of Middle East Report.)
Operation Days of Penitence,
launched on September 29, 2004, is the Israeli military's most extensive
incursion into the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the current Palestinian
uprising and its largest offensive within the Occupied Territories since the
2002 reconquest of West Bank cities during Operation Defensive Shield. Two weeks
and more than 100 deaths later, it is increasingly clear that Israel's
determination to prevent Palestinian militants from using the northern Gaza
Strip as a launching pad for rocket attacks on Israeli border towns provides a
partial explanation at best for the unfolding drama. The stakes are much higher,
and they extend well beyond the conflict zone.
The backdrop for the
incursion is, of course, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for
"unilateral disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, initially unveiled in late 2003.
Stripped to its foundations, Sharon's plan revives the traditional Israeli view
that the structure of Israeli-Palestinian relations should be determined not by
negotiation with the Palestinian national movement but rather by Israel's
undisputed military superiority and physical control of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Sharon and his fellow travelers reject the concept of a Palestinian
partner because they are loath to contemplate the Israeli concessions that any
negotiated agreement would necessarily entail. But, at root, "disengagement" is
widely popular in Israel because the Labor Party failed to conclude a viable
agreement with the Palestinians in the framework of the Oslo accords. The
resulting four years of increasingly violent conflict have seen a growing
majority of the Israeli public prepared once again to give unilateralism the
benefit of the doubt.
SHARON'S STRATEGIC
OPENINGS
While Sharon had little trouble rallying the public and
the parliamentary opposition to his side -- the Labor Party was so enthused by
his plan that it initiated coalition negotiations to ensure its success -- his
core constituencies within the Likud Party and the settler movement have been
uncooperative and often hostile. Blinded by their resolve to keep the Occupied
Territories in their entirety, they refused to appreciate the strategic
opportunities so evident to Sharon. In the months preceding announcement of the
disengagement plan, the Israeli premier had overseen calculated sabotage of the
"road map" initiative advanced in May 2003 by the Quartet of the US, UN, Russia
and the European Union. Europe's subsequent embrace of the informal Geneva
Accord, concluded in mid-October 2003 between prominent Israelis and
Palestinians, carried with it the risk that the international community might
seek to fill the diplomatic void if Israel did not act first. On the other hand,
Washington's virtually unconditional embrace of Sharon, coupled with the reality
and regional implications of the US occupation of Iraq, meant that if Israel did
act it would enjoy an unusual degree of latitude. The continuing Palestinian
uprising -- particularly the increasing sophistication of the Hamas attacks
within the Gaza Strip and associated public criticism of the costs of retaining
that benighted territory -- and the need to keep up appearances formed the only
constraints.
Much as Menachem Begin had in 1979 evacuated the Sinai
Peninsula in order to retain the other occupied Arab territories, Sharon
proposed to relieve Israel of the burden of Gaza in order to consolidate
Israel's grip within the West Bank. No sooner had he formulated his intentions
than George W. Bush rushed to embrace them. At an April 2004 joint press
conference at the White House, Bush told the world he had given the Israeli
prime minister a letter stating that Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice
line demarcating the internationally recognized boundary between the West Bank
and Israel was "unrealistic" as it would require leaving "major Israeli
population centers." The letter also conveyed Washington's understanding that
Palestinians made refugees in 1948 would not be settled in Israel. With this
letter, Bush reversed decades of formal US policy on settlements, borders and
refugees while a beaming Sharon looked on. Indeed, the letter took down the
entire legal edifice undergirding the peace process launched by Bush's father in
Madrid in 1991 and the policy upheld during the Clinton years that any changes
thereto must be mutually agreed upon by Israel and the
Palestinians.
CANDOR AND CIRCUMSPECTION
The
significance of these developments, even if they do reflect what had effectively
become US policy in practice, is difficult to overstate. Dov Weisglass, Sharon's
most senior political adviser, hit the nail on the head in a particularly candid
interview that appeared on October 6 in the Israeli daily Haaretz. Weisglass
told the interviewer: "The significance of the disengagement plan is the
freezing of the peace process. 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...a presidential blessing and the ratification of
both houses of Congress. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies
the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political
process with the Palestinians."
Coming at the height of the US
presidential campaign – an unlikely coincidence -- Weisglass's statements
elicited only a tepid reaction from Washington. A State Department spokesman
spun the comments with the claim that Sharon did not really mean what his
closest adviser had just publicly enunciated on his behalf.
"It's for the Israeli government to explain Mr. Weisglass's comments and for
them to explain what the position of the government of Israel is," said Richard
Boucher on October 7. "The Prime Minister of Israel has issued a statement
where...he states...that the road map is the only way forward to achieve peace."
Washington has shown similar circumspection about the present Israeli incursion
in Gaza, with Secretary of State Colin Powell following a US veto of a strongly
worded UN resolution by asking that Israel end its offensive "as soon as
possible."
In addition to the White House's endorsement, Sharon's plan
has the advantage of not relinquishing physical control of the Gaza Strip. While
Jewish settlements and Israeli military bases within the territory would be
removed, there would be continued Israeli control of boundaries and borders
(including access to and from Egypt and the West Bank), air space and coastal
waters. Those elements of the plan, along with Israel's self-proclaimed right to
"fight terror" inside Gaza even after withdrawal, ensure that the strip will
remain the world's largest open-air prison.
STARK CHOICES FOR
PALESTINIANS
Sharon's determination to act unilaterally means
that, as a matter of design, there is to be no Palestinian counterpart with whom
to implement the initiative. This reality has produced both a new series of
dynamics within the Palestinian political system in the Gaza Strip, and added
extra dimensions to existing Israeli-Palestinian ones.
On the Palestinian
side of the equation, three main trends have emerged. The first, represented by
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, sees disengagement primarily as a threat, and
is above all determined to avoid the political consequences of Sharon's
initiative as spelled out by Weisglass. Sharon's success necessarily entails
their failure to achieve their strategic objective of a viable Palestinian state
within the Occupied Territories established on the basis of Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations and to maintain their stewardship of the Palestinian national
movement. The second trend, associated with former Gaza security chief and
current strongman Muhammad Dahlan, views disengagement as an opportunity to
revive the political process interrupted by the renewal of violent
Israeli-Palestinian conflict in September 2000. Rather than seek to scuttle
Sharon's initiative, they believe that through cooperation or, failing that,
reciprocal Palestinian measures, disengagement will establish the basis for
renewed international engagement leading to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
Their ability to ensure stability in the Gaza Strip in the wake of an eventual
Israeli withdrawal will both place them at the helm of the political system and
mark them out as reliable partners with whom Israel and the international
community can do business. The third trend, most visibly represented by Hamas
but encompassing a broader array of Islamist and nationalist militants, sees
disengagement as vindication. As in southern Lebanon, a strategy of armed
struggle is compelling Israel to withdraw from occupied territory without an
agreement or a political quid pro quo. It therefore follows that those who sowed
the seeds of resistance will reap the harvest of political profit.
Both
Dahlan and Hamas have their power base in the Gaza Strip, and Dahlan's agenda is
all but predicated on his ability to neutralize the Islamists. So it is perhaps
surprising that the internal Palestinian conflicts that emerged in July 2004
were between forces loyal to Dahlan and Arafat. Simply put, Dahlan's first
priority has been to establish control over the Palestinian security forces and
the Fatah movement. For this reason, the ongoing spate of kidnappings, attempted
assassinations and arson attacks has been widely attributed to armed elements
enjoying his support. If the methods have been thuggish, they are also clever,
in that they target officials who are both universally reviled for their
malfeasance and closely identified with Arafat. Such activities have also been
accompanied by increasingly vociferous calls for democratic reform and public
accountability.
Yet Dahlan's assumption of the reformist mantle is also
his greatest weakness. Security chiefs, particularly in the Gaza Strip, have
virtually no public credibility in this respect. Given the broader political
context, Dahlan has additionally been denounced as a putschist -- and his
campaign portrayed as an instrument of foreign forces -- by Arafat loyalists. No
less importantly, Hamas, ambivalent about Dahlan since he led the PA's brutally
successful anti-Islamist crackdown in the mid-1990s, remained decidedly aloof.
Its only intervention, a telephone call to Yasser Arafat placed by Hamas
politburo head Khalid Meshaal in mid-July to emphasize the need for national
unity and reform, sent a clear message that the Islamists would not be
facilitating Dahlan's ambitions.
THE
STAKES
Rather, Hamas has been preoccupied with ensuring that
Israel is at least seen to be withdrawing from Gaza under fire, and that its
efforts are translated into a requisite share of the political pie in any
post-withdrawal scenario. Formerly content with the luxury of rejectionist
opposition, today Hamas seeks the opportunities of power but not -- yet -- the
burden of leadership. Indeed, no faction has been as systematic in registering
its followers for the first tranche of municipal elections scheduled for
December 2004.
Hamas's tactics -- increasingly bold attacks on Israeli
encampments within the Gaza Strip, close cooperation with other armed groups
and, particularly, launching improvised missiles over the fence meant to isolate
the Gaza Strip -- could well portend the future of the West Bank if Sharon does
indeed withdraw and complete the separation barrier in the West Bank. It is
precisely for this reason that Sharon is determined to crush the Islamists in
the course of Operation Days of Penitence. By neutering them in their Gazan
strongholds, he hopes to reassure the Israeli public that they need not fear
disengagement and that it will have no strategic ramifications within the West
Bank. Simultaneously, Israel is sending a shot across the bow of Palestinians
who might contemplate similar tactics from West Bank regions that abut the
Israeli heartland.
The political stakes invested by Israel in the
disengagement plan, coupled with the personal stakes for Sharon, also explain
the extraordinary brutality of the current offensive – schoolchildren shot dead
in their classrooms, an officer emptying his magazine into the body of a dying
girl and increasingly brazen accusations leveled at international organizations
like the UN Relief and Works Agency. It seems unlikely the worst has passed.
Palestinian armed groups are bent on demonstrating that Sharon will be leaving
Gaza in the same manner that his predecessor Ehud Barak left Lebanon. They have
been neither deterred nor defeated by the security zone established by the
Israeli military within the northern Gaza Strip. Inexorably, Sharon is being
driven to pursue the militants ever deeper into the Gaza Strip in order to
demonstrate that Israel's generals only retreat in the wake of decisive victory.
Horrific as the current reality undoubtedly is, it could yet prove to be the
opening gambit of a larger conflict.
Indeed, Sharon's refusal to
countenance either a negotiated disengagement or even a reciprocal ceasefire
that would necessarily curtail Israel's freedom of action within the Occupied
Territories makes further bloodshed all but inevitable. In the meantime, the
choices facing Palestinians are stark. To many, the conflict between those
allied with Arafat and Dahlan appears, in the words of a Fatah activist, as
little more than "a struggle between Palestinian thieves and collaborators over
the privilege of governing the world's most desolate corner on behalf of
Israel's foremost war criminal." By the same token, people have little faith
that Hamas can end the occupation with homemade rockets, but full confidence
that Israel will extract an increasingly high price from the civilian population
in lieu of its inability to eliminate the rocket crews. Meanwhile, the periodic
attempts to forge a Palestinian strategic consensus, now sponsored by Cairo,
remain blocked on account of competing strategies and interests. Yet these
on-again, off-again talks could offer the only escape hatch from an increasingly
desperate reality.
[JPN Commentary: The following include: an
introductory call for action and a brief public-health analysis of conditions in
the Occupied Territories. The analysis, compiled by Derek Summerfield, a senior
lecturer in psychiatry and an activist, was published last week in the British
Medical Journal. Outlining a picture of horrific health conditions in the
Occupied Territories, Summerfield draws on the publications of internationally
recognized organizations such as the World Bank, Johns Hopkins University and
Amnesty International. Taking a public health perspective, the analysis brings
into view the severely punitive impact of Israeli policies and actions upon an
entire collective, including the whole of the civilian Palestinian
population.
The brief call for action comes from public health researcher
Rita Giacaman of Bir Zeit University. It describes the efforts of groups and
individuals who call themselves pro-Israel to discredit such evidence of the
inhuman conditions inflicted upon the Palestinian collective, and deny the vast
asymmetry of power in Israeli-Palestinian relations. In addition, it testifies
to a sharp imbalance between the networks disseminating information on these
issues outside of Palestine and Israel.
In the past weeks, I've
personally, on a few occasions, driven a young woman from her sealed village in
the West Bank to a Tel-Aviv hospital to receive chemotherapy treatments. Due to
the tortuous bureaucracy of arranging for travel permits and medical coverage,
the treatments and ensuing tests were repeatedly postponed for months. Thousands
of Palestinian women, men, and children are uncounted casualties of the
Occupation, dying or disabled due to inaccessible or postponed medical care. --
RM]
We need your help in writing letters to the 'rapid response'
section of the British Medical Journal. Dr. Derek Summerfield, who was here in
March 2004 visiting us at the Institute of Community and Public Health, Birzeit
University ,has just had a piece published in the British Medical Journal on
Palestine. The onslaught was enormous, many hate mails to him and responses to
the BMJ that we need to address. Unlike the Lobby, we are very few here who are
able to access journals, and are organized with enough material and other
support to be able to respond as the Lobby does. Please, can you read Derek's
article and some of the responses and reply?
Palestine: the assault on health and other war
crimes
Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer, Institute of
Psychiatry, London derek.summerfield@slam.nhs.uk
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7471/
Does the death of an Arab weigh the same as that of a US or Israeli citizen?
The Israeli army, with utter impunity, has killed more unarmed Palestinian
civilians since September 2000 than the number of people who died on September
11, 2001. In conducting 238 extrajudicial executions the army has also killed
186 bystanders (including 26 women and 39 children). Two thirds of the 621
children (two thirds under 15 years) killed at checkpoints, in the street, on
the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over
half of cases to the head, neck and chest—the sniper's wound. Clearly, soldiers
are routinely authorised to shoot to kill children in situations of minimal or
no threat. These statistics attract far less publicity than suicide bombings,
atrocious though these are too.
Amnesty International has called for an investigation into the killing of
Asma al-Mughayr (16 years) and her brother Ahmad (13 years) on the roof terrace
of their home in Rafah on 18 May, each with a single bullet to the head. Asma
had been taking clothes off the drying line and Ahmad feeding pigeons. Amnesty
noted that the firing appeared to have come from the top floor of a nearby
house, which had been taken over by Israeli soldiers shortly before. Amnesty
suspects that this is not "caught in crossfire," this is murder.
Israeli military reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza—a system of military
checkpoints splitting towns and villages into ghettos, curfews, closures, raids,
mass demolition and destruction of houses (more than 60 000), and land
expropriations—has made ordinary life impossible for everyone, and is driving
Palestinian society and its institutions towards destitution. Moreover, Israel
has been constructing a grotesque barrier that, when completed, will total over
400 miles—four times longer than the Berlin Wall. Extending up to 15 miles into
Palestinian territory, the real purpose of the wall is permanently to lock more
than 50 illegal Israeli settlements into Israel proper. This is expansive,
aggressive colonisation, in defiance of the International Court of Justice in
The Hague and the United Nations General Assembly resolution of last July.
Last year a UN rapporteur concluded that Gaza and the West Bank were "on the
brink of a humanitarian catastrophe." The World Bank estimates that 60% of the
population are subsisting at poverty level (£1.12; $2; 1.6 per day), a tripling
in only three years. Half a million people are now completely dependent upon
food aid, and Amnesty International has expressed concern that the Israeli army
has been hampering distribution in Gaza. Over half of all households are eating
only one meal per day. A study by Johns Hopkins and Al Quds universities found
that 20% of children under 5 years old were anaemic, 9.3% were acutely
malnourished, and a further 13.2% chronically malnourished. The doctors I met on
a professional visit in March pointed to a rising prevalence of anaemia in
pregnant women and low birthweight babies.
The coherence of the Palestinian health system is being destroyed. The wall
will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations
they serve. Qalqilya hospital, which primarily serves refugees, has seen a 40%
fall in follow up appointments because patients cannot enter the city. There
have been at least 87 documented cases (including 30 children) in which denial
of access to medical treatment has led directly to deaths, including those of
babies born while women were held up at checkpoints. The checkpoint at the
entrance to some villages closes at 7 pm and not even ambulances can pass after
this time. As a recent example, a man in a now fenced in village near Qalqilya
approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms, and begged the
soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The
soldiers refused, and a Palestinian doctor summoned from the other side was also
refused access to the child. The doctor was obliged to attempt a physical
examination, and to give the girl an injection, through the wire.
There are consistent reports of ambulances containing gravely ill people
being hit by gunfire, or detained at checkpoints while drivers and paramedics
are interrogated, searched, threatened, humiliated, and assaulted. Wounded men
are abducted from ambulances at checkpoints and sent directly to prison. Clearly
marked clinics are fired on, and doctors and other health workers shot dead on
duty.
Physicians for Human Rights
(Israel) have lambasted the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) for its silence in
the face of these systematic violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which
guarantees the right to health care and the protection of health professionals
as they do their duty. Remarkably, IMA president Dr Y Blachar is currently
chairperson of the council of the World Medical Association (WMA), the official
international watchdog on medical ethics. A supine BMA appears in collusion with
this farce at the WMA. Others are silenced by a fear of being labelled
"anti-semitic," a term used in a morally corrupt way by the pro-Israel lobby in
order to silence. How are we to affect this shocking situation, one which to
this South African-born doctor has gone further than the excesses of the
apartheid era.
