Groundhog Day in Gaza
David Aaronovitch sets out the issues on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in clear and balanced opinion piece in The Times.
How we got to where we are today can be argued over for decades to come, but the point comes when people have to decide whether they actually want peace or not and that has to involve both sides conceding ground on some major issues.
The key ingredients of a peace settlement, as David Aaronovitch says, have been on the table for 10 years and more: a return to Israel's 1967 borders plus land exchanges, a shared status for Jerusalem and a demilitarised Palestinian state on a 'pro tem' basis, as a way of guaranteeing Israel's security from rocket or other attacks.
All of this is perfectly possible to negotiate, if and when the two sides decide to get serious.
Mutual fear condemns Gaza to Groundhog Day
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
The basic ingredients for a solution are in place. But Israel and Hamas must come to the table without preconditions
The problem with the now famous tweet by the Liberal Democrat MP David Ward — “The big question is, if I lived in Gaza would I fire a rocket? Probably yes” — is not that it is somehow outrageous, but that it lacks the very imagination that it lays claim to. He seems to think that a rocketeer is someone who says: “I’m really angry, I’ll go down to the missile shop and let one fly at the Israelis; perhaps I’ll actually hit something.”
I’m not an expert on the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, but I don’t think it works like that. Even so, Mr Ward might also want to add some detail about whether he will hide his rocket at a UN school and fire it, perhaps, from next to a hospital. As people have.
But his biggest imaginative failure is not to have written a second tweet saying “and if I lived in Sderot would I be urging the Israeli army to silence Hamas for ever? Probably yes.” Because then we could have had a perfect picture of the reflexive impulses that see us once more watching Groundwar Day in Gaza.
Taking sides, David, is the easy part. Fred tweets pictures of the funeral of the three dead Jewish boys (what else can you expect from such people?) to his followers and Shirley tweets out footage of the funeral of the murdered Palestinian lad (typical of their barbarism) to hers. And both of them ignore the meeting between the parents of one young murdered Jew and those of the murdered Palestinian.
It is easy and pious to talk about the futility of war when the terrible truth is that war sometimes resolves things. Bad stuff, such as the wall of separation that scars the area, can work. Not always, though. I listened yesterday to an Israeli expert saying that Hamas would be much weakened by the ground assault, however reluctant the Israeli prime minister was to launch one. The problem was that I had heard all this before, not once, not twice, but maybe half a dozen times.
In 2003, before Hamas took over Gaza, I was there briefly. I interviewed a hardline Hamas leader who had been a paediatrician and had about six months to live before a targeted missile killed him. But the most troubling thing was the school that I visited. After talking to the children (now of fighting age) I wrote that “tomorrow’s harvest will (if nothing stops it) become the killing of one group of the flawless young people I encountered last week by the other. In Gaza, as in the other Palestinian territories, the space for moderation gets smaller with every minor humiliation and every death.”
That observation required no prophetic gift. In 2005 Israel closed Jewish settlements in Gaza unilaterally. If it was hoping for a dividend it was disappointed. A year later Hamas won elections in Gaza. In 2007 it organised a coup and, in effect, separated from the West Bank. There have been no elections since, and Hamas has ruled a one-party, increasingly Islamified, ramshackle, semi-blockaded, siege state ever since. Every couple of years a series of incidents escalates to the point of major Israeli action against the crowded strip, and people die. Their relatives weep, their orphans are traumatised and things settle down, kind of, until the next time.
But this is a Groundhog Day in which everything gets worse each time. Soon this particular action will be over, Israel will withdraw and Hamas will start building rockets again. Perhaps when we have the next war we can all save ourselves effort and money and just reuse the pictures and bloody reports from this July.
What would I do? That is Mr Ward’s question, to which he answered: “Try to kill someone,” and I think we can do better.
First, though, it is not obvious to me that the best answer to Hamas rockets is always military retaliation. It could be that, for Israel, the deaths of those boys on the beach, or of the extended families of Shujai’iya, are worse outcomes than the fear of rockets in Sderot.
Why, after all, do the missiles get fired? Because those firing them think that not firing them is worse than losing children to the inevitable Israeli response. In other words, the deaths are factored in by the rocket firers.
Situations such as Gaza, as I said last week, end all thinking. Even the best reporters there are so caught up in the horrors that there has been no time for analysis. I’ve seen adult journalists using the unequal death toll as a weird form of scoring the conflict. Whoever loses the most people is, somehow, the good guy. Nothing on what Hamas or Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, wants, calculates or fears.
When the John Kerry peace talks failed last year, so horrendous had things become in the rest of the Middle East that no one much took any notice. Certainly not the fabled “Arab street”, which has other things to worry about, such as Syria, the caliphate and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet we know the basic ingredients for a two-state agreement are there (I’m discounting the exclusionist one-state fantasies of Greater Israel), as represented in the Clinton parameters of 2001 and the Geneva Initiative of 2003. It’s the 1967 borders with land exchanges, a shared Jerusalem, a demilitarised Palestinian state pro tem and so on.
We have light at the end of the tunnel, Shimon Peres famously said, but unfortunately there is no tunnel. To get an agreement and make it work involves not just marginalising the rejectionist opposition, but overcoming the deep sense of humiliation felt by Palestinians and the just-as-deep existential fears of the Israelis. They both have to know — properly know — that the other is never going away.
A very good and extended insider account of the last failed peace talks appeared in this month’s New Republic magazine. What was clear from it was that neither side could give up the habit of imposing conditions — unnecessary conditions — on the peace process, to satisfy their domestic critics. To take two examples, stopping all settlement building should not be a pre-condition of talks, nor should the involvement of Hamas. If Hamas wants to exclude itself (as it well might) and leave the talking to Fatah then that’s its decision. But Israel should allow the possibility of a relatively moderate wing emerging with which it can do business. Then it would be talking to almost all the Palestinians.
None of this is likely, of course. And that will mean spending more time in David Ward territory, where stupidity increasingly seems preferable to silence.
