The following is from the London Review of Books, publication date
of January 29, 2009. The author Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East
Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of
London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of
the Synagogue Council of America.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n02/sieg01_.html
29 January 2009
Israels Lies
Henry Siegman
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of
Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently
violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend
it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamass capacity to
launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation,
part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own
defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies
against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV
channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events.
Criticism of Israels actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush
administration), has focused instead on whether the IDFs carnage is
proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking
adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me
state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated
the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return,
Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it
tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral
international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.)
Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDFs Gaza Division. In an interview in
Haaretz on 22 December, he accused Israels government of having made a
central error during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by
failing to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen,
the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a
tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues, General Zakai
said, it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and
that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just
land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress theyre in,
and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.
The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December,
required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas
had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other
groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israels intelligence agencies acknowledged
this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put
a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This
understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza
and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets
and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on
condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its
obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it
didnt even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect
its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the
strangulation of Gazas population.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings
and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and
largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision,
citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the
Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won
the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result
and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been
dismissed by Israels leaders as a plucked chicken. They armed and trained
his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas brutally, to be sure
pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest
democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush
administration imposed the blockade.
Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in
withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the
chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take;
instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at
Israels civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all
its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent
years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the
Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords
who terrorised Gaza under Fatahs rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and
other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would
have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.
The greater lie is that Sharons withdrawal from Gaza was intended as a prelude
to further withdrawals and a peace agreement. This is how Sharons senior
adviser Dov Weisglass, who was also his chief negotiator with the Americans,
described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Haaretz in August
2004:
What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the
settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be
dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians
turn into Finns . . . The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the
freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you
prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion
about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package
that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been
removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bushs]
authority and permission . . . and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians dont read the Israeli
papers, or that when they saw what was happening on the West Bank they couldnt
figure out for themselves what Sharon was up to?
Israels government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its
Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic
terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a terror organisation (Israels
preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish
homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement
resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny
Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous
Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 triggered a wave of Irgun
bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the
conflict. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the
IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Haaretz, that material
released by Israels Ministry of Defence showed that there were far more
Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of
April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated
explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the
villages themselves. In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF
carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Haaretz whether he
condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:
A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of
700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no
choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland
and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to
cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.
In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their
national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are
terrorists.
It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a terror organisation. It is a
religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist
movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it
is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian
state. While Hamass ideology formally calls for that state to be established
on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesnt determine Hamass actual
policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined
Fatahs actions.
These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the
former head of Mossad and Sharons national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy.
The Hamas leadership has undergone a change right under our very noses,
Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that its ideological
goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future. It is now
ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the
temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how
temporary those borders would be, they know that the moment a Palestinian
state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change
the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far
from their original ideological goals. In an earlier article, Halevy also
pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.
In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due
to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any
understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief,
Khaled] Mashals declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaidas approach, and
provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for
the better.
Why then are Israels leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they
believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into
accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian state made up of
territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain
permanent control. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective
of Israels military, intelligence and political elites since the end of the
Six-Day War.[*] They believe that Hamas would not permit such a cantonisation
of Palestinian territory, no matter how long the occupation continues. They may
be wrong about Abbas and his superannuated cohorts, but they are entirely right
about Hamas.
Middle East observers wonder whether Israels assault on Hamas will succeed in
destroying the organisation or expelling it from Gaza. This is an irrelevant
question. If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity,
it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in
dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical
Palestinian opposition.
If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that
outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable
peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave
them to work out their differences, he will assure a future Palestinian
resistance far more extreme than Hamas one likely to be allied with al-Qaida.
For the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, this would be the worst
possible outcome. Perhaps some Israelis, including the settler leadership,
believe it would serve their purposes, since it would provide the government
with a compelling pretext to hold on to all of Palestine. But this is a
delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic
state.
Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle
East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for
Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing
the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost and were probably
no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective
strikes on key Hamas facilities. Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily
escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly
achieve? he asks. Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms
that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israels actions seriously damage the
US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes
and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.
Cordesman concludes that any leader can take a tough stand and claim that
tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and
Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their
country and their friends.
15 January
Note
[*] See my piece in the LRB, 16 August 2007.
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Other articles by the same author:
Gazas Future ? Breaching the Barrier
The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam ? There Is No Peace Proces
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