It is possible, though at this point highly unlikely— see my note #1 below– that the Israeli government will forcefully intervene sometime in the near future to break the link between the Gaza Strip and Egypt that was opened up in such an amazing way on Wednesday through the organized, nonviolent mass action of Gaza’s people.
Barring such an intervention, the new direct link between Gaza and Egypt that has been opened up will become in one way or another institutionalized.
Until Wednesday, there was no direct link. The only “direct” crossing point between the two territories, at Rafah, was overseen on the Palestinian side by an EU monitoring group who did their monitoring on behalf of the Israelis, transmitting information about the people crossing through a videolink to Israeli officials working at the nearby “Keren Shalom” freight crossing point linking Gaza and Israel. Rafah was only for persons, not goods; and under the terms of an earlier US-brokered agreement between Israel and the PA, Israel was able to define the limits on who could use it, namely only residents of Gaza crossing in and out, and only I believe with prior approval for their crossing from Israel.
Thus, for example, Gaza Palestinian resident Laila el-Haddad, could on occasion cross in and out with her parents and child. But her Palestinian husband Yassine, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and carries only the laissez-passer that Lebanon issues to Palestinian refugees, could not enter Gaza with his wife and child(ren)– through Rafah or through any other point.
Anyway, at Israeli insistence, the Rafah crossing has been completely closed for some months now.
Now, the situation at Rafah, and indeed along the length of the 7-mile border between Gaza and Egypt, has changed completely. Today, nobody is exercising any degree of control over the border. But the only bodies with forces nearby who could possibly exert control over it relatively easily are Hamas and the Egyptian government. That is the new reality.
On Wednesday, I wrote that the mass bust-out from Gaza of that day “raises the intriguing possibility that the elected Hamas leaders may now seek to implement a plan they have long had to re-open Gaza’s connection with the world economy through Egypt, rather through Israel.” Yesterday, Jonathan Edelstein contributed this thoughtful commentary on that possibility. Both he and I referred to the interviews I conducted in Gaza back in March 2006 with the then- newly elected Hamas parliamentary leaders, especially Hamas veteran Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, with whom I had a fairly lengthy interview in English at that time.
It’s worth going back and seeing what he said in that interview, which I wrote up most fully here. It’s also worth going to the longer article I published afterwards in Boston Review, in which I explored the emergence of what I called “parallel unilateralisms” between Olmert-ist Israel and the (Hamas-led) Palestinians.
The key difference between this approach to conflict reduction and social stabilization in Israel and Palestine and the “Oslo” approach is that, while the latter depends centrally on folding the Palestinians into an Israeli-dominated economic order and imposing a strongly Israeli-weighted resolution of the conflict onto the Palestinians, a parallel unilateralisms approach sees the two societies each focusing on pursuing its own economic capabilities including economic links with the outside world, while allowing most of the remaining issues of contention between them to remain, for now, unresolved.
My 3/18/06 JWN write-up of the interview with Zahhar included this:
- I asked how he foresaw a Hamas government proceeding in the tricky arena of international trade relations. Ever since the birth of the PA in 1994, its economy has been tied to Israel’s much larger, much wealthier economy through an agreement called the ‘ Paris Agreement’, which delineates a single ‘customs envelope’ around the two countries. Israel exercises complete control over the movement of all goods into and out of Gaza and the West Bank– and this control continues, even regarding Gaza, and even after last summer’s withdrawal of all of Israel’s troops and settlers from the body of the Gaza Strip. This control over all avenues for external trade has given Israel a stranglehold over the PA’s economy that is even tighter than the one that apartheid South Africa used to exercise over its Bantustans.
The Paris agreement also allows Israel to control all aspects of bilateral trade between the two entities, a fact that it has exploited by treating the Palestinian areas as a captive markets for its own goods while placing extremely high, often insuperable, barriers on the Palestinians’ ability to export their goods to Israel.
Zahhar spoke with calm determination about the prospect of Gaza breaking out of the Paris Agreement. “An opening of our trade links to Egypt and through our seaport is a first option for us,” he said.
- The Israelis have violated all the economic agreements from the Paris Agreement through to the Rafah Agreement [which was concluded with Secretary Rice’s help just last November]. So we are not obligated to remain within them.
If we push ahead with regard to opening our border with Egypt, we can certainly make it work to the benefit of both sides. You know, in September, right after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza,when our border with Egypt was unsecured– we learned that our people spent $8 million in El-Arish in just ten days, because the prices of everything in Egypt are so much lower than the prices the Israelis impose on us here.
I mentioned a concern that some Palestinians had voiced: that if Gaza broke out of the Paris Agreement, this would split it off even more from the West Bank– an area that remains under much tighter and more pervasive Israeli control than Gaza. Zahhar was unfazed. “Gaza is already cut from the West Bank,” he said. He noted that any switch by the Gazans from the customs envelope with Israel to a new economic link with Egypt, “should of course be by arrangement with Egypt.”
He was harshly critical of the record of the Fateh-dominated security services…
I will just add a few quick further notes here. (I am really rushed because I still need to write up last week’s interview with Khaled Meshaal properly… I have gotten so behind!)
- 1. We still need to look carefully at the capabilities the Israelis and their Bushist allies have to “roll back” the victory Hamas won this week. I haven’t given this question adequate thought yet. But my gut instinct is that neither country has much capability to do this– due to US over-stretch in Iraq and continuing leadership paralysis in Israel. Probably the most they can do is try to contain the extent of the Hamas victory?
2. If Hamas is successful in pursuing and institutionalizing the Zahharist vision of unilateralism, the situation in Gaza would have many parallels with that in Hizbullah-dominated South Lebanon. With the Cairo government playing the same alliance role to Hamas that the Beirut government back in the Hariri days played to Hizbullah? There are some evident differences. But the relationship between Hamas and Cairo will be key. One problem being, though, that the present government in Cairo feels itself strongly threatened by Hamas’s long-time brothers in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe this can only work if there is a new form of entente between Mubarak and the MB in Cairo? Might the Gaza bust-out force this outcome onto Mubarak?
3. Fateh and its supporters remain, I think, deeply hostile both to Hamas (goes without saying) but also to the idea of Gaza “going it alone” in any way. They want to find a way to reassert Ramullah’s rule over Gaza. The Hamas people have reached out to Abu Mazen to ask him to negotiate a new crossing(s) arrangement with Egypt. (Unclear how genuine that invitation to cooperation was?) But Abu Mazen has turned them down. The stage is set for a new form of strategic competition– this time, perhaps, between the “development model” of Hamas-ruled Gaza and that of the Israel-and-PA-ruled West Bank.
4. I find Zahhar’s argument that Gaza and the WB were already split from each other, so Hamas going it alone in Gaza is not a splittist move, quite convincing. Also, though Palestinians have lived under many different administrations in the region for 60 years now– under Israeli occupation, under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation before that, as (second-class) citizens of Israel, as exiled refugees outside their homeland, etc… still, the vast majority of them have not abandoned their feeling of being part of one unified Palestinian people.
5. Re the possibility of Egypt moving in assertively to re-close the border: No, I don’t see it as ever being able to close it up as tightly as it had done prior to January 23. Naturally, both Egypt and Hamas have an interest in having some form of control-line either along the existing international border or somewhere close. But Egypt cannot now, I think, return to its previous situation of being Israel’s sub-contractor in maintaining the total noose of siege around Gaza. Mubarak tried to maintain that role on Tuesday, but finally decided it put him in an untenable position.
6. Jonathan wrote about the possible conditions for encouraging “foreign investment” in a liberated-from-Paris Gaza. I don’t think we even need to go as far as considering “foreign” investment. But we can look first and foremost at the prospects for Palestinian investment in the Strip if it enters an economic arrangement with Egypt.
One of the problems the “Oslo” economic plans always encountered was that the many fairly wealthy Palestinians around the world were reluctant to invest very much in Gaza or the West Bank because the territories still remained under Israel’s control in the economic and all other domains. They didn’t want their big investments to be held hostage by Israel. And the events of April 2002, when Sharon sent his army in to demolish large numbers of the infrastructural and other economic facilities in both territories showed how right they were to be wary. In a Gaza that is on a state of “no negotiations but some degree of mutual deterrence” with Israel, anyone’s investments could still– as we saw in Lebanon in 2006– be hostage to an outburst of very destructive Israeli “shock and awe-ism.” But still, maybe Israel could move away from that? (Okay, perhaps a big “maybe” there; but I’m trying to think aloud here… )
7. Gaza has a very well-educated population that is thickly connected to the outside world. Every Gaza family has family members who are “outside”– whether as migrant workers, teachers, bankers, or whatever. (Hence, btw, the huge joy these families felt this week on being able at last to reconnect with loved ones from whom they have long been separated through Israel’s maintenance of the movement controls and the even tighter recent siege.) These are huge assets for anyone contemplating the economic rehabilitation of Gaza. It is not a basket-case.
8. Water and sewage issues will of course be, as Jonathan mentioned, a massive constraint on any sustained growth. One of the first priorities must be to completely rehabilitate the sewage-disposal system, which is in terrible, life-threatening condition. Israel certainly has a continuing responsibility to provide Gaza with adequate supplies of water. The amounts and terms of this water supply can no doubt be negotiated in some way. Water-course-wise, the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza all sit on a series of underground aquifers in which, in general, the water flows from east to west. Right now Israel controls water usage in the West Bank. (Giving, as we know, hugely disproportionate amounts of water to its coddled Jewish settlers there.) It also sits astride the aquifer that flows under Gaza, and by its own depletion of that aquifer has wrecked the quality of the water available to Gaza. A system of water usage based on the equality of all human persons and the provision of water to national communities on a basis proportional to their population, needs to worked out as soon as possible.
Anyway, now I need to hurry back to my real work. I urge you all to go back and read 2006 writings linked to above. And let the conversation continue.
There is another issue. King Abdullah must be quaking in his boots as to whether another break-out attempt might be made across the Jordan. The Jordan river is only a puddle these days, as nearly all the water has been taken.
It might not be possible, as the Israeli barbed wire is too thick. But the fire has been lit, and it will not disappear from the minds of Palestinians, or their numerous relatives in Jordan.
Back to the future? A return to pre-1967 when Gaza was under the thumb of Egypt and Jordanian King Abdullah’s rule extended to the West Bank of the Jordan River?
I do not think that it is back to the pre-1967 days for Gaza because of one crucial difference: Gaza I believe would emerge as a key factor in the power play going on in Cairo between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian regime. It (Gaza leadership) may either foster an understanding on the issue of Mubarak succession or tip the balance in favor of the Brotherhood (too early to tell). I have held the opinion that Gaza would not be a political or economic satellite of Israel, and that much has certainly been clear since the demise of the PA regime there. The Jordan valley (and I include both banks of the valley) has historically been a different matter. For a variety of reasons it has gravitated both politically and economically to the more powerful centers to the East and West of it: first to Iraq and since to Israel. It is not clear however whether a Gaza contagion can be prevented long-term if its breakout succeeds, hence the strategic dilemma of the Israelis and the Americans. This is where I would skeptical of the view that the developments in Gaza may proceed hermetically sealed from those of the West Bank and Jordan.
Now how about the effects of the Gaza breakout on Lebanon? I It would not be too surprising to state that it would strengthen the hand of the anti-American camp there. Time would tell.
Sorry, all I have are questions.
1. What is the total military strength of Egyptian security forces for Sinai? Is it limited by the 1979 Treaty to a total security force of 750? Are weapons limited to basic small arms and a collection of lightly armored vehicles?
2. Does the 1979 Treaty require the deployment of the Egyptian Army east of the Suez Canal? There are conflicting reports of Sinai being demilitarized by the 1979 Treaty, while some sources report an Egyptian Army deployment of “half a division”.
3. Is a total troop strength of 1000 for Hamas in Gaza a reliable figure?
I’ve found a possible answer to question 3:
“Israeli military officials estimate that the group [Hamas] has approximately 13,000 armed members divided into four brigades.”–Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
This is a very interesting development in the client state relationship Israel has had with Gaza. Gaza breaking out of their Israel imposed blockade with Israel not retaliating with force shows how much Israel has lost it’s dominance after the Israel incursion into Lebanon fiasco last year.
The end result may be that Israel will have to attack Egypt with the IDF if they are to wrestle economic superiority back from Gaza/Egypt similar to Israel attacking Beruit when Lebanon’s economy began to rival Israels in the recent Israel/Lebanon war.
Hopefully Israels business interests will not petition the Israeli government to follow the same path with Gaza/Egypt as they did with Hezbolla/Lebanon when Israeli’s economy is rivaled by Gaza in the near future.
Seele, you make it sound like Israel’s motivation for fighting the 2006 war was because Beirut was doing better economically. Do you really have any evidence on the idea that Israel would actually go to war just because Beirut businesses were apparently having better earnings? Really, there must be less messy ways of achieving economic superiority…This sounds like a conspiracy theory that stereotypes Israelis as resorting to violent and destructive responses to even an issue as mundane as economic performance.
“a conspiracy theory that stereotypes Israelis as resorting to violent and destructive responses to even an issue as mundane as economic performance”? goodness me, how far-fetched.
Viewing photos from Yahoo News, for the first time it appears that regular Egyptian Army units are now present at the border, as reinforcements. A squad of Egyptians appears in several photo frames, wearing distinctive camo BDU’s and army type helmets. They are seen making repairs to the outer wall’s concertina wire, at a position breached by a Palestinian bulldozer.
Which brings me back to my previous questions regarding relative troops strengths of military and security forces within Sinai. This situation offers the potential of a military showdown between corresponding forces, which may or may not be contained within a political negotiation.
One finds the darndest stuff here…like the $24 billion Lebanese economy is outperforming the $150 billion Israeli economy.
When the facts are so wrong, how can one rely upon the conclusions drawn from them?
Yes Truesdell, I was struck by that as well. We do it all because we’re jealous and afraid of the Lebanese and Gaza economies!
“Business Owners, Workers Charge Israel Deliberately Targeted Lebanon’s Economy”
http://www.democracynow.org/2006/9/19/business_owners_workers_charge_israel_deliberately
excerpt:
“ANA NOGUEIRA: Liban Lait, the country’s largest dairy farm, is another widely cited example of a factory bombed by Israel for reasons of economic competition. In 2001, the company won a $15,000 per week contract to supply the United Nations interim force in Lebanon with dairy products. Prior to that, the contract was held by an Israeli firm. This is Michel Waked, the company’s director.
MICHEL WAKED: We were quite respectable, I think. Quite respectable trademark on the market. And we had, I think, one of the best dairies in the area. UNIFIL switched from Israel to us. And this is the reason, you know, because they were satisfied with our quality, with the milk, with everything. And we have been supplying them for the past five years, milk, until we were bombed.
ANA NOGUEIRA: Israel has said it bombed facilities it suspected of housing munitions for Hezbollah. But Liban Lait’s Christian Maronite owner says the claim is ridiculous.
MICHEL WAKED: When you have a contract with the United Nations, and the United Nations contract, they say, you know, they can inspect the factory any time they want. So, second, we had the contact people. They come here very often, and they live on the site. And they know every corner of the factory. Hezbollah, are they so stupid to come and put their bombs here? If all—they come and put in a dairy who has a contract with the United Nations and who produces a dairy license from a French company, and we have engineers, foreign engineers. Will they put their bombs here?…”
I don’t think that the suggestion is that Israel started the war because it wanted to cripple the Lebanese economy, but rather that Israel tried to damage Hezbollah’s standing in Lebanon by attacking economic targets, hoping that the Lebanese would blame Hezbollah for its loses. And Israel also found a way, by bombing certain Lebanese companies that compete with Israeli companies, to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.
If you want to come up with a plausible alternative reason for bombing a dairy farm owned by a Christian Maronite, that any reasonable Israeli intelligence analyst would have clearly known could not have been a source for Shi’ite Hezbollah weaponry, have at it. But to totally dismiss any economic reason for the targets Israel chose seems to be a clearly cavalier attitude borne of ignorance of the type of damage Israel wrought in Lebanon.
If you want to come up with a plausible alternative reason for bombing a dairy farm owned by a Christian Maronite, that any reasonable Israeli intelligence analyst would have clearly known could not have been a source for Shi’ite Hezbollah weaponry, have at it. But to totally dismiss any economic reason for the targets Israel chose seems to be a clearly cavalier attitude borne of ignorance of the type of damage Israel wrought in Lebanon.
Yes, I have a much more plausible explanation. The dairy facilities were really being used by Hizballah. The fact that the owner is Maronite really doesn’t rule this out. Remember Michel Aoun? He’s Maronite Christian, and he entered into a political deal with Hizballah and Amal.
I have no doubt that the IDF bombed infrastructure to put pressure on the Lebanese government to enforce Taif. But to suggest that the IDF pinpointed specific competitors to help Strauss or Tnuva sell to the UN is – well – ridiculous. To argue that Israel is somehow threatened by Lebanon’s economic activities – the two compete in hardly anything – is laughable.
BTW, you might want to check and see who’s selling milk to the UN now. I have no idea, but that might be interesting.