Tahdi’eh: Israel confirms

There will be no handshakes and back-patting on the White House lawn, and no turn-on-a-dime lionizing of this Palestinian leadership by the pillars of the world Jewish community. But the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) agreement that Israel has now confirmed it has agreed to with Hamas may well bring a long-needed degree of calm to both Gaza and southern Israel. And if it holds, it could serve as a foundation stone for an entirely new kind of Israeli-Palestinian relationship over the years ahead.
The rest of the day today, Wednesday, may yet see some fighting, perhaps even a last-minute esclation, as we saw along the Israel-Lebanon border in the 40 hours before the August 2006 ceasefire there went into effect. The Hamas-Israel tahdi’eh is scheduled to go into force at 6 a.m. local time Thursday, 15 hours from now, so hopefully not too many more lives will be uselessly lost before then.
Here’s the deal. Ever since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, the government of Israel– with considerable support from the US-led portions of the “international community”– has maintained and progressively tightened an inhumane and illegal economic siege on Hamas-dominated Gaza, while government leaders have said they would lift the siege only if Hamas and its allies stopped the sporadic rocket attacks they’ve been launching against southern Israel.
But the economic siege and the Hamas rocketings were not the only thing that was going on there. The Israeli military has also, until now, clung hard to a claimed “right” to exercise full freedom of military action in Gaza, and has undertaken many forms of very destructive military actions against militants and others in the Strip. (Remember that the sheer weight and lethality of the ordnance it has used there has far outweighed anything Hamas or anyone else had access to.) In recent years, Israel has also assassinated more than 120 alleged “terror leaders” in the Strip, many of them political leaders, and in the process killed a far greater number of innocent passers-by or family members.
So Hamas, not unreasonably, has demanded that any ceasefire it agree to should be equally binding on Israel.
In 2005 and early 2006, Hamas, like Fateh but unlike some of the smaller Palestinian groups in the Strip, largely complied with a Fateh-Hamas agreement unilaterally to refrain from taking any military action against Israel. That unilateral (Palestinians-only) ceasefire allowed Israel to undertake its withdrawal of troops and settlers from Gaza without major incident. It also allowed the orderly holding of the Palestinian elections of January 2006.
But once Israel had pulled its settlers out of Gaza, it felt no hesitancy about using its military to hammer Gaza hard whenever it pleased.
For Hamas, the idea of returning to a unilateral, Palestinians-only ceasefire with Israel was quite untenable. For them, winning reciprocity in the ceasefire aspect of the deal was vital. Now, they have won it. That is a significant achievement, won after much suffering.
There remains a major potential problem in that the compliance of the two sides with this ceasefire has no monitoring mechanism that I know of. Therefore, ill-wishers either side of the line could still provoke an incident unless the two parties are both willing and able to police it very robustly. If Hamas is to be able to do that, it will probably need some upgrading of its command and control structures, though it has already shown itself fairly capable of exerting discipline throughout the Strip over the twelve months since it chased the ragtag (and US-armed) Fateh bands and hangers-on out of the Strip.
The government of Egypt, which used its longstanding diplomatic relationship with Israel to good advantage to mediate this ceasefire agreement, might well be able to also play a continuing monitoring role? Perhaps even on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border? I’m not sure if that has been discussed yet, but it still could be.
Anyway, if the ceasefire succeeds, the Gaza issue will continue to be an increasingly large issue within Egyptian politics. As it will be, of course, if the ceasefire should catastrophically fail.
If this tahdi’eh goes forward as planned, the Israeli economic siege on Gaza will be progressively lifted, started pretty soon. At some point, the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt will also be re-opened– but this time, according to the reports I’ve seen, notably without any Israeli monitoring role there at all. But with an EU role. An interesting diminution of Israel’s control over Gaza’s borders, if true.
Also, during the week ahead, if the tahdi’eh proceeds, negotiations on the prisoner exchange involving Gilad Shalit and some 350-plus Palestinian detainees will go into high gear. In Palestine as in Iraq, the mass detention of native peoples is one of the ways in which foreign occupying forces try to exert and maintain their control. Don’t think for a minute that, in a huge proportion of these cases, there is any reason for these detentions other than the drive to control the natives, subvert their understandable movements for independence from foreign rule, and use them as hostages in negotiations.
But if this tahdi’eh thereby becomes what I call a tahdi’eh-plus, it might also lead towards some form of longer-term hudna (armistice) between Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank… that is, to some version of a two-state solution. Or, it could lead to a situation in which– as both Hamas and Israel’s Likud desire– the border between the West Bank and Israel dissolves completely and a new kind of polity arises throughout the whole of Mandate (pre-partition) Palestine.
But that’s for the future. For now, just keep hoping and praying for the success of this tahdi’eh. It will bring vitally needed relief to the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza, and to their neighbors in southern Israel. And it might provide enough calm inside both national communities for the members and leaders of both to start planning their future in the tiny slice of land between the sea and the Jordan River in a more rational, equitable, and sustainable way.