Jimmy Carter has been in Gaza today, having crossed from Israel through the horrendous concrete processing-point at Erez. He is due to meet with elected Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haneyya of Hamas, and to pass on to him a letter for longtime Israeli POW Gilad Shalit, that he was given by Shalit’s father in Israel.
It’s been a busy trip for the 84-year-old former president. He started in Lebanon where he monitored the (very well-run) June 7 elections. Then he went to Syria, where he met the Syrian president and the overall head of the Hamas movement, Khaled Meshaal. In Israel, he met prime minister Netanyahu, other government leaders, some settlers from the West Bank, and Noam Shalit. In Ramallah he met US-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the few elected Hamas parliamentarians who are not currently in Israeli prisons on terms of imprisonment without trial…
And now he’s in Gaza.
During the trip Carter is almost certainly following up on the efforts he made last year to help Hamas and the Israelis find a way to– indirectly– negotiate a robust ceasefire along the Gaza front. He has also urged the Palestinians to end the lengthy feud between Hamas and Abbas’s Fateh movement. (The Bush administration, by contrast, did a lot to fuel that feud.)
In Gaza today, Carter has already visited the sites of some of the buildings destroyed by the IDF during the recent war, including the “American International School” in northern Gaza. He denounced the treatment of the Strip’s 1.5 million people, who have been subjected to a tight Israeli siege for the 41 months since Hamas won free and fair Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006.
After the latest round of intense fighting came to a halt January 18, Israel– with cooperation from Egypt– tightened the siege yet further, blocking the entry into Gaza even of basic materials needed to rebuild homes.
Carter called for an end to the siege:
- “Tragically, the international community too often ignores the cries for help and the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings,” he said as he toured the war-torn, blockaded Gaza Strip.
“The starving of 1.5 million human beings of the necessities of life — never before in history has a large community like this been savaged by bombs and missiles and then denied the means to repair itself.”
… The US and Europe “must try to do all that is necessary to convince Israel and Egypt to allow basic goods into Gaza,” he said. “At same time, there must be no more rockets” from Gaza into Israel.
“Palestinian statehood cannot come at the expense of Israel’s security, just as Israel’s security cannot come at the expense of Palestinian statehood.”
Carter has been closely concerned with Israeli-Palestinian issues continuously since the time of his presidency. His 2007 book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid was controversial in much of the United States– but it was also a runaway best-seller. With the book and with his many public appearances around it, he opened up considerable new space in the American public discourse in which people could start to think about and discuss the Palestine question in new and much more realistic ways.
(Carter was always at pains to clarify that when he talked about “apartheid” he was referring to the emerging situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, not in Israel itself.)
In addition, working with Robert Pastor and other leading staffers at the Atlanta-based Carter Center, the former president has made several very helpful contributions to Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding. The Carter Center has monitored all the Palestinian elections that have been held under the terms of the 1993 Oslo agreement– including that 2006 parliamentary election, in which Hamas competed for the first time and won 74 of the 128 seats.
In early 2008, Carter and Pastor worked hard, and generally behind the scenes, to help nail down the terms on which Israel and Hamas would enter into a six-month ceasefire along the Gaza front. That ceasefire went into operation June 19, 2008 and led to a near-total end of hostilities between the two sides that lasted until, on November 4. On that day, Israel committed a serious violation by undertaking a big ground operation into Gaza that killed five or six Hamas fighters. (Most Americans were focused on other issues that day.)
The November 4 operation led to a progressive breakdown of the June ceasefire. As the ceasefire’s endpoint approached in December, the parties were unable to reach agreement on renewing it… and that set the stage for Israel’s launch, on December 27, of its big assault against Gaza.
On January 18 Hamas and Israel each, separately, announced a decision to cease military operations against the other. That completely un-negotiated brace of ceasefires is inherently unstable and could lead to a new explosion at any point. Meantime, Israel’s tight maintenance of its siege imposes a harsh and continuing collective punishment on Gaza’s people. Egypt is a junior partner in maintaining the siege– partly because of its responsibilities under the terms of its 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and partly for the Egyptian government’s own reasons.
Untangling all these complex issues– as well as the ever-thorny questions of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees, etc– is a big challenge for Sen. George Mitchell’s peacemaking mission. And Mitchell is for political reasons currently quite unable to meet directly with Meshaal, Haneyya, or any other leaders in Hamas, a movement that has a strong following among Palestinians, as has been proven at the ballot box.
Earlier this month I interviewed Meshaal in Damascus. He expressed great readiness to meet with Mitchell, and asked, “Why is Obama ready to deal with Iran without preconditions, but not us?”
He and I both knew that is unlikely to happen in the near future. But at least Mitchell and Obama can benefit from having former President Carter’s eyes, ears, and and considerable talents as a peacemaker brought to bear on the situation.