Author: Helena

Every so often people can surprise you. Thus it was today with Daniel Pipes, writing in the Jerusalem Post that Israel should just “offload” Gaza onto Egypt.
What I don’t like about Pipes’s piece is the extremely demeaning way he writes about the Palestinians. “Given that Gazans have shown themselves incapable of responsible self-rule… ” and so on. But here’s the thing about the “parallel unilateralisms” approach– parallel as between Likudniks like D. Pipes, and the people in Hamas, as I wrote about here, back in 2006: participants in that kind of approach don’t have to be all lovey-dovey; they don’t have to like each other, or even particularly pretend that they do. They just need to let each other get on with their lives.
Pipes says that the “disengage from Gaza” project was suggested to him by Rob Satloff of the Washington Institute for Pro-Israeli Policy. He writes that Satloff suggested that Israel announce these three steps:

“a date certain for the severing of Israel’s provision of water, electricity and trade access, free entry for replacement services through Egypt, and an invitation for international support to link Gaza to Egyptian grids.”

And he notes that “Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, would also detach Gaza from its customs union with Israel and the West Bank.”
This would be music to the ears of many or most of the leaders of Hamas. Interesting. Particularly interesting if Likud comes into power and actually does this.
Parallel unilateralisms is almost the polar opposite of the “integrationist” approach to peacemaking that has been pursued in particular by Shimon Peres and some people in Fateh– with huge amounts of funding from well-meaning people and governments in the west who just love all that encounter-group bonding stuff. However, I worked in one such project, at the non-governmental level, for nearly two years back in the early 1990s; and I can tell you there are a lot of very unhealthy power plays that go on in many or most of them. How could there not be? What you’re talking about, after all, is representatives from one very powerful group, that have passports and resources and nearly all the contacts with the funders, ability to set the agendas, etc etc, and representatives from the other group who have almost none of those advantages…
Thus you had, for example, Shimon Peres who even while he was professing all his “New Middle East” business, was the one who as Prime Minister launched Israel’s extremely lethal 1996 punitive military attack against Lebanon and supported various other uses of quite disproportionate military violence. He wasn’t about to cede any real say in the diplomatic agenda to anyone, no matter how nice he made… And there are power plays and huge vested interests from many of the “mediators” and would-be mediators in the west, too.
I know politics and diplomacy are not the same as interpersonal relations. But they sometimes have a lot in common. Speaking from my experience of my first marriage breaking up, I think it was essential for me– and maybe for my ex, too– to be able to have a “Clean break” from each other. While we still both tried thereafter to deal with each other in a cordial, indeed helpful, way in our management of our continued joint interests (that is, the rearing of our children), once we’d made the decision to divorce neither of us was under any pressure to be “best friends” with each other any more. That would surely have led to some horrendous “Kramer vs. Kramer”-type difficulties. Instead, we both moved on and married other people, and created two new blended families.
The “integrationist” approach has been pursued by Israel towards the Palestinians– without success– since Oslo. Maybe it could have worked in the 1990s, under very different circumstances. (Including some serious and visionary engagement by Bill Clinton in the process, rather than having him just act as in-house attorney for whoever happened to be in power in Israel which was the role he played for eight years there.) But we are 15 years on from Oslo now. The integrationist approach has not worked and it shows no imminent signs of working. Maybe it really is time for a “Clean break”– but of a kind notably different from the one the Likudniks and PNAC-ers proposed back in 1996.
I have Palestinian friends who, when we’ve discussed this matter, have argued passionately that if Gaza “switches” from being tied to the current Israeli-dominated customs union to being linked to Egypt’s economy, then that would signal a disastrous break between Gaza and the West Bank. A long-held mantra of the Palestinian nationalists has been that Gaza and the West Bank are “one political entity.” All previous moves Israel has made at enacting a “Gaza first” approach were strongly criticized.
But Gaza has been disconnected from the West Bank, in practice, for 15 years now. And meanwhile, its people– as also, indeed, the 2.2 million Palestinians of the West Bank– have been suffering hugely from their subordination to Israel’s economic as well as military domination. So if the 1.4 million Gazas have a chance to escape that economic servitude, at last; to break out of the completely anti-humane conditions of economic siege that Israel has imposed upon them and re-open their economy to the world through Egypt: then why should a completely unelected Mr. Salam Fayyad in Ramullah and his many western bankrollers forbid them from doing that?
We should underline the fact that since Oslo it has been forbidden for nearly all Gazans even to visit Jerusalem or anywhere else in the West Bank. Travel between the two territories was far easier before Oslo– even during the height of the First Intifada! It was Oslo that brought the tightened restrictions on travel and trade. Most Gazans alive today have never had the chance even to visit their holy places in Jerusalem.
But– and this is important to note– the fact of this longlasting separation in practice between Gaza and the West Bank has not diminished by one jot the feeling that Gazans have of allegiance to the Palestinian national identity, or their love of and longing for Jerusalem. Similarly, nearly all the millions of Palestinians living as multi-generational refugees in Jordan, and Syria, Lebanon, or elsewhere, also still keenly feel themselves to be Palestinians, who have a special tie to Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. So the argument that if Gazans build new economic ties with Egypt then they will somehow “forget” their Palestinian-ness, seems without merit.
It’s worth remembering, too, that more than 80% of Gaza’s people are also multi-generational refugees from inside current Israel. They are certainly not about to simply forget all those longstanding claims they have against Israel, which are specifically Palestinian claims and are not shared by Egyptians or any other non-Palestinians.
To be honest, I haven’t made my mind up yet– for what it’s worth– as to whether the unilateralist (or more precisely, Egypt-focused) approach to socioeconomic reconstruction and regional diplomacy can offer a viable path forward for Gaza’s people. What I do see is that the “integration with a much more powerful Israel while sporadically trying to disentangle” approach ihas not worked for the Gazans or the West Bankers… Worse than that, it is inflicting visible harms on Gaza’s people (and the people of the West Bank) day after day after day.
Hey, here’s an idea: Why not let the people of Gaza– or, the people of Gaza and the West Bank– have a free and fair vote on this matter? Why, the vote might even take the form of a parliamentary election… (What do you mean they did have just such a vote back in January 2006? They did? So where are all those parliamentarians now? Oh, in Israel’s jails… Ain’t democracy great?)

Today’s Haaretz carries exciting news about a proposal for an Israel-Gaza ceasefire that has been jointly drafted by Khaled Amayreh, a Hebron-area journalist who is close to Hamas (and whose work I have frequently cited here), and Rabbi Menachem Froman of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa.
Haaretz’s Yair Ettinger writes:

“Our proposal was presented to the highest political echelon in the Hamas government in Gaza and gained 100-percent approval,” Amayreh told Haaretz Sunday, while refusing to name the government officials. Froman said the document was presented to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has yet to respond to it.
Even if the attempt turns out to be merely an academic exercise, say Froman and Amayreh, its elements could be used by the Jerusalem and Gaza governments.

The way Ettinger describes the document, the agreement would include provision for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who has been held by Gaza Palestinians as a POW since spring 2006 and is now well established as being under Hamas’s general control. It would also include a full tahdi’eh (ceasefire) between Israel and Gaza and some, though not all, elements of a more far-reaching hudna between Israel and Palestine.
Ettinger writes:

The Hebrew and Arabic document contains verses from the Koran and the Bible and states, “God is the greatest of all and He alone can bring an end to the problems between the noble Palestinian people and the distinguished Jewish people in the Holy Land.”

I really love this formulation for dealing with the 120-year-old contest between Palestinians and Jews for control of the Holy Land: Leave that big issue to the Almighty, working in His or Her own time, which is not the same as politicians’ time!
And more immediately, there is this:

The proposal calls for Israel to lift its sanctions on the Gaza Strip, permit economic relations between Gaza and the outside world and open all border crossings. The Israel Defense Forces would end “all hostile activities toward the Gaza Strip, including targeted assassinations, the setting of ambushes, aerial bombardments and all penetrations into Gazan territory, in addition to ending the arrest, detention and persecution of Palestinians in the Strip.”
The Palestinians would be obligated “to take all the necessary steps to completely end the attacks against Israel,” including stopping “indefinitely all rocket attacks on Israel,” assaults “on Israeli civilians and soldiers” and “to impose a cease-fire on all groups, factions and individuals operating in the Strip.”

Two last quick points here. One is that I’m assuming that in addition to the release of Shalit the document also makes provision for the release of many of the Palestinians held in Israeli detention– who include around 45 of the parliamentarians elected in the free and fair Palestinian elections of January 2006.
On another page, Haaretz tells us that “Hamas has given Israel a letter apparently written by abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit… The authenticity of the letter has been examined and sent to the Shalit family.”
So it looks as if the letter was deemed authentic enough to send it on to the family. It seems, too, that Hamas has underlined in this way that it does indeed have control– whether direct or indirect– over Shalit and therefore, by extension, is in a position to assure his release if its conditions for an Israeli counter-release are met.
The Haaretz article gives further details of the negotiations over how many, and which, Palestinians Israel is prepared to release. Olmert is reported to have relaxed his criteria for the release somewhat, but negotiations among Israel’s various security bodies still continue and the writer’s sources say there may not be a deal for a number of months yet.
And finally– this is something of direct relevance to what I was writing yesterday— this morning, a Palestinian suicide bomber who had reportedly crossed into southern Israel across the lightly guarded border with Egypt blew himself up in the Negev town of Dimona, killing one Israeli woman and himself, and wounding 11 other people. A second reported bomber was shot dead at the scene by police before he could detonate his vest.
So here’s a very important aspect of the attack that Haaretz and others report:

Abu Fouad, a spokesman for the Fatah-allied Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – which claimed responsibility for the attack – said the operation had been planned for a month, but was made possible after militants violently opened Gaza’s border with Egypt on January 23.

But here is my concern: Is there a possibility that Israel’s leaders, politically embattled and embarrassed by last week’s release of the final portion of the Winograd report, might use the Dimona attack as a pretext to hit back hard against the people of Gaza and the newly empowered Hamas leaders there?
Israel’s often pugnacious Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has reportedly been pushing for a significant military attack against Gaza for some time now. He doubtless has the plans for such an attack all ready to go. Barak has been particularly embarrassed by the fall-out from Winograd because before its publication he had vowed that if the report was critical of PM Olmert then he would lead the Labour Party out of the governing coalition. The report was very critical of Olmert’s leadership during the 33-day war, though not naming him or anyone else by name. Barak has not resigned.
(Btw, I find it fascinating that party discipline in the Labour Party is so weak these days that this was apparently a decision that Barak alone, as party leader, could make. Shouldn’t it have been a party decision? Just asking here… )
I’ll just note that almost exactly 25 years ago, when Defense Minister Areil Sharon was itching for any excuse at all to launch a big attack against the PLO in Lebanon, he used the pretext of an attack made against the Israeli ambassador in London by operatives from the virulently anti-PLO Palestinian faction of Abu Nidal to launch that attack.
Let’s hope wiser heads will prevail this time.
Look at what Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon led to!!!

* The birth and amazingly successful establishment of Lebanon’s Hizbullah party, which previously never existed.
* An 18-year quagmire for the Israeli troop presence in Lebanon, which was finally ended only when Ehud Barak himself, as the newly elected Prime Minister of Israel decided to pull the last troops out unilaterally, in 2000.
* The rise in the occupied territories of the first generation of home-based Palestinian national leaders, who five years after 1982 launched their first, remarkably successful– even if ultimately aborted– Intifada.

A full-scale invasion and reoccupation of Gaza this time round could be expected to have results considerably more counter-productive than that from Israel’s point of view.
That’s why the Amayreh-Froman document and the cautious, tension-calming path forward that it lays out, may gain some traction within Israel in the weeks ahead, just as it already has with the Hamas leadership. Let’s hope so.

Egypt’s great daily paper Al-Masry Al-Yawm has an important article today describing the intensive efforts Egyptian officials have been making to secure both a (degree of) Hamas-Fateh reconciliation and an agreement with the relevant Palestinian parties– preferably, both of them– regarding the orderly operation of the Rafah crossing point. (Hat-tip Bill. By the way, readers should also note that, in addition to being a great paper, AMAY’s website has an excellently edited English-language version. Kudos to them!)
The authors of the article are Sherif Ibrahim, Fathia al-Dakhakhni and Mahasen el-Senousi.
They write:

An Egyptian diplomatic source revealed that Egypt is making continuous efforts with Fatah and Hamas about crossing points between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. It also said that the talks recently held in Cairo over this issue were not a failure but just a first step.
The source affirmed that over the next few days, Cairo would host two delegations from Fatah and Hamas to reach a solution over crossing points and start a dialogue between the two movements…

And then this important information from Hamas spokesperson Taher al-Nounou:

He affirmed that Hamas accepted European observers at the gate provided that they do not decide when to open and close it, that they live in Arish or Rafah and not go to Israel as they used to. He also stressed on the fact that the Europeans would be back by virtue of a new comprehensive agreement not related to the 2005 one.
Nounou said that the most important issue of the talks – focused on by Egyptian officials – was Egyptian security in Sinai, pointing out that Egypt opened the Rafah transit border as it refused to let the Palestinian people die of hunger.
“We told Egyptian officials that the government in Gaza was eager to guarantee Egypt’s security,” he said “and that this security would not be undermined.

The close-to-Hamas Palestinian Information Center (PIC) website carried this report from a press conference that Hamas’s former foreign minister Mahmoud Zahhar held yesterday in Rafah.
It said this:

The Hamas leader announced that the Palestinian-Egyptian borders will be closed Sunday morning in cooperation between security men of both sides until the procedures aimed at rearranging the movement of entry and exit have been completed, pointing out that the caretaker government headed by premier Ismail Haneyya will do its utmost to control the crossing.
He explained that the coming days will witness a series of positive developments, describing his visit and the delegation accompanying him to Cairo as highly successful.

And this morning AP is reporting from Rafah that,

Egyptian troops closed the last breach in Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip Sunday, ending 11 days of free movement for Palestinian residents of the blockaded territory, witnesses and Hamas security officials said.
Hamas police aided with the closure, drawing pistols and arresting Palestinians who were throwing stones at Egyptian troops along the frontier. It was a dramatic turnabout for Hamas, whose militants had used explosives to bring down the border wall.
The Egyptian troops were allowing Gazans and Egyptians to cross the border to return to their homes on the other side but prevented any new cross-border movement, according to witnesses and Hamas security officials in the border town of Rafah. The Hamas officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

It is certainly significant that the Hamas people are working with the Egyptian security forces to establish a stable regime along the Gaza-Egypt border— and doing so even though that involves, right now, working with Egypt to reseal the border, even if this complete resealing is only temporary.
Both sides have reason to fear a continuation of the recent chaotic situation there. The Egyptians have been searching for four Palestinians, suspected of planning suicide attacks against some of Egypt’s economically important tourist resorts, who reportedly crossed from Gaza into Sinai on Friday. AP apparently reported that 12 of the 15 heavily armed Palestinians arrested in the north Sinai town of Arish in recent days were members of Hamas. Very evidently, if the Hamas leadership wants to work out a stable agreement with Egypt regarding the border, it will also have to be able to exert its own control effectively over the situation inside Gaza— including, perhaps especially, over the actions of its own members.
It cannot do that easily if the Rafah border remains open to all-comers, including very possibly provocateurs infiltrated by Israel, or Abu Mazen, or who knows who else.
Also, of key importance: For Gaza’s economic opening to and through Egypt to work, as Zahhar and his colleagues want it to, both the Palestinians and the Egyptians need to be able to control– and keep calm– their respective borders with Israel.
Might the next step the Egyptians take, after finding a way to reconcile Abu Mazen and Hamas and a workable formula for opening one or more crossing points on the border, therefore be to help broker a meaningful ceasefire between Gaza and Israel? Why not?
Meanwhile, though Hamas has indeed today been taking actions– including against its own people– in its decision to work with the Egyptians in resealing the border, it is also showing that it retains and will probably continue to develop its capabilities of mounting nonviolent mass actions around the Gaza issue. That same PIC report that told us about Zahhar’s press conference told us this:

Simultaneously with the return of the Hamas delegation from Cairo, thousands of Palestinian women participated Saturday afternoon in a massive march organized by Hamas’s female supporters at the Rafah crossing, where they chanted slogans calling for lifting the siege and opening the Rafah crossing under Palestinian-Egyptian sovereignty.
Umm Mohammed Al-Rantisi, one of Hamas’s female leaders, stated that the march aims to send a letter to the PA leadership in Ramallah who are trying to restore the previous conditions at the crossing and bring back the Israeli occupation.

This is one of the many things I love about nonviolent mass action: It involves all members of society, not just the guys! Indeed, to be effective, it really needs to do so.
Back in 2006, I wrote quite a bit about the increasingly important political role being played by Hamas’s well-organized networks of women supporters. That became evident both in the very successful parliamentary election campaign that Hamas mounted in January of that year, and also in some of the new style of nonviolent mass public actions that we saw from the Hamas-organized women later in the year. See, e.g., these two JWN posts from November 2006: 1 and 2.
Too many people in the west– and certainly, nearly the whole of the western MSM– have taken at face value the accusations from Israel and the Bush administration about Hamas (and Hizbullah) being only terrorist organizations. But that view completely misunderstands, or wilfully ignores, the deep roots both organizations have struck among their respective constituencies– roots have been nurtured and sustained through many long years of actions in various fields of nonviolent activity, including a lot of social work and electoral/political organizing. But then, something new happened, it seems to me, when people involved in those kinds of fairly private nonviolent activities take their nonviolent organizing into the mass, open, public sphere and these actions demonstrated that they can have a huge, transformatory effect on the political scene.
One example from Lebanon was the partly organized, partly “spontaneous” mass return of south Lebanese villagers to their villages in the border zone in May 2000. The puppet-run “security zone” that the Israelis had previously maintained there just crumbled overnight.
Another example from Lebanon was the very similar– partly organized, partly “spontaneous”– mass return of south Lebanon’s people to their homes, villages, and towns, on August 14, 2006, the very day the ceasefire went into effect. That human wave of people completely swept away any hopes the Israelis may have had that they and the UN could somehow “prevent” Hizbullah’s people from re-establishing themselves in southern Lebanon– because at that point, nearly all the people who returned were Hizbullah. And, as Ze’ev Schiff (RIP) noted at the time, possession of the battlefield at the time the shooting stops is the very definition of victory. (The IDF had sent in a ground force in those last 60 hours of the war– after the completion of the negotiations for the ceasefire, indeed– precisely with the aim of trying to control as much of the South Lebanon battlefield as possible by the time the ceasefire went into effect. At the purely military level, however, their plans went sorely awry; and on August 13 and 14 the surviving soldiers from their badly mauled invasion force slunk back south across the border in considerable disarray, holding onto no land at all.)
Hizbullah’s women have also, certainly, been seen in quite a number of the party’s public demonstrations and marches, some of them organized into disciplined and slightly militaristic-looking cohorts, and some not.
Hamas women, however, seem to have been developing an even more distinctive and potentially effective role for themselves. They have run in– and in six cases, won– parliamentary elections. And on numerous occasions over the years they have organized all-women demonstrations with a very pointed political intent. Most recently, on January 22, more than 1,000 Hamas-organized women from Gaza swarmed across the Rafah crossing into Egypt in an action designed to publicize the plight of their families as Israel tightened the screws of its siege of the Strip– and also, perhaps, to test the reactions of the Egyptian security forces prior to the big bust-out across the border that was being planned for the following night. (Also worth watching: the second half of this Jazeera/YouTube report on that demo. I would say maybe they need work a bit more on group discipline?)
On that occasion, the Egyptian security forces responded with baton charges and water cannon. But the women’s demonstration, which was widely publicized throughout the Middle East, probably helped many of Gaza’s people to break through any fear they might have had, the next day, regarding the possibility of joining the throngs engaged in the bust-out. So the bust-out itself, when it happened, turned out to be a massive and truly transformative venture.
And now, by mounting another demonstration at the border crossing, it has been the organized women of Hamas, acting nonviolently, who have put the Egyptian authorities on notice that they need to find an agreement that allows the re-opening of the border fence, and soon.
Interesting times. Let’s see what Egyptian diplomacy is able to achieve.