Category: Palestine 2008

Y-net News tells us that today, one day before the long-delayed release of the Winograd Commission’s second report, Ehud Olmert spoke in the Knesset about “the loneliness of the leader.”
He did so, as part of the Knesset’s special commemoration of the centenary of the birth of renowned Zionist terror leader Yair Stern, the eponymous leader of the Stern Gang. Go read the thoughts of the besieged Olmert on that man. Also, look at the very suggestive picture of the lonely Olmert that they have on the page there.
And talking of lonely leaders, Akiva Eldar has a fascinating little vignette in today’s HaAretz, about Mahmoud Abbas’s recent meeting with a clutch of Kadima politicians.
Eldar writes,

They met an exhausted, even somewhat extinguished politician who has lost half his kingdom and is clinging to the other half. Before answering any question about the diplomatic negotiations, Abbas squinted at Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), who heads the negotiating teams along with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. His eyes sought out Qurei after every answer, as though expecting confirmation. One of the guests discerned a trace of scorn on Qurei’s lips.

Honestly, I do find Abu Mazen’s current position very tragic. I still believe he is basically a good man who wants the best for his people. But he is in this political-leadership game way over his head, and as the nominal leader of an extremely corrupt and dysfunctional political movement that is beyond his ability to control very much of it at all.
Having to keep Abu Ala’ around in the Muqata really can’t help. The two of them were keen competitors for the mantle left by Arafat’s death. They were keen competitors even while the Old Man was still alive.
That “scorn” that Eldar writes about on Abu Ala’s lips reminds me of the way that, when I had lunch with Arafat in the Muqata in early 2004, the two long-time Arafat courtiers Saeb Erakat and Yasser Abed Rabboo were almost openly mocking their boss. They were talking over him and treating him like a dotty old buffoon. (Which he may have been by that point. But it was very unseemly to see the way those two men treated the Palestinians’ national leader.)
More of Eldar’s description of Abbas’s recent meeting with the Kadima pols:

Abbas said he believes the prime minister truly aspires to reach a permanent status agreement and that if this does not happen, someone else will be sitting in the Muqata at the end of this year – maybe someone from the Hamas command, maybe someone from the Central Command.

That latter reference is fascinating! It is to the IDF’s Central Command. In other words, Abbas was saying that if this year’s US-led diplomacy doesn’t work, either Hamas will take over the West Bank completely or the whole rickety structure of the “Palestinian Authority” (PA) itself will collapse, and the IDF will have to come in and pick up the pieces itself…
Eldar wrote that long-time Labour Party bully-boy and Infrastructure Minister Benjamin (“Fuad”) Ben-Eliezer already thinks that Abbas is useless, and has for some time now been pushing the government to release imprisoned Fateh leader Marwan Barghouthi, so he can become the interlocutor instead. He wrote that Ben-Eliezer had told Olmert that:

he believes Barghouti is the only one who has a chance of getting the Hamas genie back into the bottle and restoring Gaza to the PA. Olmert responded, “This isn’t the time.”

(Intriguingly, Eldar also writes that Olmert also gave, more or less, that same response to Fayyad’s plan to put control of the crossing points between Gaza and Israel into PA hands. Really?)
And a final point of considerable interest in Eldar’s piece:

The breach of the walls along the Gaza-Egypt border and the incidents at the border crossings around Jerusalem made the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security service think about their nightmare: tens of thousands of Palestinians, with or without Israeli peace activists, embarking on a quiet march toward the capital. In February 2002, Haaretz reported that when Tanzim activist Raad al-Karmi was executed – putting an end to one of the longest cease-fires since the start of the intifada – Yasser Arafat was closer than ever to deciding to forgo the armed intifada in favor of non-violent civil revolt.
According to information obtained by Israel security sources, Arafat was talking about a march on Jerusalem. The IDF contemplated a scenario of thousands of unarmed Palestinian civilians marching from Ramallah, Jericho and Bethlehem toward the barriers that surround Jerusalem, waving peace placards at television cameras from around the world. They wondered what an officer should do when his soldiers are stuck amid hundreds of Palestinian women and children carrying posters and making their way toward a Jewish settlement. And what should they do when processions set out from all West Bank towns, toward the Jewish settlements that surround them?

Yes, what indeed…

My column under that title is in Wednesday’s CSM. (Also, archived here.*)
The bottom line is here:

During Mr. Bush’s recent trip to the Middle East, he said some welcome things about his desire for regional peace. But no one can build such a peace while continuing to exclude (and energetically combat) a large, well-rooted political movement such as Hamas.
Washington needs to find a way to talk to the leaders of the movement. Longtime friends in Egypt can help establish a channel. The war-shattered peoples of Gaza and of southern Israel need Washington to help, not hinder, the reaching of a cease-fire.

Anyway, go read the whole thing…
* Also, excerpted by Al-Jazeera, in Arabic, here. (Hat-tip Ahmed.)

More evidence is emerging that, in undertaking January 23’s mass civilian bust-out from Gaza, Gaza’s elected Hamas leadership was seeking not only to deal with the immediate humanitarian crisis brought on by Israel’s tough siege of Gaza but also to throw down a sharp political challenge to the US-Israeli plans for the region.
Up to January 23, those plans rested strongly on maintaining Fateh’s Mahmoud Abbas as the sole leader, decisionmaker, and representative for the Palestinian people. They dealt with the “inconvenient” facts of the legitimacy Hamas had gained from its victory in the 2006 elections, and its continuing popularity among large segments of the Palestinians, by waging harsh efforts to exclude Hamas from any decisionmaking role while also trying to turn the Palestinian population against it by means of the intentional collective punishment inflicted on the people of Gaza.
Now, with the bust-out, Hamas has turned the tables, and it is Abbas himself who looks besieged. At least, he looks so at the political level– though he and his followers continue to get hefty economic handouts from the US and other western powers.
Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is now on an official visit to Saudi Arabia, discussing the Kingdom’s plans to patch up Hamas-Fateh relations. It was just last February that the Saudis concluded the “Mecca Agreement” between the two sides, which led to the formation of National Unity Government. The Bush administration and its network of handsomely compensated “allies” in Fateh were very unhappy with that arrangement, and they worked hard to undermine it. In June it did fall apart, when Hamas took what Khaled Meshaal described to me as a pre-emptive, defensive action to prevent US-backed Fateh operative Muhammad Dahlan from launching an anti-Hamas coup in Gaza. (There was, in truth, plenty of blame to go all around.)
We can imagine that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who had invested considerable national and personal prestige in brokering the Mecca Agreement was not happy with the way it fell apart– or with those actions from both sides that hastening its unraveling. But now, Meshaal is the one in Riyadh, while Abbas remains shuttling between Ramullah and West Jerusalem, where he sits looking sad and uncomfortable in his meetings with Ehud Olmert, who is also sitting on his own political knife-edge at home this week.
Meshaal is expected to proceed from Riyadh to Cairo, where President Mubarak has invited both him and Abbas for talks aimed at (a) inter-Palestinian reconciliation and (b) reaching an Egyptian-Palestinian agreement to regulate the Gaza Egypt border. Meshaa accepted all parts oif Mubarak’s invitation. Abbas has turned down the invitation to meet with Meshaal in Cairo, though he said he might go to Cairo and hold his own parallel talks there with the Egyptians.
The immediate issue is what the regime will be for controlling the Gaza-Egypt border going forward. Hamas leaders have been frank for the past two years that their aim is to wrest Gaza out of the economic thralldom that Israel has maintained over it– and the occupied West Bank– since 1967. The latest manifestation of that thralldom was the Paris Agreement of 1994, which was an offshoot of the 1993 Oslo Agreement. Under Paris, the whole economy and society of Gaza and the West Bank were folded into a single “customs envelope” with Israel that got controlled by– guess who!– Israel. Thus, Israel explicitly retained the right to control all movement and goods and persons in and out of the two occupied territories.
Paris was supposed to apply only during the five-year “transitional period” that would follow Oslo, pending the conclusion and implementation of a final peace agreement between Israel and the PA. But guess what, that final peace agreement never got negotiated, so here we are 15 years after Oslo and there is still a “transition”….
It was the Paris Agreement, concluded between Israel and the PA, that enabled Israel to progressively tighten the screws of the siege it has maintained on Gaza in recent years. It has been Paris that has allowed Israel to maintain tight control over the movement of goods and persons not just into and out of the occupied West Bank, but also within the West Bank itself, thereby stifling the hopes for real economic development– or even a normal life– for the West Bank’s residents. Small wonder that the Hamas people have wanted to do whatever they can to take either (or both) of the occupied territories out of the Paris Agreement. Neither Hamas nor Egypt was a party to the Paris Agreement…
It remains to be seen whether Hamas can somehow succeed in its long-articulated goal of bringing about a stable escape from the thralldom of Paris and reconnecting Gaza’s 1.5 million residents to the world economy through Egypt, instead.
Its attempt to do this poses, as noted above, a sharp political challenge to Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak is sitting on his own potential political volcano at home, given that: (a) he is getting old, and the question of political succession in Egypt’s ossified, one-party-dominated political system is a huge one; (b) the best-organized political movement in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also the mother-organization for Palestine’s Hamas; and (c) popular sentiment in Egypt is extremely hostile to the pro-western stance Mubarak has maintained throughout his political life, and extremely sympathetic to the Palestinians in general, and Hamas in particular.
Hence, the decision Mubarak’s security people evidently made back on Wednesday and Thursday that they could not re-seal the border with Gaza by brute force.
Since then, Egyptian officials have tried to cast their repeated decisions to continue keeping the border somewhat open in purely humanitarian terms, though it very evidently has strong political underpinnings, too. As we can see from Mubarak’s decision to invite Meshaal, as well as Fateh, to visit Cairo for talks.
Meshaal is not the only regional actor now eager to make a splash in Cairo. Hamas’s longtime allies in Iran now say they are close to restoring diplomatic relations that have been broken since, I think, late 1980. (That was the year when Egyptian Islamist Khaled Islambouli assassinated Egypt’s previous pro-western president, Anwar al-Sadat. The new revolutionary regime in Iran immediately started glorifying Islambouli, including naming a street after him in Tehran. That has been a sticking point in relations ever since… )
I see that the Iranian official news agency is also describing the currently accelerating Cairo-Tehran contacts in largely “humanitarian” terms. I am not fooled.
Over the days ahead, the diplomacy around the Gaza-Egypt issue will be significant and very intense. And these days will also, in Israel, be seeing the long-delayed publication of the Winograd report. So it’ll be an interesting week.
As of now, it looks as if the two clear losers of the currtent swirl of events are (a) Mahmoud Abbas, and (b) the Bush administration’s ability to sustain its agenda in the region. The only clear winner, for now, is Hamas– though we cannot know the extent of its “victory” yet; and there will almost certainly be further surprises ahead, for everyone.
The outcomes for all the other actors involved– Mubarak, the Saudis, Olmert, Israel’s further-right parties, the Iranians– remain in play. Interesting days ahead.

In western countries and in much of the west-dominated “international community” news reports, commentaries, and statements by diplomats tend to present the Gaza-Israel conflict as some kind of two-sided issue in which on the one hand you have the siege (collective punishment) that Israel has been maintaining against the people of Gaza and on the other, the use by militant factions in Gaza– now including Hamas– of Qassam rockets against Israel.
And that’s all that gets mentioned.
Israel and its allies like to keep the emphasis on the Qassam rockets and the casualties and disruption they have inflicted on southern Israel. Some liberal organizations in the west put more emphasis on the illegal collective punishment aspects of the Israeli siege of Gaza– though they are nearly all careful to also criticize the Palestinians’ firing of the Qassam rockets. The impression often left is that these two kinds of infraction are more or less commensurable, and that if only the Palestinians would give up firing their rockets then Israel would be able to ease up on the siege… End of story.
What gets left out of this account of what’s happening are two important other dimensions:

1. The military operations that Israel, for its part, has sustained at a high level against targets in Gaza throughout the past two years. These operations have been very destructive of life, limb, and vital civilian infrastructure. They have included numerous, quite deliberate extra-judicial executions— a tactic that is quite illegal under all forms of law (hence “extra-judicial.”) They have included the use of disproportionate violence, and violence that has often failed to take the necessary steps to discriminate between military and non-military targets.
All these breaches of international humanitarian law can be classified as war crimes. And the casualties have been high. According to pages 6-7 of the 2007 Annual Report of the Israeli rights organization B’tselem (PDF here), in the two years 2006-2007 no fewer than 379 of the 816 Gaza Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces were not engaged in hostilities at the time, and of a further 37 it could not be determined whether they were or were not participating in hostilities.
On this page of B’tselem’s website we can learn, meanwhile, that between June ’04 and July ’06, fourteen civilians in Israel were killed by the Qassams. (B’tselem judges that the Qassams themselves constitute an “illegal weapon”, because of their lack of targetability. I am not sure about that.)
This detailed listing in Wikipedia tells us today that four people in Israel have been killed by Qassams since July ’06, for a total of 18 since June 2004.
I feel great concern for the families of each of those killed in those attacks. I feel exactly equal concern for the families of each of the 379 non-combatant Gaza Palestinians killed by the Israeli state’s army since January ’06. (Actually, more than 379, since the IDF have killed numerous noncombatants in Gaza since January 1 this year.)
If the “international community” is exercised about Palestinian military actions that have killed 18 noncombatants in Israel since June 2004, how much more exercised should it be about Israeli military actions that have killed 379 Palestinian noncombatants since January 2006?
2. The Gaza Palestinians still have some very serious and long-unmet political claims against Israel that some of them have been trying to pursue through their use of violence. They and the vast majority of members of the international community consider that, though Israel withdrew its forces and settlers from the heart of the Gaza Strip in 2005, still, its attempt to maintain strict control over all the Strip’s land and sea boundaries, and its airspace, mean that Israel still bears the responsibilities of an occupying power in the Strip under international law. These include a responsibility for the welfare of the people living in the Strip.
Under international law, residents of an occupied territory have a right to resist occupation, including by violent means. The actions of the French maquis or of numerous other resistance organizations throughout history fall into this category. The resisters are, of course, required to use the same due diligence as any other combatants to try to avoid harming civilians.

Clearly, what needs to be resolved in a fair and sustainable way is the underlying, 60-year-old political conflict between Israel and all the Palestinians. The actions the Israelis have been taking against the Gaza Palestinians over the past two years– both the siege and the disproportionately violent and damaging military campaign– have not brought a resolution to the political conflict any closer. Indeed, they have further soured the atmosphere for the negotiations that need to be undertaken if a resolution is to be found. (After all, we can all surely see that neither side is capable of imposing a solution on the other at this point.)
In the immediate future, we need to see three things happening between Israel and the Gaza Palestinians:

1. A ceasefire agreement under which both sides would agree to halt their military operations against the other. The Egyptian government seems ideally placed to help broker this. The ceasefire would be considerably more stable if there is also a politically credible mechanism for monitoring it;
2. A prisoner-exchange agreement that frees both the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and a large enough number of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel that the exchange itself can also become a confidence-building measure. (In the past, Israel’s stinginess in releasing Palestinian prisoners– even after agreements have been concluded on this matter– has often turned the whole business into a confidence-draining measure instead;) and
3. An end to the siege of Gaza, so that its 1.5 million people can finally get back onto the path of social and economic development and capacity-building rather than still being driven back into the debilitating and humiliating state of having to rely on international relief and hand-outs.

And please, along the way, let’s not talk about the Gaza-Israel conflict as though the siege of Gaza and the Palestinian Qassam rockets are the only things that have been happening. They are not. Israel’s continued military assaults against the Strip also need to be taken into full account.

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.

Our Israeli commenter JES wrote here yesterday that it was notable how little attention was being paid in Israel to the momentous developments in Gaza. Today, Haaretz has a significant editorial chastizing Israel’s leaders for their lack of attention to Wednesday’s bust-out and underlining the effects the bust-out has been having on the political balance in the region. Its title is quite simply The siege of Gaza has failed.
For my part, I have been struck by the degree to which the bust-out has shown the Hamas leadership’s new ability to seize the strategic initiative, to conceive of a bold and unexpected plan, to maintain operational secrecy around implementation of the plan, and to integrate nonviolent civilian mass organizing into its strategic planning.
I also want to note this analysis from HaAretz’s long-time regional affairs correspondent Zvi Bar-el, which in many respects I agree with.
He writes:

At the beginning of the week, it still seemed as though Egypt was “standing firm” against these pressures. Egypt wanted to avoid yet another confrontation with Israel or Washington over the issue of the border crossing…
But domestic Egyptian considerations gained the upper hand. Hence, too, the tremendous media effort Egypt made this week to establish that they, and no other Arab party, had convinced Israel to lift the sanctions a bit – for example, to transfer fuel and also convoys of medicine to the Strip. The other “Arab party” that claimed the credit was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas… Khaled Meshal thanked both sides for their efforts, but made it clear that letting through a few more shipments of fuel did not constitute a solution to the problem of the siege.
The firing of Qassams on Sderot and the response by the Israel Defense Forces, both in killing Palestinians in the Zeitoun neighborhood and in the total closure that was imposed this week, have created a new equation, one that has become so familiar in Lebanon, in which Hamas comes out the winner no matter what. It can determine the number of Qassam rockets that are fired on the town and thus determine a criterion for “relative quiet,” “calm” or “noise.” It will thus dictate the Israeli response on the ground, and through that – the Arab reaction. Meshal can also determine whether to establish “Grapes of Wrath-type understandings” with Israel concerning Gaza, by means of the hudna (cease-fire) or tahadiyeh (temporary truce) that he has proposed and that has won support in Israel. In this he would also serve to further weaken the status of Abbas, who is not able to stop even one single Qassam.
Meshal has succeeded in proving to Israel, to the leaders of the Arab world and to the Quartet (the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations), that it will be impossible to discuss the Annapolis resolutions or any other political proposal without Gaza, which is to say – without him.
Abbas realized this week that as long as there is someone in Gaza who is dictating the mood in all of Palestine, he himself will not be able to be seen in an embrace with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni again. On Tuesday he did declare that the political negotiations must go on despite the events in Gaza.”
The events in Gaza have made clear to Abbas is that even if he does agree to enter into a political dialogue with Hamas, the points that the organization has accumulated this week, thanks to the suffering of the residents of the Strip, will enable it to dictate the terms of that dialogue.
It is no wonder that Hamas is again voicing its demand to hold early elections for the Palestinian parliament,

Actually, I am not as confident as Bar-El that Abu Mazen has yet concluded that there’s a new balance of power between him and Hamas and that he will necessarily have to distance himself from too close an embrace with Olmert, Livni, and the Americans as a result. Nor am I as confident as he that, as he writes, “both Egypt and Saudi Arabia believe that the most reasonable solution at the moment, considering the lack of confidence in Israel’s desire to conduct a serious political process, is to establish a joint Fatah-Hamas Palestinian Authority so that it will be possible at least to solve the problem of Gaza.”
Anyway, back to the HaAretz editorial. It says:

While politicians and the media are waiting with bated breath for publication of the Winograd report on the Second Lebanon War, a new situation is taking shape on the Egyptian border that might eventually result in a new investigative committee. The diplomatic and security situation that arose on the Israeli-Egyptian border once the Egypt-Gaza border was flung wide open has apparently not yet penetrated the Israeli consciousness. But it is time to start asking pointed questions about the events of this week instead of about those of July 2006.

Instead of “instead of” there, I would say they should put “in addition to.”
Then this:

The border with Egypt was breached in a single moment, with no warning. It is impossible to refrain from asking whether any of our decision makers, or any of those who whisper in their ears, foresaw this scenario and prepared for it. When Vice Premier Haim Ramon boasts of the impressive decision-making process that preceded last fall’s military operation in Syria, his words sound bizarre in light of what is happening in the South.
While hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are streaming into Egyptian Rafah and Hosni Mubarak is having trouble reestablishing the border, while Hamas has succeeded in ending the siege of Gaza via a well-planned operation and simultaneously won the sympathy of the world, which has forgotten the rain of Qassam rockets on Sderot, Israel is entrenching itself in positions that look outdated. The prime minister speaks about the need to continue the closure on Gaza, and the cabinet voices its “disappointment” with Egypt – as if there were ever any chance that the Egyptians would work to protect Israeli interests along the Philadelphi route [i.e., the 7-mile border between Gaza and Egypt] instead of thinking first of all of their own interests. The failure of the siege of Gaza, which the government declared only a week ago to be “bearing fruit,” and especially the fear that this failure will lead to a conflict with Egypt, requires the government to pull itself together and prove that it has been graced with the ability to solve crises and to lead, not merely to offer endless excuses for its leadership during previous crises.
As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were streaming into Sinai by car and making a mockery of Israel’s policy in Gaza, the prime minister gave a speech at the Herzliya Conference that sounded disconnected from reality. There is little point in extolling the quiet on the northern border when a diplomatic and security crisis for which Israel has no solution is taking place in the South. The Qassam fire is continuing, the policy of sanctions on Gaza has collapsed and Hamas is growing stronger politically, militarily and diplomatically. It is clear to everyone that reestablishing the border along the Philadelphi route will be impossible without its consent. The confusion that characterized official Israeli responses to the international media shows that the developments in the Gaza Strip took the government completely by surprise.
In his speech, Ehud Olmert declared: “Mistakes were made; there were failures. But in addition, lessons were learned, mistakes were corrected, modes of behavior were changed and, above all, the decisions we have made since then have led to greater security, greater calm and greater deterrence than there had been for many years.” Olmert was referring to the Winograd report. But he categorically ignored the fact that what was happening in the South completely contradicts his statements. If that is what learning lessons looks like, if that is what deterrence means, the Olmert government has precious little to boast about.

I could scarcely have worded it better myself. Good judgments, Haaretz.

Note: Jonathan Edelstein is one of the best-informed and wisest analysts of Israeli-Palestinian matters– among other matters– whom I have the honor of knowing. He is not, currently, keeping up the “Head Heeb” blog that was a great resource for us all for so long. But he came over here to JWN today and posted some lengthy comments that are worthy of close consideration. So with full atrribution to Jonathan Edelstein here they are…

Helena, I wonder if the bust-out and associated developments represent a revival, or possibly a culmination, of the “parallel unilateralism” strategy that you postulated for Hamas after the January 2006 election. [Note from HC: Actually, as I later told Jonathan, I already wrote a bit about this yesterday.] During the spring and summer of 2006, some of the Hamas ministers were talking about ending Gaza’s economic dependence on Israel and realigning the economy with the Arab world, which at least for the time being means Egypt in practical terms. Hamas has now taken a rather forceful step toward doing just that.
This might also lead, to some extent, to a revival of Israeli unilateralism. After the initial shock, some senior Israeli officials began spinning the bust-out as an opportunity for Israel to disengage from Gaza economically, and I don’t think that’s entirely spin. There’s some interesting analysis along those lines in today’s Yediot.
As for Bob Spencer’s speculation that Gaza might “become some sort of loosely associated part of Egypt,” I wonder if it might end up more the other way. I did some speculating of my own about the Gaza-Sinai relationship in late 2005, at the time the Rafah crossing reopened and before the rocket-closure-raid cycle started developing its own logic. The key points were that Gaza has six times the population of North Sinai governorate, that there was more money in Gaza than in that part of Egypt, that Egyptian security control in that region was tenuous and that the ports of al-Arish and Port Said had the potential to become a key Palestinian import-export route. All these, except possibly the second, remain true, and given that it will be a political impossibility for Mubarak to re-close the border (although he has built walls against his own Bedouin citizens), Sinai al-Shamaliyya might end up becoming a de facto Palestinian economic appendage. Interesting times.
I’ll close by questioning received wisdom, noting a legal paradigm shift, and indulging in some wild speculation.
Questioning received wisdom: I think we’ve been wrong all along in describing the siege of Gaza as an Israeli siege. In fact, ever since Israel left the Philadelphi route, it’s been an Israeli-Egyptian siege, and Egypt has maintained its end for its own reasons. Hamas correctly perceived Egypt as the military and political weak link, and chose to break the siege at the Egyptian border. I’ve actually wondered why it took so long; there have been partial breaches of the wall before, and I remember thinking at the time that Hamas would gain an advantage by widening them. Maybe it wasn’t yet ready, but I think it’s now very clear that they and Israel were never the only players.
The paradigm shift: now that the Egyptian border is open, Gaza can no longer be regarded as Israeli-occupied territory. Some scholars such as Dugard maintain that the occupation continued after the 2005 withdrawal because Israel continued to control the access points. I’ve argued in the past that international law precedents, such as the ICJ’s judgment in the DRC-Uganda case, don’t support this interpretation and that the occupation ended once Israel gave up effective control on the ground. At this point, however, the argument is moot: as long as the Egyptian border stays open, Gaza can’t seriously be regarded as occupied even under Dugard’s interpretation. This would mean that the law of belligerent occupation no longer applies to Gaza, although the humanitarian law of war, including the provisions relating to siege, still do. Israel is no longer legally responsible (note: legal and moral responsibilities aren’t necessarily the same) for the general welfare of Gaza, or for supplying its people with goods like electricity or fuel.
And now the wild speculation: On the hopeful side, this is a potential chance for Gaza to get its act together. The Palestinians have, to put it bluntly, choked on Gaza several times, and neither the PNA nor Hamas has been able to control the place sufficiently to govern it or to institute an effective cease-fire. Israel has been partly responsible for this state of affairs but so has Palestinian infighting and the prevalence of splinter militias. If Hamas can re-establish an economy in Gaza and use the popularity that it has surely gained from this move to consolidate its authority, then it might be able to work out a mutual cease-fire on the Israeli border, position itself as a responsible diplomatic player, and maybe even reduce the perceived risk of Gaza by enough to attract foreign investment. This would in turn increase the pressure on both Israel and Fatah to move toward ending the occupation in the West Bank, because otherwise Hamas would be able to point to its success in Gaza as the only viable alternative.
Working against this is the fact that Egypt will now take a major security interest in Gaza, given that a linkup between Hamas and the Egyptian ikhwan is Mubarak’s worst nightmare. As noted above, it’s politically impossible at the moment for him to close the border, but he isn’t going to just leave a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated political organization alone. I think we can expect to see Egyptian security forces infiltrate Gaza in the near future, primarily in covert roles, and there’s a potential for major disruption if this turns into an undeclared Hamas-Egypt war.
Of course, the reverse might also happen – that Hamas would expand its security interests to include north Sinai. If the route to al-Arish becomes its lifeline, then it will want to protect its access to that route, and might find allies among the local Bedouins who are in effective revolt against the central government. I think Hamas wants to avoid this kind of entanglement, which is why it’s trying so hard now to come to an agreement with Egypt on border control, but I don’t think the possibility of Hamas strongholds or patrols in Sinai can be ruled out. This in turn would raise tensions along the Israel-Egypt border due to the increased possibility of infiltration.
There is now an opportunity for the Gaza crisis to either resolve into a new metastable arrangement, or to expand. I know which one I hope will happen, and I also know that I’m afraid the other will.

Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein at January 24, 2008 11:45 AM

I see that about two thirds of the above comment came after I said I was going to “close.” Famous last words.
Anyway, two more observations: First, I wonder if Hamas will open Gaza to the Palestinians living in the Lebanese refugee camps, who are the worst-off of the refugees and have recently been hard hit by the Lebanese security forces. If Hamas wants propaganda victories – which it obviously does – then that could be a big one, and possibly a humanitarian victory as well.
Second, water will continue to be the bottleneck for Gaza even if the border stays open. It can get fuel, food and other supplies either from Egypt or through Port Said and al-Arish (the latter of which has recently been upgraded), but Egypt can’t supply water given its own scarcity, and importing the volume that Gaza needs to develop would be logistically difficult. This may preclude a complete economic disengagement between Gaza and Israel, at least in the immediate term. Do you have any idea how Hamas intends to go about resolving this situation?

Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein at January 24, 2008 11:57 AM

On a not-entirely-unrelated topic, this may also be of interest.

Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein at January 24, 2008 12:35 PM

Thanks, Jonathan!
Gosh, I wish I had time start thinking more about all the questions you raise… But I really don’t as I’m crashing on several deadlines. It would be great for everyone else to jump on in with their responses to these questions.

Hamas’s Palestine Information Center has these items:

1. “Haneyya: The [Palestinian caretaker] government is ready to hold urgent talks with Egypt regarding Rafah.” Includes this:
Khaled Mishaal, the head of Hamas political bureau, called for putting the borders between Egypt and Gaza under the supervision of Egyptians and Palestinians only and ignoring any previous agreements detracting from the sovereignty of the two countries.
Mishaal underscored that Egypt did not sign the agreement in 2006 regarding the management of the Rafah crossing; thus, it is not bound by it, adding that Hamas is ready to cooperate with Egypt and the PA leadership to regulate the borders between Egypt and Gaza.

2. “PA leadership turns down Haneyya’s crossings offer.” Including this:

The London-based Ashark Al-Awsat newspaper quoted Nimir Hammad, the political advisor to PA chief Mahmoud Abbas, as saying that [Hamas’s offer to coordinate with Ramallah and Egypt over the crossings issue] was rejected.
He said that the PA presidency would not negotiate Hamas over anything until it revokes results of its “coup” and would not negotiate with it over the crossings in particular because it had nothing to do with the issue!
Haneyya had expressed readiness in a televised address on Wednesday to hold an urgent meeting with “brothers in Egypt and Ramallah” to agree on preparations for opening the Rafah border terminal and other crossings surrounding the Gaza Strip.
For its part, the Fatah faction refused Haneyya’s invitation.

And Debka-file has this item:

1. “Israeli officials [unidentified]… wonder why defense minister Ehud Barak has not cut short his attendance at the Economic Forum in Switzerland when the blockade he ordered on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip – but for fuel and other necessities – had become futile.

Note: I just deleted one reference to a Debka-file piece above, since it seemed both unsubstantiated and alarmist. Commenters Jonathan Edelstein and JES, whose views and information base I respect, have pointed out that DF is not a reliable source on its own. Generally, I agree. But I think some of their reporting on the current developments is revealing.

Debka-file started reporting at 9:38 a.m. GMT today that early today,

American forces and equipment withdrew from the Multi-force Organization base at Al Gura northeast of al Arish. This force monitors Sinai’s demilitarization under a key clause of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Washington and Cairo are discussing evacuating the entire base and its 400 multinational personnel. The Egyptian high command was informed that Hamas had begun moving some of its elite units to its new stronghold. Egyptian forces are not capable of contending with this strength or the hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians on the move between Gaza and Sinai since Hamas blew up the concrete border fence Tuesday.

If true– and I have no reason to doubt that it is– then this is huge.
The Multi-National Force and Observers (MFO) was created in 1979 as a US-led “coalition of the willing” force tasked with monitoring implementation of the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. If the force is now being redeployed (=withdrawn) from the area bordering Gaza, that is already a major development. But now, in addition, Egypt and Washington are discussing evacuating the El-Gorah base, which is one of the MFO’s two main operating bases?
The political crisis in Cairo provoked by yesterday’s bust-out of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai seems to be much deeper than I had previously thought.
(By the way, when I linked to a Debka-file report on the Gaza-Egypt situation in this JWN post yesterday, the URL there was the same as the URL linked to above. DF should understand that it’s confusing for readers when they almost completely change the content of a published file after publication! I imagine that very diligent readers who want to find the whole text of the earlier DF report could do so by searching through caches?)

I just want to add to all my previous posts here on the Gaza Palestinians’ bust-out of earlier today that the political ground for this intriguing new move was sown in good part by President Bush’s amazingly maladroit trip around the Middle East over the past two weeks.
During the trip, Bush underlined again and again his intense concern for Israelis, their security, and their every last little whim. But he turned a notably deaf ear to the pleas he heard from all his most ardent Arab friends that he do something to demonstrate some concern for the hardships being suffered by the Palestinians and some real resolve to stop, for example, Israel’s continued illegal encroachments on Palestinian land and the harsh– and also illegal– collective punishments it has been imposing on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank for many years now.
Bush even attempted to publicly “joke” about of the hundreds of much-hated checkpoints/chokepoints that have been choking any semblance of ordinary life in the West Bank for many years, and jovially urged the Palestinians to just “forget about” the whole string of UN resolutions that underline what their rights to their own lands and to a decent life thereon really are.
During Bush’s visit to the region, Israel escalated its military attacks against the Gaza Palestinians. Much of the media in Syria and Lebanon, where I was until yesterday, was full of commentary to the effect that Bush gave Israel a “green light” to do that and also to tighten the screws of the siege it has maintained on Gaza for many years now.
Is it in any wonder that in these circumstances Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak evidently feels he can do nothing to intervene to re-close the wall between Gaza and Egypt, and no other Arab leaders are prepared to step forward to help to stem the tide of Hamas’s growing power?