From Singapore to Dresden

Gaza's Road to Ruin

There’s a truism that says we should learn from the past, which is sometimes coupled with a warning that those who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat their mistakes. But one of the curious aspects of our current age of endless catastrophe, is the absence of any past at all.

Twenty-four hour churnalism; shallow infotainment punditry; politicians devoid of any knowledge or understanding of history; the propagandistic interests of interested parties, and the sheer volume of ideas and facts required to understand what is taking place in front of us - it’s a grim combination that too often wipes the past clean, so that every war, conflict and conflagration appears newly-minted and stripped of context.

The ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ has always been particularly prone to this process of forgetting and misremembering, and its latest horrific iteration is no exception. Consider, for example, the article on Hamas’s assault in south Israel that appeared in the Guardian on 12 October, in which the Israeli author and popular historian Yuval Noah Hurari lamented the fact that the Palestinians had not responded positively to Israel’s desire for peace, in the following terms:

During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made.

This has been a familiar theme in Zionist political discourse that goes right back to the 1947 UN Partition Plan: of Israeli ‘generosity’ spurned by Palestinian intransigence or an addiction to terror and violence that is essentially antisemitic. Harari is at the softer end of the spectrum on this, but his lament ignores the fact that, for example, during this period of Israeli ‘generosity’, the number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem expanded from 110,000 in 1993 to 465,000.

Gaza is the main subject of Harari’s piece however, and it’s in his regret that Hamas did not respond positively to the ‘very significant step’ of the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, that he wipes the past clean:

The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves

Though Hurari admits that Israel ‘continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank’, even after its withdrawal, and concedes that ‘it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade’, he nevertheless insists that

an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.

Once again we find ourselves in the same place where we always find ourselves: a generous Israel that only wants peace, only to be spurned by the mysterious Palestinian obsession with violence and terror. And as always, there is a lot missing from this bad faith sob story.

First of all, there is the simple fact which so often goes unobserved: an occupying power that has seized the territory of another people can never be ‘generous’ in abandoning that territory, or conceding some of what it has taken to the people who already lived there. This should be obvious, but it too often goes unsaid.

Secondly, the Gaza disengagement plan was not a ‘significant’ concession by Israel, but a strategic decision aimed at putting an end to an occupation/settlement process that was too difficult to sustain, financially and militarily. In effect, Israel was being generous to itself. Nor was the withdrawal intended to pave the way for ‘peace’. In October 2004, Ariel Sharon’s senior advisor Dov Weisglass explained its purpose in the following terms:

The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.

Thirdly, and this has been barely mentioned in the last two weeks, Hamas did not - at least initially - ‘take over’ Gaza. In 2006, Hamas was elected, in elections for the second Palestinian Legislative Council. These were elections that the Bush administration had pushed for, in the belief that the dominant Fatah faction in the Palestinian Authority and its more malleable leader Mahmoud Abbas would win, despite warnings from Palestinians and Israel that things might not turn out that way.

The US spent $2.3 million through USAID in an attempt to boost Abbas’s profile. Israel also joined in, detaining Hamas members in the run-up to the elections, and banning rallies and public meetings in Jerusalem, and closing Hamas election offices.

All these efforts came to nothing in January 2006, when Hamas won 44.45% of the vote and 74 of the 132 contested seats, while Fatah received 41.43% and won 41. This stunning outcome was widely-believed to be a vote against the corrupt Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, which had engaged in an often brutal factional struggle with Hamas for many years.

Faced with this unexpected and undesirable outcome, Israel and its allies in the Madrid Quartet (the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations) did what defenders of democracy often do when democracy produces results they don’t like: they imposed economic sanctions in an attempt to undermine the Hamas-led administration and pressure the Palestinian population to change their minds.

The Coup that Failed

Fatah was no less cynical. Encouraged by the US, it withdrew from the new administration, and even returned $50 million in US aid to prevent Hamas spending it. Not content with merely undermining Hamas, the US set out to overthrow it, and began channeling weapons to Fatah in Gaza, with the aim of bringing down Hamas and installing a pro-Abbas administration under Fatah’s sinister security chief Muhammad Dahlan.

This weapons-and-fighters pipeline was overseen by Condoleeza Rice and the ghoul-like Deputy National Security adviser Elliot Abrams - a veteran of El Salvador cover ups and the Contra program. All this fuelled the vicious conflict between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza, precisely as it was intended to. Dahlan’s men tortured and murdered Hamas members, and Hamas responded in kind.

This mini-civil war in Gaza burst out into the open in early 2007, when Dahlan’s forces attempted to topple Hamas. The bloody street fighting that followed reportedly led the US envoy to the Quartet to declare in a meeting in Washington ‘I like this violence’, because ‘it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.’

Once again, the US called it wrong, and Hamas emerged victorious and expelled Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

So to recap: the US, Israel, and the ‘international community’ wanted the Palestinians to have elections. When the elections didn’t produce the desired results, they tried to incite civil war and overthrow the administration that Palestinians had elected. And when all these efforts failed, the Quartet introduced sanctions, and Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, which by 2018, the United Nations warned, was on the brink of making Gaza ‘unliveable.’

That year the UN Special Rapporteur reported that the Gazan economy was in free fall’, with ‘70 per cent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system’, and urged that ‘all parties — particularly Israel — bring an end to “this disaster”.’

The world did not listen, and Israel did not listen. Bear in mind that Gaza was already one of the poorest regions in the Middle East before the disengagement. When I was there in the 1980s, I saw how its economy was suffocated by direct military occupation, to the point when Palestinian farmers could not even plant fruit trees without official permission, and Gaza had become an Israeli bantustan, where Palestinians were obliged to work as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ inside Israel, and return the same day or sleep overnight.

The arms-length occupation that followed the 2005 disengagement imposed new restrictions that precluded any possibility of independent economic development.

How could one of the poorest and most overcrowded regions on earth become Dubai or Singapore, when its education system was entirely depended on foreign/UN aid, it was not allowed an airport, or a seaport, and its land borders were controlled by its de facto occupier Israel, and Israel’s Egyptian partner. To evade this blockade, as the world knows well, Gazans built a network of tunnels, through which money, weapons, and all the other goods that Gaza from the outside world depends on have been smuggled into the strip.

Whatever its military possibilities, an economy based on these foundations was never likely to achieve Walt Rostow’s ‘take-off’, and it takes some gall to suggest that Gaza should have taken advantage of this ‘opportunity’ and become Singapore or Dubai on the Mediterranean. Of course, such effrontery has not been lacking, because it will never not be convenient to portray Gaza as a mad place, sunk in fanatical barbarism.

This is why in 2014, Alan Dershowitz called on ‘innocent Gazans’ to launch an ‘Arab spring’ and overthrow Hamas, and observed that

When Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, it left behind farm equipment and other material capable of feeding the population. Donor countries promised support, both financial and political if Gaza would live up to its potential as a Singapore on the Mediterranean. But instead the leaders of Gaza enriched themselves and used the remaining resources to build rockets instead of plowshares.

This is one of the few occasions when Dershowitz has ever shown any interest in ‘innocent Gazans.’ But he is not the only one to wonder what happened to these ‘plowshares’. The standard explanation for their absences the one put by Michael Kochin in a 2017 article, which argued that ‘Gaza is ruled by Hamas…Unlike Fatah, the party that controls the Palestinian Authority, Hamas is dedicated by its charter to the genocidal eradication of Israel’s Jews.’

Once again, this is a familiar tale, which leaves out a great deal. Hamas is not simply the sum of its 1988 charter. As far back as 2004, Hamas offered Israel a ‘10-year truce’ in return for its withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. In its 2017 charter Hamas softened its original position, and accepted the possibility of a Palestinian state according to the 1967 borders.

The document also insisted that Hamas was not at war with the Jewish people, but with Zionism. In pointing this out, I am not arguing that Hamas is a benign organization, or that it has not been authoritarian, brutal and recklessly militaristic. Nor am I denying that it has committed atrocities against Israelis and carried out acts of ‘resistance’ that have rebounded with terrible consequences on Gaza’s civilian population.

But Hamas is - or was - more pragmatic than it has often been portrayed. And it was - and is - capable of political engagement. It is also an organization that Gazans once elected, and seventeen years of war and blockade have made it impossible for them to revisit that choice or consider any alternative.

To expect, in these circumstances, that Gazans should rise up and overthrow the government that Israel and its supporters did not want them to have, simply in order to please the country that has trapped them in an open prison and bombed them repeatedly, is as delusional as the idea that a tiny, overcrowded strip of land that does not enjoy even the basic trappings of an independent state, could become Singapore or Dubai.

And there is another story here, which has not received the attention it deserves. Two weeks ago the Times of Israel suggested that Netanyahu preferred a Hamas-dominated Gaza, in order to prevent the possibility of a rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah, that might have laid the basis for an independent Palestinian state connecting Gaza and the West Bank. In order to achieve this

Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad. Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.

In 2019, Netanyahu told a Likud Party meeting, ‘anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.’

So all the time Israel said it could not negotiate with Hamas ‘terror’, it was in fact ‘bolstering’ Hamas, not in order to achieve ‘peace’, but to maintain Gaza in permanent isolation. Whatever else you can say about these squalid manoeuvres, they were never going to produce a Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean, and they were never intended to.

And now that strategy has blown up in Netanyahu’s face. And 2.3 million people are trying to shelter from the bombs that are daily turning Gaza into Dresden-on-the-Mediterranean.

This awful outcome is a despicable consequence of the despicable politics we have seen - or not seen - these last seventeen years, in which very few of its protagonists emerge with clean hands, but many people, most of them Palestinians, have ended up dead.