Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May-June 2008, pages 7-9

Special Report

Israel’s Zero-Sum Policy Continues to Thwart Peace Efforts

By Rachelle Marshall

An Israeli soldier throws noise grenades at Palestinian demonstrators in Nablus during a protest to mark Land Day. Hundreds of protestor marched toward the traffic-choked Hawara checkpoint outside the northern West Bank city to demand an end to the occupation (AFP photo/Jaafar Ashtiyeh).

WITH FRIENDS LIKE the United States and Israel, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t need enemies. The two close allies dealt the moderate Palestinian leader a series of blows in recent months that left his credibility as an effective negotiator in tatters and ended hopes that the peace process revived at Annapolis would succeed.

No matter how fervently Abbas declared his opposition to violence and agreed to recognize Israel, he was unable to extract a single concession from Israel. No matter how many West Bank Hamas officials his security forces arrested, Palestinians still faced the same crippling restrictions that have paralyzed their economy and affected every aspect of their lives.

Abbas suffered additional embarrassment last summer when the two countries fomented an attempt to oust the democratically elected Hamas leadership from Gaza. The Bush administration’s role in the failed coup, reported in this magazine nearly a year ago (see “The Dangerous Legacy of Occupation,” August 2007 Washington Report, p. 8) was more fully exposed in an article by David Rose in the April issue of Vanity Fair. Using confidential documents and interviews with former U.S. officials, Rose confirmed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams had arranged to arm and train a militia led by Fatah security chief Muhammed Dahlan with the aim of crushing Hamas forces in Gaza. Hamas fighters handily defeated the attempted coup, however, and routed the Fatah militias from Gaza. Dahlan was forced to flee, and Abbas was left with only a rump government in the West Bank.

Abbas was further weakened by Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza that in early March killed at least 130 people, half of them civilians. “They’re shooting at everything that moves,” a Palestinian reporter on the scene wrote. (The army barred the Israeli media from Gaza.) Instead of creating popular dissatisfaction with Hamas as the Israelis hoped, the operation aroused so much anger against Israel that Hamas gained popular support. The Bush administration meanwhile stuck to its mantra that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” As U.S.-made F-16s, Apache helicopters and air-to-surface missiles bombarded crowded Gaza neighborhoods (see story p. 10), the White House request for $2.55 billion in military aid to Israel next year remained a top budget priority.

Bush expressed outrage only when a lone Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, enraged by the killing taking place in Gaza, shot to death eight young students at a yeshiva dedicated to religious Zionism, the belief that Jews have a God-given right to all of original Palestine. “I condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jerusalem that targeted innocent students,” Bush said. “This barbaric and vicious attack on innocent civilians deserves the condemnation of every nation.”

Bush did not mention the scores of children killed by the recent Israeli attacks, including 20-day-old Amira Abu Aser, whose funeral was taking place as he spoke.

On March 2, Nabil Abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for Abbas, called the Israeli operation an “open-ended massacre,” and three days later Abbas announced he would suspend negotiations until Israel agreed to the truce with Hamas. News of Abbas’s mini-rebellion prompted Rice to interrupt her lunch with Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni and telephone the Palestinian president. What the steely voiced Rice said to Abbas was not reported, but he quickly announced a change of mind, saying the peace process was “a strategic choice” and he would resume negotiations without conditions.

As if being forced to reverse himself were not humiliating enough, three days later Prime Minister Ehud Olmert blindsided Abbas by announcing plans to construct 750 new apartments in one neighborhood of Palestinian East Jerusalem, 400 in another, and add 350 new homes to the West Bank settlement of Givat Ze’ev. Settlement construction is also going ahead in the Jordan Valley, which Israel intends to retain indefinitely. The announcement also caught the Bush administration off guard, since at Annapolis last fall Olmert had again promised to freeze settlement construction in accordance with the “road map” for peace.

A State Department spokesman said that Israel’s decision was “not helpful,” but Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat came closer to the truth when he called the planned construction “another slap in the face of the peace process.” Olmert’s spokesman Mark Regev said that regardless of any future peace agreement, Israel would retain and expand the large settlement blocs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Developers had stopped building at Givat Ze’ev when the intifada began in 2000 but said they are willing to resume now that there is “relative quiet” in the area. The message to Palestinians was unmistakable: peace negotiations and an end to armed resistance would not bring an end to the occupation, only more settlements on confiscated Palestinian land.

Israel continued to ignore Hamas’ offers of a cease-fire, despite a change in Israeli public opinion. A Haaretz poll in early March showed that 64 percent of Israelis favored a truce with Hamas. The Bush administration was unable to help defuse the crisis because of its refusal to deal with Hamas—a policy Ali Abunimah, currently a fellow at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC, described as: “You can’t talk to them. You can’t deal with them. You just cover your ears, close your eyes and pretend they don’t exist.”

It remained up to Egyptian officials to meet with an Israeli Defense Ministry representative and members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to arrange for a truce. Khaled al-Batsh, a leader of Islamic Jihad, announced that he had accepted an Egyptian request for calm while details of a broader truce involving Gaza and the West Bank could be worked out. When Israel suspended its air strikes during the second week in March, the rocketing stopped.

But on March 12, as the Egyptians and Palestinians appeared close to arranging a permanent cease-fire, Israeli hit squads in Bethlehem and Tukarm shot to death five former Palestinian militants who had long since given up armed resistance. The killings followed a pattern the Israelis have used repeatedly of provoking a Palestinian response during a truce, a tactic that enables them to continue branding the Palestinians as “terrorists” and avoid substantive peace talks.

The Bethlehem operation was also a slap to Abbas and other Palestinian moderates. One of the murder victims was Ahmed Balboul, a leader of the Al Aksa brigade who gave up his arms last summer and agreed to support peace negotiations with Israel. Abbas had asked Olmert to grant Balboul amnesty but was refused. The Authority’s prime minister, Salam Fayyad, was in the midst of planning an international investors’ conference to be held in May and was counting on Bethlehem’s reputation as a safe and calm city. A statement by Abbas’ office said, “These barbaric crimes reveal the true face of Israel, which speaks loudly about peace and security all the while committing murders and executions against our people.”

As Egyptian mediators continued their efforts to broker a cease-fire, Israel’s action brought together rival Palestinian factions in an impressive display of unity. The thousands of Palestinians who gathered together in Manger Square to protest the five murders included members of Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, as well as smaller groups. Israel responded with threats and renewed attacks. The next day its air force carried out a pre-dawn air strike in Gaza, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared, “the state of Israel will continue to hunt and to strike any murderer who has Jewish blood on his hands.”

The evidence suggests that Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza are not a response to the rocketing, as the Israelis claim, but an effort to undermine Hamas as a governing party. Correspondents reported for months that Israeli military officials were pressing for a full-scale invasion of Gaza aimed at crushing Hamas once and for all, restoring the U.S.-trained Fatah forces, and redeeming the army for its failure in Lebanon in 2006. An analysis by Jewish Peace News on Feb. 24 predicted an imminent Israeli attack on Gaza aimed at forestalling the likely formation of a Palestinian unity government and fending off European pressure to lift the embargo.

The following day Israel responded to a demonstration by Gaza school children against the embargo by sending thousands of extra troops to the border along with artillery units. As the children stood peacefully on the Gaza side, soldiers in camouflage hid in the fields of Israeli farms just across the border and fired off smoke bombs. According to The New York Times account, “There was a feeling on both sides that the event was an exercise or rehearsal for another time.” That time arrived two days later, when Israeli air strikes on Feb. 27 killed eight Palestinians, including 5-month-old Muhammad al-Burei, and destroyed the Interior Ministry in Gaza. A Hamas rocket attack in retaliation killed an Israeli civilian—the first such fatality in nine months—and Israel attacked in force, including ground troops, tanks, and planes.

The brutality and disproportion of the Israeli offensive reinforced growing Palestinian pessimism about chances of peace. Negotiations between the two sides in February reached an impasse as Palestinians continued to press for decisions on such issues as the future status of Jerusalem and the establishment of a Palestinian state, while the Israelis agreed only to formulate a “framework of principles,” with discussions of the key issues indefinitely delayed.

“I challenge you to find anyone who took part in the negotiations with Israel to say that he is optimistic,” a Jordanian diplomat, Dureid Mahasneh, said as talks dragged on. Barak even failed to show up at a March 14 meeting with the American peace envoy, Lt. Gen. William M. Fraser and Prime Minister Fayyad, sending a low-level aide instead. An Israeli official said Barak “didn’t feel like getting scolded,” referring to the fact that Israel’s construction of new settlement housing and refusal to ease restrictions on the Palestinians were violations of the road map.

Vice President Dick Cheney traveled to the Middle East in late March purportedly to observe the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and help speed a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. To those aware of Cheney’s record as administration hawk, assigning him to make peace was akin to sending an arsonist to put out a fire. The vice president was an adviser to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which long before the Bush administration took office was agitating for regime change in Iraq, Syria and Iran. Cheney’s Arab hosts may also recall that in December 2002, three months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Cheney said, “If we’re successful in Iraq we will have struck a major blow at the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” (Six months later Bush admitted, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussain was involved with 9/11.”)

The Drumbeat of War

The actual purpose of Cheney’s trip was to persuade friendly Arab leaders to help shore up the deeply divided government in Baghdad, and secure Arab support for a possible U.S. attack on Iran. That possibility became increasingly imminent with the resignation on March 11 of Adm. William J. Fallon as commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. Fallon was the only senior military official to speak out publicly against action against Iran. After declaring on Al Jazeera television that the “constant drumbeat of conflict” from Washington was “not helpful and not useful,” he was no longer welcome to the Bush administration.

The “drumbeat” Fallon criticized has since become louder. On the same day as Fallon’s resignation Bush renewed his executive order declaring that Iran posed “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.” Cheney during the same week warmed that the Iranians may be building an ICBM missile capable of striking the United States within 10 years, and Secretary of State Rice blamed Iran for sabotaging Bush’s Middle East peace plan by supplying rockets to Palestinian militants. Presidential candidate John McCain went so far as to accuse Iran of training al-Qaeda forces and sending them into Iraq, only to be reminded by his traveling companion, Sen. Joseph Lieberman,that al-Qaeda is composed of Sunnis, and regarded as an enemy by the predominantly Shi’i Iran.

In a speech to Christian broadcasters in mid-March, Bush emphasized his goal of spreading freedom and democracy around the world.“The effects of a free Iraq and a free Afghanistan will reach beyond the borders of those two countries,” he said. But whatever Bush’s war has brought to Iraq and Afghanistan it is neither freedom nor democracy. More than a million Iraqis have died so far and 4 million made homeless. Unemployment is at 50 percent, nearly 50,000 Iraqis are in prison, and the child mortality rate is one of the highest in the world. In much of the country, armed militias impose their own rule.

When Senator McCain visited Iraq on March 16 and expressed his support for continuing the war, a shop owner in Samarra said, “I would like to show him the schools and hospitals and how the children and women suffer.” The next day Cheney was in Baghdad praising Iraq’s “phenominal” improvement in security and political reconciliation when a suicide bombing killed 43 people in Karbala, a city within Iraq’s supposedly most secure area.

The resistance against NATO forces in Afghanistan is at its highest level since the war began, fueled by anger at the allied air strikes that often kill civilians. The U.S. bombing of Pakistan’s tribal areas and the suicide bombings in retaliation have stirred popular outrage in that country as well. A poll by the International Republican Institute in early February found that although most Pakistanis oppose Islamic extremists, they also objected to the way the war on terrorism is being waged. Emblematic of the hostility to the Bush administration in the Muslim world, only 9 percent favored continued cooperation with the United States.

President Pervez Musharraf’s identification with Bush undoubtedly contributed to his party’s defeat in the Feb. 18 election, in which Pakistanis overwhelmingly voted in new leaders committed to limiting Musharraf’s powers and restoring constitutional rule. Disregarding the election results, Bush not only pledged his support for the unpopular president who had jailed his opponents and silenced the media, but pressured Pakistan’s new leaders not to reinstate the judges whom Musharraf fired.

Washington’s Hollow Words

Bush’s words about freedom and democracy would above all sound hollow to the Palestinians, who have suffered crushing punishment for electing a governing party in 2006 that Israel and the U.S. find objectionable. In order to be acceptable to Israel as negotiating partners, Palestinians must not only renounce violence but recognize Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, with borders defined by Israel. Israel has refused to negotiate in good faith with any Palestinian leader—whether the West Bank tribal elders in 1967, Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or President Abbas. In refusing to discuss even a cease-fire with Hamas, the Israelis have assured that violence will continue. Olmert and his colleagues apparently prefer to risk the death of more Israelis than risk their own political careers by withdrawing to Israel’s legally recognized borders.

A poll in late March by Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that for the first time a majority of Palestinians favor an end to negotiations with Israel and the continued firing of rocket attacks against Israel. Shikaki attributed the change to the despair and rage among Palestinians aroused by Israel’s attacks on Gaza, its murder of the five Palestinians in Bethlehem, and continued settlement construction. Two-thirds of those polled still favor normal relations with Israel if it returns to its 1967 borders, but 75 percent believe the current negotiations are going nowhere.

On Feb. 23 Israeli Foreign Minister Livni dismissed a plea from the European Parliament that Israel lift the blockade on Gaza by saying, “It would be better if Europe understood that Gaza is a zero-sum game. Either Hamas or the moderates.” But a zero-sum game too often means that both sides lose. If Israel insists on maintaining its brutal occupation, the day may come when there are no “moderates” left.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.