Israel and Hamas: Fire and Ceasefire in a New Middle East

[ICG logo. Image from crisisgroup.org] [ICG logo. Image from crisisgroup.org]

Israel and Hamas: Fire and Ceasefire in a New Middle East

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by International Crisis Group on 22 November 2012.] 

Israel and Hamas: Fire and Ceasefire in a New Middle East 

Executive Summary and Recommendations

There they went again – or did they? The war between Israel and Hamas had all the hallmarks of a tragic movie watched several times too many: airstrikes pounding Gaza, leaving death and destruction in their wake; rockets launched aimlessly from the Strip, spreading terror on their path; Arab states expressing outrage at Israel’s brute force; Western governments voicing understanding for its exercise of self-defence. The actors were faithful to the script: Egypt negotiated a ceasefire, the two protagonists claimed victory, civilians bore the losses.

Yet if this was an old war, it was fought on a new battleground. It was the first Israeli-Arab confrontation since the wave of Arab uprisings hit in early 2011, and Islamists rose to power. Hamas was better equipped and battle-ready and had exchanged its partnership with U.S. foes for one with Washington’s allies. Egypt is ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organisation, which made its reputation partly by lambasting its predecessors for accommodating Israel and abandoning Palestinians to their fate. In this first real-life test of the emerging regional order, protagonists sought to identify, clarify and, wherever possible, shape the rules of the game. The end result is a truce that looks very much like its predecessors, only this time guaranteed by a new Egypt and occurring in a transformed environment. If it is to be more durable than those past, key requirements of both Israel and the Palestinians will need to be addressed.

Israel was keenly aware of the transformed landscape, wary of it, but also determined to show that these changes change nothing. With Egypt in Brotherhood hands, it sensed that Hamas was feeling invulnerable, confident that Israel had lost its freedom of action, limited in what it could do against Gaza for fear of provoking Cairo and jeopardising diplomatic ties. Israel’s military operation could be interpreted as a reply to rocket attacks. Yet, the chronology of events, precise targeting (eg, of Hamas’s principal military leader) and overwhelming response suggest more than that. Israeli decision-makers were delivering a message: if Hamas thinks it enjoys a cloak of immunity, if Cairo thinks it can deter Jerusalem, think again.

Turn this logic upside down, and you have Hamas’s perspective. Egypt long had been the wall against which Israel would back the Palestinian Islamist movement, President Mubarak and his colleagues not so secretly wishing for the pummelling that would end Islamist rule in Gaza. The wall, Hamas believes, has since become its strategic depth. By standing its ground, Hamas was measuring the support it could expect from countries that have the resources and international connections its previous allies lacked, prodding them to do more, seeking political dividends from the new regional configuration. It was discovering whether, by substituting Egypt, Qatar and Turkey for Syria and Iran, it had traded up. It was trying to convey its own message: rules have changed. The Arab world is different. Israel must live with it.

For Egypt’s leaders, the test had come much too soon. They still are finding their way, uneasily balancing competing interests. Their immediate priority is economic, which pushes them to reassure the West and deny any intention to upend relations with Israel. But they have domestic constituencies too, as well as a longstanding creed and history of denouncing previous rulers for selling out Palestinians. Passivity in the face of Gaza’s suffering would expose their impotence and undermine their credibility.

The conflict next door also helped shed light on the balance of power at home. Still a creature of Mubarak’s regime, the military-security establishment has its interests when dealing with Gaza: cut Hamas down to size; maintain working relations with its Israeli counterpart; and, ensure Egypt does not assume responsibility for the chaotic Palestinian territory, becoming its sole exit to the outside world. Today’s Muslim Brotherhood civilian leadership might be animated by other concerns; physical boundaries matter less, and closer ties to Islamist-ruled Gaza appeal more. Whether the crossing between Egypt and Gaza opens up, as provided for in the ceasefire agreement, will help elucidate the state of this internal tug of war.

At this point, the balance sheet is not absolutely clear. Israel showed it would not be cowed by the Islamist wave and that it retained both freedom of action and Western backing. But it hesitated before a ground invasion and felt compelled to reach a quick ceasefire that did not clearly address its central concerns; among reasons for its reluctance was greater mindfulness about inflicting irreparable damage to relations with Cairo. Israel also benefited from strong Western support, principally from the U.S. But Washington’s apprehension about the conflict dragging on and negatively affecting broader regional dynamics was palpable; in the end, the U.S. evidently pressed Prime Minister Netanyahu to endorse the Egyptian proposal.

For its part, Hamas can claim a major triumph: it showed it would not be intimidated and has basked in unparalleled visits to Gaza by Arab officials. The ceasefire agreement promised greater access of Gaza to the outside world, a considerable and long-sought achievement. The Islamist movement proved itself the central player in Palestinian politics. In Gaza, demonstrators conveyed a genuine sense of triumph. Still, the picture cannot be said to be entirely positive: if Arab rhetoric was more combative, the actions were somewhat stale. Prisoners of their own dilemmas, Egypt’s rulers offered little fundamentally new: outraged denunciations, the recall of their ambassador to Israel, behind-the-scenes mediation and cooperation with Washington in finding a solution.

For now, the immediate objective must be to ensure fighting truly stops and that the other commitments mentioned in the ceasefire agreement are fulfilled. There is good reason for scepticism given the history of such undertakings and the imprecision in the text itself. But new dynamics in the Middle East potentially could make this time different. Cairo has an incentive to ensure success; it has much to offer – politically, diplomatically and, together with its allies in Ankara and Doha, materially – to Hamas; and the Islamist movement would be loath to alienate Morsi’s Egypt in the way it rarely hesitated to alienate Mubarak’s. By the same token, Israel can take solace in the fact that, even when governed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt proved pragmatic and eager to avoid escalation. If it does not wish this situation to change, it too will have to live up to its undertakings. Finally, the U.S. and President Obama likely acquired new credibility and leverage in Israel by virtue of the unquestioned support they offered Jerusalem; those assets can be used to ensure compliance with the ceasefire agreement.

Many unanswered questions remain: whether the ceasefire’s ambiguity will be its undoing, as has happened in the past; whether Egypt will effectively monitor implementation and whether it will live up to its own commitments, namely opening the Rafah crossing to Gaza; whether other third-party monitors, European perhaps, will be involved; how the U.S. will meet its parallel pledge to Israel to curb weapons smuggling into Gaza; whether Egyptian cooperation will be needed to that end and, if so, be forthcoming; and whether Iranian factional allies will seek to reignite a conflict that serves Tehran’s and its Syrian ally’s interests.

One thing is clear. Whatever else it turns out to be, the new order does not look kind to the non-Islamist side of the Palestinian national movement. With attention focused on Gaza, Islamists doing the fighting and the negotiating, the Palestinian bid for a UN status upgrade pushed to the sidelines, the Palestinian Authority looking irrelevant and powerless, and West Bank protesters sporting Hamas’s flag for the first in a long time, President Abbas and Fatah, as well as prospects for a two-state solution, are on the losing end. Then again, what else is new?

Advancing a genuine peace will not be easy. At a minimum, and as a first step:

  • Egypt should relaunch an energetic push toward reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, so that the PA can fully return to Gaza, and a unified government can be formed, elections held and negotiations resumed between Israel and a patched-up national movement; and
  • it should use its reaffirmed cooperation with the U.S. to try to persuade Washington to adopt a more flexible, pragmatic attitude toward Palestinian unity.

Ultimately, as the dust settles and guns turn silent, much more will be known about the new regional map – how it works, who sets the rules, how far different parties will go, whether the obstacles continually encountered in the past can be overcome. This short war has been, as President Obama might put it, a teachable moment. A pity the education came at such a high price. And that, once more, all the wrong people – the civilians on both sides – were asked to foot the bill.

[Click here to read the full report.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412