Palestine and the awful logic of suffering

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Just at the moment, the middle east seems like a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the world. The conflict is driven by some horrible, inescapable logic, which makes the most outrageous cruelties seem inevitable.

Recent events

Tensions had been high in Gaza and Israel, because of Qassam rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli towns near the border. Over 800 rockets were launched in seven months, and the Israeli Defence Force replied with at least 5100 artillery shells. IDF missile attacks in early June caused at least 22 Palestinian deaths including 8 children, after which Hamas took open responsibility for the rocket attacks and ended its supposed ceasefire.

This armed and occasionally violent standoff appears to have been broken when the Israeli Defence Forces beat up an old man and abducted his two sons in Gaza on June 24th. The IDF says they were planning an attack on Israel, the father says one is a doctor and the other a student of Islamic law. [Thanks Aine for finding that story.] Hamas retaliated the next day with a raid into Israel in which they killed a number of soldiers and kidnapped one. They demanded the release of all Palestinian female and child prisoners held in Israel in return for his release.

The IDF responded by launching a full scale invasion of Gaza, one possibly planned in advance. Hamas officials were arrested or targeted, and militant facilities were attacked. Gaza’s only power station was also destroyed, the water network damaged, and bridges cut linking north and south Gaza. Amnesty pointed out that this “collective punishment” is a war crime under the Geneva convention, a statement echoed by UN envoy John Dugard, who said that the attacks violated the “most fundamental norms of humanitarian law and human rights law.”

Then on 12th July Hezbollah launched an attack over the border from Lebanon, killing 8 IDF soldiers and capturing two. Israel responded with air attacks and then began what it called “severe and harsh” retaliation, even promising to “turn the clock back in Lebanon 20 years”. The airport, fuel stores, roads, and bridges were hit, killing at least 153 people, nearly all civilians, including a family fleeing shortly after an Israeli instruction to evacuate. Meanwhile Hezbollah incapacitated a blockading IDF vessel, apparently with an Iranian supplied missile, and reached as far as Haifa with other missiles, causing 23 casualties.

Lebanon celebrated Hezbollah’s actions, and in Israel USA Today reports

“If somebody comes to hurt you, you have to give them something back,” says Rachel Rotman, 74, who was born in Tel Aviv to Russian immigrant parents. “They will know they can’t attack us for nothing.”

Why?

This is the logic. Israel must respond to aggression. It cannot negotiate with a gun to its head. The terrorists must be destroyed. Hamas and Hezbollah make other calculations. Israel colonises more and more of the West Bank, and leaves Gaza isolated and impoverished. Without struggle, by whatever means possible, the Palestinian people will be gradually displaced and destroyed.

No really, why?

I think the real reasons for the current conflict lie just under this public reasoning.

Hamas was struggling before this all started. Neither Israel nor the US would recognise it as the legitimate government of Gaza, and foreign support for the Palestinians had been frozen. The people of Gaza were beginning to disagree with Hamas’ hard line approach to Israel, and Abbas had gained support for a more conciliatory approach, recognising Israel’s right to exist and a two state solution based on the 1967 borders.

But I think the possibility of a return to a peace process in fact threatened Olmert as much as it threatened Hamas. Israel had withdrawn unilaterally from Gaza, but it used this both to define an enemy outside it’s supposed sphere of responsibility and to legitimise its land grab in the West Bank. The wall and the settlements in the West Bank constitute a de facto denial of the possibility of a meaningful return to the 1967 borders and a real and effective Palestinian state. If the peace process were to gain international momentum there was always the possibility of serious pressure from the US (under a new administration) to go in a direction entirely unsatisfactory to Kadima, which has as part of its platform (and needs, in order to retain its support base) the retention of Jerusalem and settlements in the West Bank.

Meanwhile Hezbollah, which was created twenty years ago in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, had its own problems. Although largely autonomous within the politically weak and divided Lebanon, it drew much of its support from Syria and had become increasingly isolated since Syria had been forced out of that country. It was probably fairly certain that it could provoke an overreaction from Israel with its attack. Hezbollah then stands to gain support from a large section of the population otherwise indifferent to its extremism.

Israel’s response to this provocation is based partly on the threat from an Iranian-armed Hezbollah. They seem to be attempting to destroy Hezbollah’s military capability whilst preventing troops and especially materiel from being withdrawn to Syria. They are also clearly meting out a collective punishment to the people of southern Lebanon for their support for Hezbollah. That twisted reasoning truly does not respond to analysis.

Syria, a major backer of Hezbollah, gains from this by forcing diplomacy back into Damascus to deal with the threat from the terrorist group. Rather than being treated as a rogue state they must again be dealt with as a serious player in the political situation.

What can be done?

There is, to be sure, a certain inevitability about a conflict where all the people with guns gain from war and all those without guns suffer the most. It creates a reality of escalation, savagery, and suffering. The only way to break this cycle, I believe, is to force the leaders to step away from their intended “victories”. As Adam Savage is fond of saying I reject your reality and substitute my own.

This will need active support from the US and from the Arab world, and that is perhaps the biggest difficulty. Bush himself gains from increased tension in the region, as it takes the heat off his errors in Iraq.

First Israel must be called to account for its disregard for the civilian consequences of its tactics. Hezbollah cannot be expected to hand over its weapons, but with a strong UN force in south Lebanon [thanks, The Egyptian] and enough pressure on and from Syria it can be expected to pull out of the area. Similarly a UN force in Gaza can disarm Hamas. Both these forces, however, would have to be made up of troops from Arab countries – perhaps Egypt, Pakistan, and even Jordan?

But this is not enough. Gaza is not, as it stands, a viable state. Unilateral withdrawal by Israel is therefore meaningless. The full 1967 borders and a two state solution plus a type of “Marshall Plan” for the newly created state – this is the only way in my view to create a situation in which it’s in the Palestinians’ best interests to make their own future rather than trying to take back the future they remember believing in before 1948. In the same way a strong and prosperous Lebanon is the best answer to the power of Hezbollah.

Kadima has no interest in this. They stand to gain from tension and conflict, and the (I believe illegitimate) dreams of the West Bank settlers. It will take considerable pressure from the US in particular to achieve agreement to this plan from Israel. Like the militant palestinians they thrive on a poisonous and ungenerous world view. The question is, since the people on both sides are trapped by it, and the media believes it as certainly as those who benefit, what hope is their for change?

The only hope, in the microcosm as in the macrocosm, is that those who lose by the logic of suffering demand that their leaders reject it.

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