Of significance is the lack of political action or influence of Arab and Muslim rulers who do not match the inspirations and actions of their masses Where will this aggression lead to? George Joffe will discuss the true motives behind Israel’s aggression and the strategic implications for Palestinians and the region as a whole.
George Joffe: What I am going to do is not quite address the topic I have been given mainly because I think everyone knows what happened in the last three weeks in Gaza and there is little point in me rehearsing the points that you already know.
But given the fact that today is the investiture of Barak Obama and he has been seen by many as a potential for real change in the region I thought I would begin by addressing that issue first. I am going to address it because if there is going to be a change in Gaza it is going to depend, whether we like it or not, very much on an American intervention to change the situation there. It is extremely unlikely that that is going to happen and I would like to explain why I believe that to be the case.
One of the reasons is a very complicated reason. It arises from the fact that we all tend to believe that the neo conservatives in the USA who supported the Bush administration, who were responsible in large part for the way in which the Bush administration supported Israel, lost. I don’t think they did. I think they actually won.
They won in a very peculiar way. Not because they succeeded in Iraq or because they succeeded with Israel in the Palestinian territories or with Palestine itself but because what they succeeded in doing is changing the terms of the debate. They had a quite clear agenda. They believed that they should guarantee American security through a process which they called democratic peace and constructing democracies in those areas where American interests most appeared to be threatened. They believe they should establish democratic peace through intervention – the classic case being Iraq. And further more that there intervention should be pre emptive – it should anticipate risk and security threats.
Of course as part of that process, choosing the Middle East as the main target of their concerns, they chose Israel as their necessary ally on the dubious assumption that it was a democratic state. In a sense, therefore, their primary purpose in the Middle East has been to create what they called a democratic environment, namely regimes that behaved in ways which they considered democratic and also protecting Israel and its neighbours. And that was their primary purpose.
And to do so they needed to create what they called a noble myth to gain public support. And of course the occasion for the noble myth was given on September 11th 2001. As a result of that they were able to build a vocabulary through which they were able to express an immediate and imminent threat. A threat that was not merely a threat of violence but a threat which was existential and systemic.
On that basis they have constructed a whole discourse in the media in the United States and a discourse in terms of security in diplomacy and with their allies. And the result of that has been that they have actually changed the way in which the problems of the world, particularly the Middle East are now discussed. In effect, if you think of the media in this country or elsewhere what you will see is a series of assumptions that have entered into the public discourse, that in effect adopt all the principles that the neo-conservatives proposed.
We now consider all threat to be a mythically dangerous threat, a threat of such stupendous proportions that our societies can’t survive it. You and I know this is nonsense but it is generally believed. We have also constructed an argument where violence, that we normally define as terrorism, is in and of itself to be condemned. There is no need to consider why it occurs, there is no need to consider what it represents, there is absolutely no need to consider its precursors. All you need to do is to know that it is violence of a kind that you will not accept and that any action is permitted to remove it.
That has begun to condition in Europe the way in which the media, politicians and diplomats express themselves and therefore articulate their policies in a way that mimics the values, the ideas and the objectives set forth by the neo conservatives in the USA. They have created a hegemonic discourse, a discourse that excludes all alternatives. It is virtually impossible in this country to talk about what Hamas really represents, why it is behaving as it does and what it tries to achieve in the regions in which it exerts power.
Instead foreign policy has been simply securitised. All resistance is seen as a threat. There is no desire to engage with it, there is only a desire to counter it. In effect therefore when President Obama is going to be confronted with a discourse that tells him that in effect there is virtually nothing he can do apart from supporting Israel to gain some kind of victory and thus peace inside the Middle East.
In other words he is presented with an agenda fully fledged from the last eight years of violence uncalculated throughout the world by the Bush administration. And in case we think that President Obama is any more able to set an agenda than his predecessor we need to bear in mind that politicians both condition and follow hegemonic discourses of this kind.
In effect therefore he has to recognise that he is operating in an environment politically which is hostile to Iran, it is extremely favourable to Israel and it will not consider any attempt to explain phenomena which it regards as terrorist in nature. The irony also is that if you listen to what he said during his campaign and subsequently you will see that his agenda in fact mirrors that very closely.
It is worth going through it in some detail. He gave guarantees to Israel during his campaign that American support for Israel would not vary. He did in fact say that he would withdraw from Iraq but only after 16 months and only if the conditions were appropriate. Yes, he did agree that he would engage with Iran but he would not exclude the military option.
Now I would suggest to you that that is an agenda which doesn’t vary very much from the one which preceded it except for the language in which it is couched. And that is really quite important because there is no reason to suppose, now that he is president, and no longer has to vie for votes, that that agenda is going to change. I don’t believe for one minute that it is going to.
So what do we really think his agenda is going to be. We know of course that his primary concern is going to be the global financial crisis. That is inevitable. We know that he has got to consider the domestic situation inside the United States but beyond that he can’t ignore what is happening in the Middle East and we also know roughly what he intends to do.
He will give Israel his support – he may temper it in terms of the extremes of Israeli behaviour as was manifested in the operations in Gaza. But his primary purpose is to begin a peace process in the Middle East by bringing Syria and Israel together. That’s what he has said. We know that this corresponds to initiatives taken by Turkey although they have now been stopped as a result of what has occurred inside Gaza. But he will attempt I am quite sure to do that.
That will be the first stage but once this is done support for the Palestinians will be marginalised and it will therefore be much easier to deal with them. It does seem to me that policy is all about dealing with the Palestinians.
Let us look at the team which is going to achieve this. Their names are known very well indeed. Hilary Clinton who as a senator proclaimed her undying support of Israel. One should bear in mind that her husband was himself a Zionist sympathiser and whatever one may think of the peace process which he produced, one thing was clear, his primary purpose was to benefit Israeli objectives.
What about the others? There is Denis Ross. You may remember him as an active special envoy for President Clinton in trying to achieve a Clintonian agenda. There is Martin Indyk himself not an American but an Australian who was American ambassador to Israel. There is Richard Hass a senior official inside the State Department who played a role in the peace process under the Clinton administration.
I put it to you that it would be unreasonable to assume that the policies they produce are going to differ very much from those they espoused before and therefore it is difficult to imagine that a constructive, insightful policy towards the problem of the Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, is going to emerge.
I made those comments because I think it is quite important to understand the background to what we are now going to see. Now I would like to turn a little to comment on what has occurred in the last three weeks really represents.
There is no doubt that in terms of pure military power Israel can claim a victory. It would be silly to deny it. Just consider the damage. The damage was estimated by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics on 12th January in Gaza – just when the ceasefire was being announced, to be $1.4bn. That is not a very large sum in terms of the damage done by the financial crisis but in terms of the size of Gaza and the resources available it is a massive amount.
You may remember that at the meeting in Doha, and then in Kuwait the Arab League suggested there should be a fund of $2bn to reconstruct Gaza. So you can see that the sums are still significant. What does that represent? Fourteen percent of all the infrastructure in Gaza according to the Bureau of Statistics has been damaged. Four thousand residential houses have been destroyed, 16,000 have been partially damaged. The cost of repairing them will be almost $300m.
Eighty percent of the farms in the Gaza Strip are now effectively ruined. The cost of compensating the farmers will be $24m. The daily loss in terms of economic output in Gaza is something like $24m a day. We are talking here about 1.5 million people, 3900 factories have been closed and probably won’t re-open: the totality of the Gaza industrial sector. Thirty-five thousand people are unemployed. Unemployment even before the violence broke out was running at 41.9 percent in the third quarter of last year.
Additional aid is needed of the order of $50m immediately, simply to feed the population and to provide it with warmth. The dead you know, at least 1,300 people the majority of whom are women and children. The injured 5,000 and the death toll is expected to rise significantly as the work of clearance carries on.
Against that we have to face the fact that in military terms Israel can claim a victory. But in real terms there isn’t any victory of any kind. Why not? For a very simple reason. One of the objectives the Israel set itself was not only to dissuade Palestinians from firing rockets into Israel. It was also to marginalise and render Hamas irrelevant. That was in fact the hidden and most serious objective I suspect.
It was also to make sure that weapons should not be smuggled into the Gaza Strip. The tunnels have not all been destroyed. Many have been damaged but they still exist. Beyond that, Hamas clearly exists and is clearly in charge of the administration of Gaza such as it is. So that objective has simply not been reached.
Yes, there is a ceasefire. It is a unilateral ceasefire. It did not engage Hamas in any way because the ceasefire which was being negotiated by Egypt was ignored by Israel. It instead went to the United States, sought help over preventing future infiltrations of weaponry and then declared a ceasefire. The Egyptians in consequence were furious.
Yes, Hamas did accept a ceasefire but Hamas accepted a ceasefire only for a month and only to allow the Israeli forces to withdraw, which they have now done. So Hamas, as much as Israel if not more, could claim a victory. And indeed of course it does.
Why did Israel do this? This is also worth considering because it is quite clear that its objectives were never realisable. There was no way it was going to destroy Hamas and its position inside the Gaza Strip through military action alone. Everyone knew that from the very beginning. It was also clear that it would not stop rockets being fired into Israel if Hamas wished and indeed after the ceasefire 15 rockets were fired into Israel.
So we need to ask the question what precisely did it think it was doing? I think there is another explanation and it dosen’t lie in the war in 2006 in Lebanon although that is the usually stated parallel. I think there is quite a different parallel and it occurred in 2002 in the West Bank in Jenin when it was flattened quite deliberately with massive military force. At the time it was seen as an act of irrational brutality. It was certainly brutal but it was not irrational. I think its purpose was to smash all the various structures that tied Palestinian society and the polity together. The purpose of that was to so fragment Palestinian society on the West Bank that eventually it would resonate to Israel’s own preferred solution. And that is of course precisely what has happened.
It is not a question of whether Mahmoud Abbas wishes to follow the Israeli agenda. It is simply that he is being put in a situation where without violence, there is no other agenda to follow. I think the violence in the Gaza Strip is designed to pulverise Gazan society for the same reason so that eventually it becomes as passive and as compliant as the administration in the West Bank.
We need to bear in mind here questions of legality because we need to know precisely why Hamas did fire rockets into Israel. Despite all the propaganda that tells us that it was Hamas that was the aggressor the record demonstrates the reverse to be the case. What actually happened was that there was a truce. The truce was observed by both sides until November. Then in November Israel attacked a group of Hamas militants on the grounds that they were digging a tunnel inside the Gaza Strip.
We do not know what the tunnel was for. We can guess but nonetheless they were not engaged in activities aggressive to Israel. That action provoked a Hamas response. We can argue as to whether it was wise or not but it is quite clear that Hamas did not start the situation which resulted in hostilities. We could even argue that there was a deliberate provocation designed to ensure that Hamas would provide an excuse whereby Israel could attack. And I am afraid to say I think there was calculation behind all those actions designed to lead to the situation where there would be an opportunity to crush the Gaza Strip through pure military force.
Beyond that is another problem. One of the reasons why Hamas was so prepared to use rockets was because its side of the bargin on the ceasefire had been observed. It had not fired rockets, it had not threatened Israel, it had accepted the need to accept Israeli security. Israel did not honour its part of the bargin which was to remove the blockade. It didn’t need to because it had support from the West to maintain the blockade and the European Union, to its shame, and from the United States.
For Hamas, the primary purpose is to remove the blockade so that the Gazan population could live something approaching a decent life. Since that wasn’t honoured what was there to restrain Hamas? Since negotiations did not yield results why would violence not be the alternative? So whether or not we think Hamas was wise, we can agree it was provoked and it was provoked by quite a deliberate policy not to participate in anything that might be seen to guarantee its survival.
And then we come back to the point of what Israel in the end wishes to do. One can argue that its primary purpose it to get rid of Hamas and of course in that it would be roundly supported by all Western states and I suspect the new President Obama even though he has said he is prepared to talk to Hamas but only after it recognises the state of Israel, honours all previous agreements and abandons violence: Precisely the agenda it can’t abandon because that is part of its core objection to Israel. But it will engage with Israel on a temporary basis which could then be the basis for a further development of some kind of engagement.
So in that case Israel is left with the opportunity of repeating it all again, and it is going to simply because it has not succeeded. And as it has not succeeded and since it can’t consider an engagement with Hamas it will have to use military force again. It will be as unsuccessful as in the past. It will allow Israeli governments to claim they are looking after the interests of Israelis themselves and the dispute and the confrontation will be perpetuated.
Think what is coming up. Next month in Israel there are elections. Those elections almost certainly will bring to power a right wing government. You could indeed even argue that the attacks on Gaza were part of an attempt to obviate that by supporting the current government in its objective and that is hopefully in its being re-elected.
My guess is that the next prime minister of Israel is going to be somebody like Mr Netanyahu and we remember him as the person who in 1996 deliberately destroyed the Oslo Accords. In those circumstances, and since we know that he will not accept the idea of an independent Palestinian state in any form – although he will allow for a state to be constructed that depends entirely on Israel for its security and its survival – we must anticipate that the situation of the past is going to continue, that Fatah and its support for a negotiated process is going to be as frustrated as it has been over the last year, that American support will be primarily directed towards Israel, that Hamas will continue to be excluded.
And of course that will only promote more violence. And when you consider today what the people in Gaza must think not just of Israel and Israelis and the idea of peace you can see how difficult any change in the situation is really going to be.
And beyond Mr Netanyahu there are much more extreme right wingers in Israel like Mr Liberman who quite openly wants displacement. He wants the Palestinians forced out. And that is no longer the mythology of just the extreme right in Israel. I fear that it may now be a viable agenda and I wonder to what extent any question of a negotiated settlement is really possible particuarly as I said at the beginning of my remarks, the opportunity for there to be an American intervention which will be even handed and which will try to achieve a negotiated settlement seems to be as vanishingly small as it ever has been. And on top of that because for most people in the West particuarly in the United States but also in Europe the ability to conceive of an alternative world is now vanishingly small because they have bought a fundamental set of ideas which determines the way in which they can express the views they have on the Middle East.
It seems to be that very bleak scenario awaits us. I will be happy to be proved wrong but I am willing to bet I won’t be. The situation of the past is going to continue.
*George Joffe was Deputy Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) between 1997 and 2000. He is now a visiting professor at Kings College, London University and is attached to the Centre of International Studies in Cambridge University. He teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate courses at both universities. As well as being an Associate Fellow of the Middle East & North Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute, he is also a member of the Instituto de Estudos Estrategicos e Internacionais in Lisbon where he manages the EuroMesco network of strategic studies institutes in Europe and the Mediterranean basin on behalf of the European Union, as part of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. His research interests include trans-national risk in the Mediterranean legal systems, migrant communities and Euro-American relations.
Daoud Abdullah: I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me. There appears to be one underlying reason for why this onslaught on the Gaza Strip was unleashed in late December. It bolsters the credibility and image and the lost pride of the Israeli military establishment after suffering a humiliating defeat in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Thereafter the drive and the motivation for the restoration of its image as the premier military power in the region was foremost in the minds of the military officials.
That said there appears to have been a political motive also. Ironically enough it was to keep Hamas out of the political mainstream. Hamas won the elections in 2006. After that it also indicated that it was quite prepared to negotiate and live within the Palestinian state in the West Bank with a settlement based on UN resolutions for the other substantive issues, particularly Jerusalem, refugees, water and borders.
So Hamas was laying down a challenge to Israel because in a sense it was clear on the political scene it was not malleable to the Israelis as the PLO had been in the last 15 years of negotiations. We ought to recall that when the Madrid pact process started in 1991 until the outbreak of hostilities and the negotiations which Dr Rice spearheaded, the Palestinians had not really achieved much to show the populace.
We have to acknowledge this discredited political process which did not deliver anything substantive for the Palestinian people in the territories and for their leadership to justify 15 years of consultative negotiations.
In so far as the immediate causes are concerned we ought to acknowledge that hostilities started long before December 27th. It was in another form: economic hostilities. Yes, the military onslaught started on the 27th but Israel was waging an economic war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as early 2006.
You would recall that when the proposal for withdrawal from Gaza was made in 2005 an advisor to Mr Sharon said we should put the people of Gaza on a diet, not they will die of hunger but they will go hungry. So this was on the agenda. But when Hamas won the elections the calls for the blockade intensified to the extent that Jimmy Carter at the end of January 2006 wrote in the Washington Post that any blockade on the Gaza Strip would do three things: it would exacerbate the humanitarian situation, it would strengthen Hamas and it would destabilize the region. No one took his advice and they proceeded.
We should acknowledge that the status quo in the territories, not just in Gaza but in the West Bank and Jerusalem remained illegal under international law as was affirmed in 2004 by the International Court of Justice when it gave its advisory opinion in July 2004. So the fact that they withdrew, or they redeployed their troops from Gaza did not signal the end of the occupation of the Gaza Strip. The land borders, the air space, the maritime borders or waters were all sealed and Gaza remained effectively occupied territory and Israel for all intents and purposes was the occupying power and it had certain obligations under the fourth Geneva Conventions.
We were told immediately after the onslaught that his was in response to a breach of the ceasefire. You have heard Professor Joffe speaking about the breaches staged by the Israelis, particularly not lifting the siege. In fact they were supposed to lift the siege within 72 hours of signing the agreement in June but they did not do so. The truth is that the plan for war was already on the table. Haretz and other Israeli newspapers confirmed that this plan staged six months before. So in fact it was drawn up before the signing of the agreement.
If we go even earlier on in the year 2008 we had some disturbing disclosures and some menacing threats from officials such as a certain officials such as the deputy defence minister said that he would visit the people of Gaza with a shoa. He tired to put a spin on it to deny that this was the intent. But the fact is that the plans were drawn up and it was going to be devastating and as early as 2008 there was talk of a shoa in Gaza.
Who was the aggressor and who was acting in self defence. We have to acknowledge that Israel has the right to act in self defence but it does not have the right to be an occupier and if it occupies other peoples’ land those people are allowed to resist under international law by all means including armed struggle.
That said let us see what obtained between 2005 and 2008 when the siege was in place. Eleven Israelis and 250 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. Hamas was firing rockets indiscriminately at their towns and their villages. It was no match to the kind of action they took on 22nd December – clearly they were acting in self defence. Here I am referring to the two principles of proportionality and necessity. Was there any military necessity to attack 15 mosques in the Gaza Strip, or to attack at least three United Nations schools, or to attack the Red Cross? What was the military necessity for doing this? And of course the proportionality, which has extended to the use of white phosphorous and other prohibited weapons.
This could have been avoided in hindsight and the international community was warned well in advance. People have gone to the Gaza Strip throughout the 18 months of the siege. Desmond Tutu was there and said that the silence of the international community is a crying shame. See what is happening in Gaza and no is speaking about it. Jimmy Carter referred to it as the greatest crime on the face of the earth and Mary Robinson said this was the destruction of civilization.
Three international persons of immense stature condemned what was happening in Gaza and the world chose not to listen for their own reasons. The situation in December before the onslaught was such that 60 percent of Gazans were receiving water once a week. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) had run out of food. They said that for the first time in sixty years they had no food to distribute.
In fact The Sunday Times ran an article, an interview with a young lady in Gaza, Amira Jendira, and she said that she was the mother of eight and at times she and her children resorted to eating grass. So this is the background, the scale of the catastrophe before the onslaught was staged.
Of course the Israelis hoped that the siege would deliver the political changes that they sought: a removal of Hamas and of course the strengthening of Abbas in the territory. We know what happened. They trained mercenaries to support the government. Vanity Fair of March 2008 confirmed this. David Rose reported that $86m was spent training people in Jordan and Egypt. Funds from the European tax payers. When Hamas realized this was on the table they settled the matter militarily in 2007. The government said this was a coup against the people who were elected.
Before concluding I want to point out the aberrations in the whole discourse. Hamas was excluded on the pretext that it was a terrorist organization. The European Union has brought this argument. The Israelis have peddled it. But when look at the definition which they give of a terrorist organization – one that which uses military force against civilians for political gains – Israeli is seeking to do the same thing in the Gaza Strip. It is using excessive, indiscriminate violence against civilians for a political objective to unseat Hamas and create an authority which is subservient to and complicit in its own agenda.
Unfortunately none of our media experts in the West have sought to advance the argument that Israel is in fact a sponsor of state terrorism. To add insult to injury our foreign minister goes into the House of Commons last Monday and he tells us that the problem in the region is between a terrorist organization on the one hand and a democracy on the other.
When they go to the polls in Israel there will be no Arab party participating because the Kenesst has voted overwhelmingly to prevent any of the Arab parties from participating in the elections. The matter is before the supreme court but it exposes the myth of this democracy that is applauded in the West, that is the democracy in the oasis of Arab dictatorships. But it denies the Arabs, who make up 20 percent of the population the right to buy land. Land is exclusively owned by the Jewish National Front. Arabs cannot buy land in Israel today.
We heard about the likelihood of Benjamin Netanyahu coming to power. Surely it is absurd that in a mature democracy people should come to power through the butchery of other people. This is what is happening. The one who comes to power in Israel he would have earned this place because of the crimes and atrocities committed in the Gaza Strip. And we should not entertain the view, or subscribe to the view that this is democracy. At best we can say that this is an aberration of democracy.
Let me go back to the issue of expulsions – what they euphemistically call transfer. Livni went to a school in Tel Aviv and she told the students that we envisage a democratic, Jewish state and the solution to the problem would have to be founded on the basis of two national states. And when that is achieved we will tell our Arab population that their dreams have been realized elsewhere.
What is she trying to say? That the ground has been prepared for the expulsion of the population. She said it December 2008. This is the discourse of the current foreign minister. They will try to package it into something called land swap or population swap and unfortunately the present Palestinian leadership seems not willing to resist such provocations and humiliation.
This is as much as I want to say on the subject. To conclude in 1967 Israel defeated three Arab armies in seven days but after three weeks they could not bring Hamas to its knees and this is an indication of what is happening in the Middle East today. The days of conventional warfare are over. We have come to a stage in the Middle East where the popular resistance has gained ground in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Palestine. The Israelis ability to expand their expansionist policies and programmes at the expense of states and people in the region, especially the Palestinian people, has been substantially reduced with the emergence of these popular movements.
My argument is that the region not divided between extremists and moderates as Livini wants us to believe. In fact she goes so far as to say that there is no such thing as the Arab-Israeli conflict. What we have in the Middle East is a conflict between moderates and extremists and Israel: Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are moderates and Lebanon, Syria and Palestine are extremists who should be repudiated.
What we are seeing in the Middle East is a division between the oppressors and those who are oppressed, those who occupy and those who seek liberation.
*Daoud Abdullah an official with the Palestinian Return Centre and an active member of the Muslim Council of Britain. He is also an academic and a political activist.
