Another Palestinian Truce Offer

07Mar07

The Palestinian Authority has offered a “total ceasefire” with Israel in return for an end to the international boycott that has resulted in an unemployment rate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) of roughly 40%. According to a senior Hamas official,

“[the Palestians] will offer a promise from Hamas and Fatah of a total cease-fire with Israel, including a complete halt to Qassam [rocket] fire and suicide bombings.”

Naturally, Israel has responded “cautiously” to the proposal. Israel is in no rush for peace, since it is not Israel where 80% of the population is reliant on WFP food aid, without which “they are liable to starve.” A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said,

“We need to see that you can actually implement the ceasefire [in Gaza] before we can consider an extension.”

Of course, the Gaza ceasefire was doomed from the start, because Israel refused to extend it to the West Bank. It provided no reason for not doing so, perhaps because no morally or legally defensible reason exists. The only possible purpose of limiting the ceasefire to Gaza, thereby dooming it to failure, would be to prevent the danger of a new Hamas “peace offensive”, with the Palestinians using a successful ceasefire as a springboard to push for final status talks.

Olmert’s spokeswoman continued,

“It’s about time Palestinians deliver on a promise instead of just Israel delivering on ours.”

Frankly, Israel has no right to complain about the Palestinian not delivering on their promises when it stands accused by the UN of violating every single one of the border crossing agreements it signed under the U.S.-brokered Agreement on Movement and Access. Israel’s arbitrary and extended closure of the border crossings that connect the OPT to Israel and the outside world, vital for Palestinian trade and welfare, are a primary cause, together with the annexation wall and the international sanctions, of the deepening poverty in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 46% of Palestinian households are now “food insecure” or in danger of becoming so, and 80% of Gazans live below the poverty line. Olmert’s recent promises to Abbas have proved equally empty, with Israel failing to “ease restrictions” on Palestinian life. Israel claimed it had dismantled 44 roadblocks, until the IDF later admitted that none of the roadblocks in question actually existed in the first place.

Hamas, on the other hand, has demonstrated that it can stick to a ceasefire, even when the ceasefire in question is unilaterally self-imposed and even in the face of numerous provocations by Israel. Hamas voluntarily signed a unilateral ceasefire in February 2005, and kept to it, with few exceptions, for around a year and a half. As the International Crisis group noted in January 2006,

“Far more than Fatah, Hamas has proved a disciplined adherent to the ceasefire, and Israeli military officers readily credit this for the sharp decline in violence.”

Of course, some will take this latest truce offer as a sign that the strategy of economic strangulation is working. Putting the Palestinians “on a diet”, as Olmert-advisor Dov Weisglass put it last year, has, they may say, been a success – it has forced Hamas to form a coalition government with the more “moderate” Fatah, and now the latest ceasefire offer may be a sign that Hamas is weakening further. Even if true – and there can indeed be little doubt that Israel’s strategy of sparking opposition to the Hamas government by bringing the Palestinian economy to a halt and bombing the hell out of Gaza has, to a large extent, achieved its goals – the idea that collectively punishing an already desperate people in an attempt to force the collapse of their democratically elected government from within can be anything other than morally despicable, not to mention illegal, is unworthy of response.

Israel, the U.S. and the EU are likely to continue to insist that the Palestinian national unity government adhere to the three Quartet “principles” before the blockade is lifted. Of course, a moral principle is only valid if applied universally, and as none of the three pre-conditions being imposed on the Palestinians are also being applied to Israel, none of them are valid. Whereas Hamas’ position on the two-state solution is ambiguous, Israel has always made its position crystal clear: it refuses to recognise the right of a Palestinian state to exist in the areas accorded to it under international law, it refuses to recognise the legally uncontroversial right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel and it refuses to recognise the equally uncontroversial Palestinian right to sovereignty over East Jerusalem.

Israel’s pariah stance – supported by virtually no one else on the planet – was reaffirmed recently, when it called for the Saudi Peace Initiative to be “improved”. The problem, as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livny explained, is that the Arab peace plan is based on international law. Specifically, the Israeli government objects to the section that calls for a “just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194″. As a result, said Livny, “[i]t is impossible for Israel to accept the Arab peace initiative in its current formulation.” In reality, as she must know, the fact that the Arab peace plan called merely for a “just solution” to the refugee issue, as opposed to taking the stance of international law and demanding unequivocally that all refugees be permitted to return, was a significant concession. The Palestinians do not demand the return of all the 5-6 million refugees; they demand that only a small percentage be allowed to return – roughly a few hundred thousand, although precise estimates vary. In any case, polls show that even if all the refugees were permitted to return to Israel, only 10% would choose to do so. Israel could easily absorb 5-600,000 Palestinians if it wanted to. The refugee problem is not the obstacle to peace. The obstacle to peace is the occupation and Israel’s desire to perpetuate it. That is why Israel rejects the Saudi Peace Initiative, and that is why Hamas’ numerous overtures at peace have been rebuffed.

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Speaking of double standards, it is instructive to examine the media reaction to the recent news that the IDF continues to use civilians as human shields during the course of military operations. Israeli soldiers were caught on film by the AP using a Palestinian civilian to enter houses ahead of the troops, a practice that is illegal under both international and Israeli law. The use of human shields is a long-standing IDF tactic, used in last year’s military assault on Gaza.

(via)

This latest ‘revelation’ of IDF malpractice is, then, hardly surprising. But compare the media reaction to this shocking use of Palestinians as human shields to the reaction generated by Israel’s attempts to justify its slaughter of Lebanese civilians last summer with the claim that Hizbullah fighters were “hiding behind” them. Despite providing virtually no evidence to back this claim up, and despite the contrary assessments of seasoned observers (“In Lebanon, it’s a different scene. Time after time, Israel has hit civilian homes and cars in the southern border zone, killing dozens of people with no evidence of any military objective” – Peter Bouckaert, an experienced researcher for Human Rights Watch [via]) and despite a detailed Human Rights Watch investigation which concluded,

“Our research shows that Israel’s claim that Hizbullah fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let alone justify, Israel’s indiscriminate warfare… Hizbullah fighters must not hide behind civilians – that’s an absolute – but the image that Israel has promoted of such shielding as the cause of so high a civilian death toll is wrong”,

the Israeli “hiding behind civilians” PR strategy was a huge success, with Western commentators falling over themselves to apologise for Israeli war crimes. A breathless Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Boston Globe,

“It should be obvious by now that Hezbollah and Hamas actually want the Israeli military to kill as many Lebanese and Palestinian civilians as possible. That is why they store their rockets underneath the beds of civilians. That is why they launch their missiles from crowded civilian neighborhoods and hide among civilians. They are seeking to induce Israel to defend its civilians by going after them among their civilian “shields”",

while Lorna Fitzsimons asked in The Guardian,

“But how does a nation-state defend itself against a terrorist organisation or organisations that are part of, and deliberately hide behind, ordinary citizens? Of course the Israeli military and all military forces must act ethically. But if the number of civilian casualties continues to be the main issue, there is no incentive for the terrorists to stop using the civilian population as a shield.”

Writing in the Washington Post, David Bernstein lamented that international support for Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon lasted “a mere two weeks”. Ignoring all the evidence to the contrary, he characterised the “chain of events” thus:

“Hezbollah attacks Israel; Israel battles an enemy that hides among and fights from civilian populations, which inevitably leads to civilian casualties”.

In the same newspaper, Charles Krauthammer fumed at a perceived lack of support for the Israeli aggression, declaring that the entire world (bar “the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others”) has “completely lost its moral bearings”. He continued,

“Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides…

But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.”

And so on and so on. The official Israeli propaganda line, which sought to justify its horrendous military assaults on civilians by blaming Hizbullah, was simply swallowed hook, line and sinker. Once swallowed, it was then publicised. Heavily.

Compare that with media coverage of the AP footage of IDF soldiers using a Palestinian as a human shield. Unlike with Israel’s claims about Hizbullah, this allegation is actually supported by concrete evidence (the film footage). Based on last year’s performance with Lebanon, one would expect to see hordes of angry commentators frothing at the mouth with outrage. In fact, what we get is silence. The Lexis Nexis database shows that not a single national U.S. paper or major world paper has carried an article on this gross human rights violation. A few published the AP wire story on their websites (e.g. The Guardian), but that was it. This is particularly troubling, since, unlike any human rights violations committed by Hizbullah, we as British or American citizens are heavily complicit in those perpetrated by Israel.

This double standard, whereby we demand far more from Israel’s enemies (Hamas, Hizbullah, etc.) than from Israel, is not merely unfair, although it is most certainly that. It is the exact inverse of what a moral approach to the situation would be. The massive asymmetry between the two sides in the Israel/Palestine conflict, in terms of both force and legitimacy, together with the West’s deep complicity in Israeli crimes, demands a far more scrupulous examination and, if necessary, far more prominent criticism of Israel’s actions, as opposed to those of Hamas. We should be demanding that Israel abide by the law, renounce violence and respect the right of a Palestinian state to exist within the legally defined boundaries before we even think of making the equivalent demands of the Palestinians, who are suffering terribly under an occupation we help sustain. That the reverse is happening indicates that mainstream British and American political culture suffers from either a widespread contempt for human rights, uncritical support of Israel or racism, or, more likely, a toxic mix of all three.

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Tags: International & Foreign Policy