Gaza Clashes

The Struggle for Palestine's Soul

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

The message delivered to Condoleezza Rice this week by Israeli officials is that the humanitarian and economic disaster befalling Gaza has a single, reversible cause: the capture by Palestinian fighters of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in late June from a perimeter artillery position that had been shelling Gaza.

When Shalit is returned, negotiations can start, or so Rice was told by Israel's defence minister, Amir Peretz.

If Peretz and others are to be believed, the gunmen could have done themselves and the 1.4 million people of Gaza a favour and simply executed Shalit weeks ago. Israel doubtless would have inflicted terrible retribution, such as the bombing of the Strip's only power station -- except, of course, it had already done that to avenge Shalit's capture. But, with the Israeli soldier dead, there would have been no obstacle to sitting down and talking.

Yet, as we all know, there would have been. Because Israel's refusal to negotiate -- and its crushing of Gaza -- long predates the capture of Shalit.

The international community's economic blockade of the Strip, for example, has nothing to do with the seizing of the soldier; that was because Gazans had the temerity to cast their vote for the politicians of Hamas in March. The Palestinians' exercise of their democratic rights is also the reason why Palestinians with American and European passports are being torn from their families in the occupied territories and expelled.

The recent unremitting Palestinian death toll, of hundreds of civilians, is also unrelated to Shalit. That is apparently the necessary response to the homemade Qassam rockets fired from the Strip into Israel. As are the sonic booms of Israeli warplanes in the middle of the night that traumatise Gaza's children.

And what about Israel's refusal last year to coordinate its disengagement from Gaza with the Palestinian security forces? That was because Israel had "no partner for peace", even though the supine President Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah, was then in sole charge.

Israel's bulldozing of large sections of the densely crowded refugee camp of Rafah, making thousands homeless, had nothing to do with Shalit either. That was related to weapons smuggling tunnels. And the extra-judicial executions of Palestinian political and military leaders, with the inevitable "collateral damage" to bystanders, began before Shalit attended his first school. That is supposedly an essential component in the never-ending war against Palestinian terrorism.

In other words, Israel has always found reasons for oppressing, destroying and killing in Gaza, whatever the circumstances. Let us not forget that Israel's occupation began four decades ago, long before anyone had heard, or dreamt, of Hamas. Israel's rampages through Gaza have continued unabated, even though Hamas' military wing refrained from retaliating to Israeli provocations and maintained a ceasefire for more than a year and a half.

Shalit is the current pretext, but there are a host of others that can be adopted should the need arise. And that is because as far as Israel and its American patron are concerned, any Palestinian resistance to the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is unacceptable. Whatever the Palestinians do -- apart from submitting willingly to occupation and permanently renouncing their right to statehood -- is justification for Israeli "retaliation".

Absolute political and military inactivity is the only approved option for the Palestinians, both because it implies acceptance of the occupation and because then the world can quietly forget about the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. On the other hand, Palestinian activity of any kind -- and especially in pursuit of goals like national liberation -- must be punished.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

All this provides the context for decoding the latest events unfolding in Gaza, as rival fighters from Fatah and Hamas confront each other violently on the streets.

This is the moment Israel has long been waiting for, from the moment a Likud government that included Ariel Sharon began seriously meddling in internal Palestinian politics by helping to establish the Muslim Brotherhood organisation that later became Hamas. Israel hoped that an Islamist party would be a bulwark to the growing popularity of Yasser Arafat's exiled Fatah party and its secular Palestinian nationalism.

Things, of course, did not go quite to plan. In the first intifada that erupted in 1987, Hamas adopted the same assertive agenda of Palestinian national liberation (with added Islamic trimmings) as Fatah. The two groups' goals complemented each other rather than conflicted.

Later, after Israel finally allowed Arafat to return to the occupied territories under the terms of the Oslo accords, the Palestinian president avoided as far as possible carrying out Israeli demands to crack down on Hamas, understanding that this would risk a civil war that would damage Palestinian society and weaken the chances of eventual statehood.

Similarly, Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, resisted confronting Hamas almost as studiously as he has avoided challenging Israeli diktats. Instead, until recently at least, we saw fighters from Hamas and Fatah in Gaza cooperating on several attacks on military positions.

But this week's clashes in Gaza are the first signs that Israel may be succeeding in its designs to deflect the Palestinian resistance from its common goal of national liberation -- to achieve a state -- by redirecting its energies into fratricidal war.

Or as Zeev Schiff, a veteran Haaretz commentator with exceptional contacts in the military, observed: "Lesson number 1 is that the international financial and economic siege of the Hamas government, which is being led by the United States, is succeeding."

Certainly the economic blockade has nothing to do with securing the return of Shailt, as even a senior Israeli army officer and self-styled "counter-terrorism expert" warned this week. "Due to the disagreements between the two sides [Hamas and Fatah], the soldier's release is not in sight," Col Moshe Marzouk told the website of the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot.

Instead, the economic strangulation of Gaza has been the catalyst for internal Palestinian conflict. Inevitably, social bonds grow weak and fragile, even tear, when nearly half the population is unemployed and more than three-quarters are living in poverty. If children are hungry, parents will contemplate opposing their government -- even if they agree with its goals -- to put food on the table.

But the immiseration of Gaza does not, of itself, explain why the clashes are taking place, or what is motivating the factions. This is not just about who will get the scraps from the master's table, or even a struggle between two parties -- Hamas and Fatah -- for control of the government. It is now no less than a battle for the very soul of Palestinian nationalism.

It is no coincidence that the international community, at Israel's behest, has been making three demands of the Hamas government that supposedly justify the throttling of Gaza's economy. The conditions are now well-known: recognising Israel, renouncing violence, and abiding by previous agreements.

Let us put aside Israel's worse failure -- as the stronger party -- to honour any of these conditions. Observers rarely note that Israel has never recognised the Palestinians' right to statehood, not even in the Oslo accords, nor has it defined the extent of its own borders; it has not for one moment renounced violence against Palestinian resistance to occupation; and it has consistently broken its agreements, including by expanding its illegal settlement programme and by annexing Palestinian land under cover of building the West Bank wall.

But more strangely, observers have also failed to note both that Fatah, first under Arafat and then Abbas, agreed to all three conditions years ago and that Fatah's compliance to Israeli demands never helped advance the struggle for statehood by one inch.

Arafat and the PLO recognised Israel back in the late 1980s, and the Palestinian leader put his signature to this recognition again in the Oslo accords. In returning to the occupied territories as head of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat also renounced violence against Israel. He headed the new security forces whose job was to crack down on Palestinian dissent, not respond to Israel's many military provocations or fight the occupation. And of course, Arafat and Fatah, unlike Israel, had every reason to want previous agreements honoured: they mistakenly believed that they were their best hope of winning statehood. They did not factor in Israel's bad faith, and its continuation and intensification of the settlement project.

So the lesson learnt by Hamas from the Fatah years of rule is that these conditions were and are only a trap, and that they were imposed by Israel to win Palestinian obeisance to the occupation, not national liberation. During the Oslo years, the benefits of accepting Israeli conditions accrued not in a peace dividend that led to Palestinian statehood but in rewards that flowed from collaboration with the occupation, a stealthly corruption that enriched many of Fatah's leaders and kept its followers in the large government bureaucracy at a basic standard of living.

Following the outbreak of the second intifada, a majority of ordinary Palestinians voters began to understand how terminally damaging Fatah's complicity with the ocupation had become. For example, as Palestinian, Israeli and international activists tried to demonstrate against the building of Israel's wall across the West Bank, and the subsequent annexation of large swaths of Palestinian land to Israel, the protesters found obstacles placed in their way at every turn by the ruling Fatah party. Its leaders did not want to jeopardise their cement and building contracts with Israel by ending the wall's progress. Liberation was delayed for the more immediate prize of remuneration.

By signing up to the same conditions as Fatah, Hamas would be as good as abandoning its goal of national liberation, as well as forsaking the majority of voters who realised that Fatah's corrupt relationship with Israel had to end. Hamas would self-destruct, which is reason enough why Israel is making such strenuous demands of the international community to force Hamas to comply.

"The Palestinians need a government that can provide for their needs and meet the conditions of the Quartet," Rice said this week, adding that she wanted to strengthen the "moderates" like Abbas.

The struggle on the streets of Gaza is a defining moment, one that may eventually decide whether a real national unity government -- one seeking Palestinian statehood -- is possible.

The question is: will Fatah force Hamas to cave in to Israeli demands and co-opt it, or will Hamas force Fatah to abandon its collaboration and return to the original path of national liberation?

The stakes could not be higher. If Hamas wins, then the Palestinians will have the chance to re-energise the intifada, launch a proper, consensual fight to end the occupation, one that unites the secular and religious, and try to face down the bullying of the international community. As with most national liberation struggles, the price in lives and suffering is likely to be steep.

If Fatah wins and Hamas falls, we will be back to the Oslo process of official Palestinian collaboration with Israel and consent to the ghettoisation of the population -- this time behind walls. Such an arrangement may be done under Fatah rule or, more likely, under the favoured international option of government by Palestinian technocrats, presumably vetted by Israel and the United States.

The consequences are not difficult to divine. If the hopes of ordinary Palestinians for national liberation are dashed again, if Hamas falters just as Fatah did before it, these frustrated popular energies will resurface, finding a new release and one likely to have a different agenda from either Hamas or Fatah.

If the goal of establishing a Palestinian state cannot be realised, then the danger is that many Palestinians will look elsewhere for their liberation, not necessarily in national but in wider, regional and religious terms. The Islamic component of the struggle -- at the moment a gloss, even for Hamas, on what is still a national liberation movement -- will grow and deepen. National liberation will take a back seat to religious jihad.

Do Israel and the United States not understand this? Or maybe, like serial felons who cannot de diverted from the path of crime, they are simply incapable of changing their ways.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

I appreciate his work. We don't see perspectives like this int he mainstream (esp. u.s.) media.

Pregnant Palestinians give birth at Israeli checkpoints

Report, IRIN, 6 October 2006

Palestinians wait in a queue at Beit Iba checkpoint in Gaza. (Tom Spender/IRIN)

GAZA CITY - A report by the Palestinian Ministry of Health says that pregnant Palestinian women are often prevented by Israeli forces from reaching hospitals to receive appropriate medical attention, causing many miscarriages and the deaths of some women.

Since the beginning of the second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation, in September 2000, 68 pregnant Palestinian women gave birth at Israeli checkpoints, leading to 34 miscarriages and the deaths of four women, according to the Health Ministry's September report.

Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said these figures underline the need to put an end to the agony of pregnant Palestinian women held at Israeli checkpoints.

"It is urgent to facilitate access by pregnant women to life-saving services, as stipulated by international humanitarian law," Obaid said.

Rami Abu Shaaban of the Health Ministry's Information Centre said that the amount of time Palestinians spend waiting at border crossings has increased dramatically over the past five years.

"Ten per cent of women who wished to give birth at medical centres had to spend hours on the road before reaching a hospital, while six per cent spent more than four hours. The normal time, before the Intifada, was 15-30 minutes," Abu Shaaban said.

Munna al-Astal spent 19 days stranded at the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt before giving birth nearby.

She said she was among a number of Palestinians who were being processed through the crossing when it was closed by Israeli authorities for security reasons, leaving her and the others caught inside the terminal.

According to the Palestinians, Egyptian authorities do not let them back into Egypt once their passports have been given an exit stamp; and Palestinian authorities do not let them forward into Gaza if the border has been closed.

The stranded survive on food and water they are able to buy there and from handouts from the Egyptian Red Crescent. If they need urgent medical attention, they are taken to hospital in Egypt, but once they are able, they are returned to the crossing.

"I was visiting relatives in Egypt and on my way back to Gaza the crossing was sealed off by the Israelis," al-Astal said. "I was about to give birth. I went into labour for several hours with no one to help me. Finally an ambulance came to take me to the Al-Areesh Hospital [in the Sinai] but I gave birth in the ambulance.

"I named my daughter Ma'abar [Arabic for 'crossing'] to recollect the sufferings and hardships we both had at the Rafah terminal," she added.

According to the Health Ministry's report, there are currently 117,600 pregnant women in the Palestinian territories. This includes 17,640 women who are suffering difficult pregnancies due to a lack of prenatal and postnatal care.

"Inadequate medical care during pregnancy is the third leading cause of death among Palestinian women of childbearing age," said Abu Shaaban.

UNFPA has been helping pregnant women avoid suffering at checkpoints by training health personnel and equipping them with delivery kits to provide services within their communities. It has also formed local community support teams to assist health providers and raise awareness of the availability of delivery services.

Soon after the capture of an Israeli soldier on 25 June by Palestinian militants, Israel launched a military offensive in the Gaza Strip and tightened its control of border crossings. Damage to the Gaza infrastructure, including health, communication, power and transport facilities has been extensive.

This has compounded the suffering of the 1.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, particularly women and young people, health workers say.

"We conduct such restrictions at checkpoints because we receive security warnings of planned attacks on our soldiers and civilians," said Amira Aron, director of the Arab Media Department in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"Israel has horrible experience of Palestinian women being used in carrying out suicide bombings against Israeli civilian and military targets. We know that such measures increase hatred between the two peoples, but we have to defend and protect our civilians," she added.

Almost no one bothered to report it. A search of the nation's largest newspapers turned up nothing in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Tribune, etc.

There was nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News. Nothing.

The LA Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Associated Press each had one sentence, at most, telling about her. All three left out the details, the LA Times had her age significantly off, and the Washington Post reported that she had been killed by an Israeli tank shell.

It hadn't been a tank shell that had killer her, according to witnesses. It had been bullets, multiple ones, fired up close.

Neighbors report that Israeli soldiers had been beating her husband because he wasn't answering their questions. Foolishly or valiantly, how is one to say, the 35-year-old woman had interfered. She tried to explain that her husband was deaf, screamed at the soldiers that her husband couldn't hear them and attempted to stop them from hitting him. So they shot her. Several times.

Her name was Itemad Ismail Abu Mo'ammar.

She didn't die, though. That took longer. It required her life to flow out of her in the form of blood for several hours, as Israeli soldiers refused to allow an ambulance to transport her to help. Her husband and children could do nothing to save her.

Finally, after approximately five hours, an ambulance was allowed to take her to a hospital, where physicians were able to render one service: pronounce her dead, a few days before the commencement of Ramadan, a season of family gatherings much like the Christmas season for Americans. She left 11 children. None of this was in the Washington Post story, which had reported her death in one half of one sentence.

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http://counterpunch.org/weir10062006.html