JERUSALEM: After another sleepless night of terrifying Israeli bombardment in her battered Gaza neighbourhood, Um Mohammed was at the end of her tether.
“We are scared to death, but where should we go? Does fighting Hamas mean wiping out Gaza?” the mother of five asked.
In the thick of a 19-day-old blitz that Israel says is meant to deter Hamas fighters from firing rockets at it, Palestinians focused on survival find it hard to contemplate what lies ahead. “A future for Gaza?” Um Mohammed queried, taken aback at the question. “Listen, my son is five years old. He will carry these images in his mind forever. Will he ever believe in peace?”
So does anyone have a vision for Gaza’s 1.5 million people, squeezed between Israel, Egypt and the sea, once the war stops?
The densely populated, 45-km-long strip has seen plenty of misery since refugees uprooted from their land in what is now Israel swarmed into it during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.After Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war, it seethed under occupation until the 1993 Oslo peace accords sparked brief hope for progress toward Palestinian statehood.
For a few years Gaza’s economy saw some growth. Optimists dreamed it could become a new Singapore on the Mediterranean.
All that crumbled in the Israeli-Palestinian violence that erupted in 2000 after the collapse of US-led peace talks.
Israel’s abrupt unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 only emphasised its physical separation from the occupied West Bank. Israeli border controls kept its people penned in.
Dead end
Gazans have lived under Hamas rule since the Islamist group seized the enclave in 2007, 18 months after it won a Palestinian election against President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction.
Many Palestinian voters were fed up with the perceived corruption of the Palestinian Authority – and with its hapless acquiescence in a US-led “peace process” that went nowhere.
However, their democratic choice led to another dead end.
Israel, backed by the United States and its European and Arab allies, ostracised the Hamas-led government and tightened its economic blockade on Gaza. Foreign aid dried up.
Life for Gazans became even harsher after Hamas drove its Fatah rivals out, widening the split with the West Bank and weakening Abbas’s claim to speak for Palestinians on peace.
Now, with 984 Gazans dead and some 4,300 wounded so far, Palestinians are wary of looking beyond the rubble and ruins.
“The Israeli war on Gaza is undermining the peace process, undermining the moderates,” said veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat.
“You cannot say you want peace and conduct killing fields.”
Neither he nor other pro-Abbas advisers would spell out their views on Gaza’s post-war future – although some US officials are already talking of foreign-funded reconstruction as an opportunity to bolster Abbas at Hamas’s expense.
The Islamist group’s war aims, apart from reaping prestige by resisting the Israeli onslaught, focus on ending the embargo in return for a truce of up to a year, perhaps renewable, with foreign observers on Egypt’s side of the Rafah border crossing.In the long term, Hamas’s charter sets a goal of dismantling the Jewish state and installing Islamic rule in all Palestine, although its leaders have often spoken of a decades-long truce with Israel if it withdraws to its pre-1967 war borders.
Existential threat
The Iranian-backed Islamists are unlikely to abandon an ideology that Israelis view as a threat to their existence, but once the scale of destruction in Gaza becomes clear, Hamas might decide to put its cross-border rocket attacks on hold.
In turn, Israel says it will be ready to “live and let live” if Hamas submits to its conditions – end rocket fire, refrain from rearming and release an Israeli soldier captured in 2006.
That might be the best short-term outcome, according to Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. As long as Sergeant Gilad Shalit was a captive, it would be very difficult to approach anything close to normalisation on any of the crossings, he said, referring to the Israeli blockade.
“Ultimately, we want a two-state solution, not a three-state solution, so the legitimate Palestinian Authority has to re-establish its control over Gaza,” Regev said, denying that Israel intended to have any hand in that process.
Palestinian political analyst Ali Jarbawi said Gaza’s future hung on the outcome of the war: “If Israel can’t win by military means, it has to deal with Hamas by political means.”
Hamas rocket fire on Israel had achieved no results, Jarbawi added. Nor had 15 years of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
For Palestinians, the notion that Israel sincerely seeks a solution that would end occupation and give them a unified state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rings hollow.
The idea that Hamas can be removed from the equation in favour of “moderates” also seems fanciful, although that has not stopped Israel, the West and some Arab states from pursuing it.
Alastair Crooke, a former EU mediator with Hamas, argues that the group let a six-month truce with Israel lapse last month because it had brought a political solution no nearer, even as the humanitarian plight of Gazans worsened.
“The only option was to break the mould of a Gaza left stewing in its isolated misery, and a West Bank frozen in a pattern of Israeli total control, but providing the all-important illusion of a ‘political process’ that Western leaders could extol back home,” Crooke wrote last week.
Hamas’s decision and Israel’s devastating response have inflicted a huge cost on Gazans, whose future remains dark.
“Maybe Hamas is to blame partially,” said Um Mohammed. “Not for what is happening, but for failing to tell us what they wanted to get out of this. If it was all about (opening) the Rafah crossing, we do not want the Rafah crossing.”—Reuters
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