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MEIonline.com
Editorial
Hopeless in Gaza
From MEI in London
September 29th, 2005 -- Few should have been in any doubt about the implications of Israel’s much-vaunted “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip.
The settlers have gone, certainly, although a number of the issues surrounding the resources and facilities they left behind remain to be settled. The Israeli army has gone, too, in a sense. It is no longer stationed in installations inside the territory itself. But it is not far away.
There was never any question that, for Gazans, disengagement would mean anything remotely like liberation. The territory’s borders would remain sealed, its port and airport closed for the immediate future, its connections to Jerusalem and the West Bank severed. Above all, it would remain surrounded by and under direct threat from the Israeli armed forces.
As the Israeli prime minister warned on a number of occasions, the slightest provocation from inside the Strip would be met with a major military onslaught.
Perhaps the only surprise in the events of 23-26 September was that they took place so soon after the Israeli withdrawal. The mortars launched by Hamas and Islamic Jihad at the hapless southern Israeli town of Sederot on 23-24 September caused few casualties and little damage. As ever, they were an irrelevance in military terms. For Ariel Sharon, they were just what the doctor ordered.
No doubt the raid on a village in the West Bank the day before, directed against Jihad, was calculated in part at least to provoke a response. But whatever motivated the two militias’ actions, they effectively walked into an Israeli trap. For Sharon needed an excuse to demonstrate that the withdrawal from Gaza had deprived Israeli forces of none of their power to inflict damage with no fear of serious riposte from the Palestinian side.
Hamas was quick to see the implications of what it had done. Unprecedentedly, its response to a serious Israeli assault was to back down and promise to refrain from cross-border attacks in future.
For Sharon, the whole affair must have been deeply satisfying. Faced with the difficult task of heading off a challenge to his leadership of Likud on the basis of his perceived concessions to the Palestinians, he was given plenty of ammunition with which to fight his corner. First, the Palestinian mortars gave him the chance to prove that massive firepower could still be directed at Gaza at will; second, Hamas’ response — one which it surely left itself with no choice but to make — enabled him to show how effective the military could still be in the new circumstances after withdrawal.
The result, for Sharon, was victory by the slenderest of margins at the Likud Central Committee. Likud’s next party leadership contest will not now begin until next April.
The double irony of none other than Ariel Sharon fighting this contest from the peace-makers’ corner while the IDF bombarded Gaza, made mass arrests in the West Bank and sealed off both territories completely appears to have passed largely unnoticed by much of the world’s press. Feted at the UN in mid-September, Sharon has been widely commended for sticking to his decision to pull out of Gaza. The ramifications of that decision seem to be of concern in few quarters.
The international community has more pressing concerns, it seems, under which the very idea of a Middle East process is buried. The Middle East Quartet — readers can be forgiven for forgetting that it comprises the US, the UN, the EU and Russia — still meets and makes occasional statements, most recently on 20 September. But its relevance to the lives of most Palestinians is as minimal as the road-map peace plan it still proffers as the way forward.
The international response to Israel’s latest assault is also likely to have played a part in Hamas’ change of heart. For there was virtually no response at all from the US or the EU. The Palestinians — Gaza and the West Bank — are on their own. The mass arrests in the West Bank after the mortar attacks are ample indication that that territory’s fate remains tied up with that of Gaza, whatever Israel’s ultimate plans for it. And as long as the rest of the world remains effectively disengaged, it is a fate that few people in the Territories can look forward to with any degree of optimism.
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