After 50 days shooting fish in a barrel in Gaza, what will Israel do next?

[Steve Hayes]

Noam Chomsky: After 50 days shooting fish in a barrel in Gaza, what will
Israel do next?

Noam Chomsky 10 September 2014. Posted in News
The latest ceasefire will go the same way as other 'agreements' following
Israel's periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza: Hamas will
observe it, Israel will ignore it.
Gaza mass destruction

On August 26th, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) both accepted a
ceasefire agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100
Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind.

The agreement calls for an end to military action by both Israel and Hamas, as
well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.

This is, however, just the most recent of a series of ceasefire agreements
reached after each of Israel's periodic escalations of its unremitting assault
on Gaza. Throughout this period, the terms of these agreements remain
essentially the same.

The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in
place, while Hamas observes it -- as Israel has officially recognized -- until
a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by
even fiercer brutality.

These escalations, which amount to shooting fish in a pond, are called "mowing
the lawn" in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described
as "removing the topsoil" by a senior US military officer, appalled by the
practices of the self-described "most moral army in the world."

The first of this series was the Agreement on Movement and Access Between
Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November 2005. It called for "a
crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the
transit of people, continuous operation of crossings between Israel and Gaza
for the import/export of goods, and the transit of people, reduction of
obstacles to movement within the West Bank, bus and truck convoys between the
West Bank and Gaza, the building of a seaport in Gaza, [and the] re-opening of
the airport in Gaza" that Israeli bombing had demolished.

That agreement was reached shortly after Israel withdrew its settlers and
military forces from Gaza. The motive for the disengagement was explained by
Dov Weissglass, a confidant of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was in
charge of negotiating and implementing it.

"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace
process," Weissglass informed the Israeli press. "And when you freeze that
process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent
a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. Effectively, this
whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been
removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and
permission. All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both
houses of Congress."

True enough.

"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," Weissglass added. "It supplies
the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political
process with the Palestinians." Israeli hawks also recognized that instead of
investing substantial resources in maintaining a few thousand settlers in
illegal communities in devastated Gaza, it made more sense to transfer them to
illegal subsidized communities in areas of the West Bank that Israel intended
to keep.

The disengagement was depicted as a noble effort to pursue peace, but the
reality was quite different.

Israel never relinquished control of Gaza and is, accordingly, recognized as
the occupying power by the United Nations, the US, and other states (Israel
apart, of course). In their comprehensive history of Israeli settlement in
the occupied territories, Israeli scholars Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
describe what actually happened when that country disengaged: the ruined
territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip
or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day." After
the disengagement, "Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services,
and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were
destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact
continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by
means of its formidable military might."

Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense

Israel soon had a pretext for violating the November Agreement more severely.
In January 2006, the Palestinians committed a serious crime. They voted "the
wrong way" in carefully monitored free elections, placing the parliament in
the hands of Hamas. Israel and the United States immediately imposed harsh
sanctions, telling the world very clearly what they mean by "democracy
promotion." Europe, to its shame, went along as well.

The US and Israel soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the
unacceptable elected government, a familiar procedure. When Hamas pre-empted
the coup in 2007, the siege of Gaza became far more severe, along with regular
Israeli military attacks. Voting the wrong way in a free election was bad
enough, but preempting a US-planned military coup proved to be an unpardonable
offense.

A new ceasefire agreement was reached in June 2008. It again called for
opening the border crossings to "allow the transfer of all goods that were
banned and restricted to go into Gaza." Israel formally agreed to this, but
immediately announced that it would not abide by the agreement and open the
borders until Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas.

Israel itself has a long history of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the
high seas and holding them for lengthy periods without credible charge,
sometimes as hostages. Of course, imprisoning civilians on dubious charges,
or none, is a regular practice in the territories Israel controls. But the
standard western distinction between people and "unpeople" (in Orwell's useful
phrase) renders all this insignificant.

Israel not only maintained the siege in violation of the June 2008 ceasefire
agreement but did so with extreme rigor, even preventing the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency, which cares for the huge number of official refugees
in Gaza, from replenishing its stocks.

On November 4th, while the media were focused on the US presidential election,
Israeli troops entered Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants. That
elicited a Hamas missile response and an exchange of fire. (All the deaths
were Palestinian.) In late December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire.
Israel considered the offer, but rejected it, preferring instead to launch
Operation Cast Lead, a three-week incursion of the full power of the Israeli
military into the Gaza strip, resulting in shocking atrocities well documented
by international and Israeli human rights organizations.

On January 8, 2009, while Cast Lead was in full fury, the UN Security Council
passed a unanimous resolution (with the US abstaining) calling for "an
immediate ceasefire leading to a full Israeli withdrawal, unimpeded provision
through Gaza of food, fuel, and medical treatment, and intensified
international arrangements to prevent arms and ammunition smuggling."

A new ceasefire agreement was indeed reached, but the terms, similar to the
previous ones, were again never observed and broke down completely with the
next major mowing-the-lawn episode in November 2012, Operation Pillar of
Defense. What happened in the interim can be illustrated by the casualty
figures from January 2012 to the launching of that operation: one Israeli was
killed by fire from Gaza while 78 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire.

The first act of Operation Pillar of Defense was the murder of Ahmed Jabari, a
high official of the military wing of Hamas. Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of
Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz, described Jabari as Israel's
"subcontractor" in Gaza, who enforced relative quiet there for more than five
years. As always, there was a pretext for the assassination, but the likely
reason was provided by Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin. He had been
involved in direct negotiations with Jabari for years and reported that, hours
before he was assassinated, Jabari "received the draft of a permanent truce
agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the ceasefire
in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip."

There is a long record of Israeli actions designed to deter the threat of a
diplomatic settlement. After this exercise of mowing the lawn, a ceasefire
agreement was reached yet again. Repeating the now-standard terms, it called
for a cessation of military action by both sides and the effective ending of
the siege of Gaza with Israel "opening the crossings and facilitating the
movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting
residents' free movements and targeting residents in border areas."

What happened next was reviewed by Nathan Thrall, senior Middle East analyst
of the International Crisis Group. Israeli intelligence recognized that Hamas
was observing the terms of the ceasefire. "Israel,” Thrall wrote, “therefore
saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months
following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed
Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border,
and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza's
waters." In other words, the siege never ended. "Crossings were repeatedly
shut. So-called buffer zones inside Gaza [from which Palestinians are barred,
and which include a third or more of the strip’s limited arable land] were
reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were
given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank."

Operation Protective Edge

So matters continued until April 2014, when an important event took place.
The two major Palestinian groupings, Gaza-based Hamas and the Fatah-dominated
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank signed a unity agreement. Hamas made
major concessions. The unity government contained none of its members or
allies. In substantial measure, as Nathan Thrall observes, Hamas turned over
governance of Gaza to the PA. Several thousand PA security forces were sent
there and the PA placed its guards at borders and crossings, with no
reciprocal positions for Hamas in the West Bank security apparatus. Finally,
the unity government accepted the three conditions that Washington and the
European Union had long demanded: non-violence, adherence to past agreements,
and the recognition of Israel.

Israel was infuriated. Its government declared at once that it would refuse
to deal with the unity government and cancelled negotiations. Its fury
mounted when the US, along with most of the world, signaled support for the
unity government.

There are good reasons why Israel opposes the unification of Palestinians.
One is that the Hamas-Fatah conflict has provided a useful pretext for
refusing to engage in serious negotiations. How can one negotiate with a
divided entity? More significantly, for more than 20 years, Israel has been
committed to separating Gaza from the West Bank in violation of the Oslo
Accords it signed in 1993, which declare Gaza and the West Bank to be an
inseparable territorial unity.

A look at a map explains the rationale. Separated from Gaza, any West Bank
enclaves left to Palestinians have no access to the outside world. They are
contained by two hostile powers, Israel and Jordan, both close US allies --
and contrary to illusions, the US is very far from a neutral "honest broker."

Furthermore, Israel has been systematically taking over the Jordan Valley,
driving out Palestinians, establishing settlements, sinking wells, and
otherwise ensuring that the region -- about one-third of the West Bank, with
much of its arable land -- will ultimately be integrated into Israel along
with the other regions that country is taking over. Hence remaining
Palestinian cantons will be completely imprisoned. Unification with Gaza
would interfere with these plans, which trace back to the early days of the
occupation and have had steady support from the major political blocs,
including figures usually portrayed as doves like former president Shimon
Peres, who was one of the architects of settlement deep in the West Bank.

As usual, a pretext was needed to move on to the next escalation. Such an
occasion arose when three Israeli boys from the settler community in the West
Bank were brutally murdered. The Israeli government evidently quickly
realized that they were dead, but pretended otherwise, which provided the
opportunity to launch a "rescue operation" -- actually a rampage primarily
targeting Hamas. The Netanyahu government has claimed from the start that it
knew Hamas was responsible, but has made no effort to present evidence.

One of Israel's leading authorities on Hamas, Shlomi Eldar, reported almost at
once that the killers very likely came from a dissident clan in Hebron that
has long been a thorn in the side of the Hamas leadership. He added, "I'm
sure they didn't get any green light from the leadership of Hamas, they just
thought it was the right time to act."

The Israeli police have since been searching for and arresting members of the
clan, still claiming, without evidence, that they are "Hamas terrorists." On
September 2nd, Haaretz reported that, after very intensive interrogations, the
Israeli security services concluded the abduction of the teenagers "was
carried out by an independent cell" with no known direct links to Hamas.

The 18-day rampage by the Israeli Defense Forces succeeded in undermining the
feared unity government. According to Israeli military sources, its soldiers
arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335 affiliated with Hamas, and killed
six, while searching thousands of locations and confiscating $350,000. Israel
also conducted dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing five Hamas members on July
7th.

Hamas finally reacted with its first rockets in 18 months, Israeli officials
reported, providing Israel with the pretext to launch Operation Protective
Edge on July 8th. The 50-day assault proved the most extreme exercise in
mowing the lawn -- so far.

Operation [Still to Be Named]

Israel is in a fine position today to reverse its decades-old policy of
separating Gaza from the West Bank in violation of its solemn agreements and
to observe a major ceasefire agreement for the first time. At least
temporarily, the threat of democracy in neighboring Egypt has been diminished,
and the brutal Egyptian military dictatorship of General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi
is a welcome ally for Israel in maintaining control over Gaza.

The Palestinian unity government, as noted earlier, is placing the US-trained
forces of the Palestinian Authority in control of Gaza’s borders, and
governance may be shifting into the hands of the PA, which depends on Israel
for its survival, as well as for its finances. Israel might feel that its
takeover of Palestinian territory in the West Bank has proceeded so far that
there is little to fear from some limited form of autonomy for the enclaves
that remain to Palestinians.

There is also some truth to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's observation:
"Many elements in the region understand today that, in the struggle in which
they are threatened, Israel is not an enemy but a partner."

Akiva Eldar, Israel's leading diplomatic correspondent, adds, however, that
"all those ‘many elements in the region’ also understand that there is no
brave and comprehensive diplomatic move on the horizon without an agreement on
the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and a just,
agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem." That is not on Israel's agenda,
he points out, and is in fact in direct conflict with the 1999 electoral
program of the governing Likud coalition, never rescinded, which "flatly
rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan
river."

Some knowledgeable Israeli commentators, notably columnist Danny Rubinstein,
believe that Israel is poised to reverse course and relax its stranglehold on
Gaza.

We'll see.

The record of these past years suggests otherwise and the first signs are not
auspicious. As Operation Protective Edge ended, Israel announced its largest
appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years, almost 1,000 acres. Israel Radio
reported that the takeover was in response to the killing of the three Jewish
teenagers by "Hamas militants." A Palestinian boy was burned to death in
retaliation for the murder, but no Israeli land was handed to Palestinians,
nor was there any reaction when an Israeli soldier murdered 10-year-old Khalil
Anati on a quiet street in a refugee camp near Hebron on August 10th, while
the most moral army in the world was smashing Gaza to bits, and then drove
away in his jeep as the child bled to death.

Anati was one the 23 Palestinians (including three children) killed by Israeli
occupation forces in the West Bank during the Gaza onslaught, according to UN
statistics, along with more than 2,000 wounded, 38% by live fire. "None of
those killed were endangering soldiers' lives," Israeli journalist Gideon Levy
reported. To none of this is there any reaction, just as there was no
reaction while Israel killed, on average, more than two Palestinian children a
week for the past 14 years. Unpeople, after all.

It is commonly claimed on all sides that, if the two-state settlement is dead
as a result of Israel's takeover of Palestinian lands, then the outcome will
be one state West of the Jordan. Some Palestinians welcome this outcome,
anticipating that they can then conduct a civil rights struggle for equal
rights on the model of South Africa under apartheid. Many Israeli
commentators warn that the resulting "demographic problem" of more Arab than
Jewish births and diminishing Jewish immigration will undermine their hope for
a "democratic Jewish state."

But these widespread beliefs are dubious.

The realistic alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will
continue to carry forward the plans it has been implementing for years, taking
over whatever is of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian
population concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas it is
integrating into Israel. That should avoid the dreaded "demographic problem."

The areas being integrated into Israel include a vastly expanded Greater
Jerusalem, the area within the illegal "Separation Wall," corridors cutting
through the regions to the East, and will probably also encompass the Jordan
Valley. Gaza will likely remain under its usual harsh siege, separated from
the West Bank. And the Syrian Golan Heights -- like Jerusalem, annexed in
violation of Security Council orders -- will quietly become part of Greater
Israel. In the meantime, West Bank Palestinians will be contained in unviable
cantons, with special accommodation for elites in standard neocolonial style.

These basic policies have been underway since the 1967 conquest, following a
principle enunciated by then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli
leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinians. He informed his cabinet
colleagues that they should tell Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, "We
have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may
leave, and we will see where this process leads."

The suggestion was natural within the overriding conception articulated in
1972 by future president Haim Herzog: "I do not deny the Palestinians a place
or stand or opinion on every matter... But certainly I am not prepared to
consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated
in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land
there cannot be any partner." Dayan also called for Israel’s "permanent rule"
("memshelet keva") over the occupied territories. When Netanyahu expresses
the same stand today, he is not breaking new ground.

Like other states, Israel pleads "security" as justification for its
aggressive and violent actions. But knowledgeable Israelis know better.
Their recognition of reality was articulated clearly in 1972 by Air Force
Commander (and later president) Ezer Weizmann. He explained that there would
be no security problem if Israel were to accept the international call to
withdraw from the territories it conquered in 1967, but the country would not
then be able to "exist according to the scale, spirit, and quality she now
embodies."

For a century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily
on the pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground,
which the world was to ultimately come to accept. It has been a highly
successful policy. There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as
the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and
ideological support. For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized
Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change US
policies, not an idle dream by any means.

Source: TomDespatch.com
http://stopwar.org.uk/news/noam-chomsky-after-50-days-shooting-fish-in-a-barrel-in-gaza-what-will-israel-do-next


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
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