Israel, US complicit in spurring Gaza war

Now on its 26th day, the Israeli war against the Hamas militants in Gaza — the third since Hamas won the 2006 elections in that densely-populated strip of Palestinian territory along the Mediterranean Sea coast — has gravely affected the civilian population, pushing them to “the brink of humanitarian disaster.”            

The Palestinian death toll has surpassed 1,250, including 300 children. Some 215,000 people have left their homes to seek shelter in United Nations facilities, two of which have been bombed. Israeli bombings have damaged 22 medical facilities and disabled Gaza’s lone power plant, which supplied electricity to run the water and sewerage systems.

At this point, there is no sign that the fighting could abate anytime soon, much less stop.

The new political dynamics obtaining in the post-Arab Spring upheavals, principally the restoration of the military’s dictatorship in Egypt (which ousted the popularly elected government headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, allied with Hamas) has complicated the problem for Hamas and the Palestinians.

To understand the current crisis, here’s a brief background:

Gaza (population: 1.8 million) was taken over by Israel during the 1967 war with the Arab states that were supporting the Palestinians. Although supposedly ending its occupation in 2005, Israel has retained control over Gaza’s borders, access to the sea, airspace, cellphone frequencies, and population registry. Two Israeli-Hamas wars erupted in 2009 and 2012.  Both ended in uneasy ceasefires.

Hamas is the militant faction of the Palestinian movement for national liberation that has vowed to destroy Israel — a state whose existence and territory was forcibly imposed upon the Palestinian people. Its larger and moderate rival, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, leads the government in the West Bank. The PLO, under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, won significant concessions from Israel in negotiations in the mid-1990s under the Oslo Accords mediated by the Norwegian government.   

In April 2014 Hamas, deprived of revenues by the combined Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on travel and trade, opted to reconcile with the PLO. The two groups agreed to form a Palestinian “national-consensus” government on these terms:

Hamas would cede its formal authority to the PLO-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — without any of its leaders holding a significant post, although retaining 43,000 civil servants in Gaza. Moreover, Hamas reportedly pledged to comply with three conditions that the United States and the European Union had long demanded: adherence to nonviolent political actions, honoring past agreements, and recognizing the state of Israel. 

Thus the US and the EU supported the unified government, seeing in it brighter prospects for attaining peace between Palestine and Israel. But Israel opposed it, seeing any move towards a unified Palestinian government as a threat to its national security, persisting on isolating it internationally.

There began the problem: Hamas reacted by lobbing rockets into Israeli communities along the Gaza border, and Israeli retaliated with aerial and artillery bombings of ever-increasing targets in Gaza. On July 8, Israel launched a ground invasion. Attempts by the UN and other parties to secure a ceasefire accord have thus far not succeeded.

Much of the background information I have cited is culled from an article written by Nathan Thrall, senior analyst of the International Crisis Group, titled “How the West chose war in Gaza,” recently published in the International New York Times.

To complete the picture, Thrall wrote:

“Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt that bar the passage for most Gazans to the outside world.” (The civil servants cannot be paid because the Israeli-Egyptian blockades have cut off Gaza’s external revenues.) 

The US and the European Union should have opposed these Israeli actions.  But they chose to back up Israel instead. Thrall noted the following:

• When Qatar offered to pay the Gaza civil servants’ salaries, the US warned that “American law prohibited any entity from delivering payment to even one of those employees — many thousands of whom are not members of Hamas but all are considered by American law to have received material support from a terrorist organization.”

• When a United Nations envoy offered to resolve the crisis by delivering the salaries via the UN, the US “stood by” as Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called for the envoy’s expulsion on the ground that he was “trying to funnel money” to Hamas.

“The current escalation in Gaza is a direct result of the choice by Israel and the West to obstruct the implementation of the Palestinian reconciliation agreement reached in April,” Thrall wrote, concluding:  “The road out of the crisis is a reversal of that policy.” 

Expectedly, the Israeli invasion has incurred vehement condemnations worldwide. For instance, a group of British and Italian scientists and doctors declared:

“Gaza trapped under siege is being killed by one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated modern military machines… If those of us capable of speaking up fail to do so…we (become) complicit in the destruction of the lives and homes of 1.8 million people.”

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