"David Grossman
- The Guardian, Wednesday 31 December 2008
- Article history
Now, after the heavy blow that Israel has dealt to the Gaza Strip, we would do best to halt, turn to the leaders of Hamas and tell them: until last Saturday, we restrained ourselves in responding to the thousands of Qassam rockets fired at us. Now you know how severe the retaliation can be. So as not to add to the death and destruction we intend, unilaterally and absolutely, to hold our fire for the next day.
Even if you continue to fire on Israel, we will not respond by resuming combat. We will grit our teeth, just as we did throughout the period before our attack. We will not be drawn into using force. Furthermore, we hereby invite all concerned countries, nearby and distant, to mediate between us and you, in order to reinstate the ceasefire that ended earlier this month. If you also cease hostilities, we will not renew them. If you continue to shoot while we hold ourselves back, we will respond accordingly when the 48-hour ceasefire, which we began on Monday afternoon, comes to an end. But even then we will leave the door open to negotiations to re-establish the truce, and even seek a broader agreement.
This should be Israel's next move. Is it possible, or are we already captives of the all too familiar ritual of war? Until last Saturday, Israel, under the military leadership of Ehud Barak, acted with impressive level-headedness. We must not lose that now, in the heat of battle. We must not forget, even for a moment, that the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip will continue to live on our borders, and that sooner or later we will need to achieve neighbourly relations with them.
We must not, under any circumstances, strike with such massive violence, even though Hamas has for years made life excruciating for the Israelis who live on the Gaza Strip's perimeter, even though Hamas's leaders have rebuffed every Israeli and Egyptian endeavour to achieve a compromise and prevent a conflagration. Restraint, and our duty to protect the lives of Gaza's innocent inhabitants, must remain our call words today, precisely because Israel's power is almost limitless compared to that of Hamas.
Israel must constantly appraise whether the force it is using has gone beyond being a legitimate and effective response aimed at deterrence and restoration of calm. We must take care not to cross into the vortex of violence that has so often swept us up in the past.
Israel's leaders know very well that, given the state of the Gaza Strip, it will be very difficult to achieve a total, unambiguous military victory. Instead, we are more likely to return to the state of ambiguity we know so well from Lebanon. Israel will then strike at Hamas and get struck, strike and get struck, get caught in all the snares that such a tit-for-tat sets, without achieving any real and vital aims. Despite our military strength, we will be unable to extricate ourselves, and will find that we have been carried away by a tide of violence and destruction.
So let us stop. Hold our fire. For once, let us attempt to act against our usual reflexes. Against the deadly logic of military power and the dynamic of escalation. We can always start shooting again. The war will not run away, as Barak himself said two weeks ago. If we demonstrate that we can halt, we will not lose international support. We will gain even more if we demonstrate such well-considered self-control, and if we invite the international and Arab communities to intervene and mediate.
True, Hamas will then enjoy a moratorium in which it can reorganise, but it has had long years to do that anyway, so another few hours will not make much difference. In contrast, such a calculated ceasefire may lead Hamas to change its mode of response. It may offer the movement an honorable way of extricating itself from its own trap.
And one more inevitable thought. Had we taken this approach in July 2006, after Hezbollah kidnapped two of our soldiers - had we halted then, after our initial retaliatory strike, and declared that we were holding our fire for a day or two to calm the situation and give mediation a chance - we would likely be in a better position today. That, too, is a lesson that Israel's government should have learned from that war. In fact, it is the most important lesson we must learn.
• David Grossman is the author of Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo.
• This article was translated by Haim Watzman"
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 31 December 2008 19.15 GMT
- Article history
As of Tuesday evening, Israel's air assault on the Gaza Strip, an area only twice the size of Washington DC, and the world's most densely populated territory, counted at least 380 dead Palestinians, including scores of children and over 800 wounded, four dead Israelis, and one dead Egyptian soldier. Demonstrations against Israel and the United States took place in Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon, the Israeli occupied West Bank, throughout Europe - and even in Israel itself. Demonstrators targeted Arab governments too, notably America's ally, Egypt. And this is only the beginning of the latest Israeli-Arab war.
It will get worse – whenever it wasn't getting better it has always gotten worse.
For anyone to believe that this time everything will be different, they would have to be incredibly optimistic or foolish. The most likely script will be a variation on previous wars. Israel will "punish" the Arabs in Gaza as they have never been hurt before. Hamas will find ways to attack Israelis, either through rockets or through attacks inside Israel. If there is a ground war, many more civilians will die.
Once some days have passed and each side takes stock, they will begin looking for an exit strategy. If the Bush administration follows past protocol, it will encourage Israel to prolong the war in the hopes of achieving a "knock-out" blow.
At the end, a shaky return to the status quo will take place, each side will declare victory, and everyone will have lost. Israel will still have a Hamas-run Gaza Strip as its neighbour, and a more angry one to boot, Palestinians will have hundreds - if not thousands - of new graves, and hatred of the US throughout the Arab and Muslims worlds will have received a fresh boost.
So why not change the script?
The US should step in now and help negotiate a ceasefire that can achieve those goals that are consistent with American, Israeli, and Palestinian security interests, ending the violence and lifting the siege on Gaza. A third-party monitoring mechanism should be established that can work with Israel and Hamas to ensure compliance with the agreement. There is a precedent for this - in 1996, following the disastrous Israeli "Grapes of Wrath" operation in Lebanon, a monitoring group consisting of the US, Syria, Israel, Lebanon and France was instituted.
America's allies have a profound role to play right now. They will need to create back-channel opportunities for serious discussions between Israel and Hamas over the terms of a new ceasefire. Those terms will have to include reliable security for Israel and for Palestinians and a full opening of the Gaza Strip to humanitarian aid and economic assistance and development through both Israel and Egypt. That opening will have to come in part with Israel's assistance, but also with Egypt's. The institutionalisation of the "tunnel economy" between Egypt and the Gaza Strip needs to be normalised above the ground and Gaza's civilians need to be allowed to travel for the first time.
A monitoring and verification mechanism will need to be created to ensure that each side fulfills its commitments with modalities to handle the inevitable problems that will arise. It will be necessary to place some monitors inside Gaza and on the border crossings with Israel and Egypt.
The Bush administration can and should be part of this effort. It may be leaving the world a much worse place than when it started, but it can at least try to put out one fire in its last weeks in office. If not, others will have to fill that vacuum – something that has happened often in the last eight years and that we are seeing already in this latest crisis, with the beginnings of Turkish mediation and French truce efforts.
Finally, it must be made clear that this is a stop-gap measure, a prelude to a broader stabilisation effort that can deliver something at least approximating peace. And for that, America is indispensable. The place to start is not by injecting new life into the flawed Annapolis peace process. That effort, focused exclusively on the West Bank and on reaching a deal on paper, absent implementation mechanisms, inclusivity and a regional component, has just been exposed in all its redundancy.
In re-thinking its approach, America will have to work more closely with its allies, and develop a meaningful division of labour. For instance, Turkey, Arab states like Qatar, and the Europeans should be allowed to take the lead in working to get Hamas' formal acceptance of the Arab League initiative and negotiating a power-sharing agreement between the Fatah faction in control in the West Bank and the Hamas leadership in Gaza. The US has vetoed this approach in the past. Those allies will also have to be more forceful in advocating a different approach to the US and be willing to carry the extra burden of new responsibilities.
A key US national security interest goal for the incoming Obama administration is ending the state of hostility between Israel and her Arab neighbors and ensuring the creation of a Palestinian state that is part of a new regional security structure. This will help promote a more stable regional environment for withdrawal from Iraq, dramatically improve the US negotiating position with Iran, ensure Israel's prosperity and security, and win allies in the battle against Salafist extremism. It is hard to overstate the importance of creating a new regional context in the Middle East. The narrow and self-serving interests of particular Israeli and Palestinian governments (and the Palestinians currently have two) have to be subsumed to that overriding necessity.
But figuring out how to get there will take a major rethink. Obama's silence right now on Gaza, as opposed to his comments on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai or on the financial crisis, may not be such a bad thing if the alternative is an endorsement of dead-end conflict. Nuancing the failed policies the US has pursued in the Middle East over the last eight years is not enough, it will not give us very different results. Coming up with a new policy and tactics should be something that exercises the Obama administration starting from day one.
In the meantime, the United States must be seen to be a source for conflict resolution not escalation – starting now with Gaza."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment