The War on Gaza: How We Got to the “Monstrosity of Our Century” (1)

From Oslo to Onslaught

A recent Frontline documentary, Netanyahu, America & the Road to War in Gaza, provided a sweeping examination of the most critical moments leading to the ongoing war on Gaza. Starting with the Oslo Accords and continuing through to the current predicament, it draws on years of reporting and takes an incisive look at the long history of failed peace efforts and violent conflict in the region. It also looked at the increasing tensions between Israel and its ally, the U.S., over the war’s catastrophic toll and what comes next.

On 13 September 1993, an historic and hopeful moment in the century-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict took place in Washington D.C. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) negotiator Mahmoud Abbas signed a Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (the Oslo I Accord) at the White House, under the aegis of US President Bill Clinton.

The agreement was the fruit of secret negotiations that began in January 1993 between representatives of Israel led by Shimon Peres and representatives of the PLO led by Mahmoud Abbas in the Norwegian capital, Oslo. Israel accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and the PLO renounced armed struggle and recognised Israel’s right to exist in peace. Both sides agreed that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would be established and assume governing responsibilities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip over a five-year period. Then, permanent status talks on the issues of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem would be held.

Two years later, on 28 September 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo II Accord, formally called Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which detailed the expansion of Palestinian self-rule to population centres other than Gaza and Jericho.

But in Israel an outcry against the peace process had been building among the ultra-religious right-wing and security-orientated conservatives. Leading the charge was Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud party. He famously said that “The PLO, Islamic State, 15 minutes from Jerusalem or 5 minutes from Tel Aviv is a prescription not for peace but for dangerous and renewed conflict”. Back then – and still today – he did not believe in the possibility of a deal with the Palestinians whom he has never trusted nor liked.

On 4 November 1995, at the end of a rally of his own Labour party in support of the Oslo peace process, Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Israeli Jew. Rabin’s widow blamed Netanyahu for contributing to her husband’s death and said so on worldwide television. After Rabin’s death, the peace process he had championed was in jeopardy. His successor, Shimon Peres, would now try to win an election to keep it alive. He had to face Netanyahu who had railed against the Oslo Accords and promised security to the growing number of Israelis scarred by mounting violence.

Just over a month later, as the new Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu was at the White House where he reluctantly pledged to further implement the Oslo peace process. But close observers said he was slow walking, and nobody was happy with him: the left was unhappy for what he was doing to undermine Oslo and the right didn’t like what he was doing to keep Oslo. As a result, in 1999 Netanyahu lost his bid for re-election.

Netanyahu would spend the next several years working his way back into power. He watched with concern as President Clinton brought his left-wing successor Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat together at Camp David for another peace effort that would have created a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. Eventually, the negotiations failed, stumbling on the highly sensitive and contentious issue of the control of Jerusalem. The failure to make a deal set in motion a new round of frustration and violence on both sides.

By 2005, Netanyahu was back at the centre of the Israeli government. He was finance minister in the administration of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who had a new plan for dealing with the Palestinians: a unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlements and troops from the Gaza Strip but no negotiations. Netanyahu grew uneasy about the implications of handing over Gaza to the Palestinians. A week before the pull-out, he resigned in protest, declaring: “I cannot be a partner to a move that I think compromises the security of Israel”.

In Washington, President George W. Bush had been pushing the Palestinians to quickly take advantage of the moment and hold democratic elections in 2006. The Bush Administration threw its support behind the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas who’d taken over since the death of Yasser Arafat. Abbas and his Fatah party were unpopular among many Palestinians who saw them as corrupt and ineffective. The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) – which was only established in 1987 during the first Intifada – decided to run against them in what was unanimously considered as open and free elections that were promoted by the US but cautioned against by Israel. And, to the surprise of everyone, Hamas – which had been designated by Israel, the US and many European countries as a terrorist organization a decade earlier because of its armed resistance against Israel – won the election in Gaza. In the wake of this electoral victory, Hamas took complete control of the Strip, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party retreated to the West Bank City of Ramallah, and the Israeli government imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip.

By 2008, Netanyahu was once again running for Prime Minister with a campaign slogan of “strong against Hamas”. But during the run-up to his eventual victory, a new President, Barack H. Obama, had entered the White House. Netanyahu was concerned. From his first day in office, President Obama had set a new tone and signalled to the Palestinians and Israelis alike that he wanted to restart the peace process. In May 2009, he invited Netanyahu to the White House, pressing him to stop the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank on land captured in the 1967 War and claimed by the Palestinians. For Netanyahu, his first meeting with the President couldn’t have gone worse.

Obama’s peace efforts over the next few years wouldn’t be able to break the cycle of violence that had been raging between Israel and the Palestinians. He would send his veteran conflict negotiator, George Mitchell, to the region more than 20 times. Eventually, Mitchell gave up. He submitted his letter of resignation in 2011. With his Middle East efforts in trouble, Obama doubled down. Amid the 2011 “Arab Spring”, he delivered a speech at the State Department that lasted nearly an hour but would be remembered for just one line: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps”. That Israel should return land it captured in the 1967 War to form a Palestinian state was a familiar demand, but one never endorsed so publicly by a US President. For Israel this was a major and perilous development.

The Palestinians who once cheered Obama’s election, now watched with disappointment as the peace process not only faltered, but Israel continued to build settlements. Obama’s approach has been to send signals, but to never follow up his signals with actual action. Netanyahu understood that and proved to the Israeli public that “when I defend you, even against the strongest person in the world, the President of the United States, we still get what we need in defence terms, and we still get this huge check from the United States. He managed to prove that Israel didn’t pay a price.”

Netanyahu would capitalise on his defiance of Obama. As he ran for re-election in 2015, he publicly lashed out at the President over his deal with Iran to curtail its nuclear program. And it played well to his base on the Israeli right. He took an even harder line on the Palestinian issue declaring:

“I opposed, and I adamantly oppose, the division of Jerusalem. I adamantly oppose going back to the 67 borders. I adamantly oppose the right of return. And that’s not all. Look at practical reality. I haven’t pulled back a single centimetre. For years, we, I have been facing this whole pressure campaign. I have continued to build in Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods. I have never agreed to divide Jerusalem. I have never agreed to pull back to the 67 borders and I never will”.

Netanyahu’s Likud party won what’s been called a stunning re-election victory, one which emboldened Netanyahu’s approach to the Palestinians. He would take advantage of the fact they were divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “He wanted to divide, and he wanted to make sure that he doesn’t have to negotiate any deal where you would connect between the territories and Gaza”, hence preventing the creation of a Palestinian State.

With the Palestinians divided and Netanyahu pursuing a strategy keeping it that way, a new US President, Donald Trump, came to power with a new approach to the region. He boasted he’d be the first US President to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. “I speak to you today as a lifelong supporter and true friend of Israel”, he declared to an AIPAC audience. He also surrounded himself with a team that included his son-in-law, Jared Kushner who was a family friend of Netanyahu and David Friedman who supported Israeli settlements. And so, “You had these advisers on Israel, all of them Jewish, all of them strong supporters of Israel, none of them with any particular background in negotiation in the region in terms of peace talks, but with very, very developed positions and points of view.”

Just one month into his term, Trump invited Netanyahu to the White House to discuss the possibilities and gave Netanyahu an early nod in his favour, saying he would be open to something other than a two-state solution: “I’m looking at two states and one state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like, I can live with either one”. That was a sea change in American policy, because going back for multiple Presidents, the idea of an independent Palestinian state as part of an ultimate resolution of this conflict has thus been thrown out the window. Trump would soon follow that up with an even more surprising announcement fulfilling a longtime wish of Netanyahu: “Today we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. I am also directing the state Department to begin preparation to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem”, Trump said. Quite understandably, Palestinians took to the streets to protest.

In effect, in May 2018, Friedman, Kushner, Netanyahu and nearly a thousand guests gathered in Jerusalem for the official ceremony marking the move of the US Embassy. That same day, around 50 miles south, at the border with Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians had gathered to protest the embassy move and Israel’s blockade. Hamas urged protesters to break through the border fence. Israeli soldiers responded with rifle fire killing more than 60 people. “What the embassy move symbolised to Palestinians was that they were not going to have a state with its capital in Jerusalem, because now the President of the United States had said that only Israel had a legitimate claim to Jerusalem, and that it would remain eternally Israel’s capital.”

Soon afterwards, Netanyahu’s government began a rapid expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Palestinian ambassador Husam Zomlot had this to say about it: “Seeing the US performing, behaving, acting this way to the majority of the Palestinian people was definitely a source of hopelessness. And you know, hopelessness is a very dangerous feeling, and when hopelessness accumulates over decades, it’s no longer just dangerous, it’s catastrophic.”

Adding insult to injury for the Palestinians, the White House announced what would be called the Deal of the Century. The deal offered Netanyahu much of what he wanted. It was “a fantastic blueprint from the perspective of Netanyahu’s point of view. No settlements to be removed, a rump Palestinian entity that they might call a state but was not really a state, would have no control of its borders, no control even of its own water, no control of its airspace. It would not be able to function as a state. It would be a collection of municipalities.”

To try to lure the Palestinians into the deal, U.S. Administration promised international investment worth $50 billion. Then Netanyahu took the podium and went even further than the terms of the deal. He announced Israel was about to annex almost a third of the West Bank. “It’s a unilateral claim on territory, and it really throws a lot of sand in the gears of what’s going on here, because if you start unilaterally claiming sovereignty over sections of the West Bank without having made any concessions, what is the incentive for the Palestinians to come to the table?”

The Palestinians were now effectively sidelined. Moreover, U.S. Administration’s plan unexpectedly set the stage for yet another major shift in the Middle East. Indeed, in the summer of 2020, Yousef Al-Otaiba, a friend of Jared Kushner and the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the US, saw an opportunity to propose a different kind of peace deal to Netanyahu. Not between Israel and the Palestinians, but between Israel and some of its Arab neighbours. “By this time, many of the Arab governments are eager to have relations with Israel, and the Palestinian issue is a nuisance on the way. And for some of them, they felt that they were always putting their interest second to the Palestinian cause. And when Israel speaks of annexing parts of the West Bank, the Emiratis in particular, the United Arab Emirates, see an opportunity to prevent that annexation in exchange for a peace deal.”

Al Otaiba said that the UAE and other Arab nations would consider normalising relations with Israel if Netanyahu stopped his planned annexations. “The fact that the UAE would even consider signing a normalisation deal with Israel, without consulting the Palestinians, was pretty remarkable. It’s really a sign of just how much the region has changed in the past decade and how much lower the Palestinian issue was now on even the priorities of Arab states.”

After talks facilitated by the U.S. Administration, Israel and two Arab countries, the UAE and Bahrain, announced they would normalise relations, and Netanyahu dropped his annexation plans. It was the first peace treaty between Israel and any Arab country in almost 30 years. “The Abraham Accords were definitely seen as a betrayal by Palestinians. And the Palestinians in general felt that the Arab states had abandoned them”. The Palestinian Authority called the Accords despicable.

The Abraham Accords would incite Israel’s enemies and seed conflict to come. “What you see if you’re Hamas is the world is moving beyond you. They no longer care, it seems, about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. And this is a deal that is essentially marginalising Hamas, marginalising the Palestinians, marginalising their grievance, and they’re left wondering: well, what becomes of us, you know, what do we do to get some attention to our cause again?”. Ambassador Zomlot responded by saying: “You cannot ignore the Palestinian people, no matter how much you try by the power of the missiles and the tanks as we have seen throughout the years and now, or by the power of the complete capitulation of a US Administration, or by the power of getting some Arab countries to normalise without a real solution. All this, all that does not work, and shall never, ever work”.

In May 2021, violent protests erupted in Jerusalem over the potential evictions of Palestinians from their homes. The conflict further escalated when Israeli police raided the al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. From Gaza, Hamas retaliated firing rockets toward Jerusalem, and in response, Netanyahu launched multiple air strikes. It was just four months into President Joe Biden’s term and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was suddenly front and centre.

As the violence intensified, Biden pushed Netanyahu for a ceasefire, which “ended in a sort of a miserable draw. As usual, the Israeli leadership were saying we’ve won this round again, and Hamas is weakened and deterred. But for Hamas, the conflict was a breakthrough. They used it to tout themselves as fighting not just for Palestinians in Gaza, but in Jerusalem as well.” Khaled Elgindy added: “Hamas now is not just protecting its fiefdom in the Gaza Strip, but now vying for leadership of the Palestinian struggle as a whole by being the only party that is responding to events in Jerusalem, in contrast to the impotence and ineffectiveness of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah”.

In the wake of the conflict, a photo of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, sent a foreboding message. “What Sinwar did, which was quite interesting, is take a picture of him sitting on an armchair. The destruction around him was quite clear. This was saying, okay you’re maybe stronger right now, but I haven’t lost anything. I’m willing to go for another round whenever I choose. At the same time, Hamas was also beginning to prepare its plan of attack.”

Netanyahu’s go-to strategy toward Hamas – containment in Gaza – was beginning to crack, but his focus was elsewhere: he was embroiled in scandal, facing charges of bribery and corruption. He and his coalition government were briefly toppled. To regain power, Netanyahu courted Israel’s most extreme parties. “And so, for Netanyahu, he felt I have no chance but to go to the right, even the very far right. Even parties on the extreme far right that his own Likud party had always shunned. Recently re-elected, and now the head of a new far-right government, controversial plans to overhaul the justice system started pursuing a dramatic overhaul of Israel’s judicial system that would weaken the court’s power over the executive branch. Protests erupted across Israel. He needed to change Israel’s legal system so he could somehow stop the trial.”

The War on Gaza: Why Does the “Free World” Condone Israel’s Occupation, Apartheid, and Genocide?

All the while, inside Netanyahu’s government, intelligence officials worried that the political unrest was leaving the country vulnerable to its enemies. “In many meetings, the chiefs of Israeli intelligence warned Netanyahu that the political crisis and its effect on the military are perceived by Israeli enemy as the time to take more aggressive initiative against Israel.”

In Washington, President Biden watched the situation with alarm and urged Netanyahu to reverse course. For Biden, the unrest in Israel threatened to disrupt a plan he’d been nurturing to take the Abraham Accords to the next level in the Middle East. He and Netanyahu had been quietly courting Saudi Arabia. “They did push and try to expand on the Abraham Accords in particular with a vision of Israeli-Saudi normalisation that would offer a dramatically different vision of the Middle East and one that would fit in well to their vision of creating alliances, in particular in competition with China and Russia.”

By late September 2023, at the UN General Assembly in New York, a deal was taking shape. Netanyahu met with Biden for the first time since forming his far-right government. Biden used the meeting to discuss how to bring the Palestinians into the deal. “When he sat down with Prime Minister Netanyahu, the main topic of that meeting which lasted almost two hours was about the Palestinians and how they fit into the Saudi deal. Now, I’ll say Gaza was not a part of that process and that’s because Hamas is in charge of Gaza.” And less than three weeks before the October 7th attacks, Netanyahu would make a fateful speech: “I’ve long sought to make peace with the Palestinians, but I also believe that we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states”.

The leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions understood the Palestinian issue will be completely taken off the world agenda. They decided to react and had their combatants carry out the deadliest single assault in Israel’s history. This was all the more significant as it occurred on Benjamin Netanyahu’s watch. “He saw himself as the greatest protector of the state of Israel, and persuaded himself and his supporters that Israel was safe and that he could handle everything.” He reacted to what he viewed as a supreme personal humiliation by saying: “Israel will win this war, and when Israel wins, the entire civilized world wins”, a thinly veiled appeal to the US in particular and the West in general.

Unsurprisingly, President Biden was visibly shaken by the killing and taking of hostages. “Let there be no doubt. The United States has Israel’s back. We will make sure the Jewish and democratic state of Israel can defend itself today, tomorrow, as we always have. It’s as simple as that”. But despite his full-throated public support, as Israel began air strikes in Gaza, behind the scenes Biden was concerned and within days, he arrived in Tel Aviv, in what constituted the first ever visit of a US President during wartime.

The humanitarian crisis from Israel’s military response has brought widespread condemnation. In the US, there has been increasing pressure on President Biden to do more to restrain Israel’s response. In the face of the criticism, the President has been trying to turn attention to the day after. “What Biden seemed to want is to use this tragic moment for something bigger, for a two-state solution, for negotiation, and this is where he and Netanyahu are like in totally different worlds.” Indeed, Netanyahu has staked out his own hard line: “I wish to clarify my position. I won’t allow Israel to repeat the mistake of Oslo”.

In the strong and meaningful words of Khaled Elgindy, “There is no going back. Everyone agrees. Israelis, Americans, Palestinians, Gaza, West Bank, anywhere you ask, everyone agrees, there’s no going back to the October 6 status quo. The question is: where do we go from here? Is it a pathway to something less awful? Or is it more destruction and death and something considerably worse than what we’ve had before? Those are still open questions”.

Read the second part of the article

Author: Amir Nour (Algerian researcher in international relations)

 

yogaesoteric
January 22, 2024