A History of the Middle East (68 page)

To sidestep them, Sharon crafted his own plan: disengagement from Gaza. There was much debate about his intentions. Some argued he sought to exclude Gaza and its 1.4 million people from the Palestinian equation and shift the demographic balance between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River back in Israel’s favour.
Others opined he sought to maintain an aerial occupation, using drones in place of soldiers, while retaining control of Gaza’s air, sea and borders. Still others claimed that Gaza was just the first stage in a phased pull-out which would include the West Bank, unilaterally ending Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. In January 2006, Sharon collapsed into a coma, leaving the answer pending.

Most likely he sought to forestall international efforts to achieve a Palestinian state, bifurcating its putative territory into two distinct and geographically separated entities – Gaza and the West Bank. The severe limitations Israel imposed on travel accentuated the distance, as did its subsequent siege of Gaza. The Gaza withdrawal further set the two territories on separate stages of political development. While the Palestinian Authority continued to nominally rule in both, the West Bank remained under Israeli occupation. Gaza was spared the presence of Israeli troops. As Israeli intelligence officers had predicted before the withdrawal, Hamas filled the vacuum. Israel’s decision not to facilitate the smooth handover of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority quickened the Islamist rise.

Nevertheless the world, desperate for any sign of progress, applauded. Over the space of three weeks, Sharon, the father of Israel’s settlement policy, demolished the Strip’s twenty-one settlements, and relocated its 1,700 settler families inside Israel. By September 2005, the last Israeli soldier was out. When his party, Likud, protested, he dumped it and formed a new faction, Kadima.

Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert – a wheeler-dealing lawyer – promised to continue the work begun in Gaza with a second unilateral pullout from the West Bank. In April 2006, he headed to elections and won convincingly, reducing Likud’s representation from a third to a tenth of the Knesset’s seats. But despite strong parliamentary backing, outside the Knesset he had to contend with a once pampered but now embittered settler public and the Jewish religious right, opposed to a further pull-out. The demolition of a few houses in Jewish settlements in the West Bank triggered a series of violent clashes and broke his resolve. Rather than confront his
internal foes, he embarked on a war against external ones. Intended to rally a divided Jewish public behind him, it did the reverse.

Ostensibly a response to Hizbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, the rush to war was initially popular. But poorly planned and lacking in a clear objective, it quickly dragged. Undefeated, Hizbollah’s missile salvos sent hundreds of thousands of Israelis fleeing from their homes, and its militia inflicted significant losses on Israeli troops. Popular anger prompted an official commission, which condemned the war’s inept prosecution; a series of corruption investigations further sullied Olmert’s tenure. Attacked on all fronts, Olmert shied from further action against the assets of the religious right, limiting himself to rhetorical barbs on settlers (whose attacks on Palestinians he called pogroms) while giving free rein to their continued construction. By the end of his tenure there were half a million Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Rather than tackle the reality on the ground, he opted for a politically safer burst of diplomatic activity, negotiating the virtual reality of the final arrangements for an end of conflict. In November 2007 international dignitaries gathered in the American city of Annapolis to celebrate the renewal of Israeli–Palestinian talks and applauded Olmert’s promise to deliver a deal within a year. But at home he failed to convince Israelis or Palestinians he was engaged in anything more than a charade.

Pursued by corruption allegations, Olmert bowed out of office, but not before ending his tenure as he had begun it, with another war, this time an attack on Gaza in December 2008. Over the course of a month, Israel killed over a thousand people, as in the 2006 Lebanon war, and destroyed Gaza’s government complex, parliament, manufacturing base, and 3,500 homes. The Gaza war and early elections in February 2009 following Olmert’s resignation terminated negotiations long before they had reached fruition.

Despairing of a leadership which had promised peace but delivered war, Israel’s electorate shifted sharply to the right. Likud led secular right-wing parties into an alliance with Israel’s religious right
and formed a ‘nationalist’ bloc led by Binyamin Netanyahu. It was a winning formula that could hold for years: though comprising less than 25 per cent of the population, the Jewish religious public is the country’s fastest growing population group – outpacing secular Jewish growth by three to one. Jewish religious factions operate their own education systems, and exert increasing clout inside Israel’s judiciary and military. They comprised a near majority of troops in combat units and the officer corps, taking the place of the former secular elite from the kibbutzim, who have opted for more comfortable lives. Army Torah colleges, or
yeshivas
, churn out thousands of soldiers annually, and military rabbis led their troops into Gaza. Backed by a ruling caucus in parliament, they were Israel’s ascendant force. The Jewish left wing, meanwhile, has all but collapsed. Labour slipped to fourth place and joined Netanyahu’s coalition. Arab parties, excluded from ruling coalitions since the state’s birth, remained so.

Nine months into Netanyahu’s tenure, the peace process remained grounded. Whatever degree of external pressure the incoming Obama administration and the international community applied failed to match the clout of his right-wing coalition. Netanyahu well remembered how his right-wing allies had ended his previous tenure as prime minister in protest at his withdrawal from part of the West Bank town of Hebron, and he was not going to repeat the mistake. Instead he humoured Washington and uttered the words ‘Palestinian state’ and ‘settlement freeze’. But the small print eroded the meaning of both. Netanyahu’s conditions for a Palestinian state rendered it more quisling than sovereign, and his freeze did not preclude the construction of public buildings, thousands of houses on which work had already started, or any construction in East Jerusalem.

Well into its fifth decade, the evolving Israeli occupation was no longer a temporary aberration. Rather its control over Palestinian life, society, space and land remained firmly entrenched, acquiring more sophisticated and enduring forms. To make it more palatable and to consolidate the
status quo
, Netanyahu partially eased the West Bank’s checkpoint regime, but Palestinian access and movement
remained severely constrained. The West Bank was hemmed in by a matrix of five-metre-high walls, which severed access to Jerusalem, and bypass roads designed for settler not Palestinian use. Palestinians, foreigners and increasingly Israeli Jews were subject to pass laws which increasingly segregated the population along ethnic lines.

Within the multiple cantons, Israel subcontracted responsibility to a pliant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and a quarantined Hamas in Gaza. It exercised leverage over the latter by controlling movement and trade. Palestinians, except those paying for medical treatment, were denied permission to leave, exports were banned, and imports limited to basics. Adopting the Pavlovian model, Israel rewarded good behaviour. Pasta was allowed in following an appeal from prominent US Congressman and future secretary of state John Kerry, but not honey, canned fruit or construction materials to repair the damage Israel’s war had inflicted on Gaza. Israel further punished Gaza’s attempts to leverage its way out of its straitjacket by firing rockets with heavy bombing.

Decade by decade, the struggle for Jewish dominance over historic Palestine was growing ever more violent. In the first two decades of occupation after 1967, Israel killed an average of 32 Palestinians each year; in the third decade the average grew to 106, and by the fourth decade Israel was killing over 600 Palestinians per year. The infrastructure of control, too, grew ever more visible. Looming apartheid walls scarred the landscape. The result had been foretold over two decades earlier in the book
Israel’s Fateful Decisions
(London, 1988), written at the height of the first
intifada
by a former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi. He portrays a country at a crossroads, with one path – the destruction of Palestinian national rights – leading to the destruction of Israel’s democracy and the loss of international sympathy on which the Zionist state had depended since its foundation. The result, he said, would be national suicide.

At the same time, Israel’s own interest in democracy appeared to wane. Given the choice between Arab dictatorships dependent on Western allies, and democratic governments accountable to their people, Israeli strategists publicly stated their preference for the
former. Following the January 2006 Palestinian elections, won by Hamas, Israel successfully stymied what had been the high-water mark of Palestinian democracy.

The ascent from
intifada
to democratic elections followed by descent into factional warfare and the takeovers of Gaza and the West Bank by rival security forces mark another sad chapter in Palestine’s history of dashed hopes. Broken by Sharon’s counter-offensive and bereft of their leadership after five years of
intifada
, Palestinians initially set about rebuilding their shattered political and economic base. In January 2005 a former school teacher and Arafat’s sometime negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas, was elected president, and two months later the Palestinian leadership and thirteen Palestinian factions signed a ceasefire, or
tahdia
, in Cairo to which Israel committed (though did not sign). The Cairo Declaration also committed the factions to abandon the use of arms in resolving internal differences, and required President Abbas to bring Hamas into the PLO and launch without delay a process of municipal and legislative elections. It thereby paved the way for Hamas’s integration into the political process, something that Arafat had always refused.

The elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Palestinian Authority’s parliament, held in January 2006, rank amongst the fairest in Arab history. They were also probably the cruellest. Hamas won 78 of 132 seats, benefitting from a protest vote against the incumbent faction, the nationalist movement Fatah, a sign of their frustration at the endless negotiations with Israel and a political process which had seen their wealth, their freedom of movement and their land all sharply erode to make way for Israeli settlement expansion. But rather than addressing the causes, Israel led the international community in punishing the electorate. Following the inauguration of prime minister Ismail Haniya as head of the Hamas government, Israel moved to torpedo the fledgling democracy. It suspended the transfer of customs duties and donor states withheld aid, together curtailing two-thirds of the Palestinian Authority’s revenues. It barred ministers from travelling between the West Bank and Gaza, and following the capture of an Israeli soldier by armed groups in Gaza
in June 2006, arrested most of Hamas’s ministers and parliamentarians in the West Bank, including the deputy prime minister. Bereft of its quorum, the Palestinian Legislative Council was unable to legislate. The international community watched, and kept quiet.

In addition to undermining the Hamas government, Western powers bolstered Fatah’s military capabilities and the forces under President Abbas’s command. Hamas responded by raising its own police force, largely manned by fighters from its armed wing, the Ezz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Mounting clashes prompted Saudi Arabia to mediate between Fatah and Hamas, resulting in the Mecca Agreement of February 2007, whereby the two factions agreed to form a national unity government. But the failure to agree the command of the security forces was a recipe for further fighting. In June 2007, Hamas’s military wing chased Fatah’s security commanders from Gaza, and within three days had won control of the Strip. The unity government cleft in two: Prime Minister Haniya continued to govern Gaza. And in the West Bank, President Abbas dismissed Haniya and made finance minister Salam Fayyad, an IMF economist favoured by Washington, prime minister of an ‘emergency government’.

Despite their personal and ideological hostility, the two regimes had much in common. Both ruled by decree with questionable respect for the constitution, used their security forces to tamp down dissent inside their respective cantons, and waged a beauty contest, competing over who could deliver most. Despite repeated attempts at national reconciliation, both preferred absolute control of a part of the Palestinian territories to shared rule of all.

Ensconced in Gaza, Hamas raised the democratic drawbridge behind it, relying on force to hold on to power. Its fighters went house to house, armed with Fatah’s computer records, searching for senior cadres; dispersed large Fatah-organized demonstrations by shooting into the crowds; broke up wedding parties where guests sang Fatah songs by shooting grooms in the knees; and subdued clans by laying siege to their fiefdoms and lobbing rocket-propelled grenades inside. They thereby created order, if not law, out of the previous security chaos. The population, previously too nervous to
venture outdoors for fear of clan and factional violence, flocked to Gaza’s beaches and public places. Hamas considered but then backed away from implementing Sharia law, apparently to relieve social dissent.

Seizing the opportunity to cement the rift between Gaza and the West Bank, Israel responded to Hamas’s military takeover by Gaza’s severing formal trade with the outside world. It declared Gaza ‘a hostile entity’, interrupting its transactions with Israeli banks. In an attempt to break free of its isolation, Hamas punched through the border fortifications Israel had left behind barring Gaza’s access into Egypt in January 2007, but in the process stirred Cairo into joining the blockade. Fearing an Islamist breach of its national security, Egyptian forces pushed back the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who had poured into Sinai on a shopping-spree (hoping to satisfy seven months of pent-up demand), and erected a new wall along Gaza’s southern border. Thereafter, Gazans largely relied on underground smuggling from Egypt. By the summer of 2009 Gaza’s labyrinth of tunnels under the Egyptian border was so extensive that Gazans could import goods from iPhones to cars at lower prices and faster speeds than when Israel’s crossings were open.