23

2003–2006

‘The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel does not mean disregarding the rights of others in the land. The Palestinians will always be our neighbours. We respect them, and have no aspirations to rule over them. They are also entitled to freedom and to a national, sovereign existence in a state of their own.’

Ariel Sharon, 20041

UNDER SIEGE

It was the third week of September 2002 when Israeli tanks again tightened their grip on Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters, the Muqataa, one of the British ‘Tegart’ forts of reinforced concrete that had been built during the Arab rebellion in the late 1930s. The IDF operation was designed to force the surrender of Palestinians who were said to have been involved in planning attacks. It followed two more suicide bombings, including one that killed six people on a Tel Aviv bus, though these were claimed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad respectively, not Fatah. Israeli plans to arrest Arafat were aborted under heavy pressure from the Bush administration.² Thousands of Palestinians defied a curfew to show support for their president, banging on metal pots in the streets of Ramallah, Tulkarem and Nablus; five were shot dead. International volunteers were stopped from delivering medicine and bottled water to the Muqataa while cranes smashed into the third floor. The phone lines were cut and the air-conditioning units knocked off the windows.

Israeli ministers had pledged publicly neither to harm Arafat nor to expel him, though some hoped to make conditions inside so dire that he would leave and not be allowed back. The PLO leader, looking pale and unwell, had received a succession of VIP envoys in his increasingly cramped, squalid and battered surroundings during the previous five-month siege and had only left occasionally. Now the Israelis were at the gates again. Ariel Sharon’s move attracted mild criticism. ‘Not helpful’ was the only response from Washington, where George Bush was preparing for the invasion of Iraq. Europeans spoke out more forcefully, as did the UN, which demanded the immediate lifting of the latest blockade. It ended after eleven tense days but the troops, tanks and bulldozers moved back only a few hundred yards – a redeployment the Palestinians scorned as ‘cosmetic’. Arafat remained under pressure from Israel and the Americans to comply with the ‘Road Map’ – setting out the path to an ‘independent viable, democratic, sovereign and contiguous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel by 2005’ – and to undertake internal reforms. Bush had urged Arafat to show that he was ‘capable of ruling’ and called on the Palestinians to ‘elect new leaders … whose reputation was not marred by terrorism’, positions that seemed to echo the constant denigration of the PLO leader by the Israelis.3 The British government, under Tony Blair, focused on promoting PA reform, though it was not determined enough to ensure that Palestinian officials could attend a London conference on the issue in the face of Israeli objections.

Sharon faced coalition difficulties when the Labour party quit over a row about funding settlements. But the Likud then swept the board in new elections. In February 2003, after forming a government with Binyamin Netanyahu as foreign minister, Sharon set out his demands for changes in the PA. Arafat, he told Ahmed Qurei, exuding ‘great personal distaste’ for the PLO leader, could have only ‘symbolic status’. He was to be distanced from the Palestinian security services, relinquish control over finance and appoint a prime minister. Terrorism would have to end and weapons be collected and destroyed; only then could negotiations begin. Arafat was to become ‘a non-person, a ghost and an irrelevance to the supposed peace process, with which the Americans remained determined to continue despite Sharon’s preference that it be quietly forgotten’.⁴

In public the tone was harsher. In the countdown to the invasion of Iraq, Sharon’s spokesman played to the American gallery by describing Arafat as ‘second only to Saddam Hussein and … a past master in the art of duplicity’.5 Changes did take place. Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah veteran, became PA prime minister, although his appointment attracted little attention as he took office the day ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ began. Abbas was an uncharismatic figure whom Hamas condemned as the ‘Karzai of Palestine’ – a pejorative reference to the Afghan president supported by the US after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Abbas soon found himself in conflict with Arafat over control of security and jobs for loyal cronies. He was replaced within months by Qurei, the speaker of the Legislative Council and a key player in the Oslo talks a decade earlier.

Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli assassinations continued. In June 2003 a teenage Hamas bomber dressed as an Orthodox Jew killed sixteen people on a rush-hour bus in the centre of Jerusalem. It was ‘a message to all the Zionist criminals that the Palestinian fighters are capable of reaching them everywhere’, the Islamist movement declared. The day before Israel had tried and failed to kill a Hamas leader in Gaza. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah all announced a unilateral ceasefire at the end of the month. That was hailed by Israel as a victory, but in mid-August another Jerusalem bus was bombed by Hamas, this time leaving twenty dead. It was the worst attack of the past three years. Two bombings in September brought more Israeli strikes and an explicit threat to expel or kill Arafat. Shimon Peres, now back in opposition, condemned the idea, as did the left-wing Meretz Party. ‘If you deport Arafat you leave the ground only for Hamas’, it warned. ‘That’s not something the government is doing out of stupidity. It’s a strategy to keep things as they are, to prevent the solution of two states.’ Twenty more Israelis died in October on the eve of Yom Kippur: the target was Maxims, a joint Jewish-Arab-owned restaurant on the seafront in Haifa. The bomber was a young woman from Jenin, a trainee lawyer named Hanadi Taysser Darajat: she was avenging a brother who had been killed by the Israelis.⁶ ‘In the Palestinian territories there are now thousands of such people, men and women, each of them a ticking bomb’, commented Uri Avnery, of the leftist Gush Shalom movement. ‘They don’t need a political motive. An Israeli who orders the killing of Palestinians must know that this may well be the result.’⁷

Unlike the West Bank, the Gaza Strip was not reoccupied during the al-Aqsa intifada because the Israelis had only limited control on the ground and support for Hamas was strong. The IDF instead mounted raids targeting Palestinian fighters. ‘Gaza was different’, mused Avi Dichter, head of the Shin Bet. ‘You had to choose the right methods.’8 In one operation in February 2003 forty tanks with helicopter support entered the centre of Gaza City, killing eleven people. In March an undercover unit used civilian taxis to prepare the way for an armoured assault in which the Israelis killed eight people, including a pregnant woman, in the Bureij refugee camp, as well as blowing up several houses. Helicopter strikes were routine amid concerns about the production of a longer range (though still home-made) rocket called the Qassam-3, which was fired across the border at the nearby Israeli town of Sderot. Internal strains showed when fighting erupted between Hamas men and PA police. Arafat, still under siege in Ramallah, was losing his ability to influence what happened in Gaza.⁹ Also in March an American student, Rachel Corrie, a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement, which was committed to non-violent direct action, was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah. Thomas Hurndall, another young ISM activist from Britain, died from an IDF gunshot wound in Rafah after months in a coma. British cameraman James Miller was killed by an Israeli sniper in May; he had been working on a documentary entitled Death in Gaza. All three incidents fuelled growing international criticism of Israeli actions. In June thousands of Palestinians came out to protest against ‘concessions’ made by Abbas at a summit in Aqaba where he denounced terrorism and promised to end the ‘armed intifada’. In August, after the Jerusalem bus bombing, the Israelis assassinated Ismail Abu Shanab and four other Hamas leaders and bombed the home of the movement’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin – who had been released from prison after the bungled attempt to murder Khaled Meshaal in 1997. Violence stalked the land.

DISENGAGEMENT

In December 2003, Sharon dropped a bombshell: addressing the annual Herzliya strategic conference, the prime minister floated the idea of withdrawing all Israeli troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip. The proposal attracted immediate opposition on the right, but it was less surprising than it initially appeared: Gaza had never had the same emotional pull as what many Israelis still called ‘Judea and Samaria’, and in security terms it was never less than a headache – as Sharon remembered from his time as head of IDF southern command in the early 1970s. And the financial costs were enormous: an IDF infantry company, an armoured platoon and an engineering force were assigned to guard just 26 families in one small settlement, one of 21 Gaza outposts housing 8,500–9,000 settlers in all, living in gated communities with lush lawns, swimming pools and clinics within sight of Palestinian slums, misery and deprivation.

In fact Sharon had already signalled change. A few months earlier, he had surprised Likud colleagues by for the first time using the word ‘occupation’ to describe the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza. The idea of acting unilaterally, without agreement with the PA, reflected his profound mistrust of Arafat. It was also influenced by the withdrawal from Lebanon that Ehud Barak had carried out, to popular acclaim, in 2000. Sharon rejected a proposal drawn up by unofficial representatives of both sides for co-ordination between Israel and the PA.10 That was a ‘strategy of despair at the possibility of the joint management of the conflict with the Palestinians and at the possibility of promoting political moves’.¹¹ In February 2004 Sharon made clear that Israel would carrying on building the West Bank wall, just as the International Court of Justice began hearings into its legality and Israeli activists turned up in The Hague to protest with the charred remains of the No.19 bus that had been hit in a Jerusalem suicide bombing three weeks earlier.¹²

Palestinians saw Sharon’s disengagement plan as a ploy to promote the idea that Israel was no longer an occupier, although under international law the West Bank and Gaza were viewed as a single entity, as Israel had recognized at Oslo. Underlying motives included shedding responsibility for 1.5 million Palestinians, and cutting Gaza off from the West Bank, where four small and isolated settlements near Jenin were also to be evacuated. Along with the construction of the separation wall it was another blow to the already fading idea that there would ever be a viable, contiguous Palestinian state in the occupied territories. ‘Above all hovers the cloud of demographics’, commented Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s Likud colleague. Population growth projections showed that within a few years there would be roughy equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If there was no change to the status quo an Arab majority would mean an end to Israel as ‘a Jewish and democratic state’. Demographics were an essential plank of the drive for separation. ‘We don’t have unlimited time’, Olmert warned.

More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated two-state solution because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.13

Olmert’s remarks showed an unusually perceptive understanding of shifting views on the other side.

On the immediate issue of Gaza, pro-Israeli commentators suggested that the challenge for the Palestinians was to build a ‘decent mini-state, a Dubai on the Mediterranean’ whose success would determine whether Israel might be prepared to surrender the West Bank at a later date. Achieving that would clearly not be easy for PA ministries that were handicapped by ‘corruption, fragmentation, a lack of funds and resistance to reform’, as candidly described in one US diplomatic cable.¹⁴ Sharon’s intention, his critics argued, was simply to reshape the occupation without ending it – ‘slicing off Gaza is just a diplomatic nose job’, quipped one.¹⁵ US pressure was a major factor. The relationship of the disengagement plan to Bush’s ‘Road Map’ was unclear, though both Palestinians and Israelis had their suspicions. ‘Sharon has proposed his plan to bypass the Road Map and to serve as a substitute for it’, Qurei joshed with Peres, ‘and as you know he likes bypass roads!’¹⁶ Dov Weissglass, the prime minister’s adviser, appeared to confirm these fears when he famously explained that the aim was to preserve the peace process ‘in formaldehyde’ – implying that negotiations would never be pursued so that Israel would not have to make any difficult decisions ‘until Palestinians became Finns’.¹⁷

Another reason for Sharon’s decision, Weissglass revealed, was strong public support for the Geneva Accord, a two-state peace initiative signed by an unofficial group of influential Israelis and Palestinians in December 2003 that resurrected the Clinton Parameters of 2001. Sharon was also concerned by protests by former Shin Bet chiefs, IDF special forces’ veterans and combat pilots, including one who had famously bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor. For Efraim Halevy, the former Mossad chief, the Gaza disengagement plan was drawn up to escape the ‘dangerous trap’ of the Road Map.18 All this meant that Sharon was proving more pragmatic than many had expected. With one eye on Washington he even commissioned a report on settlement activity. Talia Sasson, a former state attorney, produced a devastating catalogue of how government departments had, without authorization, allocated funding to dozens of ‘outposts’ built on private Palestinian land – even when they were acknowledged to be illegal under Israeli law.¹⁹ ‘Sharon appointed me because he needed an answer to the Americans as to why he was not evacuating the illegal outposts’, Sasson recalled later. The White House was deeply suspicious of the prime minister’s motives, fearing a trick. Neither Sharon nor his successors took substantial steps to dismantle those outposts or halt government funding. Indeed, plans to expand settlement in the West Bank, especially near Maaleh Adumim, just outside Jerusalem, pointed to a more familiar side.

Attacks on Hamas underlined Israel’s determination to ensure that the Islamists did not claim victory once the Gaza disengagement had taken place. Sheikh Yassin was finally killed, with seven others, in a missile strike in March 2004: 200,000 people attended his funeral, along with a 21-man honour guard provided by the PA.²⁰ ‘Sharon,’ declared Ismail Hanieh of Hamas, ‘has opened the gates of hell, and nothing will stop us from cutting off his head.’ Yassin’s successor as Hamas leader, Abdelaziz al-Rantisi, was also assassinated a few weeks later. ‘Israel … struck a mastermind of terrorism, with blood on his hands,’ the government said. ‘As long as the Palestinian Authority does not lift a finger and fight terrorism, Israel will continue to have to do so itself.’ Pro-Hamas demonstrators in Ramallah chanted slogans in favour of resistance and attacked those who offered compromises on behalf of the Palestinians. ‘Down with the olive branch, long live the rifle’, went one chant. ‘Revenge, Revenge. Go, Go Hamas, you are the cannon, we are the bullets. Go Qassam, bring on the car bombs.’21 In May 2004 nearly three hundred homes were razed in Rafah while a tank and helicopter fired on demonstrators, killing nine people. Hamas was not the only target. In June the Israelis killed a wanted Tanzim militant named Khalil Marshud from Balata, the big refugee camp in Nablus: he was incinerated in a taxi by a missile, probably while moving from one safe house to another. But generally the population of the West Bank’s biggest city had been cowed; armed resistance had ended and Israeli ‘surgical’ operations had become the norm. ‘The usual pattern is for soldiers to arrive unimpeded to their target areas, mostly looking for “wanted” men’, reported Beshara Doumani, a Palestinian academic who was visiting from the US.

After surrounding the area, they force their way into the highest buildings and post snipers on the roofs or at top floor windows. The residents of each apartment building are rounded up at gunpoint and stuffed into a single room on the ground floor. The scene is disconcerting: men in their pajamas ill at ease in someone else’s home; children crying, whining, or peeing in their pants; women trying to be useful but hardly able even to make their way across the jam-packed room; awkward lines for a single bathroom; furtive eyes on the door locked from the outside and guarded by Israeli soldiers.²²

DEATH OF THE PATRIARCH

In the course of the debates over Gaza it became clear that Arafat’s health was in serious decline. Physical isolation and psychological pressure were taking their toll on the seventy-five-year-old. In late 2003 he suffered a mild heart attack and experienced vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pains. In October 2004 he collapsed and lost consciousness at least once. Palestinian and Tunisian doctors monitoring him were reinforced by others from Egypt and Jordan, who diagnosed flu-like symptoms. Israel agreed that he leave for treatment in a Ramallah hospital as long as he returned to the Muqataa afterwards. But as his mysterious condition worsened he was flown out to the Percy military hospital in Paris where he fell into a coma and died, on 11 November. Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ was played at the Villacoublay air base before his flag-bedecked coffin was flown to Cairo for a funeral ceremony. From there his remains were returned to Ramallah for burial in the courtyard of the Muqataa. Hundreds of thousands gathered round the coffin, which was sprinkled with earth taken from al-Aqsa. Rumours spread that Arafat had been killed by the Israelis, many inevitably remembering the botched Mossad plot to assassinate Khaled Meshaal in Amman in 1997. Forensic investigations focused on the possibility that Arafat had been poisoned by the radioactive substance polonium. But after his exhumation it was eventually determined that he had died of a brain haemorrhage and an intestinal infection.23 Arafat’s widow, Suha, continued to believe that he had been the victim of Israeli foul play.

It was, in any event, truly the end of an era. His death, commented the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi,

was met with both sadness and relief among Palestinians, a sense of anxiety at the disappearance of the only leader most people had ever known, combined with a sense that change was imperative after so many years of going nowhere. Resentment at a father figure who had clung to power for too long was accompanied by deep insecurity at the disappearance of the icon who symbolised the Palestinian cause.²⁴

The future of the cause which he had personified and with which he would always be associated had rarely looked so uncertain.

In January 2005 Mahmoud Abbas was elected to replace Arafat as president of the PA and chairman of the PLO. Abbas praised the uprising as legitimate but publicly urged his people not to use weapons. It was not an easy position to maintain: days earlier IDF tank shells had killed seven Palestinian children who were on their way to pick strawberries in northern Gaza, after mortars were fired into Israel.²⁵ Abbas denounced a ‘bloody massacre’ and demanded international intervention. In February he met Sharon in Sharm el-Sheikh for the highest-level Palestinian-Israeli encounter since the start of the al-Aqsa intifada. It ended in a loose ceasefire agreement: Islamic Jihad and Hamas insisted they were not bound by it but did commit to respecting a tahdiya (period of calm). That agreement was considered the end of the uprising – though violence carried on. The Israeli prime minister was said to trust Abbas and to enjoy ‘a strong personal relationship’ with him.26

Over the following months the political scene in Israel was dominated by preparations for the Gaza disengagement – hitnatkut in Hebrew. The word was chosen to avoid any sense of withdrawal under pressure. Sharon had a majority in the government, though not in the Likud, which led him to cobble together a new national unity coalition. The Knesset approved the Gaza move by fifty-nine votes to forty. But a call to submit it to a referendum was thrown out, angering the settlement lobby, which was dismayed by the spectacular defection of its most famous patron. Sharon described the decision as a ‘painful step’ for the nation and himself but essential for Israel’s future. Tension mounted in the run-up to the evacuation, which began in mid-August 2005. Many of the Gaza settlers, wearing orange clothes (inspired by the recent revolution in Ukraine) to express their opposition, left peacefully, though some had to be forcibly removed by the IDF in an operation that was cosily named Yad leAchim (Helping Hand). Orthodox protesters at Neve Dekalim, the largest settlement, struggled as troops dragged them on to buses. At Kfar Darom residents barricaded themselves in the synagogue. Paint was thrown at troops and police and some evacuees coached their children to leave their homes with their hands up, or wearing a yellow star to evoke Nazi persecution.

Palestinians celebrated as the operation got under way, Israeli troops firing shots into the air to halt a march towards Gush Katif. The crowd burned a cardboard model of a settlement complete with an army watchtower. In Gaza City Hamas activists hung out banners proclaiming: ‘The blood of the martyrs has led to liberation.’ In the following days Israeli demolition crews razed 2,800 settler homes. The bodies in the Gush Katif cemetery were reburied inside Israel. Near Khan Yunis an abandoned synagogue was set on fire. The IDF completed its withdrawal a few days behind schedule in mid-September. It was billed as the end of an occupation that had lasted for thirty-eight years. Yet it did not end Gaza’s embodiment, in the words of the Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, of ‘the entire saga of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict … the central contradiction of the State of Israel – democracy for some, dispossession for others … our exposed nerve’.27 Israel retained full control of Gaza’s borders – apart from the short southern stretch with Egypt – airspace and territorial waters. In international legal terms, it was still considered the occupying power. Despite the unilateral character of the disengagement, PA-Israeli security co-ordination was arranged between Mohammed Dahlan, Nasser Youssef, now the PA interior minister, and the Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz, who were used to working together against Hamas – and others. High-level discussions had been held that summer about the assassination of Hassan al-Madhoun, a Fatah commander with links to the rebellious al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, with an explicit Israeli request to the Palestinians that he be killed. Madhoun eventually died in an Israeli drone strike in November. It was a sign of changing times that the Shin Bet reported afterwards that his replacement as al-Aqsa leader was heavily influenced by Hamas.²⁸ Security liaison between the PA and Israel – personified by Dahlan – was portrayed by Hamas supporters as collaboration with the enemy. Hamas was doing well, noted one independent pundit, because for the last four years the lives of Palestinians had been dominated by three Gs: guns, gates and guards. Now a fourth G – God – was becoming more relevant.²⁹

RESENTMENT IN RAMALLAH

The imbalance of power between the Palestinians and Israel, and troubled relations with Sharon’s government, were only the most visible of the problems Abbas inherited from Arafat. Economic pressure, the lack of official transparency, the PA’s dependence on EU and US aid – at over $1 billion per year the highest per capita amount in the world – rumours about corruption and efforts to control Palestinian NGOs all created resentment with the new man in the Muqataa, who so conspicuously lacked the aura of his predecessor. In the decade since Oslo, the once-sleepy town of Ramallah had experienced a boom fuelled by international assistance and the many foreign aid organizations it brought with it, creating a prosperous new elite served by smart restaurants and new hotels. Apartment blocks, office buildings and villas transformed the skyline while the underlying situation deteriorated for ordinary folk.30 Incomes in 2005 were still 31 per cent lower than in 1999; unemployment was almost 25 per cent.³¹ Public service delivery declined sharply. The aid bonanza had created a fake economy. ‘It’s so artificial,’ argued a local businesswoman. ‘It depends on foreign aid and and we’ve seen what happens when it stops. The government employees go without salaries.’³² To a foreign observer

PA corruption was very evident, and very painful for those Palestinians who were doing their best to make do with less and less just to keep their children fed and clothed. People would not complain … about the non-payment of their salaries or about the fact that when their salaries did come through they had been cut.

An EU official returned from Gaza enraged at having seen a brandnew Cadillac being delivered to a PA minister.³³ Many believed that NGOs ‘had been deliberately introduced into the Palestinian territories by pro-Israeli western agencies to siphon off the pool of available Palestinian talent and prevent it from being used to mount any resistance to Israel’, reported Ghada Karmi, a 1948 refugee from Jerusalem who had come from London to work for the PA. ‘Expressions like “capacity building”, “sustainability”, “democratisation”, “empowerment”, all previously unfamiliar to Palestine society, became commonplace.’³⁴ Consultants enjoyed monthly salaries exceeding $5,000, while the average monthly salary of a working Palestinian was $400–$500.³⁵ Others sneered at a ‘Palestinian globalized elite’ that lived in a bubble while development trumped governance and Israeli settlements and roads transformed the countryside.

Abbas had pledged to restore law and order and reorganize the security forces, as well as to remove inept or corrupt officials, but PA control of the Palestinian population was ‘frequently nominal at best’.³⁶ And the contrast between life in the West Bank and in Gaza, where violence was far more common, could be shocking. Economic conditions were worsened by Israeli restrictions on movement caused by the separation barrier, the settlements and the network of Jewish-only roads that supported them – and by more than seven hundred checkpoints that frequently operated in an arbitrary manner. All constituted collective punishment in violation of international humanitarian law, human rights watchdogs complained. Israel’s fragmentation of the Palestinian territories into disconnected parcels of land had severe practical and psychological consequences. In 2005 the West Bank was divided into ten segments (not including ‘closed areas’ in the ‘seam’ between the barrier and the green line). Passage through a checkpoint required a permit, and eligibility varied between locations. Different types of permit were issued for individuals, private vehicles, public vehicles and trucks. Blanket restrictions on movement were often imposed, preventing working-age men accessing employment. The segments were further divided into pockets between which movement was restricted by channelling access through choke points such as tunnels under ‘restricted’ roads used by settlers.37 Checkpoints like the ones at Hawara and Bayt Iba near Nablus resembled permanent border crossings with security procedures to control the flow of traffic: pedestrian and car lanes, bunkers, guard towers bristling with machine guns and shrouded with camouflage netting.³⁸ In the words of the World Bank: ‘On any given day the ability to reach work, school, shopping, healthcare facilities and agricultural is highly uncertain and subject to arbitrary restriction and delay.’³⁹ Raja Shehadeh, the Ramallah lawyer and writer, put it more emotionally:

Everything has been designed by Israel to make Palestinians feel like strangers in their own country. Whether it is the huge areas of land expropriated and surrounded by barbed wire that one sees while traveling … the many settlements, the road signs, the presence of settlers hitchhiking on roads forbidden to Palestinians, the military training areas, the danger and apprehension felt just from using the roads, or the uncertainty about being allowed to pass from one part of one’s country to another. All these harsh realities conspire to make Palestinians feel that this land is no longer theirs.⁴⁰

Nissim Levy, who spent years working in the Shin Bet, explained the effect in terms that would make sense to Israelis, who still knew so little of life beyond the green line:

If a boy in Beersheba falls in love with a girl in Haifa, what does he do? He picks up the phone, makes a date and drives to see her. If a boy from Bethlehem falls in love with a girl from Nablus, what does he do? He has to cross checkpoints, he needs 1,001 permits. The moment that you reach the conclusion that you have nothing to live for, you immediately find that you have something to die for.41

POPULAR RESISTANCE

Israel’s military dominance, the failures of the PA and Arab governments and the dark mood in the aftermath of the al-Aqsa intifada encouraged new forms of resistance that focused on demonstrations and mobilizing civil society. The West Bank barrier was the target of regular protests at Biliin, a village between Ramallah and the green line. Biliin lost almost half its land when it was squeezed between the barrier and nearby Modiin Illit, the largest settlement in the West Bank. In 2004 the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the construction of the barrier was contrary to international law. The villagers then appealed to Israel’s High Court, which eventually ruled in their favour and ordered the barrier to be rerouted. Violence erupted weekly with demonstrators ritually chanting ‘No, no to the fence’ in Arabic, Hebrew and English, throwing stones while Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinian protests attracted left-wing Israelis as well as international activists, and were regularly filmed, reaching a wide audience in the acclaimed film 5 Broken Cameras a few years later. ‘Israeli army bulldozers had begun uprooting olive trees … and wiping out the place that had shaped our memories and those of our ancestors’, recalled the organizer, Abdullah Abu Rahmeh.⁴² Similar protests took place in Budros – captured in both a film and a graphic novel – as well as Niliin and Nabi Saleh. The barrier played a starring role in the campaign for ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS), which was founded in 2005 on the first anniversary of the ICJ ruling. Earlier boycott campaigns had been launched abroad. The goal of BDS was to increase pressure on Israel ‘until it fulfils its obligations under international law and ends its three basic forms of injustice – occupation and colonisation, institutionalised racial discrimination, and denial of UN-sanctioned refugee rights’.43 The movement, said one supporter, ‘recaptured and highlighted the moral core of the Palestinian claim and broadcast it widely to the world’.⁴⁴ An early target was the Jerusalem Light Railway, an ambitious project billed by Sharon as helping ‘strengthen … expand … and sustain [the city] for eternity as the capital of the Jewish people and the united capital of the State of Israel’.

Leftist Israeli organizations played an important role on the ground. B’Tselem was founded during the first intifada. Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, established by women activists in 2001, monitored ‘the bureaucracy of occupation’ – the closures, searches and harassment that were an everyday feature of Palestinian life. In November 2004 its members were filming as a music student on his way to give a violin lesson was stopped at the Bayt Iba checkpoint, where soldiers ordered him to play the instrument. The video of the episode attracted a huge audience and disturbing comparisons with stories of Jews made to do the same in Nazi concentration camps. ‘If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible’, wrote the novelist Yoram Kaniuk. ‘Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps.’⁴⁵ (The retort, in the media/propaganda storm that predictably followed, was that Israel’s security required vigilance and that the Palestinian who blew up the Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem in August 2001 had carried a bomb in a guitar case.⁴⁶) Gisha (Access) was set up in 2005 to deal with freedom of movement issues. Yesh Din (There is Justice) used volunteers to improve human rights in the occupied territories. Taayush (Coexistence), founded at the start of the second intifada, worked ‘to break down the walls of racism, segregation, and apartheid by constructing a true Arab–Jewish partnership’ and supported Palestinians struggling to hold on to homes and lands in the South Hebron Hills. HaMoked (Focal Point) focused on workers’ rights. Breaking the Silence (BtS) was formed by IDF soldiers to confidentially record testimonies about abuses. It began with an exhibition described as being designed to ‘bring Hebron to Tel Aviv’. BtS collected ‘stories of frightened boys who commanded checkpoints, enforced curfews, and patrolled streets and markets … stories of the indifference and numbness they developed there’.47 All these groups, often funded by European governments and charities, faced hostility and harassment from the Israeli government and its supporters at home and abroad. No more than a few hundred people were involved, angered by indifference, extreme nationalism and the mindless use of brute force against the Palestinians. All, in the eloquent words of the Taayush activist David Shulman, contributed to ‘weaving a fine gossamer web around a raging tiger’.⁴⁸

FORWARD TO THE FUTURE?

In November 2005 Sharon abandoned an increasingly restive Likud to found a new centrist political movement named Kadima (Forward) – a familiar pattern in Israeli politics since 1977. It attracted other big Likud names, including Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, who had served as minister of justice, as well as Labour’s Shimon Peres and Haim Ramon. Kadima’s creation opened up intriguing possibilities for a realignment of the middle ground of Israeli politics. In January 2006, however, Sharon suffered a massive stroke and sank into a coma, leaving a giant question mark over what he might have done next. He was replaced on an interim basis by Olmert. (Two months later Olmert led Kadima to election victory and became prime minister when Sharon was declared permanently incapacitated.)

Within weeks of Israel’s Gaza pullout the Palestinian political scene had also undergone an equally dramatic transformation. Abbas, with the encouragement of the US, where George Bush was committed to Middle Eastern ‘democracy promotion’ in the wake of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, called long-delayed elections to the Palestinian legislative council, the first since 1996. Changes to the electoral system were designed to strengthen Fatah’s position. Hamas took a pragmatic decision to participate, its instinct for survival overcoming its principled opposition to the Oslo arrangements. Its campaign focused on the PA’s many shortcomings: one TV advert opened with the word ‘corruption’ which swiftly exploded into a ball of fire, followed by a similar fate for ‘nepotism’, ‘bribery’ and ‘chaos’. Only then came pictures of Palestinian gunmen battling Israeli forces in Jerusalem and Nablus. Mohammed Dahlan, for Fatah, ridiculed the Islamists. ‘Hamas accused Arafat of betraying the people and destroying Palestine [by reaching the Oslo accords with Israel],’ he sneered. ‘But here they are taking part in elections because of what Arafat agreed. They should apologise to Fatah and admit that our plan triumphed.’49 Polling, observed by international monitors, including the indefatigable Jimmy Carter, was orderly and with an impressively high turnout of 77 per cent. The expectation in Western capitals had been that a ‘democratically legitimised and strengthened’ Abbas would resume negotiations with Israel.⁵⁰ But in the weeks before polling day worried Fatah activists urged the Israelis to help postpone the elections.⁵¹ The shock outcome was that Hamas won 42.9 per cent of the vote and 74 of the 132 seats; Fatah won 45, with independents and leftists taking the rest. It had long been clear that Abbas was making little progress with reforms and that Hamas was feeling confident, but the showing for the Islamists was still far stronger than anyone had predicted. It was a truly historic victory. Palestinians compared Abbas to the Algerian president, Chadli Benjedid, who plunged his country into a bloody civil war in 1990 by legalizing Islamist parties and allowing them to take part in elections without ever expecting them to win.⁵²

Abbas, like Arafat, had broad executive powers as president but he needed parliamentary approval for his budget and legislative proposals. It was unclear how he could pursue the ‘Road Map’ to a two-state solution when the majority in parliament was controlled by a movement that opposed Oslo, refused to recognize Israel, had carried out multiple suicide bombings and was designated a terrorist organization by Israel and the US. The fact that Hamas had observed a tahdiya since March 2005 was not deemed sufficient to cancel out the other negatives. Nor were signals from Hamas that its participation in the elections could be considered de facto acceptance of Oslo, and that it might accept the 2002 Arab peace initiative (supported by all twenty-one members of the Arab League) if Israel recognized ‘the rights of the Palestinian people’. Israel’s unambiguous view, echoed by the so-called ‘Quartet’ (the US, EU, UN and Russia), despite Russian reservations, was that Hamas was a terrorist organization that refused to recognize Israel and was implacably hostile to peace moves. The Quartet then slashed its financial support to the PA while Israel withheld customs and tax revenues it collected on its behalf. The instant result was that thousands of PA employees could no longer be paid – a hammer blow to an already rickety economy.

‘Nobody seemed to have a strategy on how to deal with Gaza’, a senior UN official admitted later.53 The boycott decision became a byword for the hypocrisy of Western governments which called for democracy (while supporting their favourite Arab autocrats and selling them expensive weapons) but then ignored its results, even though, in the ever-toxic circumstances of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, that was not the only issue at stake. The election, in any event, was a devastating verdict – a classic protest vote – on the performance of the PA (battered by allegations of corruption), impatience with infighting and, above all, continued occupation with no end in sight. ‘In contrast with the decay and corruption and fecklessness of the Palestinian Authority under Fatah, which has essentially lost touch with the people, Hamas was widely seen as attentive to their needs and largely untainted by corruption’, wrote the UN’s special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto.⁵⁴ Ismail Hanieh, the Gazan teacher who headed the Hamas list, said: ‘The Americans and the Europeans say to Hamas: either you have weapons or you enter the legislative council. We say weapons and the legislative council. There is no contradiction between the two.’⁵⁵ Hanieh became prime minister and formed a government in March 2006. In May representatives of five factions – Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and DPLP – produced the so-called ‘prisoners’ document’, which committed all to recognize the need to both resist and negotiate and alleviate internal tensions.⁵⁶ The consensus had little impact. Hamas MPs were banned from leaving Gaza by Israel and had to swear their constitutional oaths by video link to Ramallah. Exactly how these complicated arrangements would work was still being debated when, in June 2006, a new flare-up triggered wider escalation across an always unstable and dangerous region.