2006–2009
‘The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again and the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage.’
Hamas statement
‘A TIRELESS BATTLE UNTIL TERROR CEASES’1
On a humid afternoon in July 2006, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy named Nadi al-Attar set off on a donkey cart with his grandmother Khayriya and two male cousins to pick figs from an orchard at their home near Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip. Without warning, an explosion killed the woman and Nadi and injured the other boys, one of them losing both legs. Eyewitnesses and subsequent investigations revealed that an artillery shell or missile had been fired by Israeli forces, apparently because Qassam rockets had been launched across the nearby border earlier. Later that afternoon an eleven-year-old girl was killed by a shell in Beit Hanoun, a mile or two further east. The IDF insisted it did not target civilians, only terrorists, and although innocent people could be hit, a spokesman admitted, the responsibility lay with the terrorists.2 It was just one day in the bloody course of ‘Operation Summer Rains’, the incongruously pastoral name chosen to describe the latest assault on the volatile front line of the Israeli–Palestinian confrontation.
The 1.5 million people living in the coastal enclave had seen little benefit from the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers ten months earlier. On the eve of the disengagement, 65 per cent of Gaza’s population lived under the poverty line, subsisting on less than $2 per day, while 35 per cent of the workforce were unemployed. Ambitious plans by the World Bank and other international donors for industrial parks, export zones and desperately needed jobs had come to nothing. Israeli restrictions on the border crossings continued so that the number of Palestinian workers entering Israel dropped to one-third of the pre-disengagement average; Gazan exports through the Karni cargo terminal did not pick up even after the signing of an agreement on movement and access in November 2005. Life was ‘miserable and dangerous’, said John Ging, UNRWA’s director of operations. Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief co-ordinator, warned that Gaza had become ‘a ticking time bomb’.3 Victory for Hamas in the PA elections had boosted the movement’s self-confidence and worsened tensions with Fatah. In Gaza, Fatah forces loyal to Mohammed Dahlan seized weapons to stop them being used by Hamas. Rockets fired across the border led to repeated IDF air strikes and shelling. In April 2006 Israel declared the PA ‘a hostile entity’. Israel’s own initiatives contributed too. On 8 June, Israel assassinated Jamal Abu Samhadana, a former Fatah official who was now leader of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRCs). Eight civilians, seven of them members of one family, were killed in an explosion at Beit Lahiya the next day. Sderot was then hit by Qassam rocket fire. Hamas ended its commitment to the unilateral tahdiya or period of calm that had been agreed with Fatah and other groups in Cairo in March 2005. Since then, Hamas had not taken responsibility for any attacks but had made it clear it would not prevent others from carrying them out. ‘The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again and the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage’, it warned. On 25 June Palestinian fighters tunnelled 300 yards under the border near Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, killed two members of an IDF Merkava tank crew, captured a third soldier and dragged him back into Gaza. Hamas, the PRCs and the hitherto-unknown Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam) took part in the attack. Corporal Gilad Shalit was the first IDF soldier captured by Palestinians in over a decade – a bargaining chip that might be used to free some of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The goals of ‘Operation Summer Rains’, as approved by Ehud Olmert’s cabinet, were to free Shalit, halt Qassam fire and disarm all terrorist organizations. Air strikes and artillery shells hit infrastructure and bridges linking the southern and central parts of the Gaza Strip in tandem with a series of ground incursions. The Israelis fired missiles at Gaza’s only power plant, cutting off electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. By mid-August 215 Palestinians had been killed and scores of Hamas supporters arrested across the West Bank.
LEBANON, AGAIN
The crisis widened in mid-July. Inspired by the events in Gaza, and tempted to open a second front and help release its own prisoners, Lebanon’s Hizbullah acted in solidarity with Hamas, its fellow-member of what both called the ‘axis of resistance’, and mounted a raid on Israel’s northern border. Shia fighters killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others in a well-planned operation that was a more sophisticated replay of what had happened at Kerem Shalom three weeks earlier. Five more soldiers were killed inside Lebanon in a failed rescue operation. The circumstances were different from 1982, when the PLO was Israel’s target, but the Second Lebanon War took place on much of the same territory. The 34-day conflict saw an Israeli ground invasion of the south, rocket and artillery fire and air raids that killed some 1,300 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 165 Israelis, including 44 civilians. It again saw masses of refugees fleeing the fighting, though this time that happened on both sides of the border as over 240 Hizbullah rockets hit targets inside Israel. It stoked tensions across the Arab world as well as protests and recriminations in Israel. Major-General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff, faced criticism after admitting that he had sold shares on the Tel Aviv stock exchange hours after the raid, anticipating financial losses in the crisis he knew was about to start. Normal life in the metropolitan ‘bubble’ of Tel Aviv carried on undisturbed in other ways throughout the war. Still, the connection with what was happening on the Palestinian front was thought-provoking. For the Israelis, fighting in Lebanon was alarmingly different from Gaza, where the IDF enjoyed overwhelming superiority, its armour protecting it from Palestinian RPGs. Hizbullah fighters, by contrast, were equipped with sophisticated anti-tank missiles that could damage even the mighty Merkava.4 Olmert, who (as Israelis often noted) had little military experience, linked the two fronts – promising ‘a tireless battle until terror ceases’ – though his goals for both seemed unlikely to be achieved in either. ‘We will persist until Hizbullah and Hamas comply with those basic and decent things required of them by every civilised person,’ he told MPs. ‘Israel will not agree to live in the shadow of missiles or rockets aimed at its residents.’5 Both the Gaza and Lebanon attacks, it was noted, had been launched from territories from which Israel had withdrawn unilaterally. Olmert’s ideas about following Sharon’s Gaza disengagement with a unilateral pullback from the West Bank were quietly shelved.6
Palestinians in Gaza displayed pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, who flaunted his blows against Israel on Al-Manar TV and won plaudits across the Arab world – as well angering the conservative Sunni governments in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere that were deeply hostile to Iran and its Lebanese Shia ally. Nasrallah admitted later that he had not anticipated that full-scale war would erupt. Israeli analysts looking at Lebanon concluded that efforts to crush the Palestinian intifada had had a damaging effect on the country’s overall military readiness – a familiar element of pragmatic ‘dovish’ thinking. ‘The responsibility of the IDF and the other components of Israel’s defence community to provide for the safety of the country’s citizens in the face of suicide bombers seems to have drawn their energy, thinking, and resources away from preparations for conventional war’, argued one expert. And there was likely to be a direct effect on the Palestinian question. ‘Opponents of disengagement can now be expected to argue persuasively that if the reality of Gaza and Lebanon were to duplicate itself in the West Bank, Israel’s vital core would be paralysed.’ Hizbullah’s success in marketing its narrative of victory might lead to greater polarization among the Palestinians and make it more difficult for moderates to resist the temptation to emulate the Lebanese militia. The argument that ‘the only language Israel understands is force’ was now likely to enjoy a field day in Palestine.7
Nothing had been resolved in Gaza by the time the Lebanon war ended in August 2006. The toll of ‘Operation Summer Rains’ was 184 Palestinians, including 42 children, killed, 650 injured and one IDF soldier killed; $15.5 millions’ worth of infrastructure had been damaged by Israeli incursions, shelling and air strikes.8 Shalit remained in captivity, moved from cellar to safe house to avoid Israeli surveillance. In September Abbas and Ismail Hanieh agreed to form a unity government but were unable to agree a common stance towards Israel. The US repeatedly urged Abbas to break with Hamas, though the Palestinian president, noted the UN envoy Alvaro de Soto, was ‘philosophically as well as strategically disinclined to cross the line from brinkmanship into confrontation’.9 US security assistance, run by Lt-General Keith Dayton with British and Canadian support, was channelled directly to Abbas’s presidential guard, not the PA. The message was a dual one: reform the ‘Arafat-era hotchpotch of security forces’ and build up forces to take on the Islamists.10 ‘It was getting harder for the Israelis to claim that the Palestinians weren’t fighting terror’, wrote the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, ‘and harder for them to claim that they had no partner for peace.’11 Light weapons and ammunition were delivered from Egypt, with Israel’s agreement.12 Mediation by Qatar, the maverick Gulf state which was close to Hamas and other Islamist movements, failed to halt clashes, however, and Israel reacted immediately to any firing from Gaza. In November IDF shells killed nineteen Palestinians and wounded forty in Beit Hanoun because of what the Israelis said was a technical malfunction in response to Qassam rocket fire. ‘Israeli policies, whether this is intended or not, seem frequently perversely designed to encourage … continued action by Palestinian militants’, de Soto reflected.
The occupation/resistance dynamic may be a textbook example of the chicken/egg quandary, and it is difficult to refute Israel’s argument that it is obliged to hammer the Palestinians because it must protect its citizens. But I wonder if Israeli authorities realise that, season after season, they are reaping what they sow, and are systematically pushing along the violence/repression cycle to the point where it is self-propelling.13
In February 2007, internecine fighting intensified. Agreement in Mecca, brokered by the Saudis, led to the formation of a new Palestinian unity government. The US and Israel, both opposed to Palestinian reconciliation, were furious as the distinction between moderates and extremists was immediately blurred – Rice called it ‘a devastating blow’.14 The UN, by contrast, believed that Hamas could become more pragmatic, but it was powerless to help. Mohammed Dahlan, seen as a ‘safe pair of hands’, was appointed as national security adviser to Abbas to appease the Americans. But Hamas refused to end rocket fire. Law and order broke down and conditions worsened. Jaysh al-Islam, which had helped capture Shalit, kidnapped the BBC’s Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, who, ironically, had described unemployed militants with time on their hands after the Israeli withdrawal. ‘Gaza’, Johnston mused, was ‘the only place in the world where your kidnapper’s one demand is that he should be allowed to become a policeman.’15 Over the next few weeks rocket attacks increased, as did Israeli actions against Hamas. Abbas, egged on by Washington and Cairo, reinforced Fatah’s security presence in Gaza, though to little effect. In mid-June the Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, described Fatah as so ‘desperate, disorganised and demoralised’ that it had requested Israeli help to tackle Hamas.16 The crisis peaked when the Islamists took control of the entire Gaza Strip, with at least a hundred people killed in four days of fighting, and hundreds of Fatah officials fleeing by sea to Egypt. Hamas men killed an officer of the Palestinian presidential guard by throwing him off the top of a fifteen-storey building. Fatah men did the same to a Hamas official. Hamas seized Abbas’s Gaza City compound, the only institution still in its rival’s hands. In a stark demonstration of the new reality, a masked, gun-toting Hamas fighter lounged in an ornate chair in the presidential office and mockingly pretended to make a phone call: ‘Hello Condoleezza Rice. You have to deal with me now, there is no Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] anymore.’17 Rice called it ‘the final indignity’.18
Abbas declared a state of emergency and dissolved the government. Salam Fayyad, a respected, Texas-educated economist who had worked for the International Monetary Fund and been the PA’s finance minister, was appointed to replace Hanieh. Hamas presented the Gaza events as a pre-emptive action against an imminent coup by Fatah, backed by the US and Israel. ‘Dahlan was trying with American help to undermine the results of the elections’, insisted Mahmoud al-Zahar, who had been foreign minister in the Hanieh government. ‘He was the one planning a coup.’
It was a shocking outcome that could be blamed on multiple interlinked factors: the long failure of Oslo; Hamas’s electoral victory; and the international sanctions that were imposed as a result. During the 2005 debate about disengagement from Gaza, the view in the IDF was that Hamas would have an interest in maintaining calm to avoid the risk of an Israeli reoccupation. Dissenting voices had also warned, however, against the creation of what they had dubbed ‘Hamastan’.19 In the wake of the takeover, that now seemed inevitable. ‘If you have two brothers put into a cage and deprive them of basic essential needs for life, they will fight,’ said the Palestinian foreign minister, Ziad Abu Amr.20 The Quartet pledged support for Abbas while the EU declared him the ‘legitimate president of all Palestinians’, suspended aid projects in Gaza, and lifted its boycott on the PA. The US did the same. But the occupied Palestinian territories had now been divided in two – three if East Jerusalem, under unrecognized but unshakable Israeli sovereignty, was treated separately, fragmented politically as well as geographically, with rival governments in Gaza and Ramallah claiming constitutional legitimacy. In these unpromising circumstances – in a year that marked the fortieth anniversary of Israeli occupation – another effort was launched to reach a peace settlement.
THE ROAD TO ANNAPOLIS
Ehud Olmert, described by one respected commentator as ‘the most pragmatic Israeli leader since 1967’,21 hailed the Hamas takeover as an opportunity for ‘dramatic change’ and tried to persuade the US to treat the West Bank and Gaza Strip as separate entities – breaking the link that had been enshrined in Oslo. The response of the Bush administration was that it would do so only if Israel made concessions that would improve the ‘quality of life’ in the West Bank. The effect of the separation barrier on Palestinian communities, the daily grind of Israeli checkpoints slowing movement, and settler violence were all documented by the UN, US and other governments, as well as by local and international NGOs. There was certainly plenty of room for improvement.
In July 2007 President Bush announced a new effort to restart peace talks. It could ‘help sustain the good guys’, Rice told the president, appealing to his homespun wisdom. Bush suggested that the new gathering be described as a ‘meeting’ rather than a conference, to avoid raising expectations, and to assuage Israeli sensitivities about wider international involvement. The Arab invitees – unusually including both Syria and Saudi Arabia, because Bush wanted to maximize regional support – were strikingly unenthusiastic, expecting failure and fearing a new paroxysm of violence like the one that followed the Camp David debacle in 2000.22 Abbas and Olmert held several rounds of talks in Jerusalem but there was no sign of significant movement by either side. In September the Israelis again designated Gaza a ‘hostile territory’. The disconnect between these discreet exploratory talks and diplomatic manoeuvring and the harsh reality on the ground was disconcerting. In July the IDF had carried out several big incursions into Gaza. Hamas largely observed a unilateral ceasefire and most of the rockets fired in this period were launched by Islamic Jihad and the PRCs. On the eve of the meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, however, the Israelis scaled back operations in Gaza, allowed the export of strawberries and flowers at peak season and permitted a one-time shipment of lamb to enter the strip. Olmert pledged to freeze new settlement construction. But this promise, as so often, was largely meaningless as his government continued to expand a dozen existing settlements in the West Bank and, as always, it insisted that ‘united’ Jerusalem was exempt.
Expectations for Annapolis were kept low: the leaders on both sides were weak and unpopular compared to the illustrious if flawed giants they had replaced. Abbas had just lost half his kingdom to Hamas, with no prospect of recovering it any time soon: his presidency, went the joke in Ramallah, barely extended beyond his Muqataa headquarters. Olmert had been damaged by his conduct of the last war in Lebanon and was now facing corruption charges dating back to his time as mayor of Jerusalem. In addition, Bush’s credibility was tainted by the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.
In Gaza thousands rallied to attack Abbas for even being prepared to make concessions. He and Olmert pledged to ‘immediately launch good faith, bilateral negotiations in order to conclude a peace treaty resolving all outstanding issues’. The goal was a final peace settlement to ‘establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people just as Israel is the homeland for the Jewish people’. It was a reformulation of the classic principle of the two-state solution – though, of course, minus the crucial details on which, as ever, everything hung.
On the surface, the atmosphere seemed promising; unusually, Olmert’s Annapolis speech contained a strikingly empathetic acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering, with even his fiercest critics wondering briefly if this marked the emergence of an Israeli De Klerk, the South African president who had released Nelson Mandela and negotiated the peaceful end of apartheid. ‘Many Palestinians have been living for decades in camps, disconnected from the environment in which they grew up, wallowing in poverty, in neglect, alienation, bitterness, and a deep, unrelenting sense of humiliation,’ he declared. ‘I know that this pain and this humiliation are the deepest foundations which fomented the ethos of hatred toward us. We are not indifferent to this suffering. We are not oblivious to the tragedies that you have experienced.’23 Crucially, however, he did not acknowledge any Israeli responsibility for what had happened in 1948. Just a few days later Olmert recalled his own earlier statement, that ‘if we don’t do something, we will lose the possibility of the existence of two states’ and ‘[w]e will be an apartheid state’.24 Abbas said that despite their differences he had noted Olmert’s desire for peace. The novelty was that for the first time since 1993, both sides appeared ready to reach agreement even though the underlying gaps – on settlements, borders, Jerusalem and refugees – looked as difficult as ever to close. Abbas, in addition, now had no control over Gaza. And as always, the imbalance between them was enormous. Their declared goal was agreement on Palestinian statehood before President Bush left office in January 2009.
ABBAS–OLMERT TALKS
Hopes that Annapolis would lead to a speedy breakthrough faded quickly. Follow-up talks were overshadowed by a row over the latest plans to expand Har Homa, the ‘last rampart in a wall of settlements’ encircling East Jerusalem and cutting it off from Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank. An international donor conference held in Paris in December 2007 allocated a whopping $7.2 billion to the PA but the isolation of Gaza continued unrelieved. Tony Blair, who began serving as envoy to the Quartet after stepping down as British prime minister, adopted a ‘West Bank first’ strategy that supported Salam Fayyad’s plans for building national institutions and infrastructure, strengthening governance and, especially, security – echoing the approach of the Jewish Yishuv in the Mandate period. Fayyad wanted to push ahead regardless of progress in negotiations with Israel. But ‘economic peace’ was not enough, he insisted.25 Palestinian critics protested that the aim was in fact to reinforce the siege of Gaza by ‘increasing the fragmentation of the Palestinian people, in pumping up a ruined leadership, and in thwarting any chance of national unity for the Palestinians’.26 Israel did ease its blockade – items as innocent as hummus, pasta, writing materials and toilet paper were all banned at different times27 – but fuel and clean drinking water remained in short supply in Gaza. Hamas signals of readiness for a formal ceasefire were ignored by Israel. Olmert, bolstered by the Quartet, stuck by his demands for an end to violence, recognition of Israel’s right to exist and abiding by existing agreements – the last stipulation implying adherence to the terms of Oslo. Israel’s settlement policy, as Olmert’s critics were quick to point out, was certainly in breach of the Oslo spirit.
In January 2008 Israel declared ‘economic warfare’ on Gaza. The UN recorded 80 Palestinians killed that month alone; in the same period 267 rockets and 256 mortars were fired across the border, injuring 9 Israelis. Israel carried out three assassinations immediately after a visit by Bush to Jerusalem and Ramallah, where demonstrators waved placards declaring ‘Remove all settlements’, ‘It is the occupation stupid’ and ‘Gaza on our mind’. Bush did address the settlement issue: ‘Swiss cheese isn’t going to work when it comes to the territory of a state,’ he said after talks with Abbas. March saw another big IDF incursion into Gaza that left at least 106 Palestinians dead. Half of them, said B’Tselem, ‘did not take part in the hostilities’.28 In June another six-month tahdiya was agreed with the head of Egyptian intelligence, General Omar Suleiman, who was working to broker a deal to exchange the captive soldier Shalit for 1,000 Palestinians. Suleiman always had a detailed timeline for action, noted the new UN envoy, Robert Serry, but that timeline constantly had to be extended.29
Negotiations continued quietly over the next few months, led by Livni for Israel and Ahmed Qurei for the Palestinians. The principle was that nothing could be agreed until everything was agreed. In May Qurei proposed that Israel annex all Jewish settlements – referred to as ‘neighbourhoods’ by Israel – in the Jerusalem area except for the strategically positioned Har Homa. Saeb Erakat hammered home the significance of this by telling the Israelis they would get ‘the biggest Yerushalayim in history’ – his unusual use of the Hebrew name suggesting an intimacy that rankled with Hamas and other critics, who complained of the Palestinians’ ‘cringing’ and ‘ingratiating’ behaviour30 when details of the talks were leaked to al-Jazeera and the Guardian.31 (Erakat complained of a ‘slander’ campaign.) Livni ‘appreciated’ the offer but dismissed it because it did not include Har Homa or Maaleh Adumim on the road to Jericho and Ariel, the latter much deeper in the West Bank. Israel’s position was fully supported by the Bush administration. The documents also showed that the Israelis would accept just 5,000 refugees, while the Palestinians proposed the return of 10,000 a year for 10 years – a total of 100,000. It was a stark reminder that no other issue was harder to deal with.32
In a replay of the dual negotiating tracks in Washington and Oslo in the early 1990s these talks were accompanied by a parallel private channel between Abbas and Olmert, who met dozens of times without aides, Condoleezza Rice acting as intermediary.33 In August Olmert offered Abbas a take-it-or-leave-it ‘package deal’. It included a near-total withdrawal from the West Bank, proposing that Israel retain just 6.3 per cent of the territory in order to keep control of the major settlements. The Palestinians would be compensated with a swap of Israeli land equivalent to 5.8 per cent of the West Bank, along with a link to the Gaza Strip. The Old City of Jerusalem would be placed under international control. The two leaders met for the last time on 16 September 2008.34 Olmert showed Abbas a map but refused to give it to him so it would not be used as an ‘opening position’ in future negotiations. Abbas sketched the map on a paper napkin and said he was unable to decide and needed to consult colleagues. ‘No,’ Olmert replied. ‘Take the pen and sign now. You’ll never get an offer that is more fair or more just. Don’t hesitate. This is hard for me too, but we don’t have an option of not resolving [the conflict].’ Abbas groaned and then postponed another meeting arranged for the next day. It never took place.35
Olmert insisted afterwards that the Palestinian president had missed a historic opportunity – a claim that had been made by Israelis for decades. Palestinians retorted that a deal with a lame-duck Israeli prime minister – who had already announced that he would resign because of criminal charges he was facing36 – would have been worthless, as some of Olmert’s own officials also argued.37 Israeli commentators suggested that Olmert, who was subsequently tried and gaoled, had gone far beyond his brief in order to ‘save his own skin out of fear of the law’,38 or to acquire a ‘get out of gaol free’ card in the form of a historic peace agreement. ‘Even today, after years of disappointments, a politician can gain instant and widespread popularity – in the Israeli media, at least – by promising to do everything within his power to bring the conflict with the Palestinians to a close’, commented Moshe Yaalon, the former IDF chief of staff. ‘On occasion, these promises can salvage even the most tainted public image.’39 Others supported Olmert’s claim that the effort genuinely represented the last chance for a two-state solution.40 Comparisons were made with Ehud Barak’s offer to Arafat at Camp David in 2000. The US envoy George Mitchell, however, believed that Abbas had good reason to doubt elements of the Israeli proposal on refugees, Jerusalem and borders. ‘The vagueness that would be necessary for Olmert would be a liability for Abbas’, he concluded.41 In any event, even if Abbas had accepted the offer, fierce opposition from Hamas and other quarters would very likely have defeated it. Shortly afterwards there was another shocking reminder of the price of relying solely on military means to ‘manage’ rather than resolve the conflict.
CAST LEAD
Gaza’s next war was a few days shorter than the 2006 Lebanese conflict, but far more destructive – and controversial. Israel’s goal in ‘Operation Cast Lead’, so often enunciated since Sharon’s unilateral disengagement, was to end Palestinian rocket fire and arms smuggling. Its eruption was shocking, but hardly surprising. Tensions had escalated sharply since 4 November 2008 – the day Barack Obama won a historic election in America – when the Israelis killed six Hamas men who were digging a tunnel near Deir al-Balah. The IDF described ‘a pinpoint operation intended to prevent an immediate threat’. Another interpretation was that the attack was deliberately designed to provoke precisely because the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire was holding. Three months earlier Ehud Barak, back in office as Olmert’s defence minister, admitted privately that Hamas was making ‘a serious effort to convince the other factions not to launch rockets or mortars’ and this had brought ‘a large measure of peace and quiet’ to Israeli border communities. But he was concerned that Hamas efforts to use the tahdiya to build up its strength would mean a return to military action.42 PA security forces still worked closely with the Israelis against Hamas – and readily advertised the fact. Majid Faraj of the Palestinian mukhabarat (general intelligence), told his Israeli counterparts (in the presence of a journalist): ‘Hamas is the enemy, and we have decided to wage an all-out war against Hamas. And I tell you there will be no dialogue with Hamas, for he who wants to kill you, kill him first. You have reached a truce with them, but we won’t do so.’43 October 2008, in fact, had been the quietest month since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada. Now though, escalation followed quickly, with Hamas firing dozens of rockets into Israel.
Cast Lead began without warning on 27 December with air strikes that had been planned after six months of intelligence-gathering to pinpoint Hamas targets, including bases, weapon silos, training camps and the homes of senior officials. Preparations for an Israeli version of ‘shock and awe’ involved disinformation and deception which kept the media in the dark. And Hamas was apparently lulled into a sense of false security which allowed the initial onslaught to achieve tactical surprise.44 Targets hit in the first devastating mid-morning strike by F16s, Apache helicopters and drones included a graduation parade of traffic policemen in Gaza City, where 15 were killed in what was denounced as a massacre: 100 targets were hit in a few minutes. ‘Women were shopping at the outdoor market, and children were emerging from school’, reported the New York Times.
The centre of Gaza City was a scene of chaotic horror, with rubble everywhere, sirens wailing, and women shrieking as dozens of mutilated bodies were laid out on the pavement and in the lobby of Shifa Hospital so that family members could identify them. The dead included civilians, including construction workers and at least two children in school uniforms.45
TV footage showed bodies scattered on a road and dead and wounded being carried away by desperate civilians. International media coverage was intense despite a ban on foreign journalists entering the area from Israel. But al-Jazeera TV had an office in Gaza City and other news organizations had their own local Palestinian correspondents. The death toll that day alone was 230, one of the deadliest in the history of the conflict. Dozens of tunnels under the border with Egypt – used to smuggle arms as well as ordinary goods – were destroyed by Israeli bombing.
Cast Lead escalated with an Israeli ground offensive on 3 January 2009. Two days later IDF units were operating in densely populated areas as Hamas intensified rocket fire against Israeli civilian targets and managed to hit Ashdod and Beersheba for the first time. Hospitals in Gaza were overflowing with dead and wounded and facing severe shortages of medical supplies. ‘There is no safe space in the Gaza Strip – no safe haven, no bomb shelters, and the borders are closed and civilians have no place to flee’, said a report from the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.46 Israeli Jews overwhelmingly supported the war. But the largest demonstration ever held in the Arab community took place in the Galilee town of Sakhnin, where 100,000 people carried Palestinian flags and placards declaring solidarity with Gaza. The same day, 9 January, a smaller but still largely Palestinian demonstration was also held in Tel Aviv. Dozens of Arab political activists were summoned by the Shin Bet to be warned that they would be held responsible for any trouble.47
In the enclave power cuts left people shivering in the winter cold in unheated homes where they learned to distinguish between the ‘zzzz’ of drones and the ‘whoosh’ that heralded an F16 air strike.48 The operation ended on 18 January – two days before Obama entered the White House – with Israel unilaterally announcing a ceasefire and Hamas following suit a few hours later. Palestinian casualties were between 1,166 and 1,417, 431 of them children, according to figures published by the World Health Organization. In all, some 900 civilians were killed. In many cases detailed information about the circumstances of the deaths was available. Five people were killed on 4 January when Gaza’s main vegetable market was hit. Two days later a UN school in Jabaliya was shelled, leaving at least thirty dead. Nearly all were children. On 14 January, Mahmoud Ezedinne Wahid Mousa, who was seriously injured, lost his parents, brother and sister in an air strike on the family home in Gaza City, where they had just finished dinner.49 Two days later Israeli tanks shelled the Jabaliya home of Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish: three of his daughters and a niece were killed instantly and another daughter severely wounded. The IDF claimed it had been responding to sniper fire from the roof of the house, though Abuelaish and neighbours disputed this. Shortly afterwards the bereaved doctor – speaking Hebrew, and weeping – was interviewed live on Israeli TV, his grief on searing display.50 It was a rare moment when the enemy was humanized. The old notion of ‘shooting and weeping’ became ‘shooting, weeping and seeing’, in the words of one critical scholar.51 Other TV clips showed the funerals of Gaza’s many victims, crowds chanting ‘Allahu akbar’. Israel counter-posed such images with its own information warfare, applying lessons learned from the 2006 war in Lebanon. The IDF inaugurated a You-Tube channel which showcased drone footage of Israeli attacks filmed from the vantage point of the bombardier, ‘footage which functioned to sterilise and justify the air campaign through a video game-cum-war logic that rendered all persons and buildings seen from above as proto-targets’. Bloggers and other social media users more than filled the gap left by traditional journalistic coverage.
Israeli spokesmen insisted throughout that the IDF was defending the country’s civilians. But it was doing so by killing large numbers of non-combatant Palestinians. And there was no equivalence either of suffering or between the crude, unguided projectiles of Hamas and the sheer might and technological sophistication of the IDF. Israel suffered thirteen fatalities, four of them from friendly fire. Both sides were accused of committing war crimes by a UN investigation led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone, whose 575-page report documented damning evidence of abuses. Goldstone subsequently retracted his charge against Israel but his change of position was not shared by the other members of the commission. Inside Israel, Breaking the Silence publicized testimonies of soldiers that were in line with accusations by Amnesty and other international human rights groups that the IDF had acted indiscriminately and disproportionately in civilian areas. Hamas was accused of mounting indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians. Shortly after the end of the fighting the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, visited Gaza and saw ‘a desolate and shocking landscape uprooted by the heavy tracks of Israeli tanks and bulldozers which had levelled anything in their way – walls … fields, electricity poles, cars’. Some city blocks were nearly untouched but others had been reduced to rubble or buildings had had their façades blown off, exposing the interiors. Ban and his party passed a column of hundreds of men wearing green headbands and waving green flags. It was supposed to be a victory parade but they looked quiet and sullen.52
Cast Lead marked a bloody new low for the divided Palestinians – literally and politically. Gaza’s horrors were on display to the entire world and nothing could stop them. Abbas, worried about popular unrest, begged the US to support a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire but Bush ordered Rice to abstain: a veto would have been impossible in the face of domestic and international outrage about the Israeli offensive.53 Abbas was also said to have privately urged the Israelis ‘to continue the military campaign and overthrow Hamas’. In the West Bank, where people were glued to al-Jazeera’s coverage of the fighting, US-trained PA security forces maintained order throughout. ‘The IDF … felt – after the first week or so – that the Palestinians were there and they could trust them’, commented General Dayton. ‘As a matter of fact, a good portion of the Israeli army went off to Gaza from the West Bank – think about that for a minute – and the commander was absent for eight straight days. That shows the kind of trust they were putting in these people now.’54 Hamas claimed victory in what it called the Battle of al-Furqan – a reference to a Quranic concept of distinguishing between good and evil. On the last full day of fighting it still managed to fire nineteen rockets into Israel. The siege remained in place, although it was briefly eased after the ceasefire even as Israel demanded Corporal Shalit’s release in exchange for a full opening of the border crossings. Israeli officials argued that they had prevailed: ‘Having lost the initiative with Israel’s opening air raids, [Hamas] … was in a reactive mode throughout the fighting’, argued one well-informed analysis. ‘The only effective limits on the IDF were those the Israeli government imposed for operational or political purposes, or to limit Israeli military and civilian casualties. When Israel declared a ceasefire … Hamas was at the mercy of the IDF; Israeli decisions, not Hamas military actions, put an end to the fighting.’55 Neither side’s behaviour pointed to a way out of a volatile status quo punctuated by bouts of spectacular and destructive violence.