Don G. Dinsdale Loc: El Cajon, CA (San Diego County)

(Part 4)

The Separation Barrier


In 2002 Prime Minister Sharon authorized the construction of a barrier ostensibly separating Israel and the West Bank. Sharon reluctantly embraced the concept of a separation barrier only when he understood that it was demographically impossible for Israel to annex all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and remain a majority Jewish state. In contrast, the concept of “separation” (“us here, them there,” as Yitzhak Rabin put it) was long a principle of labor Z*****m.


The separation barrier runs mostly to the east of the Green Line marking the border between Israel and the West Bank. Palestinians refer to the barrier as the “apartheid wall.” It cuts communities in two, blocks routes of travel even within towns and villages, and has totally reconfigured the geography of the West Bank. About 95 percent of the barrier consists of an elaborate system of electronic fences, patrol roads and observation towers constructed on a path as much as 300 meters wide; about 5 percent, mostly around Qalqilya and Jerusalem, consists of an 8-meter-high concrete wall.


The area between the Green Line and the barrier—about 9.5 percent of the West Bank—is known as the “seam zone” and has been a closed military area since 2003, functionally detaching it from the West Bank and annexing it to Israel. Israeli officials insist that this wall is essential to preserve and defend Israeli security. In 2004, the case of the wall was taken before the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion. The ICJ ruled that the wall is “disproportionate” and therefore constitutes a violation of international law.


Popular Resistance


Dozens of Palestinian villages just east of the “seam zone” in the West Bank have engaged in popular resistance to protest the barrier’s isolation or confiscation of their agricultural lands. Villagers have mounted demonstrations and other efforts to stop bulldozers from digging the foundations of the barrier. They have chained themselves to olive trees to prevent their being uprooted, cut the barrier open in sections where it is a fence, and painted graffiti on sections of the barrier where it is a concrete wall.


The International Solidarity Movement and thousands of Israelis, many of them organized by Ta‘ayush/Palestinian-Israeli Partnership and Anarchists Against the Wall, have supported the Palestinian popular resistance and regularly participated in its activities. The four-month “peace camp” at the village of Masha in the spring and summer of 2003 and similar efforts in several other villages were critical experiences in forging solidarity among Palestinians, Israelis and internationals. Living and struggling together with Palestinians at this level of intensity for a protracted period raised the consciousness of the hundreds of Israeli participants to an entirely new level.


As a result of the popular resistance, the villages of Budrus and Bil‘in, which became internationally renowned due to award-winning documentary films about their struggle, as well as several other villages, regained some of the lands that had been confiscated for construction of the separation barrier.


The Road Map and the Quartet


On June 24, 2002, President George W. Bush delivered a speech calling for an independent Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in peace. Although this “two-state solution” had been the effective policy of the Clinton administration, Bush’s speech was the first time the United States officially endorsed that vision for ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. To advance this goal, the Bush administration proposed a “road map” beginning with mutual steps, including an end to violence and political reform by the Palestinian Authority and withdrawal from Palestinian cities and a settlement freeze by Israel.


A family picnics near Ramallah. Three Israeli settlements are perched on nearby hilltops. (Tanya Habjouqa)


The road map’s implementation was to be supervised by a Quartet composed of the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and the UN. In 2003, British Prime Minister Tony Blair conditioned his support for the impending US invasion of Iraq on a renewed international effort to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The road map was apparently the Bush administration’s response.


Efforts to implement the roadmap were delayed for one year in order to allow Ariel Sharon and the Likud to win the e******ns of January 2003 without the obstacle of an American-sponsored plan for a Palestinian state. This lag also enabled the United States to carry out its invasion of Iraq and allowed a new Palestinian Authority cabinet led by Mahmoud Abbas to be installed. Israel and the United States refused to deal with Yasser Arafat, who was confined to his Ramallah headquarters by Israeli forces.


After the road map was announced on April 30, 2003, Israel submitted a list of 14 reservations. Although this list amounted to a rejection of the plan, the Bush administration pretended that both parties accepted it and renewed peace talks began on July 1. Negotiations soon stalled, however, due to an escalation of violence.


Despite the freezing of the road map, Prime Minister Sharon had begun to realize that Israel could not remain a Jewish state and control millions of Palestinians indefinitely. In early 2004 he announced his intention to withdraw Israeli forces unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. The Bush administration supported this plan.


President Bush gave additional diplomatic support by writing a letter to Sharon on April 4, 2004, stating: “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.” Bush also stated that a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue would have to be found in a Palestinian state.


In practical terms the United States had long accepted Israeli annexation of many of the Israeli settlements established since 1967 and supported Israel’s rejection of the Palestinian refugees’ “right to return” to their homes inside Israel. Nonetheless, Bush’s letter was a dramatic shift—in Israel’s favor—in formal US policy on two key issues.


Israel’s “Withdrawal” from the Gaza Strip


In 2005 the Likud Party split over disagreements about the future of Gaza and the West Bank. Sharon led a group out of the Likud, which joined with defectors from the Labor Party to form the Kadima (Forward) Party as a vehicle to conduct Israel’s military redeployment out of the Gaza Strip. All Jewish settlements in Gaza were evacuated, and the Strip was sealed by a wall adhering closely to the Green Line. The only entry and exit for Palestinians was through several checkpoints totally controlled by Israel.


Despite official Israeli claims that this unilateral disengagement t***sformed Gaza into “no longer occupied territory,” neither those changes nor anything that has t***spired since has ended the occupation. Israel’s occupation of Gaza continues to the present day because Israel continues to exercise “effective control” over this area; because the conflict that produced the occupation has not ended; and because an occupying state cannot unilaterally (and without international/diplomatic agreement) t***sform the international status of occupied territory except, perhaps, if that unilateral action terminates all manner of effective control. In addition, Israel continues to control the Palestinian Population Registry, which has the power and authority to define who is a “Palestinian” and who is a resident of Gaza.


Another manifestation of Israel’s continuing occupation of Gaza is its periodic incursions to arrest residents and t***sport them into Israel. In the wake of Israel’s unilateral disengagement, the Knesset enacted a new law to allow for the prosecution of Gazans in Israeli civil courts and their imprisonment inside Israel.


The 2006 Palestinian E******ns and the Rise of Hamas


In January 2005, following the death of Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority with the backing of his Fatah party. In the January 2006 e******ns for the Palestinian Legislative Council, Hamas won a majority of 77 out of 122 seats. Its victory over second-place Fatah in the popular v**e was a much narrower 44.45 to 41.43 percent.


When announcing the road map, the Quartet had stipulated three conditions for participation in internationally sponsored negotiations. First, the parties had to recognize the State of Israel. Second, they had to accept all previous agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians. And third, they had to renounce the use of violence for political ends. After the e******ns, Hamas said it was willing to extend a ceasefire with Israel. Its participation in the PA e******ns could be considered de facto acceptance of the Oslo accords, since those agreements had created the PA.


And a senior Hamas figure said the party “did not oppose” the 2002 Arab League peace plan’s offer to recognize the State of Israel. He did insist that such recognition come only when Israel recognized “the rights of the Palestinian people.” The Quartet, together with Israel, has judged these positions as belligerent rather than as steps toward the Palestinian “moderation” they demand.


In response to the Hamas victory, the Quartet cut off its financial support for the Palestinian Authority. Israel began to withhold the tax revenue it collects on behalf of the PA. Because that revenue makes up over half the PA’s budget, these measures further weakened the already embattled Palestinian economy. More than 150,000 Palestinians in the West Bank are on the PA’s payroll and thousands of retirees also depend on PA pensions. Since 2006, the PA has frequently been unable to pay salaries on time or in full.


Ignoring the legitimacy of Hamas’ victory in indisputably free e******ns, the United States provided $84 million in military aid to improve the fighting ability of the P**********l Guard loyal to Mahmoud Abbas. Palestinian security forces in the West Bank were retrained under a program led by US Marine Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton. Israel also permitted the P**********l Guard to enhance its arsenal.


In June 2007, with backing from the United States, Fatah moved to carry out a c**p to oust Hamas from the Gaza Strip. Hamas preempted the move and after a pitched battle established its sole control over the territory. Governance of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has been divided between Fatah and Hamas since then.


In the aftermath of the failed c**p, Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Palestinian Authority cabinet and appointed Salam Fayyad, a US-trained economist with experience in the International Monetary Fund, as prime minister. Fayyad undertook to t***sform the Palestinian economy along neoliberal lines, hoping that this “good governance” along with more aggressive pursuit of Hamas and Islamic Jihad by the “Dayton Brigades,” as they were known, would convince the West that the Palestinians deserved a state. Fayyad resigned in frustration in April 2013.


Israel’s Siege of the Gaza Strip


On September 19, 2007, Israel declared that Gaza had become a “hostile territory.” With support from Egypt under President Husni Mubarak, Israel tightened its blockade of the Gaza Strip.


Israel’s 2008–2009 and 2012 assaults on the Gaza Strip enhanced Hamas’ stature and popularity among Palestinians and internationally. In May 2010 the moderate Islamist party ruling Turkey expressed its sympathy for Hamas by permitting the Mavi Marmara, sponsored by the Islamist Humanitarian Relief Foundation, to join a flotilla to relieve the besieged population of the Gaza Strip. Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara, k*****g eight unarmed Turkish citizens and one unarmed US citizen of Turkish origin. (A tenth victim fell into a coma and died in May 2014.) This incident led to the freeze of the previously warm relations between Turkey and Israel.


The Secret Olmert-Abbas Negotiations


Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke that put him in a permanent coma in January 2006. (He would die eight years later.) Ehud Olmert replaced him as prime minister and leader of Kadima.


From December 2006 to September 2008 Olmert and Abbas conducted secret negotiations that came close to agreement. The contents of those talks were revealed to Al Jazeera and published as “the Palestine Papers” in January 2011. Since then, Olmert and Abbas have publicly confirmed that they agreed on demilitarization of the Palestinian state; stationing of an American-led international security force on the border between Palestine and Israel; sharing Jerusalem and an international committee to oversee its holy sites; and return of 10,000 Palestinian refugees to Israel and compensation and resettlement for the rest.


The key disagreement was over the extent of Israeli annexations in the West Bank. To avoid evacuating populous settlements, Olmert proposed 6.3 percent annexation and compensation for Palestine with Israeli territory equivalent to 5.8 percent, plus a 25-mile tunnel under Israel from the South Hebron Hills to Gaza. Olmert suggested he might go down to 5.9 percent. Abbas offered no more than 1.9 percent. The settlements of Ariel and Ma‘ale Adumim, deep in the West Bank, as well as Efrat, were the main bones of contention.


The leaders expected that the United States would help them split the territorial difference, as Clinton had in 2000. But the talks were abandoned because of Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008, Olmert’s indictment on corruption charges, and the victory of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud in the February 2009 Knesset e******ns. Netanyahu refused to continue the negotiations from where they had left off.


Palestinian Statehood and the UN


Mahmoud Abbas, in his capacity as chairman of the PLO, has twice petitioned the UN to accept Palestine as a member state. In September 2011 he approached the Security Council and asked for full membership for Palestine. The petition did not receive the nine required v**es. In any case, the United States would have vetoed the petition, preventing it from being passed on to the General Assembly for a v**e.


On November 29, 2012, the sixty-fifth anniversary of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine, Abbas asked the General Assembly to accept Palestine as a non-member observer state, the same status enjoyed by the Vatican (and Switzerland before it joined the UN). This request was overwhelmingly approved with 138 v**es in favor and 9 against, with 41 abstentions. The no v**es came from Israel, the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic, Panama, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau.


The v**e had no effect on the ground. Israel continues to occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It did, however, open the possibility that Palestine could approach the International Criminal Court to pursue Israeli officials for crimes committed in the course of the occupation.


International opinion is nearly unanimous that a two-state solution, including a sovereign Palestinian state, is the best if not only way forward in the century-old conflict over historical Palestine. Yet there is no visible movement toward achieving this outcome.


One reason is the seismic rightward shift in Israeli Jewish opinion, which since the outbreak of the second intifada holds that no peace is possible with the Palestinians. Rather than “conflict resolution,” many feel, Israel should pursue a policy of “conflict management.” Partly to cater to such opinion, and partly to please the powerful settler lobby, recent Israeli governments have been unwilling to negotiate in good faith. Settlements grow apace.


A second reason is the split between Abbas and Hamas in the Palestinian body politic. Their dispute over strategy—negotiations versus resistance—divides ordinary Palestinians as well. Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens of Israel and refugees in neighboring Arab countries are adamant that a comprehensive peace must include them. There are increasingly pressing questions about the viability of the two-state vision and even the utility of international law for delivering a minimally just “solution” to the question of Palestine.


Still a third reason is the lack of political will in Washington, where the Obama administration (for the time being, at least) retains stewardship of the “peace process.” In the spring of 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry began traveling frequently to the Middle East in an effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations aimed at a two-state solution. He succeeded in doing so, and at the time of writing maintains a brave face in public about the possibility of success. There is no indication, however, that a peace agreement is on the horizon. In January 2014 President Obama himself told the New Yorker that he estimated the chances of a successful conclusion to negotiations to be “less than 50–50.” In our judgment, the odds are much lower.


(And as of 4/12/2015 there seems to be a sort of "Deal" with Iran, that will lead to full out war in the next decade and might just be WWIII... Don D.)