OPINION:There is a point beyond which hand-wringing before so much slaughter in Palestine veers from criminal negligence into complicity, writes LARA MARLOWE.
ISRAEL USED to react angrily when accused of disproportionate attacks on enemies. But when a group allied with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas claimed responsibility for firing two rockets into southern Israel on Sunday, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert used the term defiantly, promising a “disproportionate response” and adding that Israel “will act according to new rules”.
Disproportion is a thread that runs through the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thirteen Israelis were killed in the three-week assault on Gaza, compared to 1,300 Palestinians. Hoardings on the motorway to Tel Aviv demand the liberation of the Franco-Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Hamas in 2006. But I didn’t find a single Israeli who could tell me how many Palestinians are illegally held in Israel. (There are 11,000.)
A few days ago, I travelled from Gaza City to Jerusalem, via Rafah, Taba, Eilat and Tel Aviv. In a peaceful world, the journey would have taken less than two hours, but because Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip is closed, it took 14. In Gaza, whole neighbourhoods were flattened by bombardment. Comparisons to an earthquake or tsunami are not an exaggeration. It was a visual shock to arrive in the Israeli Red Sea resort of Eilat, with its glitzy opulence, cruise liners and airport. Israel long ago destroyed Gaza’s port and airport.
Two memories came back to me: an ancient, wizened Palestinian who during an earlier assault on Gaza, in December 2001, took my hands in his and pleaded: “Please, lady, tell the world: they have everything. We have nothing.”
Ten days ago, at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, a surgeon said to me: “We are all sons of Abraham. Okay. Let my Jewish cousins have 99 per cent. But give us just 1 per cent. The world treats us like stray cats and dogs.”
The recent war rendered tens of thousands of Palestinians homeless. Israel now refuses to allow building materials into the Gaza Strip to enable people to rebuild. To survive, the Palestinians are forced to become human moles, risking their lives to burrow under Rafah.
There has got to be a more efficient, less cruel way of depriving Hamas of weapons. The EU and US have promised to help Israel curb arms transfers. In view of the disproportion in casualties and damage, perhaps they ought to think about cutting the flow of weapons to Israel too. One-tonne bombs and heavy artillery shells are also weapons of terror.
When is murder not murder? The foreign minister and prime ministerial candidate Tzipi Livni told Ha’aretz magazine at the weekend: “In law a distinction is made between a murderer and someone who kills accidentally. The terrorists are murderers. They are out to kill children. In contrast, we are out to kill terrorists.”
So it’s all right then?
Rhetoric during the war was particularly ugly. Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, said his country should “fight Hamas the way the Americans fought the Japanese in the second World War” (ie nuke them).
The deputy prime minister Eli Yishai suggested Israel should “raze Gaza; then they won’t bother us anymore”.
Ms Livni said Israel had responded to Hamas rockets “by going wild – and this is a good thing”. Israelis I talked to believe that Gazans are oppressed and terrorised by Hamas. (Some Fatah supporters are terrorised by Hamas; Fatah reciprocates in the West Bank, where it is in control.) But most of the Gazans I met supported the self-styled Islamic Resistance Movement, just as Lebanese Shia in southern Lebanon genuinely support Hizbullah.
Israel should have learned by now that collective punishment never turns civilian populations against such movements, who are comprised of their sons and brothers.
In the Gaza Strip, I interviewed dozens of people who had lost their homes and or family members. Not one expressed self-pity. In Sderot, the Israeli town which has suffered the brunt of Hamas rocket attacks, a government employee told me she was traumatised because one rocket exploded in her parking lot last year. Even opponents of the war saw the conflict through the prism of their own emotion. “Everybody [in Sderot] is emotionally damaged,” a left-wing activist told me. “I define myself now as a victim of shock and anxiety.”
A study by the Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal and Rafi Nets-Zehngut, a doctoral student, strengthened my impressions: “Israeli Jews’ consciousness is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanisation of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering,” Ha’aretz reported in its summary of the study. If Israel wants peace, why have successive governments continued to steal Palestinian land on the West Bank, in defiance of international law, increasing the number of settlers from 80,000 at the time of the Oslo accords in 1993 to 285,000 last year?
The Saudi King Abdullah in 2002, the Geneva Accord in 2003, and the former US president Jimmy Carter have all offered sensible peace plans. With slight variations, all propose a two-state solution whereby Israel would relinquish control of the lands it occupied in 1967. Jerusalem would be the capital for both countries, and Palestinian refugees would renounce their right of return to what is now Israel in exchange for compensation or the right to emigrate to the new Palestinian state.
The most maddening thing about the conflict is that there is such an obvious solution, as there was in Northern Ireland for the quarter century before the Belfast Agreement.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader who did much to destroy the Oslo Accord in the 1990s, looks set to become Israel’s prime minister following the February 10th election. Netanyahu refuses to dismantle settlements or compromise on Jerusalem. With Netanyahu likely to return to power and the Palestinians divided between Hamas and Fatah, prospects for a peaceful settlement are bleak.
“We want to live,” was the one sentence I heard repeatedly in the Gaza Strip and in Israel, perhaps the only thing Palestinians and Israelis agree on.
Why don’t the US and EU take a brave, bold step and impose a solution on both parties, based on existing peace plans? The UN should flood the Gaza Strip with blue helmets, who would prevent Hamas firing rockets, and Israel from carrying out assassinations and bombing raids.
Israelis and Palestinians have shown they will not make peace if left to their own devices. There is a point beyond which hand-wringing before so much slaughter veers from criminal negligence into complicity. By shepherding Palestine to independence, the way it helped the former Yugoslav republics, the much discredited international community could re-establish its own reputation, and put a halt to the self-destruction of two peoples.
Lara Marlowe is Paris Correspondent of The Irish Times and also reports regularly from the Middle East