[News] Palestine - Unite to negotiate a real truce

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Unite to negotiate a real truce
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9672.shtml


Dr. Eyad al-Sarraj, The Electronic Intifada, 4 July 2008

[]

Palestinians hold out their passports as they wait to cross to Egypt 
at the Rafah border crossing in the southern Gaza Strip, 1 July 2008. 
(Wissam Nassar/<http://www.maanimages.com/>MaanImages)

After nearly one year of a suffocating siege imposed on Gaza by the 
Israeli military establishment, a truce agreement was reached between 
Hamas and Israel. This followed months of dedicated Egyptian good 
offices. Rockets launched from Gaza against Israeli settlements were 
to stop in return for gradually lifting the blockade. A ceasefire 
sustained for six months would then roll over to the West Bank. A 
hostage Israeli soldier would be released in a separate deal 
involving exchange of Palestinian prisoners. Future negotiations 
would set the terms for opening the borders between Egypt and Gaza.

Hamas vowed to respect the agreement as did other Palestinian 
factions. In addition to Hamas, only Islamic Jihad is to be taken 
seriously. Fatah, the faction linked to President Abbas, has long and 
vehemently criticized rocket firing from Gaza.

Five days into the long awaited ceasefire, Israel allowed the entry 
of tissues and sanitary napkins into Gaza as a form of "good will." 
Simultaneously, it carried out an early morning raid against a 
student hostel in Nablus, killing two Palestinians in their beds.

Seeking to justify what seemed to many an obvious provocation, 
Israeli spin-doctors once again invoked the "ticking time bomb" 
rationale. It was claimed that the men, both in their early 20s, were 
plotting a terrorist attack that had been prevented only at the last 
moment. Israel was instantly rewarded with the response it expected. 
Rockets landed in Sderot, the first two fired by Islamic Jihad and 
the third by the al-Aqsa brigades of Fatah, who denounced the truce 
with Israel as a form of treason, taunting Hamas for being more 
concerned with the survival of its cadre in Gaza than with the fate 
of fellow Palestinians in the West Bank.

Hamas is in a tight corner. Denied international recognition, 
embargoed and short of funds, its leaders feel responsible for 
meeting the needs of a throttled population as well as challenged by 
the daunting task of running a government with no experience behind them.

Perhaps the most painful dilemma faced by Hamas is how to govern well 
and consolidate their power while at the same time keeping faith with 
their bedrock commitment to champion the armed struggle against the 
Israeli occupation.

Some of its leaders believe that entering the legislative elections 
in 2006 was a form of entrapment -- even though Hamas won a decisive 
triumph at the polls. Echoes of this doctrinal purity can now be 
heard in charges from al-Aqsa brigade fighters against Hamas for 
abandoning the noble mission of resistance in favor of squalid 
political compromise.

It is widely believed that firing rockets hurts Palestinians and 
impedes their quest for justice, and that competing militias -- the 
al-Aqsa brigades in particular -- are out to embarrass Hamas by 
turning the ideological tables.

But Hamas leaders now insisting on self-restraint and denouncing 
those who breach the ceasefire as traitors must contend with the 
irony of time. Not so long ago, they used the same polarizing 
language to indict Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as a 
collaborator when he demanded a halt to what he called "futile" rocket attacks.

On the Israeli front, it is increasingly and tragically clear that 
continued violence represents the default mode of the Israeli 
military establishment. However often peace may be rhetorically 
invoked, in practice it remains anathema, since it inevitably means 
the surrender of occupied land to the Palestinians.

Israel is a master at disguising aggressive intransigence as 
self-defense. The assassinations carried out last week in Nablus 
aimed to incite retaliatory Palestinian violence. It did so. And this 
in turn served to confirm the master narrative, so familiar in media 
coverage of the conflict, which casts Israelis as perennial victims 
and Palestinians as treacherous and untrustworthy.

Such an Israeli strategy is not new. The current intifada, which was 
provoked by former Israeli prime minister and war criminal Ariel 
Sharon's visit to Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque and quickly militarized, 
has witnessed a veracious Israeli appetite for Palestinian land in 
the West Bank. And as settlements expand and grow more entrenched, 
Israel has succeeded in making the Palestinians play the scripted 
role as violent spoilers who "never miss an opportunity to miss an 
opportunity."

In my dialogue with some of Hamas leaders I have tried consistently 
to alert them to Israeli colonial designs, and the need to change 
course in order to outflank and out think our force-addicted 
opponents. I always found listening ears.

Caught in a pincer move between a siege of medieval barbarism imposed 
by the Israeli military, and a vicious, internecine Palestinian feud, 
Gaza has been brought to the breaking point. But residents have 
displayed amazing steadfastness, finding the strength to persevere 
from religious faith, traditions of familial solidarity, and an 
abiding belief in the justice of the Palestinian cause. Resilience, 
however, has its limits.

The siege must be completely and permanently lifted so that the 1.5 
million people who have endured a kind of collective water-boarding 
get the chance to come up for air. For this to happen, political 
leaders in Ramallah and Gaza must concentrate less on settling scores 
and more on meeting the needs of the citizens they represent, 
communicating a set of core messages to European and American 
audiences, and crafting an agile, principled and tough-minded 
strategy to negotiate with Israel.

Dr. Eyad al-Sarraj is the founder and director of the 
<http://www.gcmhp.net>Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP).




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