What Will the Ceasefire Bring Gaza and Palestine?

January 19, 2009. A World to Win News Service. History argues, as does an analysis of the forces and factors at work today, that the purpose of this ceasefire is to inflict more suffering, oppression and inevitably violence on the Palestinian people.

What happened during the last ceasefire, from June 2008 to the end of the year: The most important items in the unwritten but quite explicit agreement were Hamas' promise to stop rocket and mortar firings and Israel's promise to open the border crossings for imports and exports, not all the way but enough so that people in Gaza could live more ordinary lives. That is exactly what Israel did not do, and for bluntly stated reasons: Palestinians in Gaza were not going to be permitted anything like ordinary lives as long as Hamas was in charge.

There were some projectiles shot from Gaza in the first month or so of the agreement, reportedly by groups other than Hamas. Official Israeli statistics counted only 11 rockets and 15 mortar shells fired from Gaza between July 1 and November 1, 2008. "While no means a hundred percent secure, the southern Israeli town of Sderot [the Zionist settlement closest to Gaza] was hardly living under a ceaseless rocket barrage," writes Mouin Rabbani in Middle East Report Online. (January 7)

If the Israeli blockade of Gaza had a political aim, so did Hamas rockets: to force Israel to live up to that agreement. (Hamas' use of violence, like Israel's, is always politically motivated and calibrated. It is said to believe that suicide bombings are politically counterproductive at this point. There has been only one in Israel in almost four years.) Instead, Israel tightened its strangulation of Gaza, until the people there were in desperate straits. As the deadline for a new agreement approached, Hamas stepped up its negotiation-pressure rockets. Israel responded on November 4 by a raid into Gaza that killed half a dozen Hamas fighters and put an abrupt end to these dealings. This was done in full knowledge of how Hamas would react, and when more rockets went up, Israel had the excuse it wanted for the all-out attack it had been training its troops for and planning for a year.

What Israel sought to accomplish during its weeklong artillery and missile barrage and its two-week invasion: Commentator Rabbani tries to make a scientific evaluation of Israel's targets, and comes to a conclusion shared by other informed observers. The assault began with the 90 warplanes dropping more than 100 tons of explosives, immediately killing more than 225 people and wounding at least 700 more. The initial targets were not Hamas military sites but Gaza's civilian infrastructure, buildings and institutions led by Hamas, such as the parliament; all of the various ministries, most with no possible direct military significance; the main university; the Hamas television station; police stations, including traffic control posts; a prison, killing inmates arrested by the Hamas-led police; a number of neighborhood clinics, some run by foreign aid groups; hospitals; schools, mosques and so on. The greatest single death toll that day came when Israel struck the crowd at a graduation ceremony for police cadets. In short, Israel knew it could not root out Hamas, but instead sought to destroy the instruments of its governance.

At the same time, while continuing to focus on this aspect of its military campaign, the Zionist state also pursued what can only be understood as a war against the people, a collective punishment inflicted on civilians with the political goal of turning them against Hamas or at least making them conclude that the price for a Hamas-led government was more than any human being could stand. Israel also wanted to prove its determination to achieve its aims no matter what the price in blood. By the second week of the war, Israel had dropped an average of almost six bombs and missiles per square kilometer in Gaza, and the real impact was far worse because these munitions were concentrated on inhabited areas. It's morally indefensible to blame the civilian deaths on Hamas, as Israel and the U.S. do, or even to draw an equivalence between Israel and Hamas, the invader and the invaded. This is not to hide the nature of that Islamic fundamentalist organization, but the truth is incontestable: Hamas had nowhere but Gaza from which to fight the invaders, while it was Israel that prevented civilians from fleeing Gaza or even finding any safe haven there.

All the bombings of four UN-run schools used as civilian refuges and the shelling and burning of the UN refugee assistance headquarters complex could not have been accidents. Israeli commanders had their geographical coordinates. In some cases the shellings continued even as UN officials were on the phone to Israel begging them to stop shooting at the civilians under their protection. Tel Aviv's parting shot before declaring a ceasefire was to attack yet another UN school refugee center, in Beit Lahiya, setting it ablaze with what were apparently phosphorous bombs, killing two brothers, aged five and seven, and severing their mother's legs. The British-based medical journal The Lancet cried out in an editorial, "The collective punishment of Gazans is placing horrific and immediate burdens of injury and trauma on innocent civilians. These actions contravene the fourth Geneva convention."Further, it blasted ''national medical associations and professional bodies worldwide'' for keeping silent. This standard should be applied to all organizations and public figures everywhere: where were you when Israel was committing these inhuman and illegal acts?

The ceasefire: Israel and Hamas (joined by the other Palestinian armed organizations in Gaza) have each declared a ceasefire. Although each side said it was doing so unilaterally, an agreement between them had been reached, at least indirectly, through the Egyptian government, which assured the Israelis that Hamas would follow Israel's lead in declaring an end to the fighting, and assured Hamas that the Israeli troops would pull out within a week. But the Haaretz article that gave this information added, "The IDF [Israeli army], however, will continue to amass conscript troops along the Gaza-Israel border, as a threat." (January 19)

The Israeli press reports high morale among the country's troops as they march out of Gaza. They certainly succeeded in killing a lot of people, especially civilians, about half of the approximately 1,250 dead (BBC, January 19) and they suffered very few casualties themselves. Gaza is all but destroyed, so this can be counted as a victory. But Hamas fired a few dozen rockets just before declaring a ceasefire itself, just to show that it still could, putting the lie to Israel's stated reasons for gloating (if, as Israel claimed, they invaded to stop the rockets, it didn't work). Any deeper understanding of this war's results will have to wait until the smoke clears. But one thing is obvious already: Israel intends to use the ceasefire and whatever follows it, whether labeled war or peace, to continue pursuing the same aims that led it to this war.

Israel’s most important success may be that it rallied the ''international community'' to its side more than ever, and with perhaps more direct participation than before. The conference of Arab and European countries co-sponsored by French President Nicholas Sarkozy and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, just after the cease-fire, was truly incredible. A conference to decide the post-war future with no attendance from Hamas, one of the two sides! Further, as analyst Rabbani pointed out on Al Jazeera, at this conference on the future of Palestine, the word "occupation" was never mentioned. Another observer noted that there was so much talk about "humanitarian crisis" and "reconstruction" and so little about politics, you'd think the meeting had been convened to deal with the results of a natural disaster and not a war of aggression.

But of course this conference was highly political: the unstated but obvious goal was how to rebuild Gaza, to whatever extent that happens, in a way that weakens Hamas instead of strengthening it. If ''international donors'' such as Saudi Arabia and Europe pay the bills, they'll expect to call the tune. It has been widely remarked that the now docile Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, driven out of Gaza by Hamas, was initially pleased that Israel seemed about to wipe out its Islamist rivals, but now it faces a dilemma about how to reap the advantage since it does not dare come back to Gaza riding on Israeli tanks. Improving Abbas' standing was another goal of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference, since he doesn't seem eager to speak to Palestinian crowds, even on the West Bank. Maybe now he can come back riding on an aid lorry from Sweden or France.

The U.S., while not attending the conference, supposedly because Washington was busy bringing in Barack Obama, dominated the landscape anyway. In a bizarre twist, the written agreement credited with bringing about the ceasefire was signed not between the two belligerents, but between the U.S. and Israel. The Israeli government announced that it could declare a ceasefire because of the memorandum of understanding signed in Washington by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and her American counterpart Condoleezza Rice detailing an unspecified "series of actions" to "halt arms smuggling" from Egypt into Gaza. The UK, never idle when the Americans are about, chimed in by offering to send warships to seal off Gaza by sea. This seems to be the point of all these diplomatic efforts: no matter how well or badly Israel may have done in reducing Hamas' military capacities, all the Western imperialist powers, and the Arab regimes that are dependent on them, are resolved that Hamas will not be able to rearm and reap the political benefits of its resistance, arising victorious from the ashes as Hezbollah did after Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

Mubarak blew hard about how he would never allow international troops on Egyptian soil, but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (perhaps not labeled "troops"?) are already at work on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border and there is little chance that he will dare displease his Washington overlords. He blamed Hamas for the war and called it ''an Iranian satellite that has grown on his doorstep.'' (Haaretz, January 19) The Israeli media outlet that reported this was eager to situate the ceasefire in context: "the real battle is being fought against Iran." This is an exaggeration about Hamas, which isn't exactly anyone’s proxy, and it's dishonest, too, since Israel was waging war on the Palestinians when Iran, like Egypt today, was still an American asset. But these distinct contradictions have come to form a single layered process.

Palestinians have never had a choice between war and a real, bearable peace. It's been pointed out, in regard to the current ceasefire, that one of Israel's most notorious massacres of Palestinians, at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, occurred when that particular war was supposed to be over, after the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership and fighters left Lebanon in return for an American pledge to protect the security of Palestinian civilians left behind. This isn't to argue that history will necessarily repeat itself, at least in the same way. But this does demonstrate that for the Palestinians, war or peace is not the key question. Either way many will die at the hands of Israel, whether directly by gunfire or indirectly by measures such as the year and a half-long Israeli blockade of Gaza that caused so much malnutrition and so many premature deaths.

The eyewitness account of former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who visited Gaza in November, before the war, sheds light on both the blockade that proceeded it and the context of the war itself: "Their whole civilization has been destroyed, I'm not exaggerating," she said about the conditions she found there. She called this situation "collective punishment... It's a shocking violation of so many human rights... It's almost unbelievable that the world doesn't care while this is happening." (BBC, November 4) Those who falsely claim to be moved by the human cost of the war but drew a curtain around the human cost of the so-called "peace" that came before will surely do their best to hide what happens next.

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine (aworldtowin.org), a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

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