Reflections on Gaza

Since the last time Israel got really angry about Gaza, I have visited the place itself (an account of this is to be be found here  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/10/lattes-beach-barbecues-and-dodging-missiles-in-the-worlds-biggest-prison-camp.html

 

I find this helps me a little in deciding what to say now. My main feeling has always been that neither side is working for the interests of the people of Gaza. But I would add that the Israeli state has never really claimed that it did. The current government of Gaza, which presumably does claim to be working for the good of the people of that place, has rather more to be ashamed of.

 

The origins of the mess lie in the 1948 war, in which Israel established itself by right of conquest in the pre-1967 borders that the Arab world now loves so much, but loathed at the time. And, as we know, or ought to know the 1948 war originated in the British government’s duplicitous promise of the area to both Arabs and Jews. And that originated in the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain and France thought they could parcel out between them. In the end they were too weak to hold on to their conquests, all of which passed out of their control soon after World War Two.

 

And then alas ther region became involved in the Suez debacle of 1956, and was soon afterwards caught up in the global rivalry between the USA and the USSR, made still more complex by the West's hunger for Arab oil, and by the collapse of the Shah of Iran. None of this is very nice, and if we had all known in 1917 what was going to happen next, we might have come up with some better ideas. But of course we didn’t, and we have what we have and must deal with that. I should have thought the main aim of anyone involved would be to ensure that we did not make things any worse, or cause any more needless deaths , or human grief.

 

If you go to Gaza you can still, in places, just make out the remnants of the railway line which once linked Cairo and Jerusalem, going on northwards to Beirut, Aleppo and ultimately Istanbul - and from there across a short stretch of water to Europe. It is a dream journey, never likely to be possible in my lifetime (I once thought of writing a book about an imaginary railway journey from Jerusalem to Moscow, another politically impossible dream). The only passage from Gaza to Israel now is a rather alarmingly exposed slog on foot between the enormous and errily empty customs and passport sheds of Israel’s Erez crossing to the good-humoured if rather basic hutments of the Hamas border control. How it must gall the Hamas officials, each Islamically-bearded, to handle and accept passports bearing the stamps of the hated Zionist Entity. Many Arab Muslim states (not to mention Iran) would turn you away for that. But Gaza wants Western journalists to visit, and the other way in, through Egypt, is far harder for Westerners to use.

 

Oddly enough, there was another time when Gaza was technically independent. This was between 1948 and 1959, when there was something called the All-Palestine Government. Despite its grandiose name, this controlled only the Gaza strip (and was itself a puppet of the Egyptians). The vast bulk of the original Palestine Mandate was (as it is now) incorporated in the Kingdom of Jordan. That Kingdom had after 1948 annexed what is now the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan and a large chunk of Jerusalem, including the Christian,  Jewish and Muslim Holy Places. Although the annexation seems to have had no basis in international law, it was recognised by Great Britain and Pakistan and not greatly protested against by the rest of the world.   People forget these things. What was left was in the hands of the State of Israel.  Anyway, the claim that there was any sort of Palestine government was abandoned by Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1959, when he placed it under Egyptian direct rule, in the form of a military governor. Again, I’m not quite sure what lawful right Egypt had to make this annexation, but there doesn’t seem to have been much fuss about it. Then Israel captured the Strip in 1967. Then it pulled out in 2005.

 

I am myself fascinated by this question of national title to land. How is it settled? How far can one go back to reopen the case? These days we tend to frown on conquest by force, but it was such conquest which fixed (for example) the current very odd borders of Poland (1945) and the even more fascinating Southern Frontier of the United States (1848), not to mention the boundaries of Denmark, Italy, and te enture title deeds of Australia and new Zealanmd, all very recent.

 

And of course it was the British defeat of Turkish arms (who would have thought that this great structure, sprawling across the centuries and half as old as time,  would be brought down by British Tommies and Woolwich artillery?). This was achieve din 1917 by Edmund Allenby, and it created the general parcelling out of territory into the states now known as Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (modified slightly by Mustafa Kemal’s brilliant leadership of his nation, so converting the humiliating Treaty of Sevres (1920) into the much-less-humiliating Treaty of Lausanne(1923) ). Not to mention Saudi Arabia, another longer story for another time.

 

Quite how, out of all this seizure and gobbling, and counter-seizure, followed by yet more gobbling and counter-seizure, anyone can come up with clear statements that anyone’s settlement in such and such an area of Mandate Palestine is definitively ‘illegal’ rather beats me.  

 

Significantly, the refugees from the 1948 war were not allowed to settle freely where they chose in Egypt (or in any other Arab neighbour country), but were kept in cramped and squalid conditions in so called ‘camps’ (actually grimly permanent slums ), where their descendants remain. This seems to me slightly to contradict Arab propaganda in solidarity with, and in support of the displaced Arabs of the Palestine Mandate.  As I have pointed out before, the other victims of mass ethnic cleansing of the 1940s – the millions of non-Muslims who fled Pakistan for India or the millions of Muslims who hurried the other way, and the millions of Germans driven (with British connivance) out of central Europe –were long ago resettled and given citizenship of their new states. The curious will have to wonder why it is in the Holy Land and nowhere else that the descendants of refugees still live in cramped penury and misery as citizens of nowhere. I have my own theory, but I won’t force it on anyone.

 

I concentrate on these questions because it is these two features – the refugee crisis and the question of who owns the land – that lie beneath all the quarrels in this region.

 

Nobody really wants Gaza. Israel very foolishly tried to incorporate it after the war of 1967, when it had no real idea what it was doing. I am fairly sure that the 1967 borders were unworkable in central Israel, being more or less indefensible. And I think that the pre-1967 division of Jerusalem was unjust and enforced in a  disagreeably sectarian manner (limited access to Christian sites for Christians, no Jewish access to Jewish sites. The Israeli control of the Holy Places, though far from faultless, has I think been more generous than the Jordanian period). But the attempted Israeli takeover of the entire West Bank and Gaza  (remember that in 1967 Israel had also captured the Sinai) was unrealistic and wrong. No occupying power can remain popular, simply because it is an occupying power. And occupation weakens and corrupts the occupier.

 

The question is whether a permanent compromise between the 1948 and 1967 boundaries was ever possible. I suspect not. And one of the reasons for my suspicion is that Israel’s departure from Gaza in 2005, has not led to peace of any kind, but rather to the current futile and miserable war. It is a cliché, but do look at a map and see where the 1967 border ran. And then imagine how it would be if Israel withdrew from the West bank as it has from Gaza, and militant groups began to site missiles in the formerly occupied areas. Just look at what they could hit.

 

Often when I listen to the BBC reporting on Gaza,  I note turns of phrase in the reports which suggest that the reporter has forgotten, or never knew, that Israel left Gaza, bag and baggage, seven long years ago. I sometimes almost forget it myself, even though I have travelled the length of the Gaza Strip, from the Erez crossing to the tunnels at Rafah.

 

So why do Hamas launch rocket attacks into Israel? If they say it is because of Israel’s blockade, we should be sceptical because the blockade is not that stringent (see my article) , and also because a lot of people (many of them friendly to Hamas) make a lot of money out of the enormous amount of smuggling through tunnels which results from it.

 

And why does Israel react to these rockets with air attacks and talk of invasions? Of course it is tragic and appalling when an innocent person is killed in her home by one of these weapons, but it is equally tragic that innocents in Gaza die thanks to ‘collateral damage’ in Israeli attacks. I wonder if more effort could be spent on blocking or shooting down the often very crude rockets which are launched from Gaza.

 

And many more will, inevitably die in any Israeli ground assault, with its accompanying shelling. Could the approaching general election have anything to do with it? Could Hamas’s affiliation to Iran, and its dislike of the rival Fatah (now cohabiting rather well with Israel) have anything to do with it?

 

What would I know?

 

All I’m sure of is that the rentacrowd anti-Israeli protests are selective and disproportionate (Have the same people protested against Arab killing of Arabs on much larger scale, in several places? No. Why not? You work it out) . And also that another round of American-sponsored ‘peace’ talks will make things worse, because of their insistence on pursuing the Utopian ideal of a ‘final settlement’ when that is precisely what there will never be, and precisely what the leaders on both sides most fear to conclude, because such a settlement would certainly destroy them. I’m also sure that another Israeli invasion of Gaza will rebound on Israel in many ways, and will not in the end solve the problem( as I said last time they did it)

 

Left alone, the peoples of the area have proved rather good at creating a practical, unacknowledged sort of peace, under which the people of (say) Ramallah have recently begun to experience a far more abundant and settled life than they have known for many years, in fact since the last great push for ‘peace’ by Washington, which got us where we are now. This strikes me as a good thing. As an old acquaintance of mine, an Israeli Arab said to me when I was last in Jerusalem (I quote him in the Gaza article) ‘Oh, how I long for the good old days before we had peace’.