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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tareq Baconi
Read between
October 23 - December 5, 2023
“The continued presence of the occupation means the continued presence of resistance. . . . We either raise the white flag and surrender, or we resist.”
The blockade’s philosophy took on a geographic dimension: while the West Bank under Abbas’s leadership could be embraced and empowered, Gaza under Hamas’s control was to be ring-fenced. The reasoning was presumably simple: once Gazans suffered and their lives were badly hit relative to West Bankers, they would revolt against Hamas’s authority. This would pave the way for Hamas’s collapse and the return of the Palestinian Authority, under Mahmoud Abbas’s leadership, back into the Gaza Strip, thereby reunifying the Palestinian territories under a single leadership committed to negotiations with
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This prompted Israel to unleash “Operation Hot Winter,” an expansive air and ground attack on Gaza that killed 110 Palestinians in five days.112 The European Union denounced Israel’s “disproportionate” response and policies of “collective punishment,” while analysts interpreted this operation to be a dry run for a future invasion.113
2008.
The Palestine Papers elucidated the extent to which PLO negotiators had conceded on behalf of Palestinians in negotiations with Israel. The leaked records demonstrated that the PLO, and in rarer cases Israeli negotiators, had gone far beyond declared red lines and had been willing to give up significantly more than publicly acknowledged.
Following the end of hostilities, the United Nations established a commission to investigate the conflagration. While the Palestinian leadership offered full support, the Israeli government boycotted the investigation and prevented the investigators’ access into the Gaza Strip.75 The UN’s investigation accused both Hamas and Israel of carrying out war crimes. In response, Israel retaliated that the United Nations was “taken hostage by terrorist organizations” given its anti-Israel bias.
The PLO believed, rightly, that ideological concessions would allow it to negotiate with Israel. It also imagined, mistakenly, that diplomacy would lead to Palestinian statehood. Hamas has learned this lesson and is unlikely to concede on any of its core ideological tenets without guarantees that such compromises would lead to the fulfillment of Palestinian rights.
