Luckless Gaza's Grim Prognosis
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday January 24, 2008
AT LEAST for now, the rocketeers of Gaza are winning - not militarily, but politically. Israel's decision to ease its recently intensified blockade of the narrow, coastal Palestinian enclave, which has been ruled by the extremist Hamas movement since last June, was sensible. However, it showed that the cynical Hamas tactic of encouraging Palestinian fighters to maintain a haphazard barrage of homemade missiles on nearby Israeli civilian targets has worked, prompting an all too typical, and counterproductive, Israeli overreaction.
This took the form not only of military strikes against suspected terrorist targets in Gaza, inevitably causing some civilian casualties, but of an economic siege, including blocking supplies of industrial diesel fuel for Gaza's main power station.No less predictably, Israel's actions and the prospect of a humanitarian crisis brought an international outcry. The United Nations Security Council held an emergency session to debate calls for a denunciation of Israel's "collective punishment" of Gaza's 1.5 million people and an end to the blockade. The Bush Administration, while defending Israel's right to respond to rocket attacks, expressed concern about the effect of the Gaza lockdown on civilians. There were angry demonstrations within Gaza itself. After five days, the Israelis relented, allowing restoration of fuel supplies for the power station, if only temporarily.It is not the end of the story. Hamas will not abandon its tactics, and the Israelis will continue to rely on massive retaliation. But this is the sort of conflict in which the underdog can have the upper hand, as is the case at the moment. Nothing is working for the Israelis - not targeting the Hamas leaders, nor its fighters on the ground, nor relentlessly tightening the screws on Gaza's population in the hope that it will rise against its extremist rulers.Indeed, if anything, the siege of Gaza has probably reinforced Palestinian support for Hamas, while making the Fatah government on the West Bank look ineffectual. As for the peace process that was supposed to be revived by the Middle East conference at Annapolis in November, it now seems increasingly irrelevant, as do the diplomatic efforts of the so-called quartet group - the US, Europe, Russia and the UN - and its envoy, Britain's Tony Blair. The hard fact is that there can be no settlement until Hamas is invited into the game, and it refuses to play except on its own, unacceptable terms.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald
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