Strangling Palestine

With 2006 dominated by the disintegration of Iraq and the Israeli-Hezbollah war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict received far less attention than might otherwise have been the case. This is particularly unfortunate since the current lull in Fatah-Hamas violence at start of a new year, and the election of Hamas to a position of dominance in the Palestinian Legislative Council this time last year, bookend one of the darkest chapters in the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe. Those who had hoped there might be some lower limit to the depths of the Palestinian's suffering, or to the cynicism of their tormentors, will have been roundly disabused of that notion by the events of 2006. What is unfolding now is a potentially decisive stage in what Israeli academic Baruch Kimmerling called the “the politicide of the Palestinian people”; meaning “a gradual but systematic attempt to cause their annihilation as an independent political and social entity.”

In Al-Ahram, Khaled Amayreh provides a useful narrative of the post-election events; the West's strangulation of the already devastated Palestinian economy (not just through cutting Western aid, but by stealing Palestinian tax revenues and threatening to blacklist banks that attempt to transfer anyone's money to the increasingly desparate occupied territories), Israel’s military aggression, the escalating Fatah-Hamas confrontation and the increasingly overt nature of Fatah's role as the long arm of the West.

On this last point, one might reflect, upon seeing a picture in yesterday’s Guardian of Fatah security officers carrying a picture of the executed Saddam Hussein, that both Saddam and Fatah have been backed by the West as bulwarks against local resistance to US-led imperialism (that Saddam's execution could turn him into a symbol of resistance to the US is quite something). In earlier editions of Al-Ahram, Joseph Massad has described the insidious role of the West and of regional governments in Palestinian politics generally, and the Fatah-Hamas confrontation specifically; repeatedly comparing the Hamas-led government's current position to that of Allende's in Chile just before the US-backed military coup in 1973.

"Make no mistake about it", says Massad of the division between the class co-opted by the West under the ‘Oslo peace process’ on the one hand, and Hamas and the wider population on the other, "this is what the ongoing battle in the West Bank and Gaza is all about. What lies in the balance is the fate of nine million Palestinians."

It should not be forgotton that Hamas has repeatedly indicated its willingness to negotiate a long term peace deal on the basis of international law and existing security council resolutions – the same deal supported by the entire world save for Israel and its closest allies, who have been blocking it for three decades, offering increasingly spurious and desperate justifications. It is this threat – of a peace that is just and lasting, but disadvantageous to Western interests – that it is hoped will be extinguished by starvation, bombardment and civil war.

Why is this an issue for us in Britain? Because the UK continues to give unstinting support to Israel - as documented on this site last summer in the case of the Israeli-Hezbollah war - and to one side in the nascent Palestinian civil war. For example, Massad cites reports in Haaretz that "the United States government ... has been training [Palestinian President, Mahmood] Abbas's Praetorian Guard in Jericho for over a month with American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian military instructors".

For us, now, the ‘question of Palestine’ is one of our own complicity in the punishment of an entire population for having the temerity to vote against our preferred candidate in a free and fair election, and for their elected representatives daring to make a genuine “generous offer” for peace. It is with this in mind that we should assess the Prime Minister's efforts to support ”people who want a two-state solution, who are moderate and who are prepared to shoulder their responsibilities”. As in the war on Lebanon last summer, the only “solution” Blair and the West are interested in is victory, whatever the human cost.