Ramallah, West Bank // Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israel’s prime minister, has been much criticised in Israel, as well as abroad,
for failing to present his own diplomatic initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process to forestall US intervention.
Mr Netanyahu may have huffed and puffed before giving voice to
the phrase “two states for two peoples” at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but the
contours of just such a Palestinian state – or states – have been emerging
undisturbed for some time.
In fact, Mr Netanyahu appears every bit as committed as his
predecessors to creating the facts of an Israeli-imposed two-state solution, one
he and others in Israel’s leadership doubtless hope will eventually be adopted
by the White House as the “pragmatic” – if far from ideal – option.
While Israel has been buying yet more time with Washington in
bickering over a paltry settlement freeze, it has been forging ahead with the
process of creating two Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West
Bank, that, despite supposedly emerging from occupation, are in reality sinking
ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill.
This is creating a culture of absolute Israeli control and
absolute Palestinian dependency, enforced by proxy Palestinian rulers acting as
mini-dictatorships.
For a growing number of Palestinians, the conditions of bare
subsistence and even survival are Israeli gifts that few can afford to spurn
through political activity, let alone civil disobedience or armed resistance.
The Palestinian will to organise and resist as their land is seized for
settlements is being inexorably sapped.
It is little mentioned but Israel all but abandoned completing
its massive separation wall in the West Bank some time ago. There are
significant gaps waiting to be filled, but, with things having grown so quiet
and the cost of each kilometre of wall so high, the sense of political and
military urgency has evaporated.
Suicide bombers, had they the determination, could still slip
into Israel. But increasingly Palestinians view such attacks as futile, if not
counterproductive: Israel simply wins greater international sympathy and has the
pretext to turn the screw yet tighter on Palestinian life.
None of this has been lost on Israel’s leaders of either the
so-called Left or Right.
Rather than being an aberration in response to rocket attacks,
the blockade of Gaza has become Israel’s template for Palestinian statehood. The
West Bank is rapidly undergoing its own version of disengagement and
besiegement, with similar predictable results.
Gaza’s blockade – and the savage battering it took in December
and January – has suggested even to Mr Netanyahu that the Israeli version of the
carrot-and-stick approach works.
The stick – a devastated Gaza unable to rise from the rubble
because aid and basic goods are kept out – has transformed most of the
population into a nation dependent on handouts, borrowing where possible to buy
necessities smuggled through the tunnels, and concentrating on the lonely art of
survival.
As the normally restrained International Committee of the Red
Cross reported last month: “Most of the very poor have exhausted their coping
mechanisms. Many have no savings left. They have sold private belongings such as
jewellery and furniture and started to sell productive assets including farm
animals, land, fishing boats or cars used as taxis.”
The carrot – if it can be called that – is directed towards
Gaza’s leaders, Hamas, rather than its ordinary inhabitants. The message is
simple: keep the rocket fire in check and we won’t attack again. We will allow
you to rule over the remnants of Gaza.
In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more
tantalisingly visible. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is
colluding in the creation of a series of mini-fiefdoms based on the main cities.
Trained by the US military, Palestinian security forces with
light weapons are taking back control of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Qalqilya,
Ramallah and so on, while the PA is encouraged by promises of economic charity
to prop up its legitimacy.
The leader of a Palestinian non-governmental organisation in
Ramallah confided at the weekend that what is being created are “City Leagues” –
a mocking reference to the Palestinian regional militias known as the Village
Leagues armed by Israel in the early 1980s to stamp out Palestinian nationalism
by threatening and attacking local political activists. Those were a dismal
failure; this time Palestinians are less sure Israel will not succeed.
Palestinian prisons are starting to fill not only with those
suspected of belonging to Hamas but those who dissent from Fatah rule. The
ground is being carefully tended by Israel to create a brutal client state.
The stick, as in Gaza, is directed at the ordinary population.
The news headlines are of the easing of movement restrictions at the
checkpoints. That may be true at a few places deep in the West Bank. But at the
big checkpoints that separate Israel from what is left of the West Bank, such as
the one at Qalandiya between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the monitoring of
Palestinian movement is becoming fearsomely sophisticated.
These checkpoints are now more like small airport terminals, with
limited numbers of “trusted” Palestinians entitled to pass through. To escape
the poverty of the West Bank each day to reach manual work inside Israel, they
must have a magnetic ID card storing biometric data and a special permit. Cards
are denied by Israel not only to those with a record of political activity but
also to those who have distant relatives deemed to be politically engaged.
The same NGO leader concluded, again with bitter irony: “Our
leaders are declaring victory: the victory of defeat.”
Should Mr Abbas and his PA functionaries sign up to this Israeli
vision of statehood, the defeat for the Palestinians will be greater still.
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