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Jean-Marcel Bouguereau | Hamas Controls the Game •
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Inescapable Hamas
Le Monde | Editorial
Tuesday 04 March 2008
Three months after the international meeting the United States organized in Annapolis on November 27, 2007, can we still talk about an Israeli-Palestinian peace process? After seven years of subcontracting the Palestinian issue to the Israeli authorities, with the success we see before us, George Bush, supported by the Europeans, had imagined a last-minute re-engagement to save a regional policy shipwrecked in Iraq.
Taking advantage of the bloody rupture between Hamas's Islamists - sole masters of Gaza - and President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah, Washington had conceived the following plan: favor the Fatah-controlled West Bank and make it the laboratory for the state-to-come, irrigated by donations gathered during the December 2007 Paris conference, so that Hamas, isolated in Gaza, should become the target of Palestinian anger and frustration and so that Palestinian public opinion would turn away from that organization.
For this plan to succeed, however, it would have been necessary for the Gaza Strip, under siege by the Israeli Army since its unilateral withdrawal in September 2005, to disappear into oblivion, preserved by UN transfusions. That was not the case, given Palestinian rocket fire that has spectacularly reversed the scale of deterrence during the last two years of a second Intifada that was too quickly deemed an indisputable Israeli military victory. Twice in the last several weeks, Israeli attempts to put a halt to that rocket fire - which primarily affects civilians, even if it is less deadly than the attacks of armed Palestinian groups during the 2001 to 2004 period - have turned to the Israelis' disadvantage.
First of all, the embargo Labor Defense Minister Ehud Barack wanted sparked the January dynamiting of a part of the border guarded by the Egyptian Army - which is very mistrustful of Hamas, a successor organization to the Muslim Brotherhood Hosni Mubarak's regime continues to incarcerate. The return of Israeli tanks to the alleys of the Jabaliya refugee camp March 1 and 2 was no more fruitful than previous attempts, decimating trapped Palestinian civilians without stopping the rocket fire. From this perspective, the outcome is proving catastrophic even, since the Israeli town of Ashkelon, ten kilometers north of Gaza, is now under fire from Palestinian weaponry more sophisticated than in the past and, according to Jerusalem, acquired thanks to Iran's support.
Consequently, the "West Bank First" plan has achieved precisely what it was supposed to avoid: installing Hamas at the center of the game and to such a degree that the pertinence of Israel, the United States, and the Europeans boycotting a radical organization that is also capable of pragmatism is more than ever open to question.
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Hamas Controls the Game
By Jean-Marcel Bouguereau
Le Nouvel Observateur
Tuesday 04 March 2008
Israel is once again confronted with the choice between two bad solutions. Since Hamas - which has continuously bombarded the little town of Sderot - has extended its targets to Ashkelon, a coastal city of 110,000 inhabitants 65 kilometers from Tel Aviv, the Israelis may not sit idly by. But at what a price: Saturday alone, Israeli reprisals killed 63 people in Gaza, the organizers of that rocket fire, but also numerous civilians, including women and children, inciting the world's general indignation. Now everything indicates that this deadly operation could be the first of a series that could end up with the invasion of the Gaza Strip, the closing and control of the wall between Gaza and Egypt through which pass the rockets Iran furnishes Hamas and, undoubtedly, an out-and-out "cleansing" of this narrow band of territory. This recalls the slogan once invented by Yitzhak Rabin - Israel will fight terror as though there were no peace process and pursue the peace process as though there were no terror. That strategy is now less appropriate than ever.
"Israel behaves like a blind Goliath that strikes hard, with no political objective. (É) It's a mistaken concept, denuded of any strategic reflection, that leads nowhere," deems Professor Menachem Klein of Bar Ilan University. This specialist considers that "this whole operation has been counterproductive. It has not stopped the rocket fire; it has considerably weakened Mahmoud Abbas" who could not under any circumstances continue the peace negotiations. Nonetheless, having learned some lessons from the fiasco in southern Lebanon, people worry: what would the goals of such an operation be? According to good sources, people are talking about bombing - not targeted, but "indiscriminate" - around a two kilometer area from the point of rocket launches, or - another option - having the Army penetrate Gaza for a "two- to three-month" long operation to dismantle Hamas's military networks. With the IDF bogged down in a new quagmire and a peace process already in serious trouble. And with the possibility that Israel be caught between two fronts, should Iran activate Hezbollah in the North. Even as one IAEA official has just presented extremely alarming data with respect to Iran, most notably about the manufacture of a nuclear warhead.
Jean-Marcel Bouguereau is editor-in-chief of the "Nouvel Observateur." He is also an editorialist at the "Republique des Pyrenees," for which this article was written.
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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