Gaza, pt. 1

The latest edition of Middle East Report Online has an editorial piece on the Gaza campaign, situating the bombings into the context(s) of the ceasefire agreement, Israeli elections, Egyptian complicity, Palestinian infighting, international law, Obama's politics of change, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process:

In the meantime, the Israeli attack prepares the political battlefield in anticipation of an Obama administration-led peace process. Assuming that Obama’s effort follows the phased approach of Clinton, and continues to freeze out Hamas, Israel is protected from the concessions of a comprehensive settlement. As long as Gaza remains separated from the West Bank, and the Hamas-Fatah divide festers, no peace process can gain traction. This is true regardless of which party wins the upcoming Israeli elections, for Israel will be able to claim that the Palestinians have no single political address, and Hamas will have every motivation to sabotage any attempt to strike a deal with Mahmoud Abbas alone. The siege of Gaza would then stretch on indefinitely, with Hamas duly weakened.

Another path is possible, of course. Obama could quietly drop US rejection of the 2006 Palestinian election results, and work to help the Palestinians form a national unity government. As the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is advocating, he could call the siege of Gaza by its rightful name -- collective punishment -- and demand that it cease. He could throw the weight of Washington behind Security Council action toward that end, and toward a genuine halt to settlement and separation wall construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He could enforce the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, and terminate US supply to Israel of F-16s and Apache helicopters, paid for with US military aid dollars, because they have been used to harm civilians in the attack on Gaza. The measure of Barack Obama will be how far, if at all, he travels toward such a dramatic transformation of US policy on the question of Palestine.

Is it true that “change is coming” when Obama enters the White House? We hope so. Yet the conventional pro-Israel tilt of his campaign indicates otherwise, as does the composition of his foreign policy crew. Obama appears poised to content himself with more energetic US engagement in the sort of flawed negotiations of the Clinton years, the sort that put ending the occupation last, as if the developments of the Bush years had not rendered that approach utterly untenable.

Sara Roy (probably the foremost authority on Gaza in the US academy, and one of my main sources for thesis research) writes in the London Review of Books on the effects of Israel's siege of Gaza during the ceasefire.

Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.

For more on the November siege, see Jonathan Cook's "The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza," and a couple of links I posted around that time (here and here).