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Letting
Gaza Burn
Chris Toensing
TomPaine.com
(7/13/06)
The captivity
of Israeli solider Gilad Shalit is over two weeks old, with no sign
of a breakthrough, and a second front with Hizbullah now threatens
to divert world attention from the conflagration in Gaza.
Following Israel's
grievously disproportionate military rejoinder to Shalit's capture,
over 70 Palestinians, including several civilians, and one Israeli
soldier lie dead. A Gazan power plant insured by American taxpayers
lies in ruins. Even Time magazine wants to know: “Where is the U.S.?”
Washington is
supposed to be the “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians,
the sole superpower that prevents this incendiary conflict from
burning out of control. Is the Bush administration's non-response
to the latest flareup a function of its many distractions? Severe
as other global crises are, the answer is no. It is, in fact, the
Bush administration's policy to do no more than tut-tut while the
already singed hopes for moderating Hamas go up in smoke.
Israel's Operation
Summer Rains has redefined the term collective punishment. After
three armed Palestinian groups killed two Israeli soldiers and took
Shalit prisoner, Israeli warplanes bombed the power plant, which
serves most of Gaza's 1.4 million people, sealed tight the only
commercial crossing into the coastal strip and, until July 1, shut
off the fuel pipeline as well. What remains of the Gazan electric
company struggles to channel six hours of power to Palestinian homes
per day. Hospitals are running neonatal incubators and other equipment
on their own generators, which guzzle the scarce fuel. Meanwhile,
the Israeli air force regularly breaks the sound barrier above Gaza,
usually in the wee hours of the morning, jangling Palestinians'
nerves and terrifying children. Shrugs Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert: “Nobody dies from being uncomfortable.”
In the face
of this assault, not to speak of Israeli arrests of some its leaders
and seeming assassination attempts on others, Hamas will be loath
to use whatever leverage it has with Shalit's captors to secure
the soldier's release. For years, the Islamist movement lambasted
the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority for knuckling under to
Israel's shows of superior force. Now that they are nominally in
charge, they do not wish to display weakness. Hamas hardliners who
want the movement to go underground will be strengthened as the
crisis develops, particularly after Olmert rebuffed the ceasefire
offer from Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, their party
leader.
Watching the
confrontation heighten from Washington, Bush officials have merely
affirmed Israel's “right to self-defense” at every opportunity,
while conspicuously declining to identify how properly functioning
air conditioning in Gaza City poses a threat to Israeli civilians.
In a nod toward balance, White House spokesman Tony Snow added:
“We have urged and continue to urge the Israeli government to proceed
with moderation.”
This tiptoeing
around the facts, while it sounds unusually absurd on this occasion,
is in line with Bush (and Clinton) administration practice of long
standing: Blame the Palestinians for starting the fight, exonerate
Israel of any culpability, place the onus on the Palestinian leadership
for Palestinian suffering at Israeli hands and hint at behind-the-scenes
pressure on Israel to stand down. These last hints have grown steadily
more delicate in the post-9/11 years. When the Bush administration
decided that they, too, wanted to order missile strikes against
Islamist militants on foreign soil, they stopped complaining about
Israel's extrajudicial executions in Gaza and the West Bank. When
President George W. Bush called for Israel's “immediate” withdrawal
from reinvaded West Bank towns in April 2002, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice clarified that “now” did not mean “right away.”
The withdrawal, she said, should be “orderly,” and not “helter-skelter.”
Still, decorum
required the White House to insist that Israel not “remove” Yasser
Arafat and, eventually, to prevail upon Israel to provisionally
accept Bush's “road map” to peace. In the name of that document,
the State Department objected when Israel wanted to withdraw
from Gaza without any coordination with the Palestinians, and Rice
set about polishing her diplomatic rock-star image with an arduous
parlay to open a Gazan border crossing that Israel kept closing
even after withdrawing.
In the wake
of the Hamas victory in January's Palestinian elections, however,
the daylight between U.S. and Israeli positions disappeared. That
border crossing has been closed for nearly half of 2006, to the
predictable detriment of Gazan exports and incomes. The U.S. discontinued
financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, and stayed quiet as
Israel withheld millions in customs revenue that belong to the Palestinians
by treaty. So it seems superfluous to ask “Where is the U.S.?” as
Gaza feels the squeeze.
Rather, the
questions ought to be: Will the U.S. demand that Israel not unleash
similar collective punishment on Lebanon? Meanwhile, how can Bush
believe that the U.S. can help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
by unequivocally backing one side? And when will Americans demand
that their presidents act as truly honest brokers?
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Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, publication of the
Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).
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