Uri Avnery
16.5.09
Quarrel on the Titanic
ONE OF THE HAPPIEST moments
in my life occurred in a restaurant.
It happened before the
second intifada. I had invited Rachel to celebrate her birthday with dinner
at a famous restaurant in Ramallah.
We were sitting in the
garden under strings of colorful lights, the air was fragrant with the perfume
of flowers and the waiters were hurrying back and forth with laden trays. We
ate Mussakhan, the Palestinian national dish (chicken
with tahini baked on pita bread), and I drank arak. Our waiter, who had overheard us talking, took our
order in Hebrew. We were the only Israelis there. At the nearby tables, Arab
families with the children in their best clothes, as well as a bride and groom
with their wedding guests. Bursts of laughter punctuated the murmur of Arabic
conversations, and spirits were high.
I was happy, and a sigh
escaped me: “How wonderful this country could be, if only we had peace!”
I THINK of that moment
every time I hear sad news from Ramallah. The news is depressing, but the
memory helps me to keep alive my hope that things could be different.
The most depressing news
concerns the split between the Palestinians themselves. This split is a
disaster for them, and, I believe, also for Israel and the world at large.
That’s why I dare to comment on a matter that seemingly does not concern us
Israelis. It does.
It is easy to blame
Israel. Easy and also justified. In their struggle
against the national aspirations of the Palestinians, successive Israeli
governments have applied the old Roman maxim divide et
impera, divide and rule.
Since the Oslo agreement,
the central component of this policy has been the physical separation between
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Article IV of the Oslo Agreement
of September 1993 says: “The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as
a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved”.
Article X of Annex 1 of
the Interim Agreement of September 1995 says: “There shall be a safe passage
connecting the West Bank with the Gaza Strip for movement of persons, vehicles and
goods…Israel will ensure safe passage for persons and transportation during
daylight hours…in any event not less than 10 hours a day.”
In practice, the safe
passage was never opened. Among all the blatant violations of the Oslo
agreements, this was the most severe. Its consequences have been disastrous for
both sides.
True, there was a lot of
talking about the passage. Ehud Barak once fantasized about constructing a
giant bridge between the West Bank and the Strip, after seeing such a
THE PRETEXT was – as
always – security: convoys of murderers and terrorists would pack the safe passage, trucks loaded with Palestinian rockets would drive
to and fro. But the consequences disclose the true aim: what remained of Palestine
was cut into two disconnected parts.
One cannot rule a
territory without physical contact with it. That was proven in Pakistan, which was
founded as a state with two disconnected parts separated by Indian territory. Soon enough, war between the two broke out and
the Eastern part became the independent state of Bangladesh.
According to the latest
Palestinian statistics, which seem reliable, there are now 2.42 million
Palestinians living in the West Bank and 1.46 million in the Gaza Strip (in
addition to 379 thousand in East Jerusalem). From Yasser Arafat I once heard
that more than half of the Palestinian Authority’s resources were being devoted
to the Gaza Strip, in spite of the fact that the Strip amounted to only 6% (one
sixteenth) of the Palestinian territories.
Now there exist in practice
two Palestinian entities: the West Bank, whose actual capital is now Ramallah,
and the Gaza Strip, with its capital Gaza city. From the political, economic
and ideological points of view, the distance between them is growing.
And from the point of
view of the Israeli occupation policy, that is a great victory.
THE ISRAELI government
conducts different strategies against the two Palestinian entities.
Against Gaza, the policy
is simple and brutal: to overthrow the Hamas government by turning the life of
those 1,460,000 men and woman, old people and children, into hell. They are allowed
to bring in only the most basic foodstuffs. There was an international outcry
when Senator John Kerry discovered the import of noodles is prohibited, because
pasta is apparently a luxury. “We shall not give them chocolate when Gilad Shalit is not getting
chocolate,” an army officer declared this week. It would be interesting to know
how much chocolate the 11 thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are
getting.
The war against Gaza
(“Molten Lead”) was intended to wreak death and destruction upon the civilians,
so that they would rise up and overthrow their elected government. The dead are
already buried, but the piles of rubble remain. The Israeli government does not
allow building materials to be brought in, and the inhabitants have started to
build homes of mud, as their ancestors did centuries ago. (To make the whole
thing even more depressing, it is forbidden to bring in toys, books and musical
instruments.)
The Egyptian government
cooperates with the Israeli army in enforcing the blockade on the inhabitants of
Gaza. Lately it has intensified its efforts to choke the essential supply line through
the Rafah tunnels (“smuggling” in Israeli and
Egyptian parlance). The campaign recently started by the Egyptian authorities
against Hizbullah agents in Sinai has the aim, among
others, of cutting this pipeline.
The Gaza people have not
toppled the Hamas government. On the contrary, their opposition to the Ramallah
government seems to be growing, and some say that it is turning into pure hatred.
AGAINST THE Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank, the occupation authorities employ a different, but
no less destructive, strategy. They make every effort to present it as a kind
of Palestinian Vichy regime, in order to prevent the healing of the Palestinian
rift.
The Israeli government
declares this openly and loudly. This week, the Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi,
wondered publicly how the Palestinian Minister of Justice could sue Israel before
the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Gaza.
How come, Ashkenazi complained,
when throughout the Gaza War there was such close cooperation between Israel
and the Palestinian Authority?
In other words, the Chief
of Staff of the Israeli army declares publicly before the Palestinian people
and the entire world that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah cooperated
with the Israeli government in the war against their Palestinian brothers in
Gaza, in which - according to the Ramallah Minister of Justice - systematic war
crimes were committed. A more damaging blow to the standing of Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be
imagined.
Other Israeli officers do
not spare their praise for the Palestinian security forces, which – they allege
- cooperate with the Israeli army in eliminating Hamas sympathizers in the West
Bank. It is hard to imagine that such statements by the occupation officers
will do anything to elevate the standing of Abbas in
the eyes of the Palestinians, who see with their own eyes how the settlements on
their land grow daily.
This week, a friend told
me about a conversation he had with a Palestinian official from Ramallah. If Israel
attacks Iran, he said with great enthusiasm, the Hamas regime in Gaza will
collapse.
For an outsider looking in,
this is incomprehensible. When the entire Palestinian people is facing a danger
to their very existence, when the Israeli government is working tirelessly to
make it impossible for a Palestinian state to come into being and there is a real
threat that the Palestinian people will be eventually driven out of Palestine
altogether, the split resembles a quarrel on the bridge of the Titanic.
THERE IS an old Jewish
saying that “the destruction of the temple (in the year
Disunity has always been a
curse. In 1948, when they were fighting for their survival, they were unable to
form a unified leadership and a unified military force. In practice, every
village fought alone, without coming to the aid of its neighbors. Otherwise,
perhaps, the Naqba would not have happened, and the
untold suffering that continues to this very day would have been prevented.
The main result of the
disunity 61 years ago was that the Palestinians were unable to establish the
State of Palestine next to the State of Israel, and the territory allotted for
it by the UN was divided between Israel, Jordan and Egypt.
Yasser Arafat understood
this well. He made a huge effort to maintain the unity of his people at almost
any cost. As long as he was alive, this unity was maintained. The secret
services that planned his murder obviously wanted to sabotage this unity, much
as Yitzhak Rabin’s murderers wanted to destroy the peace process. The two
murders complemented each other, and not by accident.
Anyone who believes that
peace is essential for the two peoples and for the entire world must fervently hope
for the establishment of a Palestinian unity government.
I believe that this is still
possible.
IT SEEMS that in this
matter, too, Barack Obama must play a leading role. He must put an end to the
stupid and disastrous policy of boycotting Hamas and employ his full power to
bring about the creation of a Palestinian unity government. Perhaps it will have to be, in the
beginning, a kind of super-government under which both the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip keep some kind of autonomy.
Peace among the
Palestinians themselves is a necessary precondition for peace between Israel
and Palestine. Only Israeli-Palestinian peace can also bring about reconciliation
between the two peoples and perhaps restore the atmosphere of that magic
evening in the Ramallah restaurant – so that it will not remain just a sweet memory.