Updated 2024-02-24
2023-11-28 The beginning of the end? The hypothetical future of Palestinian politics Under Hamas, the Gaza Strip has been besieged, impoverished by Israel and assaulted on five occasions in the past 17 years. In this latest assault, the Palestinian political future looks very precarious. Israel said it aims to destroy Hamas entirely and that is why it launched an all-out assault on the Gaza Strip on October 7. Israeli raids, settler violence and settlement expansions in the occupied West Bank are among the reasons Hamas launched its attacks on October 7, Izzat al-Rasheq, a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau, said. “We warned the Israelis and the international community that this relentless pressure will result in an explosion, but they did not listen,” al-Rasheq told Al Jazeera, adding that incursions on Al-Aqsa Mosque, thousands of unjustly detained Palestinians, and the blockade on Gaza all played a role as well.
A unified Palestinian entity is the stated US goal, especially as discussions arise on the fate of Gaza after the war, according to Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the New York-based Soufan Center. This entity would control both Gaza and the West Bank, accept Israel’s existence and resume Oslo negotiations with Israel, he said, referring to agreements between Israel and the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1990s. Rafe Jabari, a French-Palestinian political science analyst, agreed that a two-state solution should be pursued after the war’s end but said a new agreement should be drawn up to replace the Oslo Accords because Palestinians were coerced to make too many concessions in that process.
Israel will be unwilling to relinquish control of the lands it occupies, he added, and it will not be able to take out Hamas as it says it wants to. “Hamas is a part of Palestinian society. They can’t eliminate Hamas,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that they’re not just a political wing. Hamas agrees. “They cannot rearrange the Palestinian house to suit themselves. Hamas will remain, and what comes after Hamas will also be Hamas,” said al-Rasheq, adding that Palestinians would not accept “the US or Israel or anyone else” telling them who should govern them. “The Palestinian people will never accept an entity that enters Gaza on an Israeli tank,” he said. Because it is impossible to eradicate Hamas, Jabari said, the group will have to be involved in any post-war negotiations.
A transition period involving an international peacekeeping force in Gaza was mentioned by both Katzman and Jabari as a possible first step before negotiations. But, Jabari added, these forces have been abject failures in recent conflicts.
The PA’s government in the West Bank is seen by many Palestinians as collusion with Israel. Much of the frustration is with Abbas, who is seen as weak for not managing to advance any peace processes in his nearly two decades in power, Jabari said. He is also seen as not having advocated enough against Israel’s practices from settlement expansions to harassment of Palestinians, he added. I think that’s true for Palestinians in the West Bank as well. They don’t want … forever war with Israel.” However, al-Reshaq said: “Palestinians everywhere support Hamas more. They see Hamas is working to resist the occupation,” he said, adding that global support for Palestinians has surged in the past few weeks.
In the event that Israel cannot take Hamas out, the fissure between the two Palestinian political groups will deepen, Hamayel predicted. Hamas would remain standing, a valiant hero for Palestinians for fighting Israel, and the PA would appear weak, shamed for cooperating with Israel over the years, he said. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-beginning-of-the-end-the-hypothetical-future-of-palestinian-politics/ar-AA1kDSKI?
2023-11-04 THIS Is How The War In Gaza Will End – w/ George Szamuely t’s been nearly a month into the devastating war on Gaza that followed the stunning October 7th Hamas attacks inside Israel and many have begun to wonder whether we’re approaching an end game as so much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble. The question is whether Israel will continue with the onslaught and attempt to drive Palestinians out of Gaza and into Egypt while facing the possibility of sending ground troops into tunnels after Hamas, or if Israel will decide to pull back in the face of ballooning casualty numbers.
Guest host Craig Jardula and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger speak with columnist George Szamuely about why he feels the Israeli military is not capable of defeating Hamas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7ylZUiEQ-E&t=3s
2023-10-25 Eleven Aspects of Palestine-Israel Conflict that Deserve More Attention While clearly these are the top priorities just now, some other important but relatively neglected aspects of this conflict also deserve more attention.
Firstly, ultimately the Palestinian and Israeli people must learn and accept to co-exist in peaceful, just and friendly ways.
Secondly, ultimately solutions of justice-based peace have to be found not on the basis of the past but on the basis of a sincere and strong commitment to a future of peace and justice.
Thirdly, there should not be overemphasis on religious identity
Fourthly, there is the strange reality of the Israeli authorities having facilitated the emergence and strengthening of Hamas as a counter to secular Palestinian forces (like the PLO and Fatah
Fifthly, if Hamas was assisted in this way by Israeli authorities in the past, and most of all under the watch of Mr. Netanyahu, then important contact-points on both sides must have been created and maintained.
Sixthly, the very big attack made by Hamas on Israel on October 7 must have required lots of preparations over a long period of time. The dominant discourse is that Hamas managed to entirely fool the powerful and efficient intelligence agencies of Israel, the USA and close allies
Seventh, isn’t it too much of a coincidence that on the precise day of the attack ie 7 October, several security units were moved away from important guarding points on borders to providing protection for religious celebrations, providing Hamas more open and secure entry-points for their highly aggressive and terrible attack.
Eighth, why would Hamas, if acting entirely on its own in a rational way, make an attack that is likely to result in massive uprooting of its own support-base?
Ninth, what is the possibility that the Hamas attack was specifically meant to actually provide the justification for a much bigger attack by Israel, as has actually happened?
Tenth, the people of Israel and in particular the young generation should seriously reconsider whether they are being helped by the forces of imperialism
Eleven, it is very clear that a very strong peace movement must be promoted and strengthened in this highly troubled region to work with continuity. https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/eleven-aspects-of-palestine-israel-conflict-that-deserve-more-attention/
2023-10-24 Is it possible to stop Israel from pursuing its brutal oppression of the people of Gaza? This video was produced by the International Movement for a Just World (www.just-international.org). In this video, the organization’s president, Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, offers valuable insights into the following questions: https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/is-it-possible-to-stop-israel-from-pursuing-its-brutal-oppression-of-the-people-of-gaza/
2023-10-23 Two Gaza Scenarios: Greater Israel vs. Oslo The Israeli armed forces could hardly have been anticipating a reoccupation of Gaza, which they evacuated 18 years ago. The successive operations they launched against the strip in 2006, 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021 — to mention only the largest ones — have all been limited, essentially consisting of bombing, along with limited ground assaults in 2009 and 2014. But the extraordinary scale and traumatizing effect of Oct. 7 made it impossible for Israel’s leaders to set a lesser goal than the total eradication of Hamas from Gaza and the “pacification” of the strip.
This is a formidable challenge, for not only does the invasion of such a densely populated territory involve urban warfare of a kind that is highly risky for the assailant, but it poses most acutely the problem of what to do with the conquered territory the day after. The scale of violence that is unavoidable in the pursuit of Israel’s proclaimed goals will inevitably provoke political fallout, which will impact the conduct of the war itself.
The most obvious factor in the equation is that Israel’s tolerance for losses among its troops is very limited, as illustrated most spectacularly by the exchange in 2011 of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held captive in Gaza, for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Thus, the Israeli army’s superiority is at its maximum in terrains such as Egypt’s Sinai desert or the Syrian Golan Heights, where buildings are scarce and firepower from a distance is decisive.
A corollary of this is that the only way for Israel’s army to invade any part of so dense and vast an urban landscape as the Gaza Strip with minimal Israeli losses is to flatten the areas that it strives to occupy by way of intensive bombing before launching the ground offensive.
Now comes the political dimension. If the military goal is indeed to reoccupy Gaza in order to eradicate Hamas, the next questions, naturally, are: For how long, and to replace Hamas with what? The two opposite poles of the political divergence translate into two scenarios that we might call the Greater Israel scenario and the Oslo scenario. Ultimately, the two scenarios — Greater Israel and Oslo — are predicated on Israel’s ability to destroy Hamas to a degree sufficient to prevent it from controlling Gaza. This entails the conquest of most of the strip, if not all of it, by Israel’s armed forces — a goal they could only achieve by destroying most of Gaza, which would come at an enormous human cost. https://againstthecurrent.org/two-gaza-scenarios-greater-israel-vs-oslo/
2023-10-16 After the Gaza War What happens after Israel invades Gaza? And is there any prospect of the aftermath leading back toward a durable peace process?
The Netanyahu government has no idea what it will do after the invasion. It does not want a long-term occupation of Gaza. The government hopes to limit a humanitarian disaster by allowing civilians to leave northern Gaza, and to wipe out Hamas as a military force. Both of these goals are wishful, and somewhat inconsistent. Biden, after several days of expressing unconditional solidarity with Israel, finally said publicly that he expects Israel to abide by “the rules of war.” Biden also said flatly, “There needs to be a path to a Palestinian state.”
In Gaza, there needs to be a stabilization and normalization process, with a great deal of international aid for relief and rebuilding. There also needs to be a major international initiative to guarantee the security of both Gaza and of Israel, including limits on Hamas and on Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Inside Israel, Netanyahu has to be ousted. As soon as the immediate war subsides, the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations will continue. The broad Israeli public, which had massively turned against Netanyahu even before the Hamas massacre, is now doubly enraged at Netanyahu for failing to keep the country safe. Netanyahu’s assault on the judiciary has been shelved for now, as a condition of opposition leaders joining his war Cabinet. By the time things normalize, he could be on trial.
Several Israeli friends point out that this turn of events means that the peace party—the center-left and the left—is on the verge of its greatest resurgence in decades, but only if the military situation does not lead to all-out regional war. https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-10-16-after-gaza-war/
2023-10-10 Israel and Palestine: No ExitTheir real enemies—Israel’s far-right and center-right parties, which dominate the Knesset—have made Israel’s 56-year occupation of Palestinian territories even more oppressive and violent in recent years. Those forces have grown stronger in Israel in rection to each successive intifada, as the pro-two-state Israeli left has dwindled to a sliver of the electorate. At this juncture, it’s impossible to envision the Israelis and Palestinians resolving this conflict themselves or, for that matter, doing anything other than intensifying it. Once the current round of slaughtering civilians has run its god-awful course, the United States and other nations with the wherewithal to enforce borders and provide financial aid should do all they can to compel a two-state solution. Some populations, like the Israeli settlers on the West Bank, will have to be and deserve to be moved—in the settlers’ case, to within Israel’s internationally recognized borders. Anyone who still believes a single state of Israelis and Palestinians is a viable option has to believe that the worst instances of settlers’ violence in the West Bank and Hamas’s mass murders of the past few days are both jim-dandy, for they’d be everyday occurrences in a unified state. https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-10-10-israel-palestine-no-exit/
2009-03-00 The Future of Israel/Palestine The following essay, written in May 2008, has been issued as a pamphlet by ICAHD and is even more relevant today in the context of the Israeli massacre in Gaza. We are publishing it here, slightly abridged for space reasons, because it not only presents the reality of “facts on the ground” but also throws light on the stark policy choices facing the incoming Obama administration. We feel it also helps to place in context the so-called “one state/two state solution” controversy, which is often discussed too abstractly among solidarity forces outside Palestine/Israel. The voices from inside, developing a framework of struggle today linked to a vision for the future, are of paramount importance.
The Road Map, like international law regarding the end of occupations in general, also insists on a negotiated solution between the parties. Olmert made a great issue of Palestinian terrorism (playing on American sensibilities to this buzz-word), placing pre-conditions on negotiations. Israel is willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, he said, if it renounces terrorism, dismantles the terrorist infrastructure, accepts previous agreements and recognizes the right of Israel to exist (a right Israel has not recognized for the Palestinians).
What is not mentioned is Israel’s Occupation which, regardless of an end to terror and negotiations, is being institutionalized and made permanent. For neither security nor terrorism are really the issue; Israel’s policies of annexation are based on a pro-active claim to the entire country. Virtually no element of the Occupation — the establishment of some 300 settlements, expropriation of most West Bank land, the demolition of 12,000 Palestinian homes, the uprooting of a million olive and fruit trees, the construction of a massive system of highways to link the settlements into Israel proper or the tortuous route of the Barrier deep in Palestinian territory — can be explained by security. Terrorism on all sides is wrong (let it be noted that Israel has killed four times more civilians than the Palestinians have), but to demand that resistance cease while an occupation is being made permanent is unconscionable.
Finally, what was meant? In a word: apartheid. The “A” word was missing from Olmert’s speech, of course, but the bottom line of his convergence plan is clear: the establishment of a permanent, institutionalized regime of Israeli domination over Palestinians based on separation between Jews and Arabs. The “convergence plan” also eliminates any possibility for negotiations — not because of Palestinian intransigence, but because Israel has nothing of meaning to negotiate.
So how do we adapt this unilateral plan to Europe’s insistence on preserving the moribund Road Map? Simple. Just switch from “convergence” to “realignment.” In Olmert’s new formulation, Israel is merely “realigning” its borders in an “interim” manner that conforms to Phase Two of the Road Map. The Palestinians get their state, albeit with “provisional borders.” And that’s where we stay forever. De facto convergence in Road Map clothing. This, of course, is the Palestinians’ greatest fear, that the Road Map gets “stuck” in Phase Two and never gets to Phase Three, an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state.” De facto for Israel means permanent. Once it has turned the Separation Barrier into a border, annexed the settlement blocs and “greater” Jerusalem and created the semblance of a two-state solution, no further pressures to advance to Phase Three will be forthcoming. https://againstthecurrent.org/atc139/p2077/
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