The 12 Palestinians, including five youths, one as young as 12, killed by yet another Israeli assault on Gaza is the latest indication that Israel’s pullout from the strip was never a real withdrawal. Israel enters, leaves and re-enters Gaza whenever it pleases, killing, wounding, raiding houses and destroying them with impunity. Helping Israel come and go into Gaza is the Ehud Olmert policy — backed by the US — of divide and rule. Olmert pursues a dual policy of hitting Hamas along with “serious and responsible negotiations that can lead us to agreements” with the Fatah movement, led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas, in turn, helps Olmert’s cause by agreeing to meet the Israeli prime minister whose government oversaw the recent genocidal onslaught against Gaza. How Abbas continues to hold these cordial meetings with Olmert while refusing to meet Hamas continues to amaze. A dialogue with Hamas, even as its leaders rebel, is just as important, if not more, than chummy chats with the genuine enemy.
What is just as perplexing is the actual inability of the two leaders to agree when they do meet. When Abbas asks Olmert to halt settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Olmert’s reflex response is to demand that Abbas stop the firing of homemade rockets against Israel from the Gaza Strip. When Abbas tells Olmert that Gaza is not under his control, Olmert’s invariable reply: That’s not our problem. When Abbas pointedly reminds Olmert that Israel’s settlement expansion is in clear violation of the terms of the road map, Olmert’s immediate justification is that expansion is consistent with President Bush’s infamous letter to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 in which Bush assured Sharon that major Israeli settlements in the West Bank, especially in the Jerusalem region, would remain within Israel as part of a final-status solution with the Palestinians. When Israel is urged to remove the roadblocks and checkpoints that choke the flow of goods and people between Palestinian towns in Gaza and the West Bank, only a small number of dirt piles are pushed aside while the main obstacles to Palestinian movement that seriously disrupt Palestinian life and make impossible meaningful commerce remain intact. And so the peace process goes, frustratingly slow and its credibility dwindles fast.
Despite the ongoing violence and the peace talks meandering aimlessly, Olmert and Abbas have one more surprise in store for us: an “optimistic” outlook. But Israeli officials make clear that even if a final status agreement is concluded by year’s end, it will not be implemented before the Palestinians have complied with the road map, which requires them to close down the armed wing of Hamas and other resistance groups. Thus, again the vicious circle is propagated.
Perhaps this latest round of bloodshed in Gaza will not derail talks. But with Israel doing little more than blaming the Palestinians for failing to reach peace, a final-status agreement on the creation of an independent Palestinian state before the Bush administration leaves the White House in January 2009 is simply too far-fetched to credit.
