IT did not take long for Israel to show who really controls Gaza. Less than two weeks after it formally ended its 38-year occupation, Israel was back with a vengeance. Deadly airstrikes, troops massed on the border and a planned ground incursion into an area that Palestinians should have been able to use freely and in its entirety for the first time in decades. The reason behind what Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz described as “crushing” retaliation in which “the ground of Gaza should shake” was 35 rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli towns — but the rockets neither killed nor injured a single Israeli. Of course, Mofaz failed to mention that the Hamas strike came after 15 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an explosion at a Hamas rally in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp or that four Palestinian officials were killed on Saturday in what appears to be a resumption of Israel’s targeted killings of Palestinians, a practice it suspended during the truce.
The escalation threatens to derail the already shaky seven-month-old truce and quashed hopes that Israel’s pullout from Gaza would invigorate peacemaking. Such a heightened state of instability in what should have been a new era in the peace process is the result, not of Israel withdrawing from Gaza but doing so unilaterally and without the guarantees provided by signed agreements and international backers.
Therein lie some of the dangers of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement. The Israelis have so far not permitted Gaza’s international airport to reopen. They intend to maintain control over the territory’s airspace and its coastline. Israel will also retain a hold over all movement between Gaza and Egypt for at least several months to come, if not for longer. Without freedom of passage and mobility, Gaza will be little more than kind of prison rather than what should represent the beginning of a genuine peace process. Sharon’s plank of the unilateral disengagement policy also includes the consolidation of settlement blocs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as expediting construction of the separation barrier. The unilateral pullout from Gaza plus Sharon’s assumption that he has carte blanche to do what the Palestinians diametrically oppose because of the pullout reduces any significant progress toward what any peace agreement must aim for — an independent Palestinian state.
The pullout from Gaza won huge praise from the international community as a step to help revive the troubled peace process but it now, ironically, could help lead to several steps backward. The latest Israeli operation will probably only grow in intensity, leading up to a ground operation in several days. Israel says this might not happen if Palestinian security takes action to halt the rocket attacks or Hamas itself ends the attacks. Neither appears forthcoming. Some observers say that Mofaz wants to exact a high price from Palestinians everywhere, not just Hamas. Thus the Israeli operation was aptly dubbed “First Rain.” It is indeed the first assault on Gaza since the last Israeli soldier left on Sept. 12. It will almost surely not be the last.
