Despite the horrors of the past week, Palestinians and Israelis are still willing to talk about peace. The latest Israeli siege of Gaza that killed more than 120 people, mostly civilians, could easily have derailed the negotiations. At the same time, Israel could just as easily have called a halt to the talks following the attack on the Jewish seminary.
Either event was enough to put the brakes on contacts; the parties should be commended that that has not happened. It would not be unfair, however, to say that the Palestinians are deserving of the greater commendation. Apart from the killings, Gaza’s humanitarian situation, according to UK-based human rights and development groups, is at its worst since Israel occupied the territory in 1967. From the intensification of the siege in order to prevent electricity, fuel and medicines from reaching Gaza to the concentration of the population into more confined spaces, these are scarcely thinly veiled ways of targeting and punishing the civilian population. This would have necessarily prevented more negotiations and dialogue with Israel’s political leaders. It has not.
In the open-air prison called Gaza, the Palestinians have refused to surrender to Israeli diktat and have proven invulnerable to Israel’s machinations to break their spirits.
There are Israelis who were already opposed to Prime Minister Olmert’s decision to engage in talks with President Abbas. The seminary shooting will only make stronger their determination to stop any agreements being made. In addition, if talks with the Palestinians continue, there will be strong pressure from within orthodox religious circles for the Shas party to leave the government. It is ambivalent about the talks with Abbas to say the least and it has set itself firmly against any discussion of the future division of Jerusalem. It will have to weigh the benefits of being inside the coalition, in terms of patronage and power, with the demands of the broader religious community.
Talks between Israel and the Palestinians have for now survived the latest killings, though a flying visit by the US secretary of state was needed to patch up the diplomatic damage. Quite where these talks will lead given the divisions between Hamas and Fatah and given Israel and US’ insistence that Hamas must be isolated is far from clear. The deadline for progress, at the end of this year near the time when President Bush leaves office, looks more and more unattainable.
The rivalry between Hamas and Fatah has been the backdrop to Palestinian politics in the occupied territories since Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005. The culmination of this antagonism was the physical separation of a Fatah-run West Bank from a Hamas-ruled Gaza last summer. Fatah and Hamas are now divided — not only geographically but also by their diametrically opposed strategies for dealing with the Israeli occupation. Fatah wants the peace process to continue but other Palestinians are under no illusions about the peace process, having seen Jewish settlers leave but Israel’s military control and its economic siege of Gaza only tightened. As long as the Palestinians are divided to resist the occupation effectively, Israel can carry on with the talks and with its murderous ways.
Some Israeli officials are calling for a large-scale invasion of Gaza to stop the Hamas rocket attacks, but Tel Aviv has so far refrained from such action. Still, what Israel is doing in Gaza makes it clear that it is prepared to cooperate with an interminable peace process that will give the Jewish state the time it needs to wreak even more deliberate, irreversible damage to the process.
