BEIRUT — In a few months, the Arab-Israeli conflict will be 60 years old, if we use the 1948 war and the establishment of Israel as its starting point. What happened in Palestine and Israel this week? Israeli troops attacked assorted targets in Gaza, killing dozens of militants and civilians. Various Palestinian resistance groups — the United States, Israel, Micronesia and a few other powers see them only as terrorist groups — fired hundreds of missiles into Israel. The Israeli government threatened tougher military measures, “no mercy,” and a tighter blockade of the Gaza Strip, including cutting off all fuel supplies. Israeli and Palestinian leaders met to negotiate a peace accord, while US President George W. Bush traveled to the region to show his support for a negotiated Arab-Israeli peace agreement.
What’s wrong with this picture? The juxtaposition between military action on the ground and the words and acts of politicians is dizzying in its contradictions. Sixty years after the tensions between Zionism and Arabism in Palestine erupted into a full war, we continue to experience warfare as a routine mode of interaction between Israelis and Arabs, mostly on the Palestinian-Israeli front, and occasionally on the Lebanese-Israeli front. Simultaneously, politicians explore opportunities to end the conflict through a negotiated peace agreement, but without any major successes on the Palestinian-Israeli front.
The most important single development in recent weeks, I suspect, was the Palestinians’ firing of longer range missiles into southern Israel, some of them traveling over fifteen kilometers. They have caused very little material damage in Israel; they frighten and traumatize many people, and have killed maybe half a dozen Israelis over the years, while Israeli attacks against Gaza and the West Bank in the past year have killed hundreds of Palestinians.
This imbalance in numbers is typical of the history of Palestinian-Israeli warfare. More relevant today is the trajectory of the fighting. Israel has had total control and a free hand in Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, through a combination of direct occupation, punitive and preemptive attacks, and attempts to seal the border through the use of walls, fences and blockades. What does it expect to achieve with renewed military ferocity and brutality that it has used for 40 years, since 1967? It should recognize at some point the real legacy that it will continue to reap from such a policy: Palestinian rockets that reach deeper into southern Israel, and many young men who are prepared to risk death to fire them, and who are not intimidated by Israel’s military capabilities or renewed threats.
The Israeli threat to attack Gaza will result in more deaths and widespread suffering by civilians. It is unlikely to crush Palestinian national resistance, though, or the will to live in freedom and dignity. A new Israeli assault would probably only trigger Palestinian efforts to develop or obtain rockets with an ever longer range, perhaps to hit central coastal cities in Israel. This is clearly one of the lessons of the past 60 years: Sustained Israeli attacks elicit greater Arab technical proficiency and political will to resist and retaliate. Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other smaller groups manifest this reality. The regional infrastructure to enhance Palestinian military technical proficiency is in place, as Hamas and other resistance groups forge increasingly close working relations with fellow Islamists and nationalists throughout the region.
The threat of another Israeli military assault on Gaza and the promise of fiercer Palestinian retaliation for Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian militants are both signs of great will, but also of immense political frustration. Neither side is likely to win, or be defeated, purely by more military attacks. Mutual militarism is a dead-end road that both sides must travel, however, to reach the point where they grasp the stalemate they have achieved. We are near the point where repeated mutual attacks and terrorized civilian populations lead to consequences and reactions that are so predictable — more rockets, assassinations, and missiles from both sides — that they become politically meaningless.
This kind of warfare is as much about self-assertion as it is about self-defense. Asking one side to stop its militarism and violence as a precondition for political engagement is unrealistic, which is why this approach has never worked. The antidote — which has succeeded briefly in recent years — is to explore a cease-fire that both sides fully observe.
Israelis and Palestinians have amply demonstrated the depth and durability of their national identity, the ferocity of their will to fight, and their occasional willingness to explore political rather than only military resolutions of the conflict. Mature adults should be able to transcend the anger they feel at suffering military attacks, and instead probe the underlying political and national issues that generated the fighting in the first place. Any serious external mediator should explore the possibility of a total mutual cease-fire linked to serious negotiations based on internationally accepted benchmarks and reference points, especially UN Security Council resolutions.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2008 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 21 January 2008
Word Count: 821
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