ROGER COHEN, N.Y. TIMES
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a ritualistic obscenity. It offends the conscience of humankind. The Oslo accords are dead. The “peace process” initiated through them is a farce. It is time to rethink everything.
In Gaza, an open-air prison for 1.8 million people, more than 300 children are dead, killed in the almost month-long Israeli bombardment. Each of those children has a name, a family. Several were killed in the recent shelling of a United Nations school, an act that the United States called “disgraceful.” The many civilian casualties in Gaza cannot be waved away as the “human shields” of Hamas. They were not human shields; they were human beings. When the guns die down, Israel will begin a difficult accounting.
But, yes, Hamas used these human beings, used them in the sense that the organization has no objective in the real world. Israel, which it says it is bent on annihilating, is not going away. Hamas manipulates and subjugates the Palestinians it governs in the name of a lost cause. To send rockets into Israel is to invite a certain response whose result, over time, is to reinforce a culture of paralyzing Palestinian victimhood. Hamas is criminal. It is criminal in its sacrifice of the Palestinian national cause to a fantasy, in its refusal to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel’s right “to exist in peace and security,” in its determination to kill Jews, and in its willingness to see the blood of its people shed for nothing.
A Jewish homeland was voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947 calling for the creation of two states in the Holy Land, one Jewish and one Arab. That homeland was defended through Arab-initiated wars aimed at reversing the world’s post-Holocaust mandate. Israel’s existence is irreversible. It is grounded in that U.N. decision, won on the battlefield, expressed in the forging of a vibrant society; and it represents the rightful resolution of the long Jewish saga of exclusion and persecution.
Except that the resolution is incomplete. Israel’s denial of a Palestinian state, its 47-year occupation of the West Bank, its highly “capricious control regime” (in the words of the former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad) over the lives of Palestinians, its expansion of settlements — all this creates an unacceptable “status quo” in which every lull is pregnant with violence. The occupation must end one day. Without two states Israel will lurch from one self-inflicted wound to the next, growing ever angrier with its neighbors and a restive world from which it feels alienated.
With nearly 2,000 dead, including 64 Israeli soldiers, the victors of this latest Gaza mini-war are apparently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. Support for Netanyahu is overwhelming. A vast majority of Israelis back his actions; many believe he has not gone far enough. Hamas, meanwhile, has hurt Israel; it has endured; it has exercised command-and-control under prolonged attack; it has embodied Palestinian resistance
But these are Pyrrhic victories. Deeper currents are at work. Surely even Netanyahu must take from this horrific episode the conviction that something must change. He has long pooh-poohed peace. He compared Yitzhak Rabin to Neville Chamberlain, and Israelis somehow forgave him. He came very late and very lamely to the idea of two states for two peoples, only to set impossible conditions for that goal, undermine moderate Palestinians, and waste U.S. mediators’ time.
He seized a few months ago on the formation of a Hamas-Fatah unity government to say “the pact with Hamas kills peace.” Now Netanyahu would like nothing more than for the Palestinian Authority, representing the Fatah faction, to take control of Gaza. In effect he would like the Palestinian unity he lambasted to work. He knows demilitarization of Gaza, the stated Israeli objective, can only be attained by remilitarizing it with an Israeli tank on every corner. Nobody wants that. Israel is already running the lives of enough Palestinians — or trying to.
As for Hamas, its victory is also illusory, adrenalin before the fall. It can offer its people nothing. The place to start now is with ending the divisions in the Palestinian movement that the unity government papered over — Gaza first, instead of West Bank first. A Palestinian national consensus is the prerequisite for anything, including the rebuilding and opening-up of Gaza.
Real reconciliation can only come on the basis of an ironclad commitment to nonviolence and to holding of free and fair elections, the first since 2006. Good Palestinian governance, unity and nonviolence constitute the path to making a free state of Palestine irrefutable. The longer Hamas fights this, the greater its betrayal of its people.
Netanyahu has fought Palestinian statehood all his life. But it is the only way out of his labyrinth. In the end his sound bites yield to reality. That reality is bitter indeed.