ما وراء الانفجار الداخلي في غزة

بقلم: يوري أفنيري

ميل أند جارديان  - 29/6/2007

ما الذي يحدث عندما يتم سجن مليون ونصف إنسان في منطقة صغيرة وقاحلة جداً, و يتم قطع اتصالهم مع أقربائهم ومع العالم الخارجي و تجويعهم باستخدام الحصار الاقتصادي بحيث لا يستطيعون تامين لقمة العيش لأبنائهم.؟

Behind the implosion in Gaza

Uri Avnery

What happens when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families?

Some months ago, I described this situation as a sociological experiment set up by Israel, the United States and the European Union -- the population of the Gaza Strip as guinea pigs.

This week, the experiment showed results. They proved that human beings react exactly like other animals: when too many of them are crowded into a small area in miserable conditions, they become aggressive, and even murderous.

The organisers of the experiment in Jerusalem, Washington, Berlin, Oslo, Ottawa and other capitals could rub their hands in satisfaction. The subjects of the experiment reacted as foreseen. Many of them even died in the interests of science.

But the experiment is not over. The scientists want to know what happens if the blockade is tightened still further.

What has caused the present explosion in the Gaza Strip?

The timing of Hamas’s decision to take over the Strip by force was not accidental. Hamas had many good reasons to avoid it. The organisation is unable to feed the population. It has no interest in provoking the Egyptian regime, which is busy fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother-organisation of Hamas. And it has no interest in providing Israel with a pretext for tightening the blockade.

But the Hamas leaders decided that they had no alternative but to destroy the armed organisations that are tied to Fatah and take their orders from President Mahmoud Abbas. The US has ordered Israel to supply these organisations with large quantities of weapons to enable them to fight Hamas. The Israeli army chiefs did not like the idea, fearing that the arms might end up in the hands of Hamas (as is actually happening now). But [the Israeli] government obeyed American orders, as usual.

The American aim is clear. President George W Bush has chosen a local leader for every Muslim country, who will rule it under American protection and follow American orders. In Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan and also in Palestine.

Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is [local Fatah leader] Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as though he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, “moderate” (that is, obedient to American orders) and “pragmatic” (obedient to Israeli orders). And the more the Americans and Israelis lauded Dahlan, the more they undermined his standing among the Palestinians.

In the eyes of Hamas, the attack on the Fatah strongholds in the Gaza Strip is a preventive war. The organisations of Abbas and Dahlan melted like snow in the Palestinian sun.

How could the American and Israeli generals miscalculate so badly? They are able to think only in military terms: so many soldiers, so many machine guns. But, in interior struggles in particular, quantitative calculations are secondary. The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organisations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation.

That is not a matter of Islamic fundamentalism. In this respect, all nations are the same: they hate collaborators of a foreign occupier, whether they are Norwegian (Quisling), French (Petain) or Palestinian.

In Washington and Jerusalem, politicians are bemoaning the “weakness” of Abbas.

They see now that the only person who could prevent anarchy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would be Yasser Arafat. He had a natural authority. The masses adored him. Even his adversaries, like Hamas, respected him. He created several security apparatuses that competed with each other, in order to prevent any single apparatus from carrying out a coup d’etat. Arafat was able to negotiate, sign a peace agreement and get his people to accept it.

But Arafat was pilloried by Israel as a monster, imprisoned and, in the end, murdered.

The Palestinian public elected Abbas as his successor, hoping that he would get from the Americans and the Israelis what they had refused to give to Arafat.

If the leaders in Washington and Jerusalem had indeed been interested in peace, they would have hastened to sign a peace agreement with Abbas, who had declared that he was ready to accept the same far-reaching compromise as Arafat. The Americans and the Israelis heaped on him all conceivable praise and rebuffed him on every concrete issue.

They did not allow Abbas even the slightest and most miserable achievement. Ariel Sharon plucked his feathers and then sneered at him for being “a featherless chicken”. After the Palestinian public had patiently waited in vain for Bush to move, it voted for Hamas, in the desperate hope of achieving by violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve by diplomacy.

The Israeli leaders were overjoyed. They were interested in undermining Abbas, because he enjoyed Bush’s confidence and because his stated position made it harder to justify their refusal to enter substantive negotiations. They did everything to demolish Fatah. To ensure this, they arrested Marwan Barghouti, the only person capable of keeping Fatah together.

The victory of Hamas suited their aims completely. With Hamas, one does not have to talk, to offer withdrawal from the occupied terri-tories and the dismantling of settlements. Hamas is that contemporary monster, a “terrorist” organisation, and with terrorists there is nothing to discuss.

Avnery is an Israeli journalist, former member of the Knesset and founder of Gush Shalom (The Peace Bloc). This article first appeared on his website

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=312273&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/

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نشرنا لهذه المقالات لا يعني أنها تعبر عن وجهة نظر المركز كلياً أو جزئياً

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من حق الزائر الكريم أن ينقل وأن ينشر كل ما يعجبه من موقعنا . معزواً إلينا ، أو غير معزو .ـ