Israel always had a bit of a problem with Gaza ever since it conquered the territory in 1967. It’s one of the most densely populated places in the world, it houses a lot of people driven out of their homes in 1948, doesn’t really have that much going for it and is therefore less of a prize than the West Bank is. As Christopher Hitchens (!) recounts in his foreword to Edward Said’s Peace and its discontents, Gaza has always been seen by the Israelis as a trap to spring on the Palestinians; as Moshe Dayn allegedly put it, “a bridge to doublecross”. The Israeli withdrawal from it in 2005 was therefore a bit of p.r. stunt; Israel could do with Gaza much more easily than it can do without its control of the West Bank. And because they kept control of the borders, airspace and the sea, the Israelis thought they had created more or less the largest open air prison in the world, a ghetto even, which if the inhabitants got too uppity could always be choked off. As Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert put it in 2006 “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. Olmert himself talked of “not allowing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza” but having no intention of “making their lives easier”. Such nice, humanitarian gestures are of course much more easy to pull off if there aren’t settlers stuck in the middle of Gaza of course.
But as we’ve seen again and again in the years since the Israeli withdrawal, the Gazans have not let themselves be cowed, voting in a Hamas government despite Israeli, European and American warnings about what would happen if they did, the rockets have continued to be launched against Sderot (founded in 1951, but once the site of a Palestinian village called Najd), so talk has been turning in Israel to more extreme measures…
Back in March of 2008, Lenny reported about a plan for a possible ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, (or as the Israelis might call it, the establishment of a security zone), based on a report by an Israeli television channel. More rumours of such a plan have been floating around ever since and ever since the war began I’ve been thinking this was going to be the IDF’s ultimate war aim. When the ground invasion began this seemed to be further confirmed and now we learn that the Israeli defence minister has been asking legal approval to “evacuate” thousands of residents of Gaza City. It may not be necessary, as already some fifteen thousands people have
fled towns in northern Gaza, after being threatened by Israeli pamphlets and radio announcements…
But, as the inhabitants of southern Lebanon found out back when Israel targeted their country in 2006, fleeing does not make you safe. Even United Nations schools, known to the Israelis to be UN schools, with the UN having provided the IDF with the full details and GPS coordinates of all their buildings in the Gaza Strip, are not safe: thirty dead when an Israeli tank shelled it. As per usual the IDF blames their enemy for making them shoot the school, as the troops in question were supposedly fired upon. Of course, everytime something likes this happens, the IDF trots out the same old story and every time it turns out to be a lie.
So don’t put too much faith in all the “diplomatic efforts” being undertaken by the various bigwigs to end this conflict, especially when Tony Blair, with his usual brilliant prioritising thought the most important question was to stop Hamas getting weapons. This conflict will end when Israel wants it to end, or is forced to do so. If we don’t ratch up the pressure on Israel quickly, this will end with ethnic cleansing. When you have people like Avedon Carol talking about getting ‘a chill up my spine when I heard they were talking about a “permanent solution” to the Palestinian issue’, you know this is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever will. But it only will if we make the Israelis stop.