No cease fires

The big idea Blood will be shed on both sides of the fence until Israel is prepared to offer Palestinians sovereignty on their own land, Jonathan Shainin writes.

I'll be watching you: An armed Israeli security guard looks into the northern Gaza strip from atop a cement barrier at the Erez checkpoint.

Blood will be shed on both sides of the fence until Israel is prepared to offer Palestinians sovereignty on their own land, Jonathan Shainin writes.

As of press time, the Israeli assault on Gaza is in its 19th day, with the death toll climbing toward a thousand. There is naturally no agreement about precisely how many of these are civilians, but it seems to be around half. This should come as no surprise: the Israeli airforce has carried out over 2,300 strikes since December 27 on innumerable targets, including a school, a mosque and a university, many of them in densely packed cities and camps.

Meanwhile the war over the war rages on in the West: Israel's mighty public relations machine has successfully repackaged the carnage as something benign and noble - at least in the United States, the only place that matters. It is, Israel and its defenders say, a simple matter of self-defence: if Mexico were firing rockets into Texas, they say, wouldn't America do the same? Hamas violated the ceasefire; Hamas is sworn to Israel's destruction; Hamas is a pawn of Iran, which is also sworn to Israel's destruction; Israel is very, very careful to avoid civilian casualties at all times, but Hamas hides among women and children. (I would hate to see what an Israeli army not careful to avoid civilian casualties would do.) Besides, it is said: Israel left Gaza three years ago, and look where it got them. We gave those Palestinians a chance and they thanked us with rockets.

Tempting as it is to engage these nonsensical claims, they are beside the point. The war is always on - sometimes spectacularly violent, sometimes quietly so - as it has been on for decades. Every few years the steady grind of violence explodes into a conflagration and we honour it with the word war. The details of each particular flare-up, which endlessly preoccupy volunteer flacks for both sides around the world, are just footnotes, meaningless fodder for insipid arguments about which side violated the ceasefire or broke the "lull" or left the negotiating table, mere distractions from an underlying reality of occupation that never changes, no matter how many peace processors conclave in hotels in Taba or Annapolis.

Three weeks into this war - "maybe the only war in history," the dovish Israeli journalist Gideon Levy quipped, "against a strip of land enclosed by a fence" - it is not clear what it is supposed to accomplish. Ehud Olmert, whose political career was torpedoed by a more foolhardy adventure in Lebanon, indicated on Tuesday that "the military operation still has not achieved its goals," which are presumably more expansive than merely killing 1,000 Palestinians, further blackening the reputations of Israel and the United States and undermining Palestinian and Arab moderates predisposed to negotiate with Israel.

Hamas has been bloodied, to be sure. (There's a lot of blood to go around in Gaza these days.) Pro-Israel commentators have gloried in the restoration of the IDF's "deterrent power", as if the ability of one of the world's most powerful armies to kill people was ever in doubt. Israeli officials, who targeted various symbols of Hamas authority - municipal buildings and police stations, the Islamic University, television stations and a hospital or two - have stated with satisfaction that they have fatally damaged Hamas's ability to govern the Gaza Strip. But this is the only thing Hamas does that is useful to Israel, which has no desire or inclination to do that job itself.

It is important to understand that Israel did not leave Gaza in 2005. Israeli settlers left Gaza, and Israeli soldiers moved from its center to its perimeter. The deprivation inflicted by the subsequent siege has been widely chronicled elsewhere, and while it may provide little justification for Hamas violence, one thing is absolutely clear: Israel has controlled the Gaza Strip from June 1967 until today. It decides who enters and who leaves, decides when food and medicine and money can cross the border and when they can't. It decides where the walls go and who guards them, when to send in its tanks and planes, who can govern and who cannot govern, and above all, who lives and who dies.

The prominent Israeli commentator Ari Shavit - a former leftist and brilliant writer who became the foremost liberal hagiographer of Ariel Sharon - wrote on Tuesday that this is "a war for Israel's sovereignty." Close, but not quite. Israel's sovereignty has never been at issue: it is the unquestioned sovereign power, the authority over those that are its citizens and those that are not. It is the perpetuation of Israeli sovereignty over the Palestinian territories - and not the occupation of territory, per se - that is precisely the issue. Palestinian residents of the occupied territories are citizens of no state; they are subjects of no government and no law, bearing no rights. The problem is that this is not a temporary situation: the abysmal failure of the Oslo process, which perceptive observers saw from its start, was that it promised territory without sovereignty, a meaningless offer that represented Israel's most generous proposal.

For Israelis and Palestinians alike, the ambiguous consensus established in the last six months of 1967, when Israel confronted the reality of its newly enlarged territory, has continued to circumscribe the situation up until the present day. Israel had acquired the lands of which it had long dreamed, firing the passions of Biblically-minded extremists to return to the hills of Judea and Samaria. At long last the "Whole Land of Israel" was in Jewish hands - but it was covered with Palestinians. Israel wanted the territory but not its inhabitants, and it set out on a disastrous 40-year attempt to make this impossible wish into reality.

In the cabinet debates that followed the Six-Day War, the most influential voices belonged to Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, who plotted distinct but related trajectories for the territories and their unwanted residents. The hawkish Dayan was confident Israel could impose its will on the Palestinians without giving up a dunam, keeping all the land and granting "autonomy" to the Palestinians within Israel's expanded borders but not citizenship, a sop of fake statehood without the prerogatives of sovereignty. "You Palestinians," he later told a poet from Nablus, "don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you."

Dayan's plan was an accurate forecast of the occupation in practice - indefinite Israeli rule over the territories - but Allon provided the theory that would guide the Israeli administration of the West Bank and Gaza. His fundamental insight was that Israel need not possess territory to control it - establishing a matrix of settlements within new borders that cut the West Bank into pieces would give Israel "the whole land strategically and a Jewish state demographically."

The disengagement from Gaza, hailed by fools as an unprecedented about-face by Sharon, was nothing of the sort. "His concept of national security is the one we should follow," Sharon said of Allon, and follow it he did. Commentators agree that Israel has "no intention of reoccupying Gaza" but this, perversely enough, would at least force Israel to administer the territory it already controls, in accordance with what Colin Powell called the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it.

Crushing Hamas's already feeble military capabilities is no great challenge for a fleet of Merkavas and F-16s. But there seems little reason to believe that the stature of Hamas can be reduced into rubble like some crowded apartment block. Past experience would suggest that insurgent movements are rarely discredited by brutal attacks against the occupied population they purport to represent. "Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today," Moshe Dayan said in a famous 1956 eulogy for a young kibbutznik killed by infiltrators from Gaza. "For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate."

But Israel, Dayan went on, could never lay down its arms: it could not live "without the steel helmet and the cannon's maw". Fifty years later the Palestinians still sit suffering in their miserable camps, and Israel continues to heed Dayan's unyielding call to rule the land by force, which decades of failure have somehow not managed to discredit.

Jonathan Shainin is editor of The Review.