This morning, Israeli forces killed yet another three Hamas activists in an air strike on Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip. Over the past two weeks, some 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military forces, mostly in the Strip, even as Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak insists his army continues to hold out on wide scale military action there.
Israel claims it is defending its citizens from the rocket attacks into their towns and cities just outside of the Gaza Strip. And Israel doesn’t mince its words. “It is time to kill those who carry out attacks against Israelis,” Barak said. In turn, Israel has tacked a number to its argument, perhaps to offer more credibility and hence justification for these targeted killings. According to Israeli government sources, some 2,000 homemade Palestinian rockets have been fired into Israeli territory in the past year. Sounds scary, no doubt until one realizes just how inaccurate if not virtually innocuous these rockets really are. In this past year, two Israelis actually died as a result of these rockets, by admission of Israel itself. According to an Israeli ministry of foreign affairs website named, “Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism since September 2000”, two Israeli citizens died in May of this year after a Qassam rocket hit their town of Sderot.
Still, Israel continues to cut down Palestinians even if on suspicion that they belong to a military group, especially those affiliated with Hamas. What is so shocking is that almost no one blinks an eye anymore at the news of these ongoing assassinations.
It is not as if this were the first time Israel carries out such atrocious actions. Assassinations in the name of Israeli security have been going on since the start of the Israeli occupation over 40 years ago and have escalated exponentially since the Aqsa Intifada seven years ago. However, another factor now plays into the seemingly indifferent and sometimes callous approach of the international community towards these killings, namely Annapolis.
This is certainly not an attempt to cast blame on the Palestinian leaders who believe the negotiating track with Israel is the best approach to end the occupation and thus the suffering of the people. Neither is this a praise of Hamas’ tyrannical hold on the Gaza Strip at all costs. It is not even an endorsement of the armed struggle, which the firing of these rockets would logically fall under.
It is, however, a criticism of the dangerous schism that has divided the Palestinians, partly by our own doing but definitely fed and nurtured by Israel and its allies. The current struggles in the so-called corridors of Palestinian power have had devastating ramifications at a number of levels, one being that it has watered down our responses to Israel’s atrocities and those of the world. Now, instead of focusing on the illegality of the occupation and all that entails, the world is more interested in following-up on the Annapolis conference, hoping beyond hope that it will yield any sort of positive results.
That is why, when 30 Palestinians are killed openly by the Israeli army in less than two weeks, the headlines fail to highlight them. Instead, President Bush’s upcoming visit to Israel is splashed across newspapers, and words like Annapolis, the roadmap, negotiations and commitments take precedence over Palestinian lives.
This split, where the West Bank is governed by the more moderate Abbas government and Gaza is under the strained rule of a desperate Hamas, has unfortunately caused a split in our own loyalties. The bitter and often bloody clashes between Fateh and Hamas have hardened our sentiments even towards our own people. When our fellow Palestinians are blown to pieces by an Israeli missile, this usually elicits a passionate response from the rest of the people. Today, as much as it is painful to say, that is no longer true. After allowing ourselves to shed each others’ blood, we watch with near nonchalance when our real adversary sheds it for us.
This is the regrettable result of the split that now plagues our reality. Instead of uniting our energies and brainpower and channeling it into one direction, we have taken opposite turns. On the one hand, there is President Abbas, who for better or for worse, has chosen the path of negotiations and international diplomacy. The only hitch here, is that being part of this track also means shunning a considerable sector in his own society, those who choose to rally around Hamas. In practical terms, this also means that when Israel takes measures against Hamas or any other opposition party, the West Bank government can protest but so much – one condition of the roadmap on the Palestinians, which both parties supposedly agreed to implement – is dismantling “terrorist” organizations, in this case Hamas and its military wing.
In all fairness, Abbas and his government are not in an enviable position. Agreeing to be part of this movement has and continues to take a heavy toll, especially in terms of their relationship with their own people. However, this responsibility does not fall solely on them. The Hamas leadership is hardly guilt-free in feeding into this enmity among brothers. While it is true that they are being targeted even more fiercely than usual, that is no excuse for their behavior in the Strip. Hamas, once a legitimate resistance movement, has become a power-thirsty tyrannical quasi-government, which has proven that it will sacrifice even its own people to stay in control. The fact that Hamas has also turned its guns on its brethren in Fateh may also play a role in the lukewarm protests against Israel’s killings of late.
But at the risk of sounding overly simplistic, this is gravely wrong. Israel is a powerful and insidious force with even more powerful allies prodding them on. Despite commitments made in Annapolis about halting settlement expansion, on December 4 Israel announced the construction of 307 more housing units in the east Jerusalem settlement of Har Homa. Furthermore, according to the Israeli civil administration in the West Bank, only 107 “illegal settlement outposts” were evacuated out of 3,449 orders to do so.
This is just a drop in the sea of struggles before the Palestinians in their battle with the Israeli occupation. The jury is still out on whether the Annapolis government will reap positive results and actually lay concrete groundwork for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. And while Hamas’ approach seems to be counterproductive, or at least futile, there is a responsibility among our leaders to at least wage the battle from the same trench, because as long as Israel continues to kill our people and expand illegal settlements with impunity, no government, neither that in the West Bank nor the deposed one in Gaza, carries any real weight. The only way we as Palestinians have a chance at achieving independence and freedom for ourselves is if we set aside our differences and remind ourselves that the path we are now on can only further us from this goal.
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