360 Days

Reading about the Vietnam War, as I have been doing lately, is maddening. As President Lyndon B. Johnson makes fateful decisions that will ultimately leave 50,000 Americans dead and destroy his presidency, I almost want to shout out, “Stop! Are you blind? Can’t you see where this is leading?”

But, of course, LBJ couldn’t see that.

They say that hindsight is 20-20 and also that Monday morning quarterbacking is easy. That is too simple. The point of knowing history is that it enables you to utilize past experience to understand the present. That is also why football teams watch game tapes. Certain plays will be repeated. Watch out for them; exploit your knowledge of how the other side plays the game.

The Israeli government, sad to say, seems oblivious to history and apparently its library of CNN game tapes is empty. It keeps repeating the same mistakes, the big ones and the small ones. The biggest one of all is believing that it can “win” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by making the Palestinians “cry uncle.” That is what the economic blockade of Gaza is all about.

It is not about the shelling of Sderot. Israel began applying sanctions on the Palestinians immediately following the Hamas legislative elections of June 2006. Those were the elections that the United States insisted upon (over the objections of both the Israeli government and the Palestinians). Natan Sharansky had convinced President Bush that all elections are good by definition. So the Palestinians were pressured into holding them, voted “wrong,” and the United States, Israel (including Sharansky, of course), and the Europeans all decided that the Palestinians had to be punished. Almost immediately, Congress moved to cut off aid.

The blockade has only deepened ever since, especially after radical Palestinians in Gaza increased their  rocket fire at Sderot. In the past two years 45 Israelis were killed in terror attacks while 810 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by the IDF in response. Add to the toll on Gaza the cutoff of most foreign aid, the ban of virtually all imports from Israel and abroad, and finally the power cuts, which left Gaza dark and freezing, and you have a pretty bleak picture.

And what exactly did all these punitive measures accomplish? Nothing. They didn’t make Israel safer. After all, you do not have to block the import of cement and flour to keep out weapons and explosives, which, in any case, were coming in through the tunnels from Egypt.

All they accomplished was to make Palestinian life miserable in the hope that misery would produce a popular uprising that would overthrow Hamas. In theory, the Palestinians would blame Hamas, not Israel and America, for their misery. Naturally that did not happen.

Even if Hamas was growing less popular due to the shortages, that all changed this week when Hamas succeeded in ending the Israeli blockade by destroying the wall separating Gaza from Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were suddenly free to purchase the necessities (and luxuries, no doubt) that had been denied them. Israel no longer had any control of whom and what could enter Gaza (a dangerous situation which quickly produced an influx of sophisticated weapons) and Hamas was suddenly transformed into the hero. In other words, the Israelis produced precisely the situation they did not want. They kept out home heating oil and sugar while ultimately allowing Hamas to smuggle in God only knows what!

As of now, it is unclear what will happen next. Some Israelis, desperate that Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s fuel cutoff not appear to have produced the worst possible situation for Israel, are claiming that this week’s developments are all for the good. Egypt, they say, is now responsible for Gaza. “We have now completed the Gaza withdrawal. The Gazans are on their own and to hell with them,” one Israeli told a reporter.

There is some truth to that, but not much. Israel cannot divest itself of responsibility for Gaza simply by declaring it. Is Israel prepared to let Gaza control all its borders, its air space, and its sea lanes? Is it prepared to rule out military intervention in Gaza in response to continued attacks? Of course not. Israel wants to divest itself of all humanitarian responsibility for Gaza while maintaining control. It just does not work that way. Responsibility and control are two sides of the same coin.

It’s true that the week’s developments are in keeping with Ariel Sharon’s concept of unilateral withdrawal, the concept that produced the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops from Gaza.

But unilateral withdrawal failed. It failed because unilateralism is no way to solve any international conflict. Had Israel negotiated the Gaza withdrawal with Mahmoud Abbas, as Abbas wanted, there would have been a signed and binding agreement between Israelis and Palestinians governing Gaza’s future. As it was, Israel just picked up and left, handing Hamas the opportunity to increase its support by claiming that it drove Israel out, weakening Abbas and setting the stage for the shelling of Sderot and the ultimate Hamas takeover of Gaza.

As grandma used to say, “let that be a lesson to you.”

The lesson is that we are no longer living in an era in which major powers can dictate to the powerless. Winston Churchill could not, today, dictate that the area east of the Jordan would no longer be Israel/Palestine but rather Transjordan. Nor could France and the United Kingdom draw lines on a map and call this acreage Syria and that one Lebanon.

No, in 2008, the only way to resolve disputes between nations is through direct negotiations. That means that all the problems posed by Hamas in Gaza can only be resolved through negotiations that will end the Israeli occupation, create a West Bank/Gaza Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its shared capital and ensure the security of both Israelis and Palestinians. As the Israelis say over and over again, it needs a partner. In fact, it has one in Mahmoud Abbas. But, being essentially powerless, he is not a partner Israel can hold responsible for very much.

That needs to change. And that means moving on President Bush’s goal of establishing a Palestinian state by the end of his term. That state will not be a gift to the Palestinians, nor will it be a reward for good behavior. What it will be is a solution to a problem that plagues Israelis and Palestinians alike (while seriously damaging America’s interests worldwide). It’s been two months since Annapolis. It’s time for some urgency, especially now that we see mobs taking events into their own hands.

Is that what we want? Or is it the full-scale invasion of Gaza by the IDF which, according to press reports, Barak is considering?

Come on, Mr. President. You are running out of time. Don’t leave this one for the next president. A president has more running room on Arab-Israeli issues in his last year than at any time in his term. Use it. Only 360 days left.