 s I sat down to finish editing
this piece over Easter the news broke of a suicide
bomb attack outside a crowded restaurant in Tel
Aviv. The pain and anguish captured by the TV pictures
were as shocking as ever – and all too familiar.
Over the last year, though, pictures of carnage
like this have usually been broadcast from Iraq.
Such scenes are rare in Israel and Palestine these
days. Hamas has broadly observed a unilaterally
declared ceasefire for many months now. However,
this attack did not come from Hamas. Rather, the
much smaller Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad,
appear to have been responsible. Despite this Israel
is still holding Hamas responsible for the outrage.
Israeli spokespeople have said they will not respond
with a military strike but is going to revoke the
residency permits of three Hamas MPs who live in
East Jerusalem. The fact that Hamas did not condemn
the attack but described it as a natural response
to Israeli occupation and violence is being seen
as ‘proof’ of Hamas’s complicity.
Whether Hamas’s ceasefire will itself become
a casualty of this event remains to be seen.
Whilst it is of course to be welcomed that Israel
has committed not to take further military action
in response to the Tel Aviv atrocity, we have to
be mindful of the fact that Israeli forces are
already shelling Gaza on a daily basis. This had
led to the deaths of three Palestinian civilians,
including two children, with 47 others wounded
over the days immediately before and after the
suicide bombing. These are the deaths which don’t
hit the headlines, and which the international
news channels do not interrupt their broadcasts
to show. Last week, the UN published a paper examining
the humanitarian situation in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip in the coming months. The paper warns
of an extremely bleak future situation for the
Palestinian people. This is the context in which
current events must be viewed.
In January, the parliamentary majority secured
by Hamas in Palestine sent shock waves throughout
the world. The international reaction was swift
and the message clear. Nobody questioned that the
elections had been run fairly or that the result
was anything other than genuine. But Hamas was
an organisation that had been responsible for the
deaths of hundreds of innocent people over the
years. If Palestine’s new government wanted
to be accepted as a legitimate player in the international
community, it had to demonstrate that it had changed.
It was going to have to abandon its demand for
the destruction of Israel and it was going to have
to renounce terrorism.
It did not matter that Hamas had maintained a
ceasefire in practice, that its election platform
had not included any reference to the destruction
of Israel or that some Hamas spokespeople had even
hinted at the possibility of negotiations. If Hamas
did not say these things as explicitly as countries
like the USA decreed, the implication was that
the consequences would be severe.
It was no idle threat. The Bush Administration
not only refused to have any contact with Palestine’s
new government but immediately suspended all humanitarian
aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). In the week
before the Easter suicide bomb, the EU followed
suit by also suspending all direct aid to the PA.
That accounted for nearly half of the $600m the
EU sends to the territories. The cut came at a
time when the Authority already had a deficit of
around $900m and when poverty in Gaza has left
infant mortality standing at 24%.
Just two months after the Palestinian election,
Israel also went to the polls. Under the simplistic
form of proportional representation used in Israel,
it is well near impossible for any party to secure
an overall majority. But there was no doubt about
which party was the winner this time. Kadima, the
new Party established by Ariel Sharon to fight
the elections he called soon before he was struck
down by a stroke in January, won 29 seats, eight
ahead of the Labour Party who had significantly
improved its own position in the Knesset.
The international community’s response to
the election result in Israeli West Jerusalem was
as swift as it had been to the result in occupied
Palestinian East Jerusalem. But it could not have
been more different. Tony Blair was one of the
quickest off the mark in officially sending the
UK’s warm congratulations and friendship
to Kadima leader Ehud Olmert as the new Israeli
Prime Minister. Hadn’t Kadima comprehensively
seen off the hard-line Likud party that both Olmert
and Sharon had abandoned just months before? Sure,
it wasn’t clear which partners would eventually
join Kadima in a coalition or what price they would
extract for doing so. Whatever happened, the Kadima
Government must surely still mean further withdrawals
from Palestinian territories. But the situation
in Israel and Palestine cannot be reduced to a
simplistic picture of a peace building Kadima contrasted
with a terrorist Hamas in the way implied by the
West’s response to the two sets of elections.
The fact that Kadima has spoken unambiguously
about the need for further Israeli withdrawals
from occupied Palestinian territory is of course
to be welcomed. But we need to be equally clear
about the not so small print of Olmert’s
plan. Withdrawal would still leave a substantial
proportion of the Palestinian territories under
Israeli occupation. Three large settlement blocks
- illegal under international law - will be annexed
to Israel, effectively slicing the West Bank in
two. Jerusalem will be largely inaccessible to
the Palestinians and Olmert has made no secret
of his determination to keep control of the Jordan
Valley. Without control over or apparently even
a say in the determination of its own borders,
and with movement of goods and people effectively
remaining under the control of Israel, Olmert’s
vision of a Palestinian state resembles a series
of Bantustans.
And it is happening now in practice, at the same
time as the West praises Israel’s leaders
for their courage, 5,300 hectares of Palestinian
land is being confiscated behind a separation barrier
that is now being confidently talked about to form
the new, expanded border of the Israeli state.
Movement restrictions are already affecting the
ability of 20,000 Palestinian children to get to
their West Bank schools.
And Israel has imposed its own further economic
sanctions on the struggling Gazan economy. Because
Israel controls the borders of Gaza and the West
Bank, it collects $55 million monthly VAT and custom
revenues due to the Palestinian Authority, Olmert
recently announced this would no longer be passed
over to the Palestinian authorities since Hamas
had won the election. In Gaza the main trade route
in and out was closed by Israel for 60% of the
time in the first three months of this year. Bread
shortages have reached critical levels.
It is true that despite Hamas’s ceasefire,
Israel’s southern border towns have had to
contend with Palestinian splinter groups in northern
Gaza firing rockets towards them. The number of
these rockets increased from 64 in January to 130
in February 2006. The fact that they are so inaccurate
that they rarely injure anyone does not alter the
genuine fear they cause in towns like Sderot. But
the level of Israel’s ‘response’ to
these attacks has been significant. According to
the UN, 1250 artillery tank shells and six F16
missiles were launched into the Gaza Strip in the
first week of April alone. At least two Palestinian
children died in such attacks just two weeks before
Islamic Jihad’s attack on the Tel Aviv restaurant.
Hamas spokespeople were rightly condemned for
describing the Tel Aviv attack as a natural response
to continuing Israeli violence against Palestinians.
There is nothing ‘natural’ about the
slaughter of people going about their daily lives
near a take-way. However, the fact that nothing
can justify such an attack is no excuse for pretending
that something like this was not predictable. Hamas
won January’s election partly because they
offered an alternative to the corruption that had
disfigured the previous Fateh dominated PA. But
the election result was also a reaction to the
failure of internationally sponsored peace plans
to end the occupation or change the lives of ordinary
Palestinians for the better. People were sick of
the chronic double standards which the international
community displayed in its dealings with Israel
and Palestine.
If we want to help bring peace to the Middle East
rather than simply wring our hands about the latest
outrage, the double standards have to end.
Richard Burden is Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield
and chair of the All-party Parliamentary Israel/Palestine
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