Soccer Dad

Defining disengagement down

In the runup to Israel's disengagement from Gaza there were several articles I'd seen that were designed on minimizing the effect of Israel's sacrifice of moving thousands of its citizens from their homes in the name of peace.
For one there was "Disenagement from Justice" by Laila El-Haddad, a "journalist" for Al-Jazeera that appeared on the Washington Post's op-ed page. She wrote:

Under the plan, Israel will start evacuating the 21 Gaza settlements and four small settlements in the northern West Bank next month. But it will also maintain control of Gaza's air, sea and borders, and will reserve the right to reenter the Strip at any time, effectively making Gaza the world's largest open-air prison, with 1.5 million Palestinian inmates.

The Gaza disengagement will simply restructure Israel's occupation. Instead of controlling our lives from within, Israel will control Gaza from without.

This idea that Gaza is and would still be a prison was picked up by David Hawkins of CBS News in "Behind Israel's 'Disengagement'":

But Israel isn’t really disengaging from the Palestinians at all, not even in Gaza, where, if all goes to plan, there won’t be a single Israeli settlement by the end of the summer. Israel will still hold the keys to Gaza, control its borders, its airspace and access to the sea. Palestinians have long described the Gaza Strip as the world’s biggest prison. Disengagement won’t change that. The prison guards will just be manning the walls instead of walking the cellblock corridors.

Both authors clearly wished to equate further progress in the peace process with more Israeli concessions. But that's disingenuous.
First of all there's a reason that Israel needs to control access to Gaza: to prevent terror attacks, a point that eluded both authors.
But there's another issue. And that is of Palestinian governance. In 12 years of "legitimacy" the PA has failed to create institutions capable of governing a population under its jurisdiction. Instead it has fostered anarchy and violence and blamed it on Israel. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza won't suddenly make the Mahmoud Abbas into Thomas Jefferson.
Eyad El-Sarraj, no friend of Israel wrote recently:

Are they the security forces? The armed tribes? The militant Militias? The business companies? Or is it all of these powers together? It is certainly not the central Palestinian Authority. It seems that we are following Somalia. Somalia is divided into armed feudal estates, in which every leader is ruling a certain area, while others do not dare to enter such areas without a permit.

We are joyful of the evacuation of the Israeli settlements, and the blow to the Zionist colonial enterprise which has victimized both Jews and Palestinians. But we fear that we entered the path of civil war from its widest doors, not necessarily between Hamas and Fatah, but rather; between the various armed feudal groups. The feudality of money, weapons, and tribalism became the ruling powers in Gaza. The central Authority has decayed to a degree of helplessness.

This lawlessness isn't the fault of Israel. And it's even inaccurate as Dr. El-Sarraj attributes it to the crumbling of the central government. But it's the other way around.
The chaos in areas under Palestinian jurisdiction is a function of Arafat's actions. In an article written nearly 8 years ago Grahan Usher wrote about this phenomenon in "Arafat revives tribal power.":

"Since the PA was installed in 1994, Arafat has based his rule on two
crucial constituencies. One was his Fatah movement, many of whose cadres
were absorbed into the PA's burgeoning and often lawless security
forces. But the other was Arafat's deliberate reempowerment of Palestine's
traditional or tribal families, like the Abu Samhadanahs or, for that
matter, the Al-Dhairs. In Rafah, the two constituencies have become one,
with tribal and political loyalties so interwoven as to be inseparable.

"For Palestinian analysts like the sociologist, Isah Jad, the PA's
"revival of tribal structures" is not only inimicable to Palestinian hopes
for a law based and democratic society. It is corrosive of the modern
national consciousness Palestinians have forged out of their conflict with
Israel. For 30 years, says Jad, "the national movement conducted a long
struggle to weaken loyalty to the family and the tribe and strengthen the
concept of nationalism and loyalty to the homeland. Any rebuilding of
tribal structures will reinstate the family and the tribe as the
individual's first loyalty."

Sowing disorder was always more important to Arafat than building a functioning society. Whether this was due to his hatred of Jews or ambition for power and wealth we can't know. However it was probably a combinatin of both motivations.
In contrast, Elder of Ziyon writes in "Plastics":

The Jews realized that they live in a tiny area with practically no natural resources. Anything they would create would have to be made from only the crudest of ingredients together with brainpower. And in the 1940s, twenty years before Mr. Mcguire was to give his famous advice to Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate", one of the brightest areas of research and manufacturing growth was in...plastics.
....
The amount of planning necessary to build an entire industry from scratch is immense. To even think of doing it during a time of terror and war could almost be thought of as foolhardy. Yet the Weizmann Institute continued on in its plastics research throughout the decade, as partition and war loomed, threatening the Jewish state before it could even have a chance:

In short Israel did what was necessary to survive. The Arabs fought and when they couldn't defeat the nascent Jewish state counted on the rest of the world to do it for them, wheither directly or not.
Even now as Abbas has received territory he seeks not to build for the future but to perpetuate a grievance. As Evelyn Gordon notes in "Gaza Grows":

If anyone thought that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza would revive prospects for peace, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas scotched that notion last week. Full withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines is insufficient, he declared: Israel must also concede additional territory inside these lines.

Specifically, Abbas demanded land north and east of the Gaza Strip. This land was indeed on the Arab side of the 1949 armistice lines, but Egypt, which controlled Gaza at the time, traded it to Israel in 1950 in exchange for a larger chunk of land that Israel held in eastern Gaza. This new border was subsequently acknowledged not only by UN Resolution 242, but also by the Oslo Accords, which the Palestinians signed. The PA, therefore, has no conceivable claim to this land: Not only did Israel "purchase" it by ceding a larger bit of land to Gaza, but the new border was recognized by both the UN and the PA itself.

Thus when PA officials first raised this demand in talks with Israel several weeks ago, Israeli officials dismissed it as a negotiating ploy. But what Abbas did last week is not so easily dismissed: In an interview published in a major Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, on Saturday, he told the Palestinian public that "the evacuation of the settlers, the settlements and the army from the Strip are steps in the right direction, but it does not mean the end of the occupation. There are lands in eastern and northern Gaza still under occupation.... We need to renegotiate the details and get back to the real border."

Or as Aluf Benn wrote in Ha'aretz:

Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has adopted the argument that Israel is continuing to occupy Palestinian lands in the northern and eastern Gaza Strip. When PA Civil Affairs Minister Mohammed Dahlan first made this claim to Vice Premier Shimon Peres a few weeks ago, the Israelis were surprised, but tried to ignore it. When Abu Mazen speaks about it, the demand becomes the official Palestinian position.

The territorial claim is not just a public relations exercise. It has consequences: The Palestinians are refusing to discuss upgrading the Erez crossing on the grounds that it is located in occupied territory. Tomorrow, someone will shell Moshav Nativ Ha'asarah, which lies within the disputed area, and claim the action is part of a just war of liberation - "the Nativ Ha'asarah Intifada."

The failure to create a government and the perpetuation of grievances have been two constant features of Palestinian nationalism. Perhaps that's because it's never been about buidling a country but about erasing one.
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Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at September 9, 2005 5:27 AM