New Israeli Tack Needed on Gaza

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Wie wil Gaza adopteren?
Anybody?

Groet / Cees

June 2, 2010
New Israeli Tack Needed on Gaza, U.S. Officials Say
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/world/middleeast/03policy.html
By ETHAN BRONNER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration considers Israel’s blockade of
Gaza to be untenable and plans to press for another approach to ensure
Israel’s security while allowing more supplies into the impoverished
Palestinian area, senior American officials said Wednesday.

The officials say that Israel’s deadly attack on a flotilla trying to
break the siege and the resulting international condemnation create a
new opportunity to push for increased engagement with the Palestinian
Authority and a less harsh policy toward Gaza.

“There is no question that we need a new approach to Gaza,” said one
official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the policy
shift is still in the early stages. He was reflecting a broadly held
view in the upper reaches of the administration.

Israel would insist that any approach take into account three factors:
Israel’s security; the need to prevent any benefit to Hamas, the
Islamist rulers of Gaza; and the four-year-old captivity of an Israeli
soldier held by Hamas, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit.

Since the botched raid that killed nine activists on Monday, the Israeli
government has said that the blockade was necessary to protect Israel
against the infiltration into Gaza of weapons and fighters sponsored by
Iran.

If there were no blockade in place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
said on Israeli television on Wednesday evening, it would mean “an
Iranian port in Gaza.” He added, “Israel will continue to maintain its
right to defend itself.”

But the American officials said they believed that even Mr. Netanyahu
understood that a new approach was needed.

Yet Mr. Netanyahu has resisted American pressure in the past. The Obama
administration initially demanded a complete freeze on Israeli
settlements in the West Bank, but had to accept a 10-month partial
freeze. Pressure on Israel also carries domestic political risks for Mr.
Obama, given the passion of its supporters in the United States.

Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza five years ago and
built the makings of an international border. But after Hamas, which
rejects Israel’s existence, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in
2006, Israel cut back on the amount of goods permitted into Gaza. When
Sergeant Shalit was seized in a raid in June of that year, commerce was
further reduced.

A year later, Hamas drove the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority
entirely out of Gaza in four days of street battles, leading Israel to
cut off all shipments in and out except basic food, humanitarian aid and
urgent medical supplies.

Hamas declines to recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence
or accept previous accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian
Authority. The diplomatic group known as the Quartet, made up of the
United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, has
said that until Hamas meets those requirements, the Quartet will not
deal with it.

But the world powers have grown increasingly disillusioned with the
blockade, saying that it has created far too much suffering in Gaza and
serves as a symbol not only of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians but of
how the West is seen in relation to the Palestinians.

“Gaza has become the symbol in the Arab world of the Israeli treatment
of Palestinians, and we have to change that,” the senior American
official said. “We need to remove the impulse for the flotillas. The
Israelis also realize this is not sustainable.”

At a meeting of the Quartet a year ago in Italy, for example, the group
asserted that the current situation was not sustainable and called for
the unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian aid within
Gaza, as well as the reopening of crossing points.

But Obama administration officials made it clear that the deaths had
given a new urgency to changing the policy.

Pressure against the blockade continued to grow on Wednesday: Turkey,
which withdrew its ambassador to Israel after the raid, said full
restoration of diplomatic ties was contingent on an end to the blockade.

The new British prime minister, David Cameron, also called for an end to
the blockade, criticizing the raid as “completely unacceptable.”

In Israel, officials say there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza because
the Defense Ministry makes sure that enough food and medicine reach the
population. But international aid groups assert that real malnutrition
is growing to about 10 percent and that problems with medical and
sanitation supplies are rising perilously because of the Israeli and
Egyptian embargoes.

In recent months, Israel has permitted increased — although still quite
limited — movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza. One Israeli
official said that under Mr. Netanyahu there had been a 20 percent
increase in goods, including some limited building materials under
third-party supervision so that Hamas would not get hold of them.

But Israel remains adamant, saying that if cement and steel were allowed
to pass in any serious amount, they would end up in Hamas missiles and
other weapons that would be aimed at Israel.

Discussion in Israel this week has largely focused on the details of the
seizure of the ship where the deaths occurred rather than on the broader
question of whether the blockade is good policy.

Amos Gilad, a senior defense official, said in an interview that in
Gaza, “we only have bad solutions, worse solutions and worst solutions.”
He added: “Hamas is a terrorist organization sworn to Israel’s
destruction. We, on the contrary, are facilitating them to bring in all
kinds of food, materials; they are even exporting strawberries and flowers.”

Aluf Benn, a senior editor and columnist for the left-wing Israeli
newspaper Haaretz wrote on Wednesday that the time had come for a new
Gaza policy.

“The attempt to control Gaza from outside, via its residents’ diet and
shopping lists, casts a heavy moral stain on Israel and increases its
international isolation,” he wrote. “Every Israeli should be ashamed of
the list of goods prepared by the Defense Ministry, which allows
cinnamon and plastic buckets into Gaza, but not houseplants and
coriander. It’s time to find more important things for our officers and
bureaucrats to do than update lists.”

He suggested sealing the Israel-Gaza border and informing the
international community that Israel was no longer responsible for Gaza
in any way, forcing Gaza to turn to Egypt as its corridor to the outside
world.

Egypt has consistently rejected such an idea in the past, asserting that
Gaza is Israel’s responsibility because it has occupied it since 1967.

One of the primary rationales for the blockade offered by Israeli
officials is the need to create a material and political gap between the
West Bank, run by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, and Gaza,
run by Hamas. And political surveys have shown a preference for Fatah
and discontent with Hamas among Palestinians. But the latest events, the
American officials say, have given Hamas a dangerous lift.

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