I’m surprised that this still needs saying, but, evidently, it does. The current civil conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is not an internal Palestinian matter. Any attempt to analyse the fighting between Fatah and Hamas militants without discussing the critical role played by Israel and sections of the international community in engineering the crisis is nothing less than a misrepresentation of the entire situation.
The connection between Israeli and Western policies and the current Palestinian civil conflict is clear, and hardly disputed among serious analysts of the region. Amira Hass, a respected Israeli journalist, sums the situation up perfectly:

“The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called `what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.`”

Israel and its international backers have been collectively punishing the Palestinians, a people already in dire straights, since last January, when they had the temerity to vote the “wrong people” into power. The Palestinians have, in the words of John Dugard (UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories and the father of modern human rights law in South Africa), been “subjected to economic sanctions – the first time an occupied people have been so treated.” Dugard recalls when “Western states refused to impose meaningful sanctions on South Africa to compel it to abandon apartheid on the grounds that this would harm the black people of South Africa”, and notes that “[n]o such sympathy is extended to the Palestinian people or their human rights.” Instead, the international community has imposed “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions…in modern times” on a population where the majority of people were already dependent on aid merely to put food on the table.

Patrick Cockburn, a veteran journalist for The Independent, visited Gaza last September and described the scene vividly. “Gaza is dying,” he wrote. “The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation.” “A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area of the world. Israel has stopped all trade…The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal.”

The UN reported in July that 70% of Palestinians live in poverty, and a World Bank report in September concluded that the Palestinians face “a year of unprecedented economic recession — real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006, and poverty [will] affect close to two thirds of the population.”

In addition to economic strangulation, Israel used massive violence to increase the pressure on the Hamas government. Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, wrote in December that,

“Most [Palestinian] civilian deaths have been the result of deliberate and reckless shooting and artillery shelling or air strikes by Israeli forces carried out in densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip.”

She also noted that the Gaza Strip “is in the grip of a deep humanitarian crisis as a result of the blockade imposed by the Israeli authorities.”

Describing last year’s `Operation Summer Rains’, a campaign of brutal collective punishment designed to force the collapse of the Hamas government from within, senior Ha’aretz correspondent Gideon Levy wrote that the IDF “has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately”.

We must be honest with ourselves about what exactly has happened and why. Israel and its international supporters have starved and bombed the Palestinians for close to year because they elected into government a party that represents Palestinian interests, as opposed to those of Israel and the West. It has been openly stated that this campaign of terrorism against the Palestinians will not end until they overthrow Hamas, or until Hamas adopts policies more favourable to Israel and the West. This is blackmail of the most despicable sort.

Consider British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett’s words, when she met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem today. According to Beckett,

“We have said consistently from the beginning that we believe that any government should be based on the Quartet principles…If nothing new changes from the position there’s been hitherto, I’m afraid the position will stay the same.”

In other words, even if Fatah and Hamas somehow manage to reach a compromise deal that will end the disastrous internal fighting in the territories, Britain and the international community will likely continue to withhold the aid upon which millions of Palestinians depend for survival. Britain will accept nothing less than total capitulation to Quartet demands before it will help end the sanctions regime that, according to Harvard’s Dr. Sara Roy, has caused “unprecedented levels of unemployment” and that, according to senior UN economist Rhaja Khalidi, has resulted in a Palestinian economy that “is now barely functioning.”

We have to be clear about this: the United States and Britain, two states that, through their diplomatic, military and (in the case of the U.S.) financial support for Israel, are deeply complicit in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and in the countless atrocities and war crimes Israel has perpetrated against the Palestinians over the decades, are using humanitarian aid as a political weapon to try and force regime change in the Occupied Territories. After decades of facilitating Israeli policies of, in Dr. Roy’s words, “expropriation and deinstitutionalization” that “long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for development, ensuring that no viable economic (and hence political) structure could emerge”, we are now using the Palestinians’ last remaining lifeline as a political weapon. What we have done and are continuing to do to the Palestinians is simply obscene. Britain has a moral duty to the Palestinians to provide them with as much aid as they need, if nothing else because of our complicity in reducing them to the state they are currently in. Of course, this means more than just financial aid – both Britain and the U.S. have a duty to do all they can to end the occupation and force Israel to accept a just settlement (as opposed to doing all they can to block a settlement, which is what has been happening up ’till now).

So how does Beckett justify this policy of withholding aid from the very people we helped pauperise? In Ramallah earlier today, when Beckett met with Palestinian officials (none from Hamas, of course), she said:

“We have said for some considerable time that if a National Unity Government could be formed, based on the Quartet Principles we would be happy to deal with.”

Let us remind ourselves of those Quartet principles:

  1. Hamas has to renounce violence.
  2. Hamas has to recognise Israel right to exist.

When evaluating those demands, we must bear in mind what Prime Minister Tony Blair said in Washington last December, when he affirmed the importance of being “even-handed and just in the application of our values”. In other words, we have to make a distinction between legitimate moral principles and sheer hypocrisy.

The demand that Hamas renounce violence is, in and of itself, completely unjustified. The Palestinians are legally entitled to resist the Israeli occupation, using violence if necessary. But putting that aside for a moment, it is surely obvious to even the most casual observer of the conflict that Israel employs violence on a far greater scale than any Palestinian organisation does. The casualty figures alone are testament to this: last year, according to B’Tselem, Israel killed a total of 683 Palestinians (at least 322 of whom were not engaged in hostilities at the time they were killed), whereas only 23 Israelis were killed by the Palestinians (17 of whom were civilian). That’s a ratio of roughly 1:30. Of course, the predictable response to this is to say that Israel doesn’t intend to kill civilians, whereas Hamas does. Whilst, as I say, predictable, this response has no basis in reality. Turning to the human rights organisations, we can see that in the past year alone Israel has committed numerous war crimes against the Palestinians, either deliberately attacking civilian targets or else firing indiscriminately into civilian crowds. To quote Amnesty International,

“Deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, also accused Israel of committing war crimes:

“B’Tselem determines that the bombing of the power plant was illegal and defined as a war crime in International Humanitarian Law, as the attack was aimed at a purely civilian object. It also was an act of collective punishment.”

The UN Human Rights Council likewise concluded that Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip last year breached international humanitarian law. John Dugard reported that even before the beginning of `Operation Summer Rains’ on June 25,

“It seemed clear to me that the Government of Israeli had embarked upon a siege in order to bring about regime change. In the process little attention was being paid to human rights, as shelling and sonic booms violated the fundamental rights to life and human dignity, and even less attention was paid to the constraints of international humanitarian law; it was already clear that collective punishment was to be the instrument used to bring about regime change.”

So, while the EU and the U.S. are demanding that Hamas must “renounce violence”, Israeli violence, which is of a much larger scale, is deemed acceptable. Indeed, the U.S. does not just accept Israeli violence; it actively works to facilitate it. Moreover, all of this is ignoring the important fact that there is a qualitative difference between Israeli and Palestinian violence – namely, that the Palestinians are fighting in self-defence, whereas Israel is fighting an aggression. The first demand of the Quartet can, then, be dismissed as unreasonable and hypocritical.

The second demand of Hamas is that it recognise Israel’s “right to exist”. The concept of states having “rights” is truly bizarre, being as it is, in the words of independent journalist Jonathan Cook’s, “not only strange but alien to international law.” In his article, `The Recognition Trap`, Cook notes that,

“the Palestinians’ problems did not start with the election of Hamas. Israel’s occupation is four decades old, and no Palestinian leader has ever been able to extract from Israel a promise of real statehood in all of the occupied territories: not the mukhtars, the largely compliant local leaders, who for decades were the only representatives allowed to speak on behalf of the Palestinians after the national leadership was expelled; not the Palestinian Authority under the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat, who returned to the occupied territories in the mid-1990s after the PLO had recognised Israel; not the leadership of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” who first called for an end to the armed intifada; and now not the leaders of Hamas, even though they have repeatedly called for a long-term truce (hudna) as the first step in building confidence.

Similarly, few Palestinians doubt that Israel will continue to entrench the occupation — just as it did during the supposed peace- making years of Oslo, when the number of Jewish settlers doubled in the occupied territories — even if Hamas is ousted and a government of national unity, of technocrats or even of Fatah takes its place.”

Cook also corrects the false impression that it would do no harm to the Palestinians to “recognise” Israel. As he says, to do so would in effect “signify that the Palestinian government was publicly abandoning its own goal of struggling to create a viable Palestinian state.” Why? Because Israel has so far refused to “demarcate its own future borders”, thus leaving as “an open question” what it considers the “existence” it is demanding Hamas “recognise” to be. “We do know”, Cook notes, “that no one in the Israeli leadership is talking about a return to Israel’s borders that existed before the 1967 war, or probably anything close to it.” Thus, demanding that Hamas “recognise Israel” is effectively asking it to recognise the legitimacy of the occupation. Once again, this is a completely unreasonable demand in and of itself.

But putting that aside for a moment, as before, a quick look at the facts will immediately lay bare the breathtaking hypocrisy evident in the Quartet’s second “principle”. While it is true that Hamas has not recognised the “right” of Israel to exist (although its language has been getting more and more ambiguous in this regard), it is also uncontroversially true that, as Norman Finkelstein explains, no Israeli leader, no major Israeli political party and no high-ranking Israeli official has ever recognised the right of a Palestinian state to exist on the areas designated to it under international law (that is, the whole of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem). What’s more, unlike Hamas, Israel has not only refused to recognise the right of a Palestinian state to exist in words, but it has actively pursued policies designed to ensure that no viable Palestinian state can ever exist for close to 40 years. Despite this, no one is talking about placing sanctions on Israel. John Dugard’s confusion as to why the PA is being punished as opposed to Israel is therefore completely understandable. He writes,

“This [the imposition of sanctions on the PA] is difficult to understand. Israel is in violation of major Security Council and General Assembly resolutions dealing with unlawful territorial change and the violation of human rights and has failed to implement the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, yet it escapes the imposition of sanctions. Instead the Palestinian people, rather than the Palestinian Authority, have been subjected to possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.”

So, to summarise so far: Israel and the international community have worked tirelessly to topple the Hamas government ever since it was elected last January, by collectively punishing the Palestinian people until they overthrow it from within. The West has justified its crippling economic sanctions on the PA by conditioning aid on Hamas’ fulfilment of two absurd demands that, if applied consistently, would necessitate equally rigorous (if not far more so) sanctions on Israel. As a result of this blackmail, the Palestinian economy, which was already “experiencing the worst economic depression in modern history” (according to the World Bank), has essentially shut down, plunging millions of already desperate people into the depths of poverty.

That is the situation and the context in which to examine the current internecine fighting in Gaza. Any sensible analysis must also take into account the following relevant facts. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President and a leading Fatah politician, has openly sided with the occupiers throughout the concerted international campaign of aggression against the Hamas government. The collaboration began with the elections last January, when Fatah accepted U.S. money to help finance its campaign. When Israel’s theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian tax revenue combined with the economic sanctions resulted in roughly a million Palestinian civil service workers having to work without pay for months on end, President Abbas used this as an excuse to attack Hamas, despite knowing that the crisis had nothing to do with Hamas’ mismanagement of the economy and everything to do with outside intervention. Abbas has endorsed the ridiculous and hypocritical demands made of Hamas by Israel, the U.S. and the EU, and has accepted tens of millions of dollars in military aid from the U.S. to roughly double the size of his private army. He has even allowed his soldiers to be trained by U.S. forces. The purpose is clear: in the coming conflict between Fatah and Hamas, Abbas’ security force is now in effect a proxy army for the United States and Israel. Fatah has openly and brazenly collaborated with the enemy against the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. As I have written before, there can really be no doubt about the current alliance between Fatah and the U.S./Israel, as illustrated by the following incident (which happened last October):

“A US volunteer was kidnapped by a previously unknown group and held for a day in Nablus. He was on Thursday freed unharmed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and brought to the mayor’s office accompanied by 20 al-Aqsa militants. The U.S and Fatah, and by extension the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, are now firm allies, out of common interest more than anything else. The U.S and Israel need Hamas out of office, because they know that Hamas will stand up and demand from them that Palestinian rights are upheld. Fatah, history has shown, will not.”

In short, then, there is no Palestinian “civil war”. The current violence is instead best understood in terms of a coup by Abbas and Fatah, who are acting as proxies for Israel and the United States, against the Hamas government. Unfortunately, the Hamas government could well go down as the latest in a long line of democratically elected governments overthrown by the United States after they espoused policies unfavourable to U.S. interests: Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Arbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Allende (Chile, 1973), Aristide (Haiti, 1991), Chavez (Venezuela, 2002), Aristide (Haiti, 2004)…could `Haniyeh (Palestinian Authority, 2007)’ be next? Unfortunately for the security of both Israeli and Palestinian civilians and for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, the list of U.S.-backed coups looks set to grow even longer in 2007. The question is: will we allow it to happen again?

Cross-posted at The Heathlander