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Egypt's President Mubarak and France's President Sarkozy embrace after news conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Jan. 6, 2009. (Reuters Photo) |
As Israel continues to widen its genocidal military campaign against Gaza which has so far killed almost 700 Palestinians and injured more than 3100, news sources recently indicated an Egyptian initiative that allegedly seeks an immediate ceasefire between the combatants for a limited time period to allow for humanitarian aid to Gaza. The initiative also calls for subsequent meetings of Israeli and Palestinian officials to prevent any "repetition of military action" and to deal with the "root causes of the conflict". Another aspect of the initiative calls for finding mechanisms for further control of Gaza's borders, preventing weapons smuggling, and hosting Palestinian reconciliation meetings to create an "internationally-acceptable" Palestinian government.
While the exact details of the initiative remain unclear at the moment, the Israeli security cabinet has voted for the continuation of the military campaign and the Jewish state indicated that it has agreed on the concept of a cease-fire "in principle", but is studying the details of the initiative before officially endorsing it. It has promised to send two envoys to Cairo to negotiate the details of the initiative. The Abbas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) has automatically welcomed the initiative and indicated its total commitment to ensure its success.
While the proposal is supported by France and carries with it the seemingly humanitarian goal of ending the fighting and achieving a momentary pause to the genocidal Israeli campaign against the people of Gaza, an understanding of the complexities and intricacies involved in the conflict itself and a careful reading of the implications of the Egyptian proposal, leaves little space for any optimism. If anything, the proposal if endorsed will complicate the conflict, heighten regional polarization, and ultimately reward Israeli aggression with tangible benefits.
The War on Gaza: Hamas' Rockets or Hamas Itself?
| The proposal if endorsed will complicate the conflict, heighten regional polarization, and ultimately reward Israeli aggression with tangible benefits. |
While Western, Israeli, and some Arab media outlets have portrayed this conflict as one which is solely directed against weakening Hamas' military wing and reducing its rocket-launching capabilities, the scale, scope, and ferocity of the Israeli military onslaught indicates that Israel is interested in crippling Hamas itself since the movement and its supporters represent the last bastion of resistance to Western-Israeli plans aimed at liquidating the entire Palestinian issue and imposing a humiliating settlement on the Palestinians. According to Ha'aretz, sources in the Israeli defense establishment said that Ehud Barak had instructed the IDF to prepare for the war over six months ago. Israeli officials have indicated that this is a full-scale war that will not end until Hamas is visibly humiliated and Israel's capacity for deterrence is revived after the IDF's mediocre performance in the 2006 War on Lebanon.
More specifically, the crisis in Gaza is an important part of an ongoing and wider regional conflict that has split the Middle East into a so-called "moderate front" composed of countries fully supportive of US and Israeli policies and a "rejectionist front" that includes Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas, and other Palestinian resistance factions. It is important to understand that Egypt's official position in the crisis has been exceptionally and unambiguously supportive of Israeli justifications for the war; official newspapers in Egypt despite their timid condemnation of Israeli massacres have been engaged in a relentless campaign against Hamas blaming the Islamic movement and their Iranian and Syrian backers for the crisis.
For the past few years, the Egyptian government has been actively collaborating with Western and Israeli efforts aimed at the imposition of a strict blockade against the Gaza Strip in order to weaken the democratically-elected Hamas movement. In the process, the horrendous siege has taken its toll on the lives of 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip who constitute the movement's main base of support. In fact, the Egyptian government has adopted shoot-to-kill policies on the borders, undertook draconian measures aimed at tighter control of border crossings, and has collaborated with US Army Engineering Corps to destroy cross-border tunnels a lifeline for the Palestinians bringing in food, medicine, or weapons to the besieged population of Gaza.
Recent reports from Israeli newspapers have indicated joint Egyptian-Israeli cooperation in the construction of a multi-million dollar electronic fence and a 12-meter high concrete barrier that runs along the entire Egyptian-Gaza border similar to Israel's apartheid separation wall in the West Bank. Egypt's fitful reluctance to open the Rafah border crossing except under the most stringiest of conditions coupled with the fact that the Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Levni, threatened Hamas from Cairo while standing beside the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Abou El-Gheit, less than 48 hours before the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza, solidified the popular perception that Egypt is an accomplice with the Israeli onslaught against Gaza.
The Dilemmas of the Egyptian Initiative
| The crisis in Gaza is an important part of an ongoing and wider regional conflict that has split the Middle East into a so-called "moderate front" and a "rejectionist front". |
Egypt's justification of Israel's military campaign, its active participation in the siege of Gaza, and the subsequent popular regional uproar against Egyptian policies, has weakened the credibility of Egypt's mediation efforts and has put its success at stake. It must be noted that Egypt has also rejected regional calls interested in holding an Arab summit for the presentation of a collective Arab position, and has shown that it is more interested in presenting unilateral proposals that receive Western and Israeli acceptance. By singlehandedly presenting its proposal without collective Arab and/or wider regional acceptance, the Egyptian government is adopting a go-it-alone policy in an effort to pre-empt other regional initiatives which might be more representative of a collective regional diplomatic effort.
More seriously, the Egyptian proposal aims at sidestepping other influential regional actors who might have been interested in presenting alternative proposals. Turkey, Syria, and Qatar have all been very vocal in their criticism of the Israeli campaign and have shown their willingness to play a role in resolving the current conflict. Yet, the Egyptian proposal has only been thoroughly discussed with the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, and has not been presented as a collective regional initiative. This has prompted Osama Hamdan, the Representative of Hamas in Lebanon, to suggest that his movement needs to study the Egyptian proposal in addition to other regional initiatives since any proposal that does not have the acceptance of Palestinian factions fighting on the ground will not hold.
| The Egyptian proposal aims at sidestepping other influential regional actors who might have been interested in presenting alternative proposals. |
The Egyptian proposal is also problematic in terms of the ambiguity of its wording and the mechanisms for the implementation of its clauses. It suggests meetings involving Palestinian, European, and Israeli officials to discuss the "root causes of the conflict" while not specifically mentioning who is to represent the Palestinian side in subsequent negotiations. However, given the wholehearted Egyptian, Israeli, and Western support for the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA), there is no room for speculation as to who is considered the intended Palestinian negotiating partner amidst ongoing political and military efforts aimed at further marginalization of the elected government of Hamas. In other words, the process of creating what the proposal calls "an internationally-accepted" Palestinian government will solely revolve around figures associated with the PA in Ramallah as long as they are "internationally accepted" irrespective of their electoral popularity or the fact that Mahmoud Abbas' presidency itself officially ends on Jan. 9th.
Thus, the Egyptian proposal de-facto nullifies the results of the 2006 popular elections which brought Hamas to power and assumes that the movement will automatically be sidestepped after this war ends.
More seriously, while the Egyptian initiative calls for an immediate cease-fire, it does not explicitly call for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, nor does it indicate mechanisms for how this should be accomplished. This leaves the door open for a prolonged Israeli military presence and a re-occupation of the Gaza Strip, thus rewarding the Israelis for their genocidal campaign against Gaza.
| The Egyptian proposal morally equates between Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimization. |
In addition, the Egyptian proposal morally equates between Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimization, and does not differentiate between the missiles and bombs of the region's strongest military and the small Palestinian rockets aimed simply at self-defense. It also seeks to limit any prospects for Palestinian re-armament in the face of any future Israeli aggression. Thus, the proposal coming from the region's largest country legitimizes the total liquidation of any Palestinian armed resistance. By seeking to create further mechanisms for tighter border controls and treating the Palestinian issue as an exclusively charitable concern, the proposal if endorsed would leave the Palestinians living in Gaza weak, defenseless, and at the mercy of the "humanitarian" goodwill of Israeli and Egyptian authorities.
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