Nicolas Pelham
September 2, 2010
(Nicolas Pelham is The Economist’s Palestinian affairs correspondent and a former senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. He is based in Jerusalem.)
Every year or so the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas confounds the Western policymakers who have worked to deny it power since its electoral triumph in January 2006. If the goal of Western policy is to keep the Islamists out of sight, out of mind, then Hamas is like a jack-in-the-box, periodically jumping out of its confines to general surprise and consternation.
In June 2006, after Israel had led the international community in withholding the Islamist government’s revenues and killed its new police chief, Hamas dug a tunnel from Gaza into Israel and captured a soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit; in June 2007 it responded to Western efforts to bolster rival forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas by overrunning their security bases in Gaza; in January 2008 it broke out of its quarantine by knocking down a seven-mile long wall Israel had built to separate Gaza from Egypt; in December 2008 it launched a rocket campaign designed to pressure Israel into lifting its punishing blockade of the coastal strip and precipitated the Gaza war. Each time, whether through military pummeling or political cajoling, the West and its regional allies have strained to wrestle Hamas back into its box.
On August 31, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu headed to Washington for a White House dinner with Abbas, an event billed by the Obama administration as the launch of a renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Hamas gunmen shot dead four Jewish settlers near the isolated settlement of Beit Haggai in the West Bank’s southern Hebron hills. A second attack the following night near a settlement northeast of Ramallah underscored the point: Once again, the Islamist faction has forcibly reminded the international community that it can intrude upon the diplomatic sphere from which it is formally proscribed.
Business as Usual
The back-in-the box pattern held following Israel’s interdiction of the international aid flotilla sent to break the siege on Gaza in late May. After a seemingly botched and bloody commando raid, which killed nine passengers, Israel routed the flotilla to the port of Ashdod, redoubled its naval blockade and reestablished itself as Gaza’s gatekeeper.
To appease embarrassed allies and soothe inflamed global opinion, there have been some modifications to the strict embargo that Israel and Egypt have enforced on Gaza since 2006. Israel has publicly accepted the principle that it will allow all goods not on a black list into Gaza, rather than banning all items but those on a white list. The influx of goods has risen threefold since the flotilla raid, though it remains far short of the 500 trucks that entered each day prior to the closure. But Netanyahu has avoided succumbing to formal agreements of the type that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, hammered out with ex-Israeli premier Ariel Sharon on movement in and out of Gaza, declined European Union offers to post international monitors at the crossings, and preserved Israel’s prerogative to set its own terms. Israel’s black list or gray list of “dual-use” goods, already said to be 3,000 items long, continues to restrict the entry of raw materials vital for Gaza’s post-war reconstruction, except under the tutelage of international organizations, on the grounds that Hamas might appropriate the concrete to build bunkers.
remainder:
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero090210.html
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