As the white phosphorus smoke begins to settle in the Gaza Strip, popular opinion throughout the world has turned against Israel. Regardless of the initial motivation for the bombing campaign and invasion, it is the manner in which Israel has conducted itself that has so horrified the world. Like a child’s sadistic destruction of a nest of ants, Israel has ground Gaza and its inhabitants to dust under its combat boots. The message is simple: Israel reserves the sovereign right to utilize violence in the pursuit of its political goals.

            The rockets launched into Israel by Hamas have been characterised by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Defence Secretary Ehud Barak as the gravest of crimes. But can the deaths of 28 people since 2001 really justify the brutal destruction that Israel has wrought upon Gaza? Of course the targeting of civilians by Hamas is totally unacceptable, but by refusing to engage in a dialogue with the elected representatives of the Palestinian people, Israel has significantly limited the avenues through which Hamas can press for change. While politicians continue to shun Hamas as a terrorist entity they actually push it towards violence as the only effective means of expression.

            Ehud Barak’s mantra throughout the war has been that ‘no other nation would tolerate attacks upon it by a neighbour.’ What this explanation deliberately fails to take into account however, is the question of whether there is a nation in the world that would not respond with violence to a blockade of its territory that prevents the delivery of food, fuel and vital medical supplies? The siege, which has been in place since June 2007, has shattered the economy of Gaza which has effectively become a prison for its estimated 1.3 million inhabitants.

            The impact of this siege has been described by the UN Relief and Works Agency as a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ and by John Holmes, UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, as a ‘collective punishment [that] is contrary to international humanitarian law.’ Yet politicians throughout the West have offered support for Israel’s argument that they attacked Gaza in self-defence. This is despite the fact that it could equally be argued that it was Israel who first violated the ceasefire when, in November 2008, they killed six Palestinians in rocket attacks and ground incursions into Gaza.

            While the behaviour of Hamas has been abhorrent, often deliberately endangering the lives of those it is duty bound to protect, Israeli policy has functioned to drive Palestinian political support towards the extremists. The democratic election of any political party is a reflection of the general will of the people. If Israel truly wishes for peace then its leaders must ensure that they begin to recognise and address the grievances of the Palestinian people. In this light the disproportionate brutality of the recent invasion appears almost suicidal. How can moderate Palestinians persuade their people to recognise Israel’s right to exist when they are burying their children and sifting through the ruins of their homes?

            This very fear was voiced by leaders of the comparatively moderate Fatah party last week, who stated that the Gaza war has played directly into the hands of Hamas. The governors of Gaza, who first came to prominence as a resistance movement during the First Intifada, had been suffering from a decline in support as they struggled to adapt to the mundane realities of civil administration. With the Israeli invasion however, they have been able to reprise their role as a resistance force and purchase further political currency through offering victims compensation. Resentment that had been directed towards Hamas will now, in all probability, shift to Israel, further damaging any possibility of a lasting peace.

            The grim reality is that the level of compromise required from Israel and the Palestinians to ensure peace, surpasses the limits to which each party is willing to go. While Hamas refuses to recognise the Jewish state, Israel will not contemplate the right of return for the estimated 3.5 million Palestinian refugees who have been displaced from their lands since the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948. Israel also refuses to end the practice of settlement in the occupied territories. The ongoing expropriation of Palestinian land and property has violated over 30 UN Security Council resolutions since 1968 and makes a two-state solution almost impossible.

            The reluctance of Israel to offer anything more than crumbs to the Palestinian people during negotiations has, perhaps more than anything, undermined the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Israeli policy has consistently sought to disempower the Palestinians as a means of reinforcing its own hegemony. The fear of a people, surrounded on all sides by enemies and carrying the weight of a history of relentless persecution, has driven a strategy in which no quarter is offered or expected. Even peaceful protests are broken up in a storm of tear gas, batons and rubber bullets as Israel attempts to silence any suggestion that an injustice has been perpetrated.

            Refusal to talk to Hamas has left the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip without a voice, now Israel has bound their hands and feet. These actions evoke philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of sovereign power in Discipline and Punish. In this work Foucault outlines how, in dispensing justice, absolute rulers inflict ‘ritual marks of […] vengeance’ upon ‘the body of the condemned’ and ‘deploy before the eyes of spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous, irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the sovereign and of his power.’

            The scar that Israel has inflicted upon the face of Gaza is a symbolic retaliation to Hamas’ own symbolic act of defiance. Like the blockade, it is an act of collective punishment that seeks to discipline the population of Gaza and demonstrate that the sovereign power of Israel exists above the law. Ehud Olmert acknowledged as much this week when he told Israelis that the soldiers sent to Gaza, many of whom stand accused of war crimes, ‘are completely safe from different tribunals’ and that ‘Israel will help and protect them’. Until a semblance of balance is restored to the relationship between Israel and Palestine it is hard to see how there can be a lasting peace for this beleaguered region.   

                       

           

           

           

             

             

             

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