Victims twice over

Once again, the Palestinians find themselves pawns of regional power struggles while brutalised by a barbaric Israel, writes Azmi Ashour*

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Developments in the Middle East bring to the fore many contradictions, ambiguities and falsehoods. Events in Gaza, today, throw into relief the fact that some of the world's commonly held perceptions on the Palestinian- Israeli conflict are founded on little more than skewed facts and myths. Foremost among these misperceptions is Israel's peaceful intent. Israel has routinely snubbed sincere peace initiatives to end the conflict, preferring instead to manage the conflict in its own relentless way, which depends heavily on aggression, killing and destruction, along with economic siege, all given a veneer of legitimacy for domestic and foreign consumption. Consequently, the other side must be forever vigilant in order to forestall an attack that could happen at any moment on such feeble pretexts as "self-defence" cited by Israel and those who have vested interests in its policies. Which leads us to the question as to whether the universally acknowledged right to self-defence is one that is denied to the Palestinians.

As events in Lebanon in 2006 and these weeks in Gaza testify, violence on the part of the resistance has always been in response to Israeli violence. After more than 50 years of being on the receiving end of the Israeli creed of employing brute force, the Palestinians have developed a kind of immunity to fear or surrender. Over time, the Palestinians have evolved the ability to choose the most appropriate means to contend with Israel's powerful and advanced military machine. The premise that begins, "As long as I am going to die sooner or later at the hands of the Israeli occupation," has given rise to a resistance culture that has manifested itself in different forms depending upon the nature of the threat it faces and that has sometimes inflicted human and material damage on the Israeli side equivalent to that the occupation army has inflicted on the Palestinians. The means are crude and simple, but they have created a kind of deterrent. Suicide bombers and other such acts of martyrdom may strike Western observers as odd, but to the Palestinian resistance mentality they are a justifiable deterrent. According to this logic, the lives of Israeli civilians are worth no more or less than the lives of Palestinian civilians. If Palestinian civilians die from Israeli bullets or missiles, then it should come as no surprise that Israeli civilians might die from one of the only means of defence available to the Palestinians.

As important as the external component is in such a conflict in which the two sides are so unevenly matched, the weight of that component is contingent upon its actual power to influence events. The US is highly influential here, not only because it is the world's sole superpower but also and more significantly because of its special relationship with Israel, which translates into military, political and economic support. The balances are thus more heavily skewed in Israel's favour, as has been continuously borne out by US positions. It is very rare that the US has been less than 100 per cent supportive of Israel regardless of Israel's actions. Only when it would be too embarrassing for it to openly back Israeli offences, as is currently the case in Gaza, does Washington confine itself to calling for a halt to violence, the implication inevitably being that the Palestinians are to blame for the violence. Indeed, this theme is central to Israeli and US rhetoric: the Palestinians are inevitably at fault whenever peace efforts break down or violence flares. Hence, Israel is justified in going on the offensive in "self-defence", even though Palestinian violence is the natural response to Israel's uninterrupted brutality, which takes the forms of killings, destruction, economic siege and other forms of collective punishment that force the Palestinians into having to choose between death one way or another.

Israeli policy relies on putting the cart before the horse and Washington has always sustained this logic, even though it knows perfectly well that the Palestinian Authority does not control the Palestinian street. Israel played the cart-before-the-horse game with great expertise following Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and subsequently when Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007. Unfortunately, Hamas played into Israel's hands when it joined in the game on behalf of other regional parties instead of acting practically on behalf of Palestinian interests. Nothing could have better served the Israeli ploy of shrugging off responsibility for its own behaviour and casting the full burden of culpability on the Palestinians.

If some had hoped that the US would step in and compel Israel to halt its recent aggression they were soon disappointed. The US record of covering for Israel indicates that the US believes that it has nothing to lose by sustaining its thoroughly pro- Israeli position. In fact, by maintaining this position the US has kept a card up its sleeve -- the hint that it might actually exert pressure on Israel -- to pressure the Arabs into falling in line with its policies, as occurred in the run up to the war on Iraq and in the war on terror. Moreover, as long as the Arabs do as America wishes and do not use their political and economic capacities to further their legitimate rights, Washington will have little reason to change tack and to depart significantly from the Israeli line.

This leads us to the most crucial questions. Will Israel and the US ever realise that the contorted logic which drives Israel's ongoing brutality and belligerency against the Palestinians will only breed more violence and that military and economic might are not the only keys to winning the battle? Simultaneously, will Hamas and the regional parties that are using it realise that their game of using the Palestinian cause in power politics, to settle scores with the US or for other purposes than finding a just solution to that cause, makes the Palestinian people themselves the victims twice over?

* The writer is a political analyst at the quarterly journal Al-Demoqrateya published by Al-Ahram.