Eyeless in Gaza
In case you didn’t know it, “Eyeless in Gaza” is the name of a British, post-punk New Wave musical duo who chose the name of their band from the novel by the same name by British writer Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s novel, which has nothing to do with the Middle East, was first published in 1936. Its title is borrowed from a line in Milton’s poem, Samson Agonistes, portraying the fate of the Biblical character Samson, who finally achieves revenge on the Philistines by pulling down the temple of Dagon with the last remains of his strength, and killing, in his dying act, more Philistines than he slew when he was a strong young man.
But less than two months after the much-publicized one-day conference in Annapolis, Maryland, hosted by President Bush to re-launch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, “eyeless in Gaza” might well be an appropriate subhead—to use journalistic jargon—for anyone associated with negotiations over the future of Gaza and of Israeli-Palestinian relations as a whole.
On January 21, Israel decided to lift the restrictions on the supply of fuel and other essentials into Gaza that it had imposed since the previous week. Defense Minister Ehud Barak insisted that there would no be a “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Other observers noted that Israel had come under intense international pressure to ease its restrictions on Gaza’s 1.5 million people. Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, and international development secretary, Douglas Alexander, had issued a joint statement saying that “Israeli security and justice for Palestinians will not be achieved by cutting off fuel or by firing rockets.” Israel said it would relent in its blockade of Gaza by allowing in some fifty delivery trucks.
On January 23, Hamas, whose security forces control Gaza, took the law into their own hands by suddenly opening the border between Gaza and Egypt. After exploding fifteen landmines at different points along the seven-mile fence separating Gaza from Egypt, Hamas security officials allowed hundreds of thousands of Gazans to stream across into Egypt in order to buy both necessities and consumer goods to bring back to Gaza. The police on the Egyptian side of the border did not inspect the documents of Gazans and merely made sure, in response to an order by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, that no arms were among the items carried back into Gaza. One Gazan resident sniffed at that order, commenting that rifles and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) were easier to buy on the streets of Gaza itself than Coca-Cola.
Israel’s restrictions on Gaza have been, in general, part of a response that the international community has taken to the violent take-over of Gaza by the Islamic political party Hamas last June. During several days of vicious fighting in June 2007, representatives of the Palestinian Authority, who have nominally been responsible for implementing Palestinian executive authority in Gaza, were shot in their offices, forced to flee their homes, or in some cases simply thrown out of windows.
Hamas, which does not recognize Israel at all and calls on its followers to hate all Jews and Americans, is the great conundrum for the Israeli-Palestinian talks prodded again into life at Annapolis. How can Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, hope to make good on any agreement he might reach with Israel if Hamas controls the lives of 1.5 million of the 3.9 million Palestinians who live in Gaza?
Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, however, faces a more immediate challenge from Gaza. During the course of 2007, literally thousands of home-made rockets—called Qassams—fired from Gaza fell on the Israeli city of Sderot, which is barely half a mile from Gaza. On one day in January 2008, no fewer than twenty Qassams fell, causing damage, but in this case no injuries or deaths. Qassams, in slightly reduced numbers, have been falling on Sderot all this week. Some 28 percent of Sderot’s adult population (the city has about 20,000 inhabitants) and 30 percent of its children have experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome because of the relentless bombardment.
Israel’s recent ground incursions and air-strikes into Gaza have resulted in the deaths of at least eleven Palestinians, including the son of one Hamas leader, Mahmoud el-Zahar. “A war is going on in the south, every day, every night,” Olmert said in a speech this week. “The most daring and boldest of our soldiers and members of the security services are taking part in it. This war will not stop. The moment will come when the scales will tip in this war and cause the firing in the south to be different from what it is today.”
The only trouble with that comment is that if the war in Gaza does not stop, there cannot possibly be a peace agreement and a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
Gaza has been unflatteringly described as “the armpit of the Middle East.” The 25-mile long strip on the Mediterranean Coast covers about 360 square kilometers and is one of the most overcrowded and impoverished localities in the world, let alone the Middle East. Gaza was originally part of the Ottoman Empire, but after the British conquered Palestine in 1917–1918, it became part of the British Mandate of Palestine. After Britain left Palestine and Israel declared independence, Egypt controlled Gaza from 1948 until the Six-Day War of 1967. Egypt never annexed Gaza, however, nor permitted its citizens Egyptian citizenship. Egypt, moreover, has shown even less interest in ruling Gaza since Israel pulled out the last of its civilian settlements in 2005. Yet if Egypt doesn’t assume some responsibility for Gaza’s future, the festering political and social sore of Gaza will end up infecting Egypt itself.
Some Israelis are arguing that Gaza is such an intractable mess that Israel ought to simply cut it loose: stop providing the 70 percent of Gaza’s electricity that it provides and discontinue to permit humanitarian medicine and food convoys to enter Gaza from Israel. Let Egypt pick up the pieces, they say. But that is unlikely to happen. Humanitarian sentiment both inside Israel and in the outside world would certainly howl if Israel stopped bailing out Gaza.
So this is the cruel dilemma for Israel. It seems to be under moral obligation to maintain life support for a squalid territory from which rockets are daily fired against it with the intention of causing death and destruction. The one thing it cannot do is what Samson did at the Temple of Dagon in Gaza; pull the whole thing down. Even an eyeless man can see that.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Faiths and Worldviews, Global Culture, Thu 24 Jan 2008
