Divide and Rule
By Uri Avnery
By Uri Avnery
August 11, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Binyamin Netanyahu is not known as a classical scholar, but even so he has adopted the Roman maxim Divide et Impera, divide and rule.
The main (and perhaps only) goal of his policy
is to extend the rule of Israel, as the "Nation-State of the Jewish
People", over all of Eretz Israel, the historical land of Palestine. This
means ruling all of the West Bank and covering it with Jewish settlements,
while denying any civil rights to its 2.5 million plus Arab inhabitants.
East Jerusalem, with its 300,000 Arab
inhabitants, has already been formally annexed to Israel, without granting them
Israeli citizenship or the right to take part in Knesset elections.
That leaves the Gaza Strip, a tiny enclave with
1.8 million plus Arab inhabitants, most of them descendants of refugees from
Israel. The last thing in the world Netanyahu wants is to include these, too,
in the Israeli imperium.
There is a historical precedent. After the 1956
Sinai War, when President Eisenhower demanded that Israel immediately return
all the Egyptian territory it had conquered, many voices in Israel called for
the annexation of the Gaza Strip to Israel. David Ben-Gurion adamantly refused.
He did not want hundreds of thousands more Arabs in Israel. So he gave the
strip too back to Egypt.
The annexation of Gaza, while keeping the West
Bank, would create an Arab majority in the Jewish State. True, a small
majority, but a rapidly growing one.
The inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip belong to the same Palestinian people. They are closely connected by
national identity and family ties. But they are now separate entities,
geographically divided by Israeli territory, which at its narrowest point is
about 30 miles broad.
Both territories were occupied by Israel in the
1967 Six-day War. But for many years, Palestinians could move freely from one
to the other. Palestinians from Gaza could study in the university of Bir Zeit
in the West Bank, a woman from Ramallah in the West Bank could marry a man from
Beth Hanun in the Gaza strip.
Ironically, this freedom of movement came to an
end with the 1994 Oslo "peace" agreement, in which Israel explicitly
recognized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as one single territory, and
undertook to open four "free passages" between them. Not a single one
was ever opened.
The West Bank is now nominally administered by
the Palestinian Authority, also created by the Oslo agreement, which is
recognized by the UN and the majority of the world’s nations as the State of
Palestine under Israeli military occupation. Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, a close
colleague of the late Yasser Arafat, is committed to the Arab Peace plan,
initiated by Saudi Arabia, which recognizes the State of Israel in its pre-1967
borders. No one doubts that he desires peace, based on the Two-State Solution.
In 2006, general elections in both territories
were won by Hamas (Arab initials of "Movement of Islamic
Resistance"). Under Israeli pressure, the results were annulled. Whereupon
Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip. That’s where we are now: two separate
Palestinian entities, whose rulers hate each other.
Superficial logic would dictate that the
Israeli government support Mahmoud Abbas, who is committed to peace, and help
him against Hamas, which at least officially is committed to the destruction of
Israel. Well, it ain’t necessarily so.
True, Israel has fought several wars against
the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, but it has made no effort to occupy it again, after
withdrawing from it in 2005. Netanyahu, like Ben-Gurion before him, does not
want to have all those Arabs. He contents himself with a blockade that turns it
into "the world’s largest open-air prison".
Yet, a year after the last Israel-Gaza war, the
region is rife with rumors about indirect negotiations going on in secret
between Israel and Gaza about a long-range armistice (‘hudna" in Arabic),
even bordering on unofficial peace.
How come? Peace with the radical enemy regime
in Gaza, while opposing the peace-oriented Palestinian Authority in the West
Bank?
Sounds crazy, but actually isn’t. For
Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas is the greater enemy. He attracts international
sympathy, the UN and most of the world’s governments recognize his State of
Palestine, he may well be on the way to establish a real independent
Palestinian state, including Gaza.
No such danger emanates from the Hamas
mini-state in Gaza. It is detested throughout the world, even by most of the
Arab states, as a "terrorist" mini-state.
Simple pragmatic logic would push Israel
towards Hamas. The tiny enclave does not present a real danger to the mighty
Israeli military machine, at most a small irritation that can be dealt with by
a small military operation every few years, as happened during the last few
years.
It would be logical for Netanyahu to make
unofficial peace with the regime in Gaza and continue the fight against the
regime in Ramallah. Why maintain the naval blockade on the Gaza strip? Why not
do the opposite? Let the Gazans build a deep-sea harbor, and rebuild their
beautiful international airport (which was destroyed by Israel)? It would be
easy to put in place an inspection regime to prevent the smuggling in of arms.
Once there was talk of Gaza turning into an
Arab Singapore. That is a wild exaggeration, but the Gaza Strip may well become
a rich oasis of trade, a harbor of entry for the West Bank, Jordan and beyond.
This would dwarf the PLO regime in the West
Bank, deprive it of its international standing and avert the danger of peace.
The annexation of the West Bank – now called "Judea and Samaria" even
by Israeli leftists – could proceed step by step, first unofficially, then
officially. Jewish settlements would cover the land more and more, and in the
end nothing else would remain there except some small Palestinian enclaves.
Palestinians would be encouraged to leave.
Fortunately (for the Palestinians) such logical
thinking is alien to Netanyahu and his cohorts. Faced with two alternatives to
choose from, he chooses neither.
While seeking an unofficial hudna with Hamas in
Gaza, he keeps up the total blockade of the Gaza Strip. At the same time, he
tightens the oppression in the West Bank, where the occupation army now
routinely kills some six Palestinians per week.
Behind this non-logic there lurks a dream: the
dream that in the end all the Arabs would leave Palestine and just leave us
alone.
Was this the hidden hope of Zionism from the
beginning? Judging from its literature, the answer is no. In his futuristic
novel, "Altneuland", Theodor Herzl describes a Jewish commonwealth in
which Arabs live happily as equal citizens. The young Ben-Gurion tried to prove
that the Palestinian Arabs are really Jews who at some time had no choice but
to adopt Islam. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the most extremist Zionist and forefather
of today’s Likud, wrote a poem in which he foresaw a Jewish state where
"The son of Arabia, the son of Nazareth and my son / will flourish
together in abundance and happiness".
Yet many people believe that these were empty
words, attuned to the realities of their time, but that underneath it all was
the basic will to turn all of Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state. This
desire, they believe, has unconsciously directed all Zionist action from then
to now.
However, this situation did not result from any
diabolical Israeli plan. Israelis don’t plan things, they just push them along.
By splitting into two mutually hating entities,
the Palestinian people actually collaborate with this Zionist dream. Instead of
uniting against a vastly superior occupier, they undermine each other. In both
mini-capitals, Ramallah and Gaza, there rules now a local ruling class, which
has a vested interest in sabotaging national unity.
Instead of uniting against Israel, they hate
and fight each other. Cutting the small Palestinian nation into two even
smaller, mutually hostile entities, both helpless against Israel, is an act of
political suicide.
On the face of it, the right-wing Israeli dream
has won. The Palestinian people, torn apart and rent by mutual hatreds, are far
removed from an effectual struggle for freedom and independence. But this is a
temporary situation.
In the end, this situation will explode. The
Palestine population, growing day by day (or night by night) will come together
again and restart the struggle for liberation. Like every other people on
earth, they will fight for their freedom.
Therefore, the "divide et impera"
principle can turn into a catastrophe. The real long-term interest of Israel is
to make peace with the entire Palestinian people, living peacefully in a state
of their own, in close cooperation with Israel.
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