History shows Israel will again fail to implement its agreement with Hamas
By David Morrison | Friends of Lebanon | August 27, 2014
26 August 2014: Palestinian and Israeli leaders have finally agreed an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire to end the seven-week-old Gaza war.
It is appropriate to recall that Israel’s last military offensive against Gaza in November 2012 also ended with an agreement concerning Gaza brokered by Egypt [1]. Under it, both sides were required to cease hostilities and Israel undertook to take steps towards ending its blockade of Gaza. The agreement seemed to have the backing of the US, since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood beside the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Mohamad Amr, when he announced it on 21 November 2012.
What happened to the November 2012 agreement?
So, what happened to this agreement? Basically, Israel failed to fulfill its obligations under it, whereas Hamas fulfilled its obligations to the letter for more than eighteen months – and the international community turned a blind eye to Israel’s failure.
Specifically, in the agreement, Israel promised “to stop all hostilities on the Gaza Strip land, sea and air including incursions and targeting of individuals” and the “opening the crossings and facilitating the movement of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting residents free movement”. Israel didn’t fulfill either of these obligations – it continued to make regular incursions into Gaza (killing 20 Palestinians in Gaza in the following 15 months) and took no steps to lift its economic blockade.
The agreement required Hamas and other Palestinian groups to “stop all hostilities from the Gaza Strip against Israel, including rocket attacks, and attacks along the border”. Hamas did so for more than eighteen months from 21 November 2012. Speaking to a Knesset committee on 30 June 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged this, accusing Hamas “of involvement, for the first time since a Gaza war in 2012, in rocket attacks on Israel”, according to a Reuters report [2].
Other Palestinian groups did fire rockets into Israel, despite being restrained by Hamas. But, according to Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group Middle East and North Africa Programme, in an article dated 1 August 2014 in the London Review of Books[3]:
“During the three months that followed the ceasefire [on 21 November 2012], Shin Bet recorded only a single attack: two mortar shells fired from Gaza in December 2012. …
“[Hamas] set up a new police force tasked with arresting Palestinians who tried to launch rockets. In 2013, fewer were fired from Gaza than in any year since 2003, soon after the first primitive projectiles were shot across the border.”
Israel’s response to quiet along the border
How did Israel respond to this comparative quiet along the border? In his London Review of Books article, Nathan Thrall writes:
“In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza’s waters.
“The end of the closure never came. Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones – agricultural lands that Gazan farmers couldn’t enter without being fired on – were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank.
“Israel had committed [in the November 2012 agreement] to holding indirect negotiations with Hamas over the implementation of the ceasefire but repeatedly delayed them. … The talks never took place. The lesson for Hamas was clear. Even if an agreement was brokered by the US and Egypt, Israel could still fail to honour it.”
If Israel had fulfilled its obligations
Had Israel ceased military incursions into Gaza and taken steps to lift its economic blockade, as it was supposed to do under the agreement, it is virtually certain that Hamas would not have resumed rocket fire. Hamas did resume on 7 July 2014, after Israel made an armed incursion into Gaza and killed seven Hamas members. And if progress was being made towards lifting the blockade, Hamas would have been in a much stronger position to stop other Palestinian groups from firing rockets and mortars into Israel.
So, had Israel fulfilled its obligations under the agreement, it is very likely that rocket and mortar firing into Israel could have been halted altogether without Israeli military action against Gaza.
June 2008 agreement
This is not the first time that Israel has failed to fulfill its obligations under an agreement with Hamas. In June 2008, Egypt brokered an agreement which, like the November 2012 agreement, provided for a cessation of hostilities on both sides and steps by Israel towards ending its blockade [4].
Hamas fulfilled its obligations under this agreement to the letter and, as a result, southern Israel was almost entirely free from firing out of Gaza for four and a half months. But Israel did not ease its economic blockade, let alone lift it, and on the evening of 4 November 2008 (when the world was watching the election of Barack Obama) it made a military incursion into Gaza for the first time since the ceasefire began in June and killed seven members of Hamas. That was the end of that agreement.
A few weeks later Israel embarked on its first major offensive against Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, with the declared objective of suppressing rocket and mortar into Israel.
The lesson of history
The lesson from the above is that the international community will have to ensure that Israel fulfills its obligations in any future agreement with Hamas. Come to think of it, does another agreement need to be negotiated? In reality, all that is necessary is that Israel be persuaded to implement the November 2012 agreement.
References:
[1] http://www.upi.com/blog/2012/11/21/Read-the-Gaza-ceasefire-deal/7401353523034/
[2] uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/30/uk-palestinian-israel-idUKKBN0F51CZ20140630
[3] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/nathan-thrall/hamass-chances
[4] news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7462554.stm
David Morrison is a Political Officer of Sadaka: The Ireland Palestine Alliance and co-author of A Dangerous Delusion: Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran (April 2013). Morrison can be reached at david@sadaka.ie.
For a virtual tour of the destruction of Gaza, see visual journalist Lewis Whyld’s gallery here.
- See also “The Victims of Gaza: A List of Palestinians Killed in Israel’s Ongoing Assault” (26 August 2014)
- See also David Morrison’s “Gaza: Israeli and Palestinian fatalities” (24 July 2014) and “Gaza: Nobody needed to die” (26 July 2014)
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The Fiction of the Jewish History in Palestine
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan | The Palestine Chronicle | April 8, 2011
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NNC Pierce Morgan on March 18, 2011 that he might agree to a Palestinian state through negotiations. And he added, “We will make territorial concessions although it is very painful to do that in our ancestral land.” Netanyahu was not talking about Poland where his ancestors lived. He was talking about Palestine where generations of its indigenous population ancestors lived, cultivated the land and are buried.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism created a new Jewish identity of blood and soil. To mobilize their followers and supporters and appeal to their emotions, the Zionists created myths. Zionism started as a tribal religion without god, but in order to fulfill its function as a unifying force, Zionism required external religious and race symbols, not inner content. Its leaders regarded metaphysical religious belief and purity of race as having value in itself. They created a divine paradisiacal state of merger with the gods. Despite his non-religious ideology, Herzl’s writings were replete with religious references. The Jews should settle in Palestine because, in his words, “the Temple will be visible from long distance, for it is only our ancient faith that has kept us together”.
The Zionists and their supporters have invested tremendous financial and scholarly resources to work within the Hebrew Bible historical narratives to affirm the links between the intrusive Zionist population and the ancient Israelite past, and by doing so assert the right of that population to the land. The political end-game shaped the investigation and the outcome. Tracing the roots of Israel’s ethnic state in biblical antiquity is effectively to silence the indigenous Palestinian claim to the past and therefore to the land. The Biblical scholarship employs a bewildering array of terms for the region: “the Holy Land”, “the Land of the Bible”, “Eretz Israel”, “the Land of Israel”, or “Judah and Samaria.” To the casual reader these names appear interchangeable, but they all imply connection to ancient Israel.
Biblical narratives or poems that cannot be supported by archeology and common sense are treated by the Zionists and their supporters as historical language. … continue
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