The Modern Middle East (64 page)

The report went on to conclude that “the Sharon visit did not cause the ‘Al-Aqsa intifada.’ But it was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that followed: the decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators; and the subsequent failure . . . of either party to exercise restraint.”
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The scope and nature of the violence that ensued were astounding even by the standards of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Each side unleashed violence on the other—the Palestinians through suicide bombings, the Israelis by tanks and bulldozers. Countless innocent civilians died on both sides. As the cycle of violence became more and more vicious, and as the Palestinian Authority became increasingly incapable of influencing the ebb and flow of events in the streets, a radicalized Hamas found itself with an expanding pool of young Palestinians willing and eager to find glory in martyrdom. According to the U.S. Department of State, in 2001, fifty-five Israeli civilians were killed in attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers, some of whom had strapped nails to their bodies in order to inflict maximum damage on their intended victims.
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Altogether, in 2001 there were some 1,970 attacks against Israeli targets, including shootings, ambushes, mortar attacks, and stabbings.
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Each attack was soon followed by ferocious retaliation by the IDF. Before long, the Al-Aqsa
intifada
had developed a violent logic of its own. Innocent civilians on both sides of the divide, some as young as two months (a Palestinian boy) or four months (an Israeli girl), became victims of the spiraling violence.

In late November 2001, as the Al-Aqsa
intifada
was picking up in intensity and violence, Prime Minister Barak surprised the Israeli political
establishment by calling for early elections the following February. The choice for the Israeli electorate was simple: to reelect a man who had been willing to negotiate away so much and at the end had achieved nothing, or to vote for Ariel Sharon, the tough and uncompromising leader of the Likud, a man who was seen as capable of effectively quelling the
intifada.
A final attempt at reviving the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations before the elections proved futile.

Figure 31.
Women marching in support of Hamas. Corbis.

In the February elections that followed, Sharon beat Barak handily. The resumption of negotiations with the PNA, Sharon declared, depended solely on the ability of the Palestinian Authority to curb the violence against Israel. But neither Arafat’s security and police apparatus nor even Israel’s mighty IDF was able to contain the Al-Aqsa
intifada.
The prodding of the United States, so vital in bringing the Palestinians and the Israelis to the negotiating table time and again, was conspicuously absent in the bloody months of 2001, 2002, and early 2003, as U.S. leaders were preoccupied primarily with the “war on terror” at home and in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also absent, in stark contrast to the Clinton administration in its final months, was any personal interest in and intimate knowledge of the conflict on the part of President George W. Bush. Finally, in March 2003 President Bush announced his vision of Palestinian-Israeli peace under the
rubric of a “road map” toward achieving comprehensive and lasting peace between the two sides.

The “road map for peace” would have three phases. In phase 1, the Palestinians would be required to “undertake an unconditional cessation of violence,” while the Israelis would “immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001.”
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This phase would entail a series of other confidence-building measures, such as a progressive withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Occupied Territories. This would lead to phase 2, which would come about sometime in December 2003, during which a Palestinian state would be established and an international conference would be convened to hammer out some of the most contentious issues dividing the two sides. In phase 3, during the year 2005, a comprehensive peace treaty would be signed that would finally resolve some of the most intractable points of contention, most notably the status of Jerusalem, the location of a Palestinian capital, and the issue of “right of return” for Palestinian refugees.

President Bush’s “road map” for ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict ended up sharing the fates of the Oslo Accords, Camp David II, and the many other stalled peace initiatives. Within weeks of toppling Saddam Hussein, Washington found itself in an Iraqi quagmire, bewildered and scrambling to contain an urban guerrilla war for which neither the Pentagon nor the military commanders had prepared themselves. By all accounts, the “road map” died before it had a chance to get started, and both the Palestinians and the Israelis did their best to ensure its demise.
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Hamas and the Islamic Jihad refused to relent on their bloody campaign of suicide bombings directed against Israeli civilians—some one hundred bombings occurred between 2001 and 2003 alone. Each suicide bombing was followed by massive Israeli retaliatory strikes, in the course of which many Palestinian civilians also perished. And the circle of violence continued.

Sharon’s government, meanwhile, embarked on the construction of an enormous concrete wall intended to physically separate the West Bank from the rest of Israel. The thirty-foot-high wall, or “security fence,” is complemented by electrified wires designed to prevent anyone from crossing it. When completed, the $2 billion project will be at least 625 miles long, although the so-called green line separating Israel and the West Bank is only 224 miles long. This is because the wall frequently veers off into Palestinian territory to keep Israeli settlements on the Israeli side, often cutting off Palestinians from their farmland, uprooting countless orchards and fruit trees belonging to Palestinians, and separating Palestinian families.
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By the time the wall is completed, sizable portions of the West Bank will be separated from it.

Figure 32.
A Jewish settler praying at sunrise from a former outpost near Nablus. Corbis.

The wall’s stated purpose is to help keep suicide bombers out of Israel. Its real impact will be to create new facts on the ground. How it will influence the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its outcome remains to be seen. Whether the wall, which most members of the Israeli Left denounce, will remain a permanent feature of the physical and psychological landscape of the region is also a question that only time will answer.

After a mysterious illness in late 2004, Arafat slipped into a coma and died on November 11. Long the symbol of Palestinian resistance, in the waning months of his life the old warrior had become a virtual prisoner in his presidential headquarters in Ramallah. For nearly two years he had been unable to leave his compound, which was surrounded, and repeatedly battered, by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Death frequently vindicates fallen heroes, and Arafat was no exception. But the collective mourning of his passing by Palestinians was followed by the excitement of Mahmoud Abbas’s election to the presidency of the PNA in January 2005. An old Fatah insider with impeccable nationalist credentials, Abbas was admired even by many Israelis in the know for his commitment to the cause of peace and his reasoned, steady approach to the conflict’s complexities and its solutions.

Earlier, in December 2003, Prime Minister Sharon had announced a unilateral “Disengagement Plan” from Gaza, one that would, he promised,
“reduce terrorism as much as possible and grant Israeli citizens the maximum level of security.” As subsequent events demonstrated, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was driven less by the imperative to “minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians,” as Sharon had claimed, than by a need to “relieve the pressure on the IDF and the security forces in fulfilling the difficult tasks they are faced with.”
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Approved by the cabinet, amid chaotic scenes of clashes between Israeli soldiers and settlers refusing to leave, the withdrawal occurred on August 2005.

The Palestinians’ euphoria at reclaiming the entirety of the Gaza Strip proved short-lived as the Israeli withdrawal did little to reverse Gaza’s descent into political turmoil, lawlessness, and economic despondency. The PNA failed to capitalize on the opportunity to deepen its base of support and legitimacy across Gaza. That opportunity instead went to Hamas, whose slogan “Islam is the answer” propelled it to victory in the Palestinian legislative elections that were held for the first time in a decade in 2006. The elections signified an almost complete divorce of the Fatah-dominated West Bank, led by the PNA, and the Gaza Strip, now controlled by Hamas. Singularly lacking in charisma and content with being a manager rather than a leader, President Abbas was left with no option but to invite Hamas to form a cabinet in March 2006, thus forging a coalition administration destined to fail from the very beginning. In the meantime, the refusal of the United States and the European Union to recognize Hamas’s victory, coupled with their punishing withholding of much-needed financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority, further eroded the PNA’s administrative capacities, which were already hampered by widespread corruption and ineptitude. The Hamas-PNA rupture was not long in coming, resulting in a brief civil war between the two in June 2007, with the United States and Israel allegedly instigating the clash and arming a pro-Fatah militia group.
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The fighting ended, but the rift did not heal. Frequent and deadly clashes continued, meanwhile, between Hamas and the IDF. Following repeated attacks by ineffective and inaccurate rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, the IDF launched Operation Iron Cast, a massive and deadly assault on Gaza in December 2008–January 2009, which, according to a United Nations report issued shortly afterwards, left over 1,300 Palestinians dead, over 5,000 injured, and thousands more displaced and without food or shelter.
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But even widespread allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza failed to bring the bickering Palestinians together.
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Once again, in November 2012, amid allegations of rockets fired at Israeli civilians from inside the Gaza Strip, Israel attacked Gaza under the rubric of Operation Pillars of Defense. Earlier, as a prelude to its attack, Israel had
started with the targeted assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari. During the eight-day conflict, Israeli warplanes hit 1,500 targets in Gaza, and a reported 1,500 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel. Once again, Gaza became the scene of massive destruction and damage to infrastructure. By the time the conflict was over, an estimated 161 Palestinians were dead, 103 of whom were civilians, and 1,269 were injured. On the Israeli side, 6 individuals were killed, 4 civilians and 2 soldiers, and 244 were injured, a majority of them civilians.
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