The Israeli government decision to end its three-year blockade of civilian goods entering the Gaza Strip is a welcome move. Sadly, it came about a year too late, and its timing and circumstances benefited the wrong parties. That’s because the Netanyahu government (in all fairness, like many of its predecessors) seems to do the right thing only under heavy pressure.
The move is welcome because the blockade was plainly counterproductive. The stated objectives of the blockade — which varied from time to time — were to oblige Hamas to moderate its policies or otherwise to weaken or depose that Islamist movement, and to force a prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit on terms acceptable to Israel. Had the blockade achieved any of these objectives, it might have been defensible to impose collective punishment on 1.5 million Gazans. Instead, Hamas grew stronger, while the more moderate Gazan business and agrarian sectors that depend on trade with and via Israel grew weaker. Gilad Shalit is still a prisoner of Hamas. The failure of the blockade was obvious at least a year ago. Even PM Binyamin Netanyahu has reportedly allowed that he recognized the counterproductive nature of the economic warfare waged against Gaza soon after taking office.
The Netanyahu government did not invent this strategy, but rather inherited it from the Olmert government which in turn inherited a partial and occasional blockade from the Sharon government. Sharon’s initial reliance on economic warfare against Gaza is instructive: upon carrying out Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Strip in the summer of 2005, Sharon threatened far-reaching military measures if, following withdrawal, Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli civilian targets continued. When, within weeks of the withdrawal, the attacks were renewed, Sharon, followed soon by Olmert, responded not with massive military force but with economic warfare, including the dismantling of the entire economic incentive structure put in place by the international community to take advantage of the withdrawal.
But Sharon’s economic punishment did not stop the Qassams. Consequently, Israel’s deterrent image was badly damaged. Hamas escalated its attacks until Israel finally did respond with overwhelming force in late 2008-early 2009. In this sense, the past five years of dealing with Hamas in Gaza are illustrative of the difficulty Israel has in finding strategies to deal with a militant Islamist non-state neighbor that rejects Israel’s existence, would welcome an Israeli invasion and is prepared for its population to be martyred.
Israel did not embark alone on the blockade. Three years ago, when Hamas took over the Strip in a violent coup against Fateh, the decision to punish Gaza until Hamas agreed to renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept the Oslo framework was made collectively by the Olmert government together with the Quartet, Egypt and the PLO. With the passage of time, and as the counterproductive nature of the blockade became increasingly obvious, Israel’s partners publicly took their distance, though privately some continued to encourage Israel to continue.
An Israeli government capable of recognizing the damage its policies were inflicting and taking bold initiatives to correct them, would have at least tried to convene its siege partners for a collective reevaluation and insist on a revised collective decision. To be fair, this might not have been easy: Egypt increasingly coordinates its own war against Islamist terrorism and Iranian encroachment with Israel, but when it comes to Gaza it insists that, as part and parcel of the Palestinian issue, the Strip is Israel’s problem. And at a time when Israel’s official dealings with the PLO are indirect and rife with mutual suspicion, coordination with Ramallah is probably impossible.
Thus it took international pressure prompted by the botched interception of a supply flotilla headed for Gaza to force Netanyahu’s hand. As a consequence, Israel appears weak. The immediate beneficiaries of the cancelled blockade, in addition to the Gazan people, are Hamas and Turkey, whose actions catalyzed Israel’s decision. Egypt and the PLO are publicly jubilant but privately ambivalent: they, like Israel, are hardly interested in strengthening Hamas. Indeed, the PLO’s prestige among its West Bank constituency can only be harmed by the move, and all it can do is make the best of a difficult situation. Further, both Israel and the PLO must now recognize that relaxing a blockade imposed in coordination with the Quartet moves us closer to direct western diplomatic contact with Hamas, to the possible detriment of an Israel-PLO peace process.
At the broadest strategic level, relaxing the blockade constitutes a step toward the seemingly inevitable acquiescence of all concerned in a three-state (or three-entity) reality, with Hamas rule in Gaza now more permanent than ever. How we arrived at a situation in which an Islamist emirate rules an over-populated, barren strip of sand along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean is no longer worth crying over, any more than is the emergence of a Hizballah emirate further north up the coast. Israel, the only candidate for militarily reoccupying either and physically eliminating Hamas or Hizballah, is not about to take up that challenge, and for good reasons: they do not existentially threaten us, however disgusting their rhetoric, while we have learned the hard way the evils of occupation.
Best to come to terms with Hamas while containing and deterring it militarily in every possible way, including by sea. And this means not only not waging ill-conceived economic warfare that blackens our international image, but also permitting the export of goods from Gaza, carefully investigating possibilities of direct contact, and coordinating policy to the greatest extent possible with Egypt, the PLO and the West.
Yossi Alpher is coeditor of the bitterlemons family of internet publications. He is former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with bitterlemons.org.
