Gaza: international plan hatched to bring back Fatah

James Bone in New York and Martin Fletcher in Sderot

A plan to create a new foothold in Gaza for the Palestinian Authority and to bring in international monitors was being drawn up by diplomats yesterday as a UN ceasefire call was dismissed by both sides.
The plan would allow a return of the authority, led by the secular Fatah faction, to the territory 18 months after it was expelled by the Islamist Hamas. Diplomats are considering taking a triangle at the southern end of Gaza, including the Rafah crossing to Egypt and the Kerem Shalom crossing to Israel, to be policed by Turkish and French military monitors to stop arms smuggling into Gaza.

The zone would nominally be controlled by the authority, the internationally recognised Government. Such a plan would allow the crossings to reopen for the first time since Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007.
The plan is being negotiated as part of the Egyptian peace initiative, announced by President Mubarak after talks with President Sarkozy of France, which calls for an immediate ceasefire to be followed by talks on securing the Gaza-Egypt border and reopening the crossings.

It faces formidable obstacles. Diplomats said yesterday that the Egyptian efforts were getting bogged down because of disagreements over how to secure the border. Hamas has said it would consider allowing observers at the border crossings with Egypt but opposes an international force. It also claimed yesterday that a delegation of three Hamas leaders had crossed the border into Egypt to join talks.

Israel, however, is insisting on a robust international force to destroy smuggling tunnels under the border.
Egypt, for its part, does not want international troops on its territory. Instead, Cairo wants to revive the 2005 agreement on movement and access, under which EU monitors oversaw the passage of people through the Rafah crossing and vehicles through Kerem Shalom, a deal that fell through when Hamas came to power. The new plan came as the UN ceasefire proposal was flatly rejected almost as soon as the Security Council backed it 14-0, with the US abstaining.

The US had been expected to back the UN resolution but abstained at the last minute. Diplomats said Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, changed her position after a call from President Bush.
Yesterday F16s continued to fire missiles at houses and apartment blocks in Gaza City, and the air reverberated with artillery fire. The fire was not all one way, though. Rockets repeatedly streaked out of Gaza towards the settlements of Sderot, Beersheba and Ashkelon just across the border.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, said: “Israel has never agreed for any outside influence to decide on its right to defend its citizens. The firing of rockets this morning only goes to show that the UN decision is unworkable and will not be adhered to by the murderous Palestinian organisations.”

Israel’s rejection of the resolution was no surprise. The offensive against Hamas is hugely popular: a poll in the Maariv newspaper showed 91 per cent of Israelis supporting it. “This is the time to back the commanders, soldiers and pilots working day and night to conduct a difficult, complex and entirely just war,” Ari Shavit, of the left-of-centre Haaretz newspaper, said.

Israel Strikes Back

By P. David Hornik

For months now, the Palestinian terror group Hamas has been shelling Israeli cities with little in the way of an assertive response. But this weekend, which capped a week when at least 300 Hamas-fired rockets and mortars pounded southern Israel, the Israeli government has at last decided to retaliate.
“Operation Cast Iron” opened on Saturday with a carefully planned, perfectly coordinated, and devastating air strike against Hamas targets in Gaza. The strike, which involved more than 100 aircraft and occurred in two waves, destroyed dozens of military and police headquarters, training camps, and above-ground and underground weapons facilities. If Hamas estimates are to be believed, approximately 200 Palestinians have been killed. Of these, a great majority appear to have been terrorist combatants. Israel has also bombed the Islamic University in Gaza, and is now threatening a full-scale invasion.

The weekend offensive marks the third time in less than a decade that Israel has opened a war whose proximate cause is terrorist aggression but which was actually fostered by Israel’s own self-delusive policies. For instance, the second intifada, which broke out in September 2000, was made possible by Israel’s Oslo-era policy of inviting terrorist armies, including Hamas, to entrench itself in the West Bank and Gaza. By allowing Hamas to build up its political power base and military capabilities, Israel virtually guaranteed that it would be drawn into a future conflict in Gaza. A similar cycle of cause-and-effect underpinned the second Lebanon War, which broke out in July 2006. That conflict was made possible in large part by Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

Likewise, Israel’s latest military campaign is the inevitable result of Israel’s ill-conceived “disengagement” from Gaza in August 2005. The flaw of the earlier withdrawal was starkly revealed this Sunday, when sorties against Hamas targets destroyed no fewer than 40 smuggling tunnels between Gaza and the Sinai. These tunnels were a testament to the terrorist activity that Israel’s withdrawal had made possible.
Seen against the background of Hamas’s resurgence, this weekend's successful strikes are long overdue. So, too, is the chastening that they signal within Israel’s political leadership – the triumvirate of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister and Labor Party Chairman Ehud Barak, and Foreign Minister and Kadima leader Tzipi Livni – which appears finally to have grasped that Hamas cannot be stopped with economic pressure and temporary ceasefires. As Barak told Fox News this weekend, “For us to be asked to have a ceasefire with Hamas is like asking you to have a ceasefire with al-Qaeda. It's something we cannot really accept.” Meanwhile, Livni reportedly said that Islamists must be drummed out of Gaza’s leadership.

This newfound resoluteness is to be welcomed. But the fact that Israel’s leaders have come to realize the urgency of confronting terrorism does not compensate for the dismal failures of their past performance. Reports indicate that Saturday’s strike relied on lengthy planning and intelligence gathering, but they don’t settle the question of how the government could have waited so long to act – particularly when 250,000 Israeli citizens had been living so long under a relentless barrage of rockets and mortar fire. The new Israeli offensive must also be considered in the context of the Olmert government’s bungled war against Hezbollah in 2006, when the limited success of an initial aerial bombardment was succeeded by a less successful ground offensive and, ultimately, a tenuous ceasefire.

Early evidence suggests that the government has recognized its past mistakes, and is intent on avoiding them. Thus Olmert, Barak, and Livni have defined Operation Cast Iron’s goals narrowly, eschewing the bombastic statements that the Olmert government made when the second Lebanon War erupted. Operation Cast Iron is designed to put an end to Hamas's rocket fire, terrorist activity, and arms smuggling.

However, questions abound. Will Barack and Livni follow through with their rhetoric about toppling Hamas, or will they be content to leave it in power after a temporary show of strength? If the latter, who will stop the weapons smuggling or prevent Hamas from recuperating militarily and preparing to drag Israel into its next confrontation?

Just as pressingly, who will take over if Israel does depose Hamas in a ground invasion? On the one hand, Olmert, Barak, and Livni remain allergic to the idea of Israel’s long-term reoccupation of parts or all of Gaza. But the possible alternatives are troubling. For instance, the experience of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon in southern Lebanon, which shields instead of thwarts Hezbollah’s ongoing empowerment, argues against the idea of NATO or other international forces taking over Gaza. Similarly, Israel should avoid replacing Hamas with Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah-run Palestinian Authority. Gaza’s transfer from anti-Israeli Hamas to anti-Israeli Fatah is in fact no solution, because even if Fatah presently lacks Hamas's energy and discipline, it can nevertheless be relied on to instill hatred of Israel in future generations of Palestinians, just as it currently does in the West Bank.

Still another troubling possibility is that, with Israeli elections tentatively scheduled for February 10, a perceived successful outcome to the war would help the current government defeat the Likud party, most of whose current lineup opposed the “disengagement” that created the current crisis in the first place. Given the Likud leadership’s foresight in this regard, it would be unfortunate if the next government did not share its grasp of the threats to Israeli security – especially at a time when, however grave the Gaza threat, the incomparably greater Iranian threat could require critical decision-making by the spring of 2009.
It is hard to trust the very people who got Israel into its mess in Gaza to get the country out of it. A viable solution to Gaza may involve Israel reoccupying its most strategic parts—the Gaza-Sinai border and the northern Strip from which most of the rockets are launched—while putting any Gaza regime on notice that continued aggression will result in further Israeli conquests. While such a solution may seem uncompromising, it is in fact greatly preferable to the successive retreats and empty “ceasefires” that have defined Israeli policy in Gaza to date. Unfortunately, it is a solution that requires the kind of political courage that has not been the hallmark of Israel’s current leadership.