Lawrence Wright on Gaza

For Gaza Palestinians, things began to go downhill after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke in January 2006. Roughly five months earlier, Sharon had ordered Israel out of Gaza, closing down Jewish settlements and withdrawing the presence of the Israel Defense Forces. Days after Sharon entered a coma, Hamas swept into power in Palestinian legislative elections, and six months later, militants snuck across the border and snatched IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit, derailing peace negotiations and setting in motion a new cycle of violence.

By the summer of 2007, Hamas had driven Fatah out of Gaza, and the grip of blockade descended: Israel on three sides, Egypt on one. Observation balloons hover at the border, pilotless drones buzz overhead, Israeli warships patrol the coast; Israel officially allows only some three dozen items, inventoried on a confidential list, through the blockade.

But militants in Gaza continued to bombard Israel - around 12,000 rockets or mortar shells between 2000 and 2008. A six-month truce reached in June 2008 expired when Hamas refused to renew it, so finally, there came Operation Cast Lead, a three-week-long air and ground assault on Gaza that began in December. Wright talks to John Ging, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, who tells him that not a single bag of cement nor pane of glass has entered Gaza since Cast Lead.

And the damage is far more extensive than that. A former industrial zone in Gaza's northeast, near the Erez crossing point, which contained concrete plants, a flour mill, and an ice cream factory, has been flattened. "According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, ninety-six per cent of Gaza's industrial sector collapsed after Operation Cast Lead," Wright says. Unemployment, except for those toiling in the black markets or lucky enough to work for international aid groups, is "practically universal." The half-mile buffer zone Israel maintains at the border cordons off thirty percent of the Strip's arable land, he writes.

In addition to schools, hospitals, sewage treatment plants and police stations, Israel targeted government buildings: the Ministry of Finance and Foreign Affairs, the Presidential Palace and the Parliament. Buildings meant for a "future state of Palestine" lie in ruins, Ging tells Wright.

What's the upshot of all this destruction? Here's a hint: "Israeli government officials have told international aid officials that the aim is 'no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis,'" Wright says. Israeli newspaper Haaretz says that the IDF has calculated that Gaza's 1.5 million people need 106 truckloads of supplies a day, but that number has fallen to as low as 37. In other words, Israel is doing a spectacularly successful job at strangling the populace to the point of near-death. And as long as they don't teeter over the edge and turn Gaza into sub-Saharan Africa, they'll avoid international condemnation.

In that respect, Israel's blockade and Cast Lead have succeeded in demonstrating to the country's Arab neighbors what happens if you "play with Israel," in the words of a Palestinian aid worker who spoke with Wright. This, one could argue, is a positive for Israelis. The blockade is so strict, apparently, that even the militant Islamists in Gaza are having a hard time connecting with Al-Qaida in any but a spiritual sense.

Yet there are so many obvious negatives. For one, the moral negative of the humanitarian cost: medical aid is inaccessible, water and food in short supply, schools have been destroyed, children's psyches have been shattered. Those 12,000 rockets and mortars I mentioned killed 30 Israelis in eight years. One of them died during the first day of Cast Lead. That same day, 280 Gazans were killed and 900 wounded, many of them civilians. "It was one of the deadliest days of conflict between Israel and its neighbors since 1967," Wright says.

In 1989, after Palestine's first intifada against Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, who is currently Hamas' prime minister, spent three years in an Israeli prison before being expelled, with 400 others, to south Lebanon. There, Wright recounts, the Palestinians "formed an enduring alliance" with Hizballah. There's every reason to believe that Israel's behavior toward Gaza, isolating and asphyxiating it, is radicalizing a new generation.

Wright meets with a man who gives his name as Abu Mohammed, who is likely a leader of an Islamist insurgent group in Gaza tied to the Popular Resistance Committees. Mohammed tells Wright that Hamas is too soft for the taste of his group; they haven't implemented Islamic law well enough. Some young men join Mohammed's organization because they "don't want to live by the rules," but others truly believe in the ideology, which Mohammed puts in the school of Osama bin Laden. "We know how strong [Hamas] are and how supported they are on the street, but we can't live underground forever," he tells Wright. Meanwhile, an Israeli general on the other side of the border sees Hamas rearming and says, "I tell you, we will come again, in better shape, because we have learned our lessons."

But I doubt any lessons have been learned. The blowback from Israel's treatment of Gaza seems inevitable. If the conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan (not to mention Saudi Arabi and Egypt) are bad enough to produce militant Islamists, then surely Gaza must be the molten core of resentment. To use another metaphor, the pot is boiling, and Israel believes that the only realistic strategy is to keep putting more weight on the lid. So-called moderates such as Haniyeh might, in fact, be willing to negotiate with Israel. But militants like Abu Mohammed and others have reached the point of no return.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, rockets followed. If Israel were to relax its chokehold now, we'd probably see the same. Wright doesn't touch on the peace process much in his article - the story functions better by simply telling Gaza's tale of despair - but you can't keep a population under heel forever. Opening the blockade, at least in part, and letting in a freer flow of aid and construction material would at least create a valve for the pressure in Gaza. Hamas may benefit, but Hamas is a fact of life. From there, a prisoner swap deal for Shalit, combined with some kind of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, is the next step. As it stands, Hamas' demands in the Shalit deal are too extreme for Israel to accept, but what if Israel were to combine a lesser prisoner swap with a loosening of the blockade? Hamas could then return Shalit and promise to negotiate with Israel. The moving parts affecting such negotiations are endless - we haven't even touched the issue of Khaled Meshaal, Hamas' political leader in exile, and the pressures being applied on all parties by the likes of Iran, Syria, the United States, Hizballah and Saudi Arabia.

But it seems that the heavy burden of paving the way toward any kind of peace rests with Israel, and here the weeds of strategic philosophy are thick. Hamas cannot act too kindly with Israel, because a rapprochement will harm their standing in the eyes of their constituents. How can you make peace with murderers who commit war crimes, they will ask. But Israel cannot accept life under a near-constant barrage of rockets and the threat of suicide bombings in population centers. So should Israel keep its foot down, keep its weight on the lid, in the hope that they will be able to deal with a Palestinian government that recognizes the current state of affairs, or should they deal with Hamas? After reading Wright's article, I think that the long-term drawbacks to the former make the latter the only way.