Despairing of a leadership which had promised peace but delivered war, Israel’s electorate shifted sharply to the right. Likud led secular right-wing parties into an alliance with Israel’s religious right and formed a ‘nationalist’ bloc led by Binyamin Netanyahu. It was a winning formula that could hold for years: though comprising less than 25 per cent of the population, the Jewish religious public is the country’s fastest growing population group – outpacing secular Jewish growth by three to one. Jewish religious factions operate their own education systems, and exert increasing clout inside Israel’s judiciary and military. They comprised a near majority of troops in combat units and the officer corps, taking the place of the former secular elite from the kibbutzim, who have opted for more comfortable lives. Army Torah colleges, or yeshivas, churn out thousands of soldiers annually, and military rabbis led their troops into Gaza. Backed by a ruling caucus in parliament, they were Israel’s ascendant force. The Jewish left wing, meanwhile, has all but collapsed. Labour slipped to fourth place and joined Netanyahu’s coalition. Arab parties, excluded from ruling coalitions since the state’s birth, remained so.
Nine months into Netanyahu’s tenure, the peace process remained grounded. Whatever degree of external pressure the incoming Obama administration and the international community applied failed to match the clout of his right-wing coalition. Netanyahu well remembered how his right-wing allies had ended his previous tenure as prime minister in protest at his withdrawal from part of the West Bank town of Hebron, and he was not going to repeat the mistake. Instead he humoured Washington and uttered the words ‘Palestinian state’ and ‘settlement freeze’. But the small print eroded the meaning of both. Netanyahu’s conditions for a Palestinian state rendered it more quisling than sovereign, and his freeze did not preclude the construction of public buildings, thousands of houses on which work had already started, or any construction in East Jerusalem.
Well into its fifth decade, the evolving Israeli occupation was no longer a temporary aberration. Rather its control over Palestinian life, society, space and land remained firmly entrenched, acquiring more sophisticated and enduring forms. To make it more palatable and to consolidate the status quo, Netanyahu partially eased the West Bank’s checkpoint regime, but Palestinian access and movement remained severely constrained. The West Bank was hemmed in by a matrix of five-metre-high walls, which severed access to Jerusalem, and bypass roads designed for settler not Palestinian use. Palestinians, foreigners and increasingly Israeli Jews were subject to pass laws which increasingly segregated the population along ethnic lines.
Within the multiple cantons, Israel subcontracted responsibility to a pliant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and a quarantined Hamas in Gaza. It exercised leverage over the latter by controlling movement and trade. Palestinians, except those paying for medical treatment, were denied permission to leave, exports were banned, and imports limited to basics. Adopting the Pavlovian model, Israel rewarded good behaviour. Pasta was allowed in following an appeal from prominent US Congressman and future secretary of state John Kerry, but not honey, canned fruit or construction materials to repair the damage Israel’s war had inflicted on Gaza. Israel further punished Gaza’s attempts to leverage its way out of its straitjacket by firing rockets with heavy bombing.
Decade by decade, the struggle for Jewish dominance over historic Palestine was growing ever more violent. In the first two decades of occupation after 1967, Israel killed an average of 32 Palestinians each year; in the third decade the average grew to 106, and by the fourth decade Israel was killing over 600 Palestinians per year. The infrastructure of control, too, grew ever more visible. Looming apartheid walls scarred the landscape. The result had been foretold over two decades earlier in the book Israel’s Fateful Decisions (London, 1988), written at the height of the first intifada by a former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi. He portrays a country at a crossroads, with one path – the destruction of Palestinian national rights – leading to the destruction of Israel’s democracy and the loss of international sympathy on which the Zionist state had depended since its foundation. The result, he said, would be national suicide.
At the same time, Israel’s own interest in democracy appeared to wane. Given the choice between Arab dictatorships dependent on Western allies, and democratic governments accountable to their people, Israeli strategists publicly stated their preference for the former. Following the January 2006 Palestinian elections, won by Hamas, Israel successfully stymied what had been the high-water mark of Palestinian democracy.
The ascent from intifada to democratic elections followed by descent into factional warfare and the takeovers of Gaza and the West Bank by rival security forces mark another sad chapter in Palestine’s history of dashed hopes. Broken by Sharon’s counter-offensive and bereft of their leadership after five years of intifada, Palestinians initially set about rebuilding their shattered political and economic base. In January 2005 a former school teacher and Arafat’s sometime negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas, was elected president, and two months later the Palestinian leadership and thirteen Palestinian factions signed a ceasefire, or tahdia, in Cairo to which Israel committed (though did not sign). The Cairo Declaration also committed the factions to abandon the use of arms in resolving internal differences, and required President Abbas to bring Hamas into the PLO and launch without delay a process of municipal and legislative elections. It thereby paved the way for Hamas’s integration into the political process, something that Arafat had always refused.
The elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Palestinian Authority’s parliament, held in January 2006, rank amongst the fairest in Arab history. They were also probably the cruellest. Hamas won 78 of 132 seats, benefitting from a protest vote against the incumbent faction, the nationalist movement Fatah, a sign of their frustration at the endless negotiations with Israel and a political process which had seen their wealth, their freedom of movement and their land all sharply erode to make way for Israeli settlement expansion. But rather than addressing the causes, Israel led the international community in punishing the electorate. Following the inauguration of prime minister Ismail Haniya as head of the Hamas government, Israel moved to torpedo the fledgling democracy. It suspended the transfer of customs duties and donor states withheld aid, together curtailing two-thirds of the Palestinian Authority’s revenues. It barred ministers from travelling between the West Bank and Gaza, and following the capture of an Israeli soldier by armed groups in Gaza in June 2006, arrested most of Hamas’s ministers and parliamentarians in the West Bank, including the deputy prime minister. Bereft of its quorum, the Palestinian Legislative Council was unable to legislate. The international community watched, and kept quiet.
In addition to undermining the Hamas government, Western powers bolstered Fatah’s military capabilities and the forces under President Abbas’s command. Hamas responded by raising its own police force, largely manned by fighters from its armed wing, the Ezz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Mounting clashes prompted Saudi Arabia to mediate between Fatah and Hamas, resulting in the Mecca Agreement of February 2007, whereby the two factions agreed to form a national unity government. But the failure to agree the command of the security forces was a recipe for further fighting. In June 2007, Hamas’s military wing chased Fatah’s security commanders from Gaza, and within three days had won control of the Strip. The unity government cleft in two: Prime Minister Haniya continued to govern Gaza. And in the West Bank, President Abbas dismissed Haniya and made finance minister Salam Fayyad, an IMF economist favoured by Washington, prime minister of an ‘emergency government’.
Despite their personal and ideological hostility, the two regimes had much in common. Both ruled by decree with questionable respect for the constitution, used their security forces to tamp down dissent inside their respective cantons, and waged a beauty contest, competing over who could deliver most. Despite repeated attempts at national reconciliation, both preferred absolute co
ntrol of a part of the Palestinian territories to shared rule of all.
Ensconced in Gaza, Hamas raised the democratic drawbridge behind it, relying on force to hold on to power. Its fighters went house to house, armed with Fatah’s computer records, searching for senior cadres; dispersed large Fatah-organized demonstrations by shooting into the crowds; broke up wedding parties where guests sang Fatah songs by shooting grooms in the knees; and subdued clans by laying siege to their fiefdoms and lobbing rocket-propelled grenades inside. They thereby created order, if not law, out of the previous security chaos. The population, previously too nervous to venture outdoors for fear of clan and factional violence, flocked to Gaza’s beaches and public places. Hamas considered but then backed away from implementing Sharia law, apparently to relieve social dissent.
Seizing the opportunity to cement the rift between Gaza and the West Bank, Israel responded to Hamas’s military takeover by Gaza’s severing formal trade with the outside world. It declared Gaza ‘a hostile entity’, interrupting its transactions with Israeli banks. In an attempt to break free of its isolation, Hamas punched through the border fortifications Israel had left behind barring Gaza’s access into Egypt in January 2007, but in the process stirred Cairo into joining the blockade. Fearing an Islamist breach of its national security, Egyptian forces pushed back the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who had poured into Sinai on a shopping-spree (hoping to satisfy seven months of pent-up demand), and erected a new wall along Gaza’s southern border. Thereafter, Gazans largely relied on underground smuggling from Egypt. By the summer of 2009 Gaza’s labyrinth of tunnels under the Egyptian border was so extensive that Gazans could import goods from iPhones to cars at lower prices and faster speeds than when Israel’s crossings were open.
At the same time, Hamas’s takeover of Gaza dramatically transformed the movement. From a non-state actor operating a social and charitable network and popular armed wing, Hamas morphed into a governing authority with an army and bureaucracy. As it turned from a guerilla movement into the ruling establishment, Hamas’s military wing, which had initially begun as a small unit of bodyguards protecting its leaders, dominated the movement. Once unsullied by the exigencies of government, Hamas now had to weigh its ideology against its business and political interests, had to compromise – even to the point of curbing attacks against Israel – to ensure entry of supplies, and in its government offices gave its enemies an address to attack.
For over a year, Hamas lobbed homemade rockets at Israel’s border towns in an attempt to pressure Israel to open its crossings. In July 2008, it agreed a ceasefire on condition Israel ended the siege, and when that proved to no avail, again resorted to rocket fire. In December 2008, Olmert launched his Gaza offensive, sending Hamas scuttling underground. Most of its leaders emerged a month on, celebrating their survival. But Hamas’s subsequent ceasefire with Israel without a reciprocal commitment to lift the siege, and the failure of its much-hyped resistance to inflict significant damage on Israel sapped Hamas’s credibility. To the movement’s loyalists and believers, Hamas’s failure either to implement Sharia law or maintain the struggle with Israel smacked of betrayal.
In the West Bank, US military and financial help bolstered Salam Fayyad’s hold on the PA. For the first time since the intifada the PA resumed formal security coordination with Israel, and by the end of 2009 Fayyad had deployed five of a planned ten US-trained battalions in Palestinian cities. Awash with donor support, the economy briefly notched annual growth rates of 10 per cent. But, as in Gaza, the political price for stability was substantial repression and constitutional contortions. President Abbas’s term in office expired and was artificially extended; and Fayyad’s government was never elected. Seeking to channel growing resentment into political aspirations, Fayyad outlined a programme to declare a Palestinian state within two years. But he was in danger of doing his donors’ rather than his people’s bidding. Democratic institutions – particularly the Palestinian Legislative Council – remained moribund, and Hamas’s institutional presence in the West Bank was decimated. Fayyad ordered the closure of their charities running schools and hospitals, or appointed intelligence agents to their boards. His security forces detained hundreds of activists, some after their release from Israel’s jails. And during the 2008–2009 Gaza war they suppressed anti-Israel demonstrations, clubbing and shooting protestors who sought to rally against Israeli forces in the West Bank.
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The trajectory of Palestinian governance matched the times. Across the region, regimes reacted to the internal chaos induced by America’s zealous promotion of democracy and the Islamist gains that resulted by firmly bolting the hatches. Hopes of an era of political reform pregnant during the 1990s dwindled sharply, as did the distinction between Middle East kingdoms and republics.
Syria was the first Arab state to morph into a gumlukiyya (a play on the Arabic words for republic, gumhuriya, and monarchy, mamlakiya). Despite its more developed civil society, Egypt appeared to follow in Syria’s footsteps. When the elderly president, Hosni Mubarak, appointed his forty-something son Gamal, a former investment banker lacking in military experience, general-secretary of the ruling National Democratic Party in 2002, many feared he was grooming an heir apparent. The security establishment (who favoured one of their own and feared that his privatization programme would threaten the military’s copious economic and land holdings, particularly the tourist enterprises the generals built along the coasts), liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood all carped from the sidelines. Other North African rulers followed suit. Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika favoured his brother, Said; in Tunis, Ben Ali gave a green light to his son-in-law, Sakhr el-Materi, and his wife, Leila Trabulsi, a former hairdresser he married five years after taking power, to amass a business empire apparently as a stepping-stone to succession. And in Libya, Muammar Qaddafy, the leader of Libya’s Jamahiriya, or State of the Masses, named his second son, Saif al-Islam, co-ordinator of the Socialist Popular Leadership, the second most powerful post in the land, responsible for internal affairs. Another son, Muatasim, oversaw the oil sector.
Protest at the concentration of the region’s substantial energy and mineral wealth in the hands of the ruler’s family while over one in four people were unemployed was met with repression. After toying with a brief opening, the Mubarak regime rapidly abandoned the experiment fearful of the results. In the presidential elections of 2005 a rival contender stood against Mubarak for the first time, and the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the largest opposition in assembly elections. Determined to limit the fallout, the regime jailed thousands, including many Brotherhood activists and the presidential candidate, Ayman Nour. Judges who questioned the polls’ integrity became the subject of criminal probes. Municipal elections scheduled for February 2006 were postponed. Elsewhere elections became exercises in beya, or traditional allegiance. In October 2009, Tunisian president Ben Ali won a fourth term as president with 90 per cent of the vote. And Algeria’s Bouteflika pushed a constitutional amendment through parliament that abolished a limit on the presidential term, granting him life-long rule. With Morocco already a monarchy, North Africa was succumbing to dynastic rule from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.
Perhaps the resentment might have been less had the existing dynasts delivered more. But the brief hope that the region’s new generation of leaders who succeeded their fathers might usher in an era of political liberalization flickered and went out. After initially experimenting with a cosmetic glasnost that did little to change the system, Morocco’s Mohammed VI, Jordan’s King Abdullah and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad all tightened their grip. While reining in Islamist opponents, each sought religious legitimacy to compensate for any deficit in a popular mandate. Mohammed VI continued his father’s practice of referring to himself as Commander of the Faithful. Abdullah promoted his Hashemite lineage, which had formerly ruled Jerusalem (and Mecca). Even Bashar al-Assad, who was not a Sunni Muslim, tried to fudge his Alawite origins. Distancing himself from
his father’s narrow Alawite old guard, he sought to broaden his power base beyond minority sects. He promoted Sunnis to positions of power, restored ties to Aleppo – a Sunni stronghold with which relations had been tense since the violent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, and adopted a more religious demeanour, leaking videos of one of his sons reciting the Koran. Embittered by Olmert’s recourse to war in Lebanon and Gaza (the latter in the midst of Turkish-mediated talks), Assad adopted a ‘resistance’ discourse that owed more to Syria’s potential Islamist challengers than to the pan-Arabism espoused by the Baathist state. The language yielded early dividends, temporarily reducing tensions with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The policy of adopting the jihadi discourse on Iraq and Palestine, however, carried inherent risks. By giving vent to Islamist preachers, he enabled previously latent ethnic and sectarian tensions to surface, and Sunni activist groups aspiring to reshape Syria as well as other states to organize. He further unsettled the established non-Sunni elites who had prospered under his father, offering a foretaste of the sectarian strife that was soon to sweep Syria. In 2003, a football clash between Arab and Kurdish teams triggered rioting by their rival supporters; further skirmishes erupted between Christians and Muslims in Hasaka, Druze and Beduin in the south, and Alawites and Ismailis in Damascus. More damaging still were signs of a blowback from Iraq’s jihad. The attack on a military intelligence base outside Damascus in September 2008 was attributed to jihadi groups and prompted a wave of arrests extending well beyond militant circles to individuals reportedly wearing Islamic dress or beards. Fearing an assault on Syria’s secular society, security forces placed some neighbourhoods under virtual curfew, and Islamic education and charities under strict regulation.
Amid the crackdown, Assad took significant steps to pave the way for a rapprochement with his Western and Arab foes, particularly following President Obama’s election victory. In July 2009, he dismissed his brother-in-law and reputed Assad family strongman, Asef Shawkat, as head of military intelligence, thus ridding the regime of the key suspect in the international investigation into former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri’s assassination. Risking a backlash from both the Islamists and the old guard, he called for a resumption of talks with Israel, exchanged diplomatic relations with Lebanon, attempted to build a new relationship with France and rebalanced his approach toward Iraq.
A History of the Middle East Page 53