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"To answer brutality with
brutality is to admit one's
moral and intellectual bankruptcy."
Mahatma Gandhi
"The world is beginning
to doubt the moral basis of our
fight against terrorism."
Colin Powell, September 13, 2006
Twelve months after 19 men steered three
hijacked U.S. jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
and crashed a fourth in Pennsylvania, the Bush administration
was citing the brutality of Saddam Hussein toward his own people
and his neighbors as the moral justification--indeed, a moral
imperative--for forcefully removing him from power.
Unfortunately for the people
of Iraq, regime change in their country has transformed Iraq
into the "flypaper for terrorists" in the heart of
the Middle East. Add to this the inter-sectarian brutality that
dominates the daily lives of more than one-quarter of Iraq's
population and that strikes randomly throughout the country,
it is impossible to see how this "moral imperative"
has made Iraq, the region, or the world safer and better as the
president promised. If anything, the brutality that has been
unleashed in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is fostering an atmosphere
of increased tolerance of brutality around the
world, even in places where full-blown combat has not been the
daily paradigm. And as so often happens, the consequences fall
most heavily on those who do not participate in the violence
but end up the victims of collective punishment.
Nowhere has this been truer
than in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since the January
25, 2006 parliamentary elections. Tired of years of corrupt and
ineffective governance by the Fatah coalition, Palestinians voted
for Hamas candidates, returning them in a majority and conferring
the right to form the next government which took office at the
end of March. The problem is that both the U.S. and Israel regard
Hamas as a terror organization and refuse to deal with it.
This "refusal" quickly
assumed a programmatic coherence. Israel, which controls all
border crossing points into Gaza, whether for people or for supplies,
and collects taxes for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)
and forwards them to Ramallah every month, refused to send the
money to the new government on the pretext that it would not
be spent for the benefit of Palestinians but for more weapons
and training Hamas forces. Similarly, the U.S. cut off all financial
support to the PNA . Together, these financial hammers quickly
wreaked havoc on the PNA, which is the largest employer (40 percent)
of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and in turn on the innocent
trying to survive day to day.
Worse was to come. The catalyst
was an attack on an Israeli outpost along the Egyptian-Gaza border,
the latter under Israeli control, by Palestinian fighters. In
the attack, two Israeli soldiers were killed and one was captured.
After three days, Israeli troops re-entered Gaza, sweeping all
the way through the towns and camps looking for the captured
soldier. The Hamas-led government, which still refused to affirm
explicitly Israel's right to exist, was powerless to stop the
Israeli Defence Forces. More than 230 Palestinians were killed.
The PNA is also powerless to
get its perspective into the international media limelight, particularly
in the United States. In a real sense, this is an even more critical
failing as the PNA finds itself two or more steps behind Israeli
interest groups and partisans.
The collapse of the Gaza economy--the
outgrowth of the cut-off of tax remittances and foreign assistance--has
led to the disruption of efforts by expatriate Palestinians who,
having been successful professionals in other lands, returned
to Palestine to contribute to the effort to re-establish a viable
and healthy economy encompassing both Gaza and the West Bank.
But restrictions on the movement of goods, always a hindrance
in the best of times, have been tightened even more. Add in the
withholding of vital revenue streams, which means families have
no money to buy the few commodities that do get in, and in short
order "economic activity" is a dream.
Now Israel has opened a new
front that will deepen even further the destitution in Gaza.
For years, Israel has exercised a type of informal "guest
worker" visa system that allowed Palestinian entrepreneurs
to stay in Gaza on a renewable three-month work visa. The same
rule applied to foreigners in humanitarian, aid, and nongovernmental
groups trying to assist the ordinary people. Under the latest
administrative ruling, foreign passport holders--even those of
Palestinian ancestry--can get only a single three-month tourist
visa in any 12 month period. Any additional visas in that 12
month period will be valid for one week only. A few additional
one-month renewals may be possible for some businessmen, but
this is not guaranteed even when their homes and families are
in Gaza.
Truly, this must be one of
the most short-sighted decisions in the whole modern history
of Israel--one that runs counter to efforts to go beyond treating
symptoms to tackle root causes of terror.
A primary non-military objective
of the Bush administration's "war on terror" is to
eliminate what the White House regards as the seedbed of terror:
the madras schools financed by wealthy Muslims and attended by
young boys whose parents cannot afford any other education for
their sons or by older youngsters who cannot find work. All these
schools teach is the Koran--word-for-word mastery of the entire
scripture and the more important (as determined by the madras'
headmaster) interpretations of the meaning of various verses.
While such a regimen may have
some benefits for family and society, if this is the extent of
the education received by the majority of young men in Islamic-dominated
countries, they will not be equipped to compete in the workforce
and contribute to improving their country or region. In areas
such as Gaza where the public education infrastructure has been
so badly damaged by armed struggle, one option that can help
overcome the limitations of the madrasas by supplementing Islamic
religious education is the foreign-financed schools that teach
the basic skills that serve as a foundation for any number of
important occupations. But in Gaza, these schools--including
one in Ramallah administered by the Society of Friends--are being
threatened by the new "three-month to one-week" visa
policy. When their English-speaking staff of teachers has to
leave Gaza when their initial three month tourist visa expires,
they could simply be denied a re-entry visa or be given a one-week
visa by the Israeli military which controls who enters and leaves
Gaza.
On the broader scope of the
Middle East, Israel's visa policy will simply reinforce the perception
that Tel Aviv has no intention of allowing a viable Palestinian
state to form. This week, Hamas agreed to form a new "national
unity government" with Fatah and to invest Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas with full authority to negotiate with
Israel and to represent the interests of Palestinians in any
peace talks. The working platform of the unity government does
affirm the "two state solution," implicitly recognizing
the existence of the State of Israel even though Hamas as an
organization still retains its opposition to Israel.
Whether this will be enough
to ease the restrictions on visas that are brutally strangling
both the educational and the economic prospects of Palestinians
remains to be seen. The current government in Tel Aviv has certainly
made egregious missteps in its relationships with the PNA and
with Lebanon to the north since coming into power at the start
of 2006. And like George Bush, its only strategy is more of the
same--"stay the course."
The Palestinian unity government
itself faces the challenge of reining in the various armed factions
operating in the Occupied Territories and turning away from the
brutality of constant warfare. To the extent that the PNA can
get control of the violence, it will be able to demonstrate that
the harsh Israeli tactics--including the short visas--are unnecessary,
punitive, and destructive not only of the chances for an economically
vibrant PNA but of the bonds of family and communal life that
are the basis of moral government.
Col.Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst
for Foreign Policy In Focus,
a retired U.S. Army colonel, and a senior fellow on military
affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Email
at dan@fcnl.org
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