The
Israeli & Palestinian State
Preamble
The status quo of Israel in Palestine is not sustainable.
There are critical security, international relations and domestic crisis issues that threaten the very existence of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples much more so than the ongoing, comparatively low intensity occupation of the Palestinian zones of control in the West Bank and blighted Gaza. The region at large is in an acute state of political and social unrest; the governments of Somalia, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Yemen have fallen resulting in foreign occupations, civil wars and general anarchy. Shi’a Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are at proxy war throughout the Muslim world.
Many will object to us describing Israel as a “Jewish military Colony”, object to calling the separation barrier “Apartheid Wall” but linguistics and agreement of a shared paradigm are vital to the success out this unit’s objectives. We assure you the credentials of our core research team from Israel is sufficiently grounded in lived experiences of both the intelligence service and defense forces; while our Palestinian team’s Jihadist and patriotic background would be of little question.
None of us nine are pro-peace; we are pro-survival.
Chaos and revolution are spreading while security, what little there was is unraveling. All of this was acutely exacerbated by the 2001 & 2003 American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; resulting in the virtual non-governance of both countries today.
This treatise has been researched and written by a group of Israelis and Palestinians who are concerned with the collective survival of their respective peoples as they occupy and are occupied in the heart of this massive, un-ending conflict. There is very little hope of this macros-regional war or micro-peace settlement between Israel and Palestine being resolved on the level of government. Palestinians have two competing governments; Hamas and Fatah; Israel has coalition government, but in reality is controlled as a military oligarchy on the behest of Ashkenazi Judaism and the foreign policy goals of the United States of America.
For the approximately 13-14 million humans living in Greater Israel/ historic Palestine; the scenarios are not optimistic in the slightest. Peace is improbable, demographics are not favorable to the 4-5 million categorized Jews and beyond the religious overtone of the landmarks described by three world religions as ‘holy land’; Israel is also a nuclear armed semi-peripheral power aligned completely and dependent on financially a Jewish Lobby and interest in the United States which cultivates the specific and direct interests of two intractable groups; the US military-industrial complex and the 1-2 million Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Jews; which enjoy a standard of living inside the Jewish colony markedly different from the Jews of other ethnic backgrounds.
There has been ceaseless warfare in the Maghreb & Middle East since 2000.
All of the scenarios discussed in the treatise are inseparable from the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it is naïve and European to link the peace of the region of our specific peace.
A peace that will never be.
Thus we concern ourselves in this manuscript with Israelis (of all religions and ethnicities) and Palestinians (of all demographics). We are concerned with the broader course of humanity, but this has been authored to ensure that regardless of humanities general course; there will always be Palestinians, and there will always be Jews; and if there are to be “Israelis” an identity that is less than 84 years old; we must engage in radical steps to subvert the course of the mainstream Zionist project; delink ourselves of Euro-American hegemony and stop the inevitable slaughter of our collective peoples.
To stop the flood gates from opening, to address the broad systemic internal contradictions of the Israeli state and to secure the third Hebrew commonwealth, a radical policy of reorientation must begin with a realistic assessment of the only other three parties on the ground besides Memshala Yisrael which can broker regional stability. Hamas. Kurdistan. Iran
The central thesis of this treatise has two parts, as its authors are diametrically grounded in two war camps; Political Islam and Zionism; both of which reflect deeply nuanced interpretations of their respective ideologies; but are wildly different in fundamental social policy.
Part One; is that in order to safeguard Israel as a ‘Jewish National Home,’ some very fundamental assumptions on regional security and domestic policy must be altered to reflect new realities emerging on the ground. The most vital among them being recognition of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement/Hamas), Kurdistan and Iran as the only viable partners the State of Israel has to implement lasting détente, separation and a cessation to this prolonged conflict with an endgame result of peace.
Part Two; actualization of Palestinian human rights and opposition to occupation and apartheid is the only mechanism for survival that Jews, particularly non-white Jews have to secure the survival of their people.
Introduction:
It is no longer a question of moralizing the conflict, obsessing over past failures or temporarily abating a cycle of degenerating violence. Or conducting expensive anthropological studies on identity.
Both the Israeli Knesset, the Palestinian resistance factions, the various Persian & Arab power brokers and the para-state organizations on the ground (and in Diaspora) all realize that neither by sheer will nor by force of arms can they destroy one another. Blame for the modern quagmire that is the Middle East may fall squarely on the post-colonial powers of Europe and the United States for proliferation of arms without stipulation or control. However the new reality is that if the third Hebrew Commonwealth of Israel is to survive; if a Palestinian State is to be brought into being; as well as if any measure of regional stability is to be achieved, radical and unorthodox steps must be taken to close the breach. The breach is not simply a result of Israeli defense against Arab aggression, or vice versa; it is a breach in the foundation of the modern security calculus. All parties involved must become more attuned to the heightened stakes via lessons of history and sound political science.
This paper treatise offers an objective analysis of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya in order to advocate for its recognition as a viable partner, not in immediate peace; but in implementation of separation, economic development and most importantly; Hudna. It makes a fundamental case for supporting Kurdish national ambitions in Turkey, Iraq and Syria. We advocate for a full and lasting partnership between Israel and the revolutionary Shi’a government in Iran.
To claim that Memshala Israel has secured its borders, or contained conventional military threats to its existence is to say that glass is made out of sand. The process by which glass is made from sand renders the base substance un-alterably changed and requires much the release of energy through fire and heat to yield something far more unstable than its original form. While the cousins of Ishmael and Yitzhak, the Israelis and Palestinians, are indeed two peoples intractably bound to a single, tiny piece of land, they are met with a reoccurring problem. The Israeli public and government (currently) lack the will to commit genocide. The Palestinian Resistance factions cannot (currently) procure or introduce a means to mass murder that won’t render their own homeland a house of ash.
Surely whispered in both camps is the notion that it wouldn’t be ‘objectionable’ for the other and their kind to be ‘pushed into the sea’ or ‘dumped on the other side of the Jordan.’ The survivors of the Shoah cannot (yet) bring themselves to this, nor would international opinion condone genocide in the Holy Land in this day and age. As for the Palestinians, pushing the Jews into the sea has more to do with rhetoric than ability, conscience or even intention. The ancestors of both races defended the holy land against the Christian Crusaders locked arm in arm.
There are over 1,400 years of precedent for relatively peaceful co-existence and less than 100 to the contrary. Anyone telling you otherwise has a vested interest in your ignorance.
Even the death toll of the First Intifada (estimated at 421 Israeli/1,549 Palestinian) and the more bloody melee of the Second Intifada, which included suicide bombers and collective punishment, cost only 1,062 Israeli and 5,500 Palestinian lives. The invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008 resulted in 13 Israeli and 1,417 Palestinians. In the ongoing Gaza Wars in 2010-2015 an estimated 100 Israelis and over 5,000 Palestinians have lost their lives.
That means that in the entirety of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict beginning in 1948; less than 50,000 people have cumulatively died, comparatively to virtually all other ethnic conflicts that is a foot note, a statistic.
The body count of the Palestinian Israel civil war is comparatively low when compared with other global ethnic conflicts like those waged in Sri Lanka, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda and Chechnya.
Hamas must be engaged as the only viable partner capable of securing Palestinian temporary acceptance of the third Hebrew Commonwealth and thereby securing the Jewish National home by buying both sides more time for ultimate reconciliation before more desperate measures are introduced. Kurdistan must be supported aggressively by both people’s overtly and covertly. Iran is the only semi-peripheral power both sides can count on, as all other states besides Egypt are European inventions; and Egypt is an incredibly unstable place locked between a US backed military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood.
This treatise is broken into nine Sections each with sub-segments utilized to illustrate the viability of the central thesis.
Section zero is a brief synopsis of the diversity and contradictions within the Palestinians and Jewish narratives with a focus on linguistics.
Section one is a baseline on Hamas’ tactics and beliefs to establish how they have developed as a movement in relation to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sunni political Islam.
Section two demonstrates Hamas’ evolution in response to failed Israeli tactics of counter-insurgency.
Section three deals with the evolution of the Hamas’ military-political strategy over time.
Section four explains how these evolutions can be interpreted as establishing Hamas as a reliable partner for separation and economic development & is a resistance strategy for the Jewish and Palestinian diaspora.
Section five outlines a strategy for bringing the long warring factions to détente.
Section six is the case for full Palestinian and Israeli support for Kurdistan.
Section seven is an outline of Iran and their proxy Hezbollah.
Section eight is a listing of all known relative players that must be brought into coalition to support the aims of the treatise.
Table of Contents
Section zero “What Jews and Palestinians Believe”
Section one “What Hamas Believes”
Section two “How Hamas Evolves”
Section three “Crusades”.
Section four “Exile”.
Section five “Hudna & Détente”
Section six “Kurdistan”
Section seven “Iran and Hezbollah”
Section eight “Factions”.
Section 0: What Jews & Palestinians Believe
“You don’t eat pork and we don’t eat pork, we’ve both been not eating pork for as long as we can remember, let’s just agree to disagree on everything and just not eat pork together.”
The Grand Narrative of Jews (Holocaust)
The Grand Narrative of Palestinians (Catastrophe)
Objective Proximate Causes
Objective proximate causes are existential problems for both states and both peoples. As in for every square meter of West Bank territory absorbed into a settlement any future Palestinian state slowly ceases to lose ground. For every Arab-Israeli (Palestinian) born inside Israel; the reality of the Jewish State begins to crumble. As revolutions break out all over the region the overall security situation is deteriorating. Peace has always take a back seat to security and has always been punctuated with a new round of violent engagement. The following causes are understood on both sides as the primary provocations which trigger violence in the conflict.
Primary Root: Physical integrity of bi-national territory.
This is clearly understood on both sides in relation to the highly limited size of territory both peoples lay their claim to. Pre-1967 Israel has a population of over 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs. East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been settled by over 650,150 Jews which hold an estimated 9% of West Bank territory. The issues most difficult to negotiate include not only Jerusalem; the capital claimed by both; or the ever expanding settlements or the separation/apartheid barriers; but by where to draw borders so that a viable Palestine can exist alongside a secure Israel.
Primary Proximate Causes:
Each side holds a seemingly intractable bottom line perspective making their distrust grow even deeper as their leaders fail to deliver peace, security or economic development. These core provocation issues and the policies taken on them most harm the ability to hold any meaningful negotiations for peace. What follows are the ten primary proximate causes which require corresponding Benefit Harm indicators we advocate for in the fourth section to monitor their resolution or disruption. Symmetric Indicators as explained in more detail later are the agreed to measurement systems for a specific proximate causes where belligerent sides in a conflict lay out specific provocation parameters.
According to a report by B’TSELEM (Sep, 2008), Access Denied, Israeli Measures to deny Palestinians access to land around settlements:
“Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation by discrimination, in which it runs separate legal systems, one for Israelis and the other for Palestinians, and under which the scope and nature of human-rights violations vary based on nationality. This system has led to the theft of hundreds of thousands of dunams of land to benefit the settlements and their residents”.
1. Structural Apartheid: Israelis are very loathe to be equated with South Africa and deeply fear the long term ramifications of the nascent boycott, divestment and sanction movement. Apartheid which is a crime against humanity is also the basis of the Israeli-Arab conflict; structural attempts in Israel and the occupied territories to maintain Jewish privilege, especially Ashkenazi Jewish privilege over all other ethnic groups. Apartheid is measured and understood as explicit and implicit structural division for the purpose of fortifying ethnic privilege. The most obvious extensions of this Apartheid are the checkpoints, ethnic identity cards and the Security Barrier Walls.
2. Jerusalem/ Holy Sites: Both Israelis and Palestinians view Jerusalem/Al Quds as their capital. The Old City holds the most holy site to Judaism (Ha Kotel/ Western Wall of destroyed second temple) and the Dome of the Rock; the third holiest site in Islam. A periodic flashpoint for violence, Jerusalem/ Al Quds highlights a major issue between both sides. The Palestinians want full control of East Jerusalem, which was occupied by Jordan prior to the Six Day War in 1967. Israel has actively worked to expand the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem and environs in order to make its division impossible. All West Bank Palestinian Muslims under age 35 are restricted from entering the Dome of the Rock except on major holidays with permits. All Palestinian-Israeli Jerusalem residents have access. All attempts to expand Jewish presence represent an explicit arena of contention. As do Arab or Jewish desecration and neglect
3. Settlement Expansion: Israeli settlements in the West Bank according to Israeli NGO B’Tselem occupy on 1% of West Bank territory but via security barriers and jurisdiction extend to a full 42% of administrative control (Yesha Council disputes this and states that the settlements take up 9.2 %, arguably on some of the best lands). This issue is one of the most glaring issues on the table as the majority of international human rights bodies have repeatedly ruled that the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories have no legal basis and must be removed in order to pave the way for a viable Palestinian state to emerge. Despite such obvious refusal of the settlements Israel has ignored all UN resolutions and recommendations and planned for more settlements to be built on Palestinian lands. Israel unilaterally dissolved and destroyed its Gaza Strip settlements in 2005.
4. Access to Water: As of today Israel has access to all the major water resources in the area some of which are located in the Palestinian Territories. Most of the natural resources that go into the Palestinian areas are only allowed to go in under Israeli control and monitoring and this would be essential to be removed in order to allow the state of Palestine to grow and enjoy full and real sovereignty.
5. Refugees/Right to Return: in 1948 over 711,000 Palestinian refugees decided to flee their homes thinking that they could return in a matter of weeks or months after Israel’s defeat by the Arab armies. Others were forced out of their homes by the advancing Israeli army which forcibly evacuated of 500 villages (Pappe, 2006). By leaving their homes they paved the way for the actual establishment of the state of Israel and paved the way for almost never returning to their homes. A good number of Palestinians did not flee and became the so-called “Arab-Israelis” and today they are part of the Israeli society albeit as fourth class citizens. Today the Refugees issue is being used for political use only as most of the Arab countries to refuse to give Palestinian refugees and rights or citizenships in order to support “the right of return” and Israel will never allow Palestinian to return as this would mean that the Jewish people would become a minority in their own Jewish land that they have fought so much in order to have. On the Jewish side, persons with one Jewish grandparent are covered under the existing right to return and are given an extensive benefit basket.
6. The Borders/ Palestinian State Recognition: The Israeli government has repeatedly stood against any idea of a true sovereign Palestinian state due to proclaimed existential security risks. According to Israel any Palestinian state will not be connected in terms of geography with limited air space and sea freedom making the idea of a state kind of hopeless in the eyes of many Palestinians. In addition, there many Israeli restrictions relating to any future state for the Palestinian people such as any state would need to be without any army and even the polices forces would need to fully report its use of weapons. The state would also be forced to rely on Israeli utility companies, water works and be economically dependent for some time.
7. US Military Aid: Israel was the recipient $2.775 billion in 2010, $3 billion in 2011, $3.07 billion in 2012 (and $3.15 billion per year from 2013-2018) while Israel’s defense budget is around $15 billion. The United States and Israel engage in extensive intelligence sharing and defense research. The US also has the largest community of Jews outside of Israel. AIPAC, the Israel lobby in the United States has a disproportionate amount of influence over U.S. policy and the notion of the U.S. an independent outside arbiter is naive.
8. Demographic Changes: Israelis are acutely worried about demographic changes inside of Israel that will affect the state’s “Jewish Character” in the long run. 1.6 million Israeli citizens of Arab, Bedouin, Druze and Palestinian descent make up currently over 20 % of the population. Equally worrying is that out of an estimated 12 million people in greater Israel (Israel, Judea & Samaria/ West Bank), under Israeli jurisdiction (excluding 1.7 million in Gaza) only 5.6 million are classified as being Jewish.
9. Regional Instability: As various Arab governments erupt in civil strife and internal conflict Israel continues to worry about its own security in an environment rife with revolution, civil war and arms proliferation. Egypt’s 2011 revolution and subsequent coup brought Muslim Brotherhood in and then out of power; Hamas is the Palestinian branch of Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan which is over 70% Palestinian is Israel’s only remaining regional ally besides Turkey which is growing also increasingly hostile.
10. Bi-Partisan Palestine: Since the Palestinian civil war in 2006 Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas and the West Bank Palestinian Authority by Fatah. Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and Fatah is viewed as corrupted. This in essence has created two Palestine’s only one of which is willing to negotiate anything with the State of Israel and neither of which can enforce policy on the other.
These are the major issue is the grievance that both sides hold against one another. This is a major point that can be far more important than Jerusalem, water, or even refugees. The hatred that both sides have for one another and the pain that each side caused the other are so deep that they cannot simply make any future agreements because of a true lack any sense of trust or sincerity. There has to be a true healing process to be formed that involves both sides with the focus on those who suffered because of the Israeli existence or the Palestinian presence in the Territories.
Section 1: What Political Islamists Believes
“Allah is its goal, the Prophet is its Modal, the Qur’an is its constitution, and death for the sake of Allah its most coveted desire.”
-Hamas Charter
Article 8.
Crusades
“You live in a democracy, which means that all 316 million of you made a decision to go towar against Islam, therefore all 316 million of you are our enemy and the Government you have elected makes you accountable.”
- Al Qaeda
When one regards the modern state, it is important to differentiate between the people and their government. The distinction is indeed quite blurred when a nation proclaims itself a democracy. To an outside observer, the actions of the democratic state, be they foreign policy or imperialist war, seem as though sanctioned by a national consensus. After all, America does tell the world that her people have freedom, and freedom implies choice. To the world it seems that Americans have chosen hegemony over international democracy and national self determination. To nations directly affected by our foreign policies, the rational conclusion is that our democracy and freedom is intended only for Americans and the reaction to that conclusion is hate. If one had always been told America was a democracy and had heard any US national rhetoric on TV, the inevitable conclusion would be that whatever was done by the US government could be blamed on the American people. It is that rational that made our civilians legitimate targets in the eyes of the terrorists. Against the strongest military power on earth, all those opposed to our presence must fight a poor man’s guerrilla war; we call such war terrorism, and to understand why they hate us we must first define who they are.
What would make someone give their life to attack the American system? It safe to say it is a combination of two factors; a profound hatred for the US and a deep sense of hopelessness that anything can change without the use of force. Force being the modus operandi of the US, it must be widely believed that it is the only thing to which our government will respond. These individuals do not necessarily wear kafias. While it may happen that most of the more visible terrorism has its objectives rooted in the US’s involvement in the Middle East, we cannot forget that our foreign policy in both Asia and Latin America has made numerous populations wary if not resentful of the American role international politics. Due to resent media coverage our perception of terrorism is that of Arabs hijacking planes and strapping bombs to themselves. This is not the case. The threat is broader and more complex than what our government tells us.
We’ve been a prominent hegemonic power for over fifty years and have retained hyperpower status since ’91. We, as a hyperpower, are the dominant player in the international community and our tendency to play fair often does not coincide with our desire to retain power. The “international terrorists” are not some isolated community of fundamentalist crazies. It is more pragmatic to assume that on many levels they are supported by the peoples of the third world. “Throughout the Muslim world there is widespread bitterness against America, even among well educated businessmen and professionals, who…resent the way the Western Powers have behaved in their countries”. Just because the bulk of the third world is not ready to commit themselves to a war of attrition with the US, does not mean they do not support one. This is not to say that all third world populations completely support the tactic of political violence. It is quite possible to hate America both culturally and ideologically without necessarily taking action. What is important to realize is that for these groups to continue functioning they need a ready source of funding and volunteers. The governments of Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq undoubtedly lent state support to terrorist organizations. However, many groups base themselves in nations controlled by governments that are relatively secular, corrupt, and admittedly pro-US. “Hatred of the United States is not peculiar to the Middle East, nor does it translate directly into a desire to launch terrorist attacks. The relationship between the two is more complicated and indirect, akin in many ways to that between oxygen and fire. Oxygen does not cause fires-the spark must come from something else-but fire requires oxygen to rage. In the same fashion, terrorists need anti-American sentiment…it provides them with people willing to give aid and comfort.” It is obvious that they hate us, now the real question is why.
They hate us because of our history. Analyzing the last fifty years of American foreign policy one must acknowledge that the US government has done some questionable things in the its war on communism. In 1953 the CIA overthrew the prime minister of Iran because he sought to nationalize the country’s oil and was thought to be leaning left toward Moscow at a time when nationalism was oft confused with the global communist revolution. We restored the Shah to power, a brutal dictator who then went about torturing and killing all opposition to his regime. Amnesty International summed up the situation in 1976 by noting that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts, and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse history in human rights than Iran” This would sow the seeds for a fundamentalist take over in ‘79 making the country markedly anti-American. When Israel launched the six day war in ‘67 and achieved a decisive victory against its neighbors using American made weapons, the already substantial Palestinian refugee problem was worsened. With most of the Arab world regarding Israel as the 51st US state much of the animosity that arose from this conflict was redirected against the US. During the war between Iraq and Iran we sold weapons to both sides fueling a long drawn out conflict that would leave thousands dead. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in ’81 the US armed, financed and trained cadres of what would become today’s terrorist leaders to fight the invading Red Army. “Sunnis from all parts of the Islamic world fought in Afghanistan, and then returned home with the will, confidence, and training to begin terrorist operations against weak domestic governments.”When the Russians withdrew the nation was left with no infrastructure and no aid from the US. As a result the nation was left to the warlords of feudal anarchy and the Al Qaeda network would receive training camps and material support. The fighters, having beaten back the Red Army returned home ready to continue the Jihad. In ’82 when Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in a joint action with the US, it was quite clear that the US was willing to use force to support its democratic allies. Combine all this with the corrupt dictators we supported, and continue to support, in most of the Arab world, the Gulf War, our military presence in the spiritual capital of the Middle East; Saudi Arabia, the devastating sanctions on Iraq, and its eventual invasion and occupation, we get some idea that perhaps some of the animosity they have for us is explained if not justified.
They hate us because of our government. The third world fails to differentiate between the people and the apparatus of the state. When our president makes statements calling groups of nations with no apparent interlinking policy or leadership (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) an Axis of Evil, how is the international community expected to react? Our government is believed to be composed and elected by the American people, so when Congress votes on war appropriations it appears to many that it was a nationally made group decision. In reality the government tends to operate without much direct involvement on behalf of its people. It is clear that our government thinks it is upholding the national interest, but at what cost must the third world pay for our economic security? Morgenthau could not have hoped to have his theories better put to practice. The US government does not seem to have many moral scruples, despite the rhetoric spouted by politicians. It has proven time and time again, from Hanoi to Mogadishu that we will kill to protect our security. Some Americans are slowly coming to this realization, but most have not. To the bulk of American society September 11th was an unprovoked attack on freedom, not the culmination of fifty years of Middle Eastern foreign policy. To the terrorists, hating the American government is the same as hating the American people that enable its existence.
They believe that all Americans are accountable. America is a complex society with a vocal minority on both the left and the right in polarized extremes. However, the bulk of middle class America, an enormous demographic, does not choose to voice a concrete opinion or take definite side for or against the government. Only 45% of Americans are registered to vote. The third world interprets this as a combination of indifference and support for the state, for in this case not saying anything maintains the status quo. That status quo is what we are hated for. Your typical American neither cares nor understands the ramifications of globalized capitalism or the reality of our military interventions. Their inaction makes them accountable. Our troops have been involved in hundreds of wars, conflicts, and interventions over the past fifty years. Our economic policies in the third world have led to destabilized economies and American control of valuable resources. Our citizens just want to watch CNN, eat Big Macs, and drive an SUV with a sense of security that they feel can be provided by their government. This gross disregard on behalf of our populace enables our leaders to enact the policies that taint our image in the global community. The hawks refer to terrorism as a protracted campaign of violence directed against non-combatants. But on many levels our non-combatants enable the deaths of civilians in the countries we invade.
Now that we understand the motives of the terrorists we must address the root issue: how do we stop terrorism? We do not fight terror by killing the terrorists as the Palestinian Intifada has shown us, for every terrorist we kill we create four more. These fighters have both the zeal and the resolve necessary to continue fighting no matter what we throw at them. They may change their national power bases, they may lose key leaders, they may suffer annihilation on an individual basis, but they retain popular support and as long as our government makes the foreign policy decisions that initiated these conflicts, they will continue to. We can never stop violent opposition to America as long as it functions as a capitalist hyperpower. We must address our history; our people must know, acknowledge, and admit to what their government has done. Most of all; we must become accountable. We the American people are responsible for what our government does, it must be made clear that not only do we oppose the state; we will actively work to change it. They will only stop hating us when America becomes what it was intended to be. One nation, under the people, indivisible, with liberty and justice for both itself and the global community.
The Rise of Political Islam
The amalgamation of religious zeal with political organization has proven to be a powerful force in the demand for radical social change in the Arab world. In understanding the circumstance through which the ruins of Arab nationalism gave birth to political Islam we must trace the movement as both a logical consequence of socio-economic factors and as a reemergence of Muslim identity reacting to the failure of western secular ideology.
The Arab world has always struggled with political identity. In a region defined by a deep rooted tradition of religious faith, left with the battle scars of imperialism and foreign domination; the emerging states by the early 1960’s had attempted to co-opt religious sentiment and place power firmly in the hands of authoritarian regimes. Despite the attempts of Nasserism to drown religious fervor in the drum beat of jingoistic patriotism there emerged an identity manifested in groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that sought to keep alive the tradition of Islamic rule. State repression could not stifle the reality of the conditions these regimes produced nor could it kill a deep seated belief system quite inherently ingrained upon the region.
By the end of 1967 the nationalist regimes of Egypt and Syria had been dealt a crippling blow by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Six Day War. Just as the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 had demonstrated the weakness of the monarchs; the illusion of Arab unity and the strength of Arab Socialism were called into serious question over their inability to uproot the “Zionist Entity.” To add insult to injury the state led economies that were promised to bring economic equality to the region were hopeless failures insuring that a quickly growing, educated, urban class of young people held far greater expectations for their futures than their government could produce. Offered mindless jobs in a hapless state bureaucracy they turned to the Islamist ideology as a vehicle which could bring about an end to the domination of the authoritarian elites. With state suppression of dissident opinion many found that the mosques were the only place where grievances against the state could be addressed. This desire for social and economic justice spread across class lines united in a belief in the sharia and the belief in an Islamic state. The intellectuals did this by concentrating on the moral and cultural dimensions of religion. They won the broadest base of support when they mobilized both the young urban poor and the devout bourgeoisie with an ideology that offered a vague social agenda but a sharp focus on morality. (Kepel p. 67)
Many found common cause with the writings of a man named Sayyid Qutb. Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote profusely on the subject of political Islam declaring that the nationalist regimes were jahiliyya, or barbaric and contrary to the Muslim ideal. He considered the nationalist “worship” of the army, party, or state to be a form of idolatry and his language was directed at the young whom he advocated to carry the torch of Islamic revolution. Along with the writings of Mawdudi and Khomeini, Qutb set up an ideological basis that would soon be spread in more moderate form by the Saudis missionary proselytizing.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel achieving an initial level of military success. In solidarity with their Muslim “brothers” the oil producing Gulf States with held oil shipments to the West causing the price per barrel to sky rocket. The real victors in this war were the oil exporting countries, above all Saudi Arabia…In the aftermath of the war, the oil states abruptly found themselves with revenues gigantic enough to assure them a clear position of dominance within the Muslim world. (Kepel p. 69) Oil however wasn’t the only thing the Saudis were exporting. Through the Muslim World League, the Saudis spread the puritanical ideas of the Wahhabite sect through extensive publication and distribution of Islamic literature, the construction of mosques, and the training of imans. The objective was to bring Islam to the forefront of the international scene, to substitute it for the various discredited nationalist movements, and to refine multitude of voices within the religion down to the single creed of the masters of Mecca. (Kepel p. 70) While they attempted to the tone down the radicalism of the political Islam preached by men like Qutb, they none the less succeeded in making the message of Islam easily accessible throughout the Muslim world at a time when the economic and social systems of the West were proving to be less than popular.
Saudi Arabia played another important role in the geo-political rise of politicized Islam. The huge over population and trend of unemployment led to mass population migrations toward the Gulf States. Here, where jobs were available, people were able to send huge sums of money back to their families in non-oil producing states and generate capital which could be reinvested in their own countries. This led to an association of economic gain with religious stability and out of this emerged a form of Islamic banking which would become a War Chest for the Islamist movements.
While the Iranian revolution in 1979 represented a social manifestation of the ideas of political Islam this modal failed to apply itself practically in any of the predominantly Sunni Muslim countries. While movements such as the Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians, and several variants in North Africa played crucial parts in the struggle against the Western backed authoritarian regimes; political Islam found itself confined as movement unable to break the strangle hold these regimes held on their countries. The return to Islam came as a result of the disparities caused by grafting western institutions on Muslim people’s and the rise of political Islam both symbolizes a return to the roots of their civilization and an increased association of the current regimes with Western impiety. The Muslim world felt a sense of pride in the return to their traditions and the political and economic conditions of its rise persistent then and today spell its continued ideological presence in the modern sphere of Middle Eastern politics.
Religious Nationalism
It is impossible to grasp the political dynamic of the region by embracing either one’s visceral reaction or a revisionist reinterpretation of historical events. We must divest our respective identities from the end game solution. We must then look at the progression of events and ideas behind the formation of Hamas through the prism of reality not Western notions of morality or international convention. The Hamas movement holds beliefs and a worldview that are a direct descendent of the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood style of political Islam and of the tangible military victories of the Shi’a Revival. We must understand the roots of their world view to calculate their evolution as a movement.
The failure of the Arab states to make social and economic progress their people yearned for, the widening socioeconomic gap between rich and poor, the growing phenomenon of social and moral anomie identified with Western culture especially affected the urban, educated, lower middle-class Muslims. Their disillusion with modernity and revolutionary secularism heightened their inclination to seek refuge in religious traditions as a cure for the current social malaise and as a source of individual and collective hope. The growing trend of Islamification and institutionalization in the cultural and social spheres soon assumed a political, sometimes violent form (Mishal & Sela, p. 27).
To assert Hamas won the 2007 elections due to a Palestinian embrace of rejectionist political violence and collective fundamentalism is to make the equally baseless claim that Israel is a product of Western guilt following the Holocaust. Both claims would be divorced from over 1600 years of generally amicable relations between the houses of Ishmael and Yitzhak. The most uncompromising, principled and ruthless advent of Palestinian Resistance is surely Hamas much as the Hebrew Commonwealth must trace its own nationalistic yearnings of nationhood to the French Revolution, the Jewish enlightenment, labor Zionism and Jabotinsky militancy following centuries of persecution in Europe. Hamas’ rise is also a product of historical factors including the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolution and the successes of the Hezbollah movement in forcing the withdrawal of Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 and 2005. The amalgamation of religious zeal with tightly compartmentalized political organization as Para-state infrastructure has proven to be a powerful force in the demand for radical social change in the Middle East, which has been utilized by Hebrew and Muslim alike. The circumstances through which the ruins of Arab nationalism gave birth to political Islam is both a logical consequence of socio-economic factors and a resurgence of Islamic identity reacting to the failures of western secular ideology.
Islamist movements are loose coalitions of three elements: a counter elite composed of businessmen and professionals, a second stratum of frustrated intellectuals and unemployed or underemployed university of secondary school graduates, and a mass base of the young, semi educated unemployed…these people harbor deep grievances. They are personally and collectively frustrated. Education and exposure to the wider world have broadened their horizons, but the grim realities of the job and housing market have dashed their hopes (Richards & Waterbury p.347).
The Muslim world has always struggled with political identity. The emerging states had attempted to co-opt populist sentiment and place power firmly in the hands of the authoritarian regimes by the early 1950’s and 1960’s in a region defined by a deep rooted tradition of religious faith and left with the deep and humiliating battle scars of colonialism and foreign domination. An identity became manifested in groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that sought to re-implement the tradition of Shar’iah law and a revival of Islamic values in the world beginning at a grassroots level. Arab state repression could not wholly stifle the resistance produced by the conditions of their regimes despite the attempts of the Nasserists to drown religious fervor in the drumbeat of Pan-Arabism and Arab socialism. Nor could they harness the deep-seated belief system of religious national identity that the political Islamists could harness via the Masjid and imagined history.
The nationalist regimes of Egypt and Syria had been dealt a crippling blow by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Six Day War by the end of 1967. Just as the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 had demonstrated the weakness of the monarchs; the illusion of Arab unity and the strength of Arab Socialism were called into serious question over their inability to uproot the ‘Zionist Entity.’ Adding insult to injury, the state led economies that were promised to bring economic equality to the region were hopeless failures insuring that a quickly growing, educated urban class of young people held far greater expectations for their futures than their government could produce. They turned to the Islamist ideology as a vehicle which could bring about an end to the domination of the authoritarian elites and rehabilitate the political weakness the Arab street felt was responsible for the emergence of a Jewish State when they were offered mindless jobs in a hapless state bureaucracy. With state suppression of dissident opinion many found that the mosques were the only place where grievances against the state could be openly addressed. This desire for social and economic justice spread across class lines uniting the implementation and belief in Shar’iah law with the conception of an Islamic state; the Qur’an as their constitution.
The intellectuals did this by concentrating on the moral and cultural dimensions of religion. They won the broadest base of support when they mobilized both the young urban poor and the devout bourgeoisie with an ideology that offered a vague social agenda but a sharp focus on morality. (Kepel p. 67)
In the year 1928, an organization by the name of Al Ikhwan Al Musliimeen (the Muslim Brotherhood) was established in Egypt by religious scholar Hassan al-Banna embracing Islamic Dawa and activism as a grassroots response to Western cultural imperialism and the weakness of the post-colonial Muslim world. Many found common cause with his ideas (for which he was murdered by the Egyptian state in 1949. The organization of Al Banna evolved over time. There was state repression of the writings and oratory of a second man named Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was an Egyptian intellectual and member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was also arrested, imprisoned and murdered by the Egyptian state in 1966. He wrote prolifically on the subject of political Islam declaring that the nationalist regimes were jahiliyya, or barbaric and contrary to the Muslim ideal. He considered the nationalist “worship” of the army, party or state to be a form of idolatry. His language was directed at the young whom he advocated to carry the torch of Islamic revolution first against their own corrupt regimes and then the Dar al Har, governments of the West. Along with the later Shi’a writings of Ayatollah Khomeini, it was Qutb who almost single-handedly codified the ideology for revolutionary political Islam. The ideology of revolutionary religious nationalist filled a vacuum left in the early 1970’s as Pan-Arabism, Arab Socialism and secular nationalist factions were met with defeat on the battlefield against Israel and brought the iron heels of repression upon the necks of their own people, notably the Palestinians.
The Muslim Brotherhood by the 1980’s was the dominant organizational framework for political Islam throughout the Middle East. It members were at times hunted and hounded by authoritarian regimes, or in other cases, like in Saudi Arabia or Hashemite Jordan, it was co-opted by the oligarchs. While the Brotherhood attempted to the tone down the radicalism of political Islam preached by men like Qutb, they none-the-less succeeded in making the message of Islam easily accessible throughout the Muslim world at a time when the economic and social systems of the West were proving to be less than popular. After the murder of Qutb in 1966, the Muslim Brotherhood spread rapidly. Its leadership took haven in Saudi Arabia and its activists laid in for a long haul strategy of Islamic society implemented from the bottom up.
Throughout the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood expanded rapidly, despite period of government repression in several countries, to become one of the largest (if not the largest) Islamist organizations in the world. Experts often haggle over the exact membership of the worldwide movement, but the Brotherhood has penetrated every Muslim country, with predictably strong membership in the Arab world but also surprisingly large numbers in the West (Schanzer, p. 15).
The events of the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel occupied the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Jerusalem was instrumental in allowing the Muslim Brotherhood of Jordan and Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt to connect their activists via Israeli occupation. The burden of Palestinian liberation was being taken up by the secular nationalist operations of the Fatah dominated PLO, no longer trusting of military victory via the Arab-Socialist coalition, but upon forces organized on the ground. While the PLO conducted wave after wave of terrorist strikes and struggles against Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood focused itself on the spiritual reformation of the Palestinian people in the occupied zones.
The Iranian revolution in 1979 represented a social manifestation of the ideas of political Islam. This model had failed to apply itself practically in any of the predominantly Sunni Muslim countries. While various MB factions in Syria, Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians and several variants in North Africa had waged various campaigns under the banner of Islam against their authoritarian regimes, political Islam found itself confined as a movement unable to break the stranglehold these regimes held on their countries. The return to Islamic practice had increased exponentially despite the failures of the revolutionaries. The rise of political Islam both symbolized a return to the imagined roots of their civilization and an increased association of the current regimes with impiety. The seizure of state power in Iran in 1979 and advent of Lebanese Hezbollah sent a clear message to Sunni Muslim loyalists of the Muslim Brotherhood. Religious nationalism could be marshaled and the successes their Shi’a brothers had achieved against Israel and the West could be tactically replicated within occupied Palestine.
The vast material network and supply lines of communications and logistics the Brotherhood possessed throughout the Muslim world would in 1987 merge Sunni Political Islam with tactics of Shi’a asymmetric resistance. On the eve of the first Intifada Hamas was born. There is virtually no doctrinal distinction to be drawn from the mother organization. The Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood’s creation of the Islamic Resistance Movement of Hamas was a tactical evolution borrowed and enhanced by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their surrogate force Hezbollah. While isolation based on religious confession can hinder the logistics and mass support in the Muslim world for these two victories of the Shi’a Revival, Hamas being spawned out of the Gaza City Branch of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood laid the groundwork for an internationalist manifestation of Sunni political Islam, which could rely on a vast pool of resources both doctrinal and material across sectarian lines in its fight against Memshala Yisrael.
The Masjid as a bunker and a school
The development of autonomous space and minimization of the Israeli intelligence forces ability to penetrate the organization and its zones of control is directly linked to the period after 1967 when Israel encouraged the rise of political Islam via the Muslim Brotherhood to discourage support and indoctrination carried out by the secular Fatah, PLO and Palestinian left then responsible for innumerable acts of armed resistance. The creation of a corporate identity on the basis of religious fundamentalism, albeit then not harnessed toward Jihad, was thought to offset gains the PLO and Palestinian leftists were making to organizing resistance activities.
The Israeli decision, despite obvious second thoughts, to grant the license to the Islamic Compound in Tel Aviv was an indicator of what would become unannounced, but official, Israeli policy. The Israeli government perceived its staunch enemy to be the nationalist and secular PLO and, by allowing Islamist rivals to flourish, believed that opposing Palestinian groups would do its work on the ground in a way that did not necessitate active Israeli involvement (Chehab, p20).
Israel allowed and granted official license for the Muslim Brotherhood to construct a massive network of mosque-centered, bootstrap social services, which by the late 80’s had become a new Muslim nucleus of Palestinian civil society complete with social infrastructure and civic organizations not controlled by the Israel occupational authorities or the wildly corrupt Fatah party. The nucleus of this organizing was the Al-Mujamma (Islamic Center), a focal point for hundreds of grassroots social services and schools of Islamic indoctrination.
In the beginning the Muslim Brotherhood was quite cognizant of the fact that it would have to begin its campaign of dawa on a mass scale in order to arrive at a Palestinian polity that was Islamic was well as independent of Israeli rule. From the outset, the mother organization of Hamas (Muslim Brotherhood) was engaged in education, proselytizing and vast reorientation of largely secular Palestinian society from the pulpit rather than the barricade. While throughout the 70’s and early 80’s groups like Black September, Fatah-PLO, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other secular nationalist groups launched successive waves of hijackings, bombings and political violence; the political Islamists who were quite aware of the force of state repression being carried against their movement throughout the Arab world, chose to engage in a program of Islamification from the ground up, by which the final armed struggle for Palestine would be proceeded by a return to ‘true Islamic practice’ by the Palestinian masses.
Until the advent and formation of Hamas as the mechanism for revolt and insurrection catalyzed by the competing forces of militant Islamic Jihad and PLO domination at the opening of the first Intifada, the Muslim Brotherhood and its chief instruments of indoctrination, Islamic University of Gaza and the al-Mujamma movement, sought to reform the religious character of Palestine via the Masjid and bootstrap social services. The Muslim Brotherhood tapped a vein of latent religiosity that had proven so successful for the Shi’a Hezbollah movement in Southern Lebanon via tapping into the hierarchy of needs. ; Palestinian society has taken an obvious turn toward conservative Sunni Islam as evidenced by the wearing of Hijab as a superficial indicator of Islamification as well as avoiding gender mixing, western dress and the permeation of Western culture. The Hijab is now commonly worn where it was once not. Cinemas have all but closed and Hamas has instituted, often by force, a regime in Gaza akin to the Taliban’s Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Hamas now directs the most sophisticated hearts and minds apparatus of any of numerous factions on the ground. Israel cannot easily penetrate the vast network of mosque-based charities and instruments of indoctrination via religion as it is loath to shut down the only functional network of charities operational in the occupied territories, which would risk an even larger human rights disaster than that which currently exists. Israel will not risk international condemnation to demolish a mosque, nor will it raid a hospital or a school. Yet the mosque is to Hamas the focal point of the resistance above all other tactics. Islamification, the blending of nationalism and religious zeal, the purge of Western influence from the Palestinian masses and the re-crafting of identity are the bedrock of the new Jihad.
The corporate identity of a movement cannot be suppressed with assassination, retaliatory airstrikes, sanctions or siege. The zeal that is being taught via the Hamas Masjid network and the successes of their grassroots charities are a bunker the Israelis cannot penetrate and a rallying point that cannot be captured.
Social Programs and Grassroots Advocacy
The sheer scope of the Hamas’ network of social infrastructure is breathtaking and bears direct responsibility for the group’s popularity. Islamic Jihad, Fatah and the other factions of the PLO do not come close to providing the wide range of services the charities set up by Muslim Brotherhood and now controlled by Hamas.
As a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and indeed inextricably intertwined with it, Hamas has been able to build on the mother organization’s extensive infrastructure in expanding its public base of operations. It is thus that nursery schools, kindergartens, social and sports clubs, libraries, and other such associations fall under its auspices, and the Islamic University continues under its control. These various institutions, to say nothing of the network of mosques-are useful vehicles for spreading Hamas’ ideas and influence and enlisting supporters (Abu-Amr, p.14).
The foundation of Hamas’ popularity and deep connectivity to the civilian base, which shelters its leaders and fighters was established through the decades of Islamic activism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel’s tacit approval of this dawa organizing, as well as Israel’s fixation on standing Arab armies and PLO terror squads inevitably allowed Hamas the breathing space and time build a mass base in both Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas has Islamified Palestinian society via the bread basket by combining the millions in aid from foreign backers and the ground apparatus of its mother organization
The Islamist movement whose Dawa tradition has most influenced Hamas, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is notable for having a politically activist nature. Academic scholars have noted that Brotherhood activists use communal activities at the grassroots level to “reshape the political consciousness of educated youth.” By focusing on impressionable youth and in areas lacking social welfare services, the Brotherhood’s Islamic institutions serve as “functional substitutes for the welfare apparatus of the state and constitute a natural and familiar setting in which young activists can reach out to uncommitted peers.” In other words, social service institutions function as an ideal tool used by Islamists to radicalize and recruit Muslim youth (Levitt, p.17).
Hamas administers its social services network via its indirect affiliations. This prevents Israel from connecting specific charitable organizations, hospitals, mosques and Palestinian civic associations with pipelines from arms and guerrilla operations. This enables vast amounts of foreign capital to fill Hamas’ coffers from Iran, Syria, Sudan and the West without allegations being made besides regular ones by America and Israel that aid money is being used for armed struggle. Each piece of indirectly affiliated Muslim Brotherhood, al-Mujamma foundation, or spiritual/educational apparatus is absolutely employed in the war effort with Israel. It is estimated that not only does Hamas utilize these boot-strap operations for indoctrination and its hearts and minds victory, each doubles as a command base, a cache or a means for the dissemination of propaganda. The most epic failure of groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah-PLO and Islamic Jihad was their myopic obsession with armed struggle without establishing such networks.
It is not logical to assume that Hamas would not engage its organizational and social programs purely for humanitarian purposes if one studies the absolute nature of the Hamas war against Israel. One can also draw lessons from years of insurgency by studying Israeli allegations of ambulances being used to move arms, of hospitals being converted into military operations centers and of mosques as being used as platforms for the spread of religious hatred. The Palestinian people certainly have their backs to the wall if one looks at sixty years of occupation and the full quarantine and siege underway in Gaza since 2007 combined with the reality of Israeli military prowess and the grinding bloodshed of two failed uprisings. Hamas social programs have become the bed-rock of their Para-state, which is utilized for both survival and the ongoing war effort.
These social services are vital to the masses of occupied Palestine, as are those administered by Hezbollah to the Shi’a of Southern Lebanon. Israel encouraged their establishment in the late 80’s and from them Hamas derives the bulk of its support in leadership of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Democratic Participation
Hamas had previously boycotted participating in the Fatah dominated government. Its leadership had posited that legitimizing the PA would by default give legitimacy to final partition. This changed in the staggered municipal elections of 2004-2006. When Hamas ran candidates in the January 2006 election, for the Palestinian National Congress, it shocked the world (and itself); by winning. To the shock and appall of Israel and the West, Hamas captured a plurality of 42.9% of the total votes as well as 74 out of 132 available seats in the congress.
Hamas’ strategies reflected a perception based on neither a full acceptance nor a total rejection of the political order emanating from the Oslo accords and the establishment of the PA. Although Hamas made its struggle with Israel a religious duty, it did not lose sight of its socio-political interests. Senses of political realism and “here and now” considerations were signs of pragmatism. Hamas’ thrust toward extremism was balanced by its awareness of political constraints and structural limitations. Hamas refused to accept basic assumptions or to officially recognize the consequences of the peace process. But, it did not seek all out confrontation with the emerging new political order prompted by the PA-Israeli dialogue. Thus the Hamas discourse represented its inclination to stick to its ideological premises and pursue its long term goal of establishing an alternative social and moral order, but it also demonstrated its implicit acceptance of the current political realities (Mishal & Sela, pp147-148).
The newly formed Hamas government was immediately boycotted by all Western aligned countries, and of course Israel, upon assuming power within the Palestinian Authority in elections that had been internationally monitored and had engaged some 80% of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Like Hezbollah before them, Hamas refused to put down their guns and acknowledge Israel’s right to statehood while engaged in the formation of an elected para-state. Although democratically elected, both the EU and USA deemed the election of a designated ‘terrorist group’ wholly illegitimate and proceeded to cut all but the most basic aspects of foreign aid via humanitarian groups and the UN.
The election was a vote of no confidence for the perceived inept and corrupt Fatah faction. It also intensified the internal fitna between Hamas and Fatah. This civil strife, which had been going on since the late 80’s and had resulted in numerous small-scale violent clashes between the two groups now reached a boiling point. A Hamas electoral victory alongside the vast networks for dawa and charity they already controlled placed incredible pressure on the Fatah party of take radical steps to consolidate a semblance of control. Both Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades and Yasir Arafat himself were highly responsible for initiating the second wave of bloodletting in the Second Intifada. Yet, after the Hamas victory the West continued to pin hope on the fact that the PLO-Fatah might revive the doomed Road Map to Peace. The West and Israel with continued skepticism, redirected aid and arms to bolster the PLO. They had been the official Palestinian negotiating party in Oslo after all; the enemy Memshala Yisrael believed it tacitly understood. Hamas prepared to seize Gaza.
Hamas crushed the Fatah regiments and police forces in Gaza in a six day military operation culminating on June 14, 2007 and assumed full control of the besieged Strip. This resulted in the international blockade of Gaza on all sides and a desperate Western attempt to shore up the positions of Fatah in the West Bank before a second seizure occurred. PLO President Mahmoud Abbas nullified the Hamas government with Western approval and set up another un-elected Congress based in the West Bank. Hamas now dominates the Gaza Strip ‘ghetto’ of 1.5 million and while is temporarily ‘contained’ by the blockade and sanctions; surely has its eyes set on the West Bank.
While various commentators view the participation in the elections as an evolution toward moderation it must be called for what it is: another card in their deck of tactics. Their mandate to rule the para-state of occupied Palestine was not a result of an across the board Palestinian embrace of terrorist tactics or political Islam. However, two lessons ought to be drawn from their stunning victory. First, the West once again has demonstrated to the Muslim world that it prefers the corrupt oligarchy that can be controlled as opposed to the democratic regime that it deems adversarial. Second, Hamas has evolved from a religious nationalist association, to a guerilla army and now on to an elected para-state. This is a testimony to Hamas’ ever increasing political sophistication. Not even in the EU or United States does 80% of any country even show up to the polls. Occupied Palestine could reasonably be called the second emerging true democracy of the Middle East except for the fact that unlike a true democracy, the political loser Fatah will surely not give up power without an even bloodier fight.
Hamas’ behavior during the 2004-2006 electoral campaign suggests that it is acutely aware not only of what constitutes power in an electoral environment, but also of its dependency on gaining votes. Its emphasis on grassroots consultations and surveys in the shaping of the electoral program and the selection of its candidates suggests that, in an electoral context, Hamas heeds public opinion-within the boundaries of its ideological commitments. It remains to be seen whether a U.S.-Israel sponsored peace process is capable of reconciling itself with an electoral system which can bring opponents of the peace process to power. But, the fact that Hamas has invested so much effort in the playing the electoral system well suggests that, at last in Hamas’ eyes, a future Palestinian state is likely to be built around an electoral system in which power is concentrated in elected offices (Gunning, p.191).
It may no longer be stated that the PLO-Fatah is the ‘sole legitimate’ representative of the Palestinian people. After the 2006 elections Hamas was, but now Fatah controls the West Bank and Hamas is isolated in Gaza Strip.
Pragmatism and Political Maturity
In most Western academic literature on Hamas there is the attempt to pigeonhole the movement as fundamentalist and unwavering in its call for the destruction of the Jewish state. While most Arab intellectuals produce tomes to the contrary, it is actually Hamas’ unwavering zeal to destroy Israel and dogmatic insistence on religious doctrine that make it the ideal partner to implement a meaningful truce.
In the 22 years since the December 8th, 1987 founding of Hamas the party has exhibited near total commitment to its core mission, the creation of an Islamic Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In its Islamification of highly secular Palestinian society, and its 2006 electoral victory over Fatah it has assumed the reigns of democratic para-state power without compromising itself in the minds of the Palestinian masses. As compared to the PLO, which has all but accepted a two state solution ceding more than 78% of the territory to the ‘Zionist entity’; renounced armed struggle against Israel (accept when pressured into it simply to compete with Islamic Jihad and Hamas); was beaten and expelled from Jordan in 1970; was beaten and expelled from Lebanon in 1983; and had for all intents and purposes neglected the running of social infrastructure while lining the pockets of its bureaucrats and family members living abroad.
Hamas is hardly to be compared to the Paki-Afghan Taliban in three important regards. First, the leadership of Hamas is largely composed of Western educated technocrats who while they embrace a framework of religious nationalism are fully cognizant of international law, global political trends and world history. Secondly, they can rely on and cultivate deep religious understanding of their faith and are for the most part capable of carrying out internal debate applying Shari’ah in a loose and far more inclusive structure than other more literal fundamentalists (like Taliban and Pakistani Salafists). Third, there exist numerous competing trends of leadership within the movement which forces Hamas to engage in a balancing act between modernity and zeal which it has thus so far navigated rather well.
To draw a parallel to the evolution of Memshala Yisrael, observe its three founding resistance factions Ha Haganah (The Defense), Ha’Irgun HaTzva’i HaLe’umi (ETZEL/National Military Organization) and the smaller, albeit more inclined to sensational terrorism: Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters of the Freedom of Israel, also called the Stern Gang). While none of these three factions were particularly rooted in Jewish religious fundamentalism they serve as telling indicators of future of the three principle clusters of the Palestinian resistance. Upon victory in 1949, the Haganah (likened in this metaphor to the PLO) assumed responsibility as the ‘sole and legitimate’ instrument of Jewish National Defense and its Labor Zionist backers were designated as the sole representatives of armed struggle. The Revisionist Irgun (which in this case I shall liken to Hamas) was co-opted into the government, but was virtually cut out of the labor coalition until the Menachem Begin victory of 1977. The Stern Gang, which in this allegory I liken to Islamic Jihad, after serving its brutal function was suppressed entirely. The members of the Haganah and members of the Irgun, most certainly were as ideologically divided as Hamas and Fatah, and certainly one came to the forefront; the one with more time, money and guns on the ground, the one first on the scene. For near forty years the Fatah dominated PLO and its leftist ilk have engaged in every tactic under the sun from hijacking, to car bombing, from Columbia Yard to the White House Lawn. And like the founders of the Labor Zionist (descendants of Haganah) realized in 1977; the PLO in a single election learned their number was up. The Irgun (Herut Party and Likud Party) had watched the mistakes of the Haganah. In the realm of Palestinian national struggle, Islamism has triumphed over Marxism and secular nationalism. In the future realm of Israeli politics: Revisionist Zionism can reshape and re-orientate Israel at the brink of ruin after a near thirty years of Labor Zionist influence and rule.
The forces that are coming to power now, are forces that brought about the beginnings of this war. The Palestinians were Muslim before there was Palestine. The Revisionists, like the Islamists of Hamas had patiently watched both their near and far enemies, developed a base and reignited the war. Just as Stern Gang had a use, as does Islamic Jihad, but just as Stern Gang lacked a base; Islamic Jihad will be absorbed or destroyed before long. But Likud is not just an evolved and matured Irgun; it is a sophisticated political machine evolved via observation and years in power. Hamas will react in a simlar fashion, in fact it already has. These rumblings about long term ceasefire (Hudna), the new responsibilities of governance, its gradual divestment form the tactic of suicide bombing, its several periods of unilateral calm(unilateral cessation of bombings); its participation in the Palestinian Authority Elections; and its interactions with para-state actor Hezbollah have all evolved Hamas. It is no longer proper to view Hamas as the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood bearing arms. They too will become more mature with power and with time. Fatah is largely discredited, its ideology of secular pan-Arab nationalism disproven, and its time is up.
Section 2: How Memshala Yisrael Behaves
“Our feet are standing within thy gates O Jerusalem and they will never leave. This is Zionism, and the United Gentiles call it ‘Racist’ and debate how to take my city away from me. Foolish world; sooner will the sun fail to rise tomorrow. The Jews have come home to their Zion and have welded their city together with fierce tightness that none least of all the humor that is the United Nations can sunder. A people patiently bides it’s time for millennia will not easily-ever-give up its state and capital.”
-Rabbi Meir Kahane
Listen World, Listen Jew
The Israeli Defense Forces, by all accounts, are superior to Hamas’ Ez Ed Din al-Qassam Brigades in funding, training, raw numbers and sophistication of firepower. Yet, despite its superiority in strength the IDF has repeatedly failed to uproot the Islamic Resistance or destroy its leadership in nearly 25 years of continuous counter-insurgency and siege. The strategic failings of the Israeli military in attempting to destroy the Islamic Resistance are many. This section will survey the Israeli strategy in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip and look to illustrate failures in several tactical segments. This section outlines the primary military deficits that have allowed Hamas to survive and thrive despite tremendous and overwhelming Israeli military pressure against them.
Unpreparedness for Asymmetric War
Certainly Hamas is a very large movement, and within it you can find a range of voices and concepts, this is part of our diversity. Still, some account should be taken of extreme pressures on the ground in terms of the Israeli occupation and military incursions, not to mention the economic boycott and the deprivation of rights. Such a situation can occasionally push people to give priority to self-preservation. Such a situation can produce errors and excesses. But this a reaction, an attempt at self-defense in the face of attack. Oppression and abuse always produce counter-reactions, which can be extreme and which we do not desire (Khalid Mishal in interview with Journal of Palestine Studies, p.178).
In analyzing the outcome of a military confrontation between disproportionately matched forces the following observation is made by military strategist Ivan Arreuin-Toft: “in regards to strategic interaction weaker powers can win conflicts when they employ tactics that minimize direct confrontation with the enemy, cultivate and maintain civilian support, and prolong the duration of the conflict.” Hamas has heeded this critical lesson well. The key factor according to Toft goes beyond the will and interests of the two parties (Israel and Palestine). It relies on applying the proper response to the enemy’s tactics that favor the conditions suitable to resistance by the weak; that is to say favorable to irregular warfare and a guerrilla campaign.
The Toft analysis is seen in light of Andrew Mack’s ideas of ‘interest asymmetry’. This understanding of asymmetrical warfare has three key elements: 1. “Relative power explains relative interest” (Hamas is representing an occupied people/ Memshala Yisrael is the strongest military power in the region), 2. “Relative interest explains relative political vulnerability” (Memshala Yisrael must answer to public wary of war and occupation) and 3. Relative vulnerability is why strong actors lose”. Summed up, Mack is saying that weak powers (like Hamas) have a high interest because it is the survival of their people that is at stake and their political freedom where as strong power’s are viewing the conflict through a prism of expansion, a theory of political dominos, or an issue of credibility. This makes them more politically vulnerable because the rational for waging a long war has to be justified on the home front to an increasingly adversarial population. The stronger power will often, according to Mack, abandon the war because of unrest at home on behalf of population or local elites (as Israel has done in several recent military engagements). Toft introduces the idea that while interest is a factor it is not the sole factor. The decisive element to the equation is known as strategic interaction.
In a conflict there is always a grand strategy (the totality of an actor’s resources devoted to the military, political, and economic objectives of the engagement) and the tactics (the art of fighting battles and specific instruments of war employed). According to Toft the objective of war is to compel the other actor to do its will. To understand this combination of grand strategy implemented through the tactics employed Toft identifies four specific types of engagement: two offensive, two defensive. Direct Attack is the use of force to capture an opponent’s values (cities, strategic assets, economic centers) and eliminate the opponent’s armed forces’ ability to resist (which Israel successfully utilized in the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973). Barbarism is a systematic violation of the laws of war (War Convention) directing violence at non-combatants via rape, torture, and genocide to achieve the military or political goals of the campaign (which Memshala Yisrael is relatively loath to do). Direct Defense is the use of armed forces to thwart an adversary’s capture or destruction of values (which Hamas avoids). The goal is to cripple the advancing force. Guerrilla Warfare is the organization of a portion of the society to engage in irregular warfare while avoiding direct confrontation with the enemy. (This is the bulk of the security threat Memshala Yisrael must contend with.) Since every strategy is presumed to have an ideal counterstrategy Toft argues that these four strategic interactions in varying combinations are at the heart of explaining asymmetrical warfare scenarios where the weak win.
In a situation of Direct Attack v. Direct Defense nothing mediates the imbalance of one side’s armed forces. The defending, weaker power as a result most is almost certain to lose the interaction. In the situation of Direct Attack v. Indirect Defense i.e.; guerrilla warfare; the forces of the attacker tend to kill large numbers of non-combatants in their attempt to uproot an irregular force. This stimulates weak-actor resistance. The defender has sacrificed values for the ability to engage the attacker when he is least prepared to resist. Values are sacrificed for time. In this scenario the weaker actor can win. With Indirect Attack v. Direct Defense attacks on civilian population centers generally harden the resolve of the defender and general acts of barbarism stiffen resistance to the enemy (as Suicide attacks and Israeli collective punishment have illustrated). In the case of Indirect Attack v. Indirect Defense where barbarism is used to repress an irregular campaign cases prove that the stronger power when willing to use barbarism on an occupied population soon make the costs of the guerrilla campaign too high to sustain (which Israel has not attempted to do). These are Toft’s strategic interaction outcomes.
In general Toft’s thesis supports the idea that each side is always better off using a mixed strategy; that is to say by using the opposite approach of the one being offered in resistance or attack. Anything that allows civilian participation in resistance, prolongs the conflict, and avoids direct engagements deflects a stronger conventional force. Whenever a stronger force can directly meet a weaker enemy or resorts to barbarism in the face of irregular warfare the weaker party is likely to lose. Toft therefore believes it is interaction not interest that explains the phenomenon of why the weak sometimes win.
Surprise is the essential feature of Guerrilla Warfare. In a circumstance where one cannot beat ones enemy in a direct confrontation the best approach is to draw out the conflict, attack when unexpected, and rely on civilian support. Passing off one’s forces as civilians but functioning as combatants; poses a challenge to the War Convention (on acceptable conduct under arms) by blurring the definition of combatant/non-combatant. If surrender is an explicit agreement and exchange: an actor stops fighting for benevolent quarantine. Than in guerrilla war the actor allows occupation (surrender) but carries on all the activities of a war. Guerillas don’t subvert the war convention by attacking civilians (as terrorists do): they invite the enemy to do that by hiding in their midst.
Walzer states that resistance is legitimate and the punishment of resistance is therefore also legitimate. There is a twofold justification for guerrilla action which serves as a framework for those that fight it. First, the people are no longer being defended by an army; the only army in the field is the army of the oppressors; the people are defending themselves. Second, if you want to fight them you are going to have to fight civilians and you won’t be war with an army you’ll be at war with a people and a nation. In this kind of war the lines are blurred.
Both Memshala Yisrael and the Islamic Resistance have incredible (and obvious) stake and interest in winning this war. However, the framework Israel has chosen to fight from make it particularly vulnerable to guerrilla attacks. Says Walzer: “Soldiers are supposed to protect civilians who stand behind them; guerrillas are protected by civilians among whom they stand.” Hamas completely blurs this line as does Israel with its national service mandatory conscription, but the reality is that Israel is still fighting the six day war, which worked in 1973, but hasn’t worked since.
Embrace of Effects Based Operations (EBO)
The IDF has zealously embraced the American tactic of EBO. The aim of Effects Based Operations (EBO) is to paralyze the enemy’s operational ability in contrast to destroying its military force. According to Col. John Warden, the author of The Enemy as a System13 in which the idea of EBO was first developed; there are three preconditions to EBO use. First, the enemy has a system-like structure; second, the system has critical junctions; and third, there is sufficient familiarity with the enemy’s system and its critical junctions. The EBO system is designed to reduce casualties by using “Shock and Awe” tactics on key elements of the targeted actor’s infrastructure. This could include elimination of the leadership or bombardment of key communications components as was so successful in both the 1956 War in Sinai and the 1967 Six Day War in which Memshala Yisrael was engaged in pre-emptive strike against Soviet supplied Para-modern armies with fixed assets, critical junctions and top down chain of command.
This strategy, in regards to Hamas and Hezbollah has failed with the Israelis for three reasons. First, Israel is unfamiliar with overall command structure (specifically identity and location of the external command of the HAMAS movement); second, the Islamic Resistance command structure is designed to reduce operational confusion by eliminating critical junctions (i.e.: granting autonomy to both regional divisions, infrastructure, and combat groups); and third, failing to utilize ground forces effectively Israel did not neutralize the bulk of Hamas bunkers, tunnels, fighting groups; nor disable the groups arms cache or logistical pipelines by which the movement can be materially resupplied by its allies Syria and Iran.
EBO only works when coupled with an overwhelming use of force on the ground and Hamas has re-organized itself to function even if a break down occurs in its lines of command. Not only does it zealously protect the identity of external leadership outside the territories from which it receives state-sponsor funding, it has subdivided districts of command and control (seven districts with five sub-districts per sector) within the Gaza Strip and West Bank to enable fighters to operate if necessary without critical junctions by which a modern army would need to coordinate battle.
Each sector within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is organized with the armaments it needs to hold out for long periods of time without needing to be re-supplied or issued direct orders from a central command. In this way Israel would have to seek out and destroy each and every combat group (totally embedded and harbored by the Palestinian population at large) and not rely on overwhelming aerial force to neutralize their ability to operate. As successive wars in Lebanon and Gaza have demonstrated, EBO is the tactic of the ‘last great war’ and using it is akin to fighting a land war in Asia. Not only does EBO fail against guerrilla armies, the primary deficit inflicts the greatest harm on the Palestinian civilian population while doing little to materially weaken the Islamic Resistance. In so far as tunnels remain open, an external leadership can raise funds abroad, and Hamas can continue to operate its network of grassroots social services EBO is in effect useless. If anything, by attacking these listed critical junctions maximum burden falls on the civilians of the Gaza Strip while providing propaganda value for Hamas. Unwilling to engage in re-occupation of the Strip and casualty intensive uprooting of underground logistics bases from which the resistance functions, Memshala Israel has directed operations largely utilizing targeted assassination in essence presuming individual leaders as critical junctions themselves.
Over Reliance on Air Power
The Israeli engagement in the Gaza War of 2008 was largely limited to air power. The IAF proved quite incapable of capturing of terminating large numbers of central leadership, disrupting supply tunnels, or accomplishing more than exacerbating an already grievous human rights disaster to little or no political or military gain. The reality is that while Hamas is certain to lose the firing mechanism (the launcher) anytime it fires a medium or long range missile from Gaza into Israel proper; there is (as was surely demonstrated in the 2006 Second War in Lebanon) little Israel can do to prevent Qassam or Katusha rocket fire simply because the launchers are cheap, mobile and ultimately disposable.
Differentiating between military and civilian targets is therefore problematic if not impossible on both sides, precisely because Hamas uses most civilian facilities as covers for their military operations and can justify most reprisals on the Israeli public due to the complete mobilization of Israeli society into the war machine. The IAF was proven incapable of contending with Hezbollah’s short and medium range missile batteries where the signature is low, the firing mechanism simple and expendable, and the volume far higher. Hamas utilizing similar operating systems with an even lower signature in its prolonged siege of areas like Ashdod, Ashkelon, Sderiot and Negev Settlements utilize simlar mechanics of operation while eliminating many of Hezbollah’s restraints on movement (i.e.: with similar weapons Hamas can strike the remaining key metropolitan urban areas of Israel; Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva and Eilat). As long as Islamic Resistance Fighters can set up and fire short range Qassam rockets close to the barrier wall with a range of 3-10 km depending on rocket class (1-3) the IAF can only cope with a part of the missile threat. And an ineffective part at that, back to the zero sum game of tit-for-tat reprisals. That is to say, failure to seriously commit ground forces led to engage a Hamas military arm leaves the organization still very much intact and the missile threat undiminished.
Long and Medium Range rockets need to be fired from trucks or installations especially outfitted to fire missiles of this size. Since the Hamas rocket campaign is more psychological than material (15 Israeli deaths since 2001); further enlarging its short range arsenal allows Hamas optimum psychological impact in Israel without exposing the lives of its fighters to retaliatory strikes.
Presumably the Israeli public and world opinion would not tolerate a highly casualty intensive re-occupation of the Strip by ground forces. The result of moving the necessary amount of troops into Gaza to disarm the Hamas Qassam brigades and demolish the numerous supply tunnels and subterranean bunker systems would result in a Grozny like atrocity. The Gaza Strip is the world’s most densely populated area with a population of 1.5 million. Hamas understands perfectly well that it can hold that strip for at least as long as the world will exert pressure on Israel (notably the Obama Administration and the EU) to disengage. Hamas is more than understanding of Israel’s unwillingness to engage in atrocity on the mass level or the Israeli public’s ability to tolerate a high threshold of causalities.
The expectation that the IAF could single-handedly dispatch a highly organized guerrilla army on the ground gave rise to false expectations. The solution to short range launchers is better intelligence and the commitment of ground forces. As long as the Islamic Resistance controls the area from which short range rockets can hit Southern border cities; air force retaliation is not an effective deterrent.
The options available are not attractive. Using ground forces to reoccupy Gaza will alienate Israel in the international community and commit the IDF to a method and theatre of fighting for which Hamas is better prepared to inflict substantial casualties. A second option relies on punitive strikes upon an area from which the missiles are launched which is called barbarism, collective punishment and a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Thus so far Israel pursues the second option. It’s the choice between the method that is ineffective and the method for which one’s enemy calls the terms of engagement. Being that the Israeli public is not likely to allow a reoccupation of the Gaza Strip due to the risk of life involved the remaining option remains with air power whose limitations we have illustrated above and whose implementation only hardens the resolve of those who support the Islamic Resistance.
Inadequate Intelligence
Memshala Israel, like most state actors continues to fight the last war, with the last wars tactics. The bulk of its counter insurgency operations against Hamas are from the playbook of combating terror inflicted by 1970’s formations Black September, PFLP and the PLO (from a time when information could be purchased from collaborators with ease). The focus had been on secular-nationalist factions largely operating from abroad, with limited territorial infrastructure to win the hearts-minds-bread-basket game Hamas so ably administers. Not only did Memshala Yisrael encourage the rise of political Islam as a counter balance in the territories, it has achieved backwards operational familiarity with the more disciplined and horizontal style of command utilized by Hezbollah and Hamas, as taught by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. As a result the IDF was in the largely in the dark at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, but more grievously during the brief Gaza War in three crucial intelligence arenas.
In regards to weapons; Israel failed to contain the traffic of arms and munitions through tunnels into the Gaza Strip, thus allowing for a massive proliferation of small arms vital to attrition based urban fighting. Memshala Yisrael was also unclear as to what extend the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their surrogate in the region Hezbollah had facilitated training programs, infiltrated supplies and evolved the Hamas military arm into something of far greater combat proficiency.
In regards to combat and defense tactics; the IDF trained in scenarios largely based on combating conventional force invasions from Arab states and Palestinian terror cells (akin more to Islamic Jihad than Hamas) found themselves in an “unfamiliar work environment” when the deployment of IDF ground forces occurred in a hyper-restricted manner. Simply put Israel was not prepared for the sophistication and training of the Islamic Resistance fighters because intelligence reports underestimated not just their size but depth of training.
Critical failures in intelligence prioritization on behalf of the Shin Bet and Mossad contribute to misunderstanding and reactionary development of armed intervention. All of the military operations carried out in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Southern Lebanon in the last nine years have accomplished nothing in regards to deterrence. The Islamic Resistance has in fact largely been strengthened because of them. The intelligence situation of the 1980’s and the field today are not comparable. Hamas and Hezbollah have maintained strict adherence to communications security and have left the IDF unprepared to deal with their military arms once hostilities resumed in 2000. Since the critical formation of Hamas and its internal security arm where once Israel might have had thousands of informants on payroll ready to sell out the resistance for coin and visa, Hamas has hunted down and murdered hundreds of informants, compartmentalized its command, and kept the identity of its external leadership secret from the military intelligence arms of Memshala Yisrael.
Underestimation is a critical failure in asymmetrical warfare especially when it leads to gross unfamiliarity with the organizational structure of one’s adversary.
Strategic Settlement
The settlements have become an integral part of the escalation of violence between Memshala Yisrael and Hamas. The surge in settlement activity on behalf of Likud government in an effort to create a permanent hold on Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is viewed by the Hamas government and the Palestinian people as a whole as tantamount to ethnic cleansing of their land hill by hill. For by transplanting hundreds of thousands of Jews into the occupied territories the Israeli government has sought through settlement to effectively legitimize the annexation of the Palestinian land. The formation of the settlements has been a progression, their trends and development evolving in response to whatever coalition holds power in the Knesset. While the settlement program was initiated by the Begin government beginning in 1977, it has proceeded unabated even during brief periods of Avodah (Labor) and Kadima control.
The Settlements are fortified civilian compound communities with the occupied territories captured in the six day war of 1967. While concentrations have been established in the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (until vacated in 2005) at the time of publication there are 280,000 settlers concentrated largely in the West Bank in 121 authorized settlements, as well as 190,000settlers in East Jerusalem and 102 unauthorized outposts of various sizes.
Large commuter settlements like Mod’in Illit, Maale Adumim, Betar Illit, and Ariel are veritable mini-cities with near 40,000 plus residents. Some such as those in the Gush Etzion Bloc are ideologically dedicated to reclaiming lost or destroyed former holy sites such as those in and around Hebron. These sites continue to be one of the most divisive issues in the conflict as their supply and security involve vast restrictions on Palestinian movement and continuity of a future state. Hamas and every other Palestinian faction interpret settlement growth as ongoing attempts to seize and hold more of already diminished Palestine.
As stated, by 1967 Israel had conquered not only Gaza, the Golan and Sinai, but the region of Judea and Samaria known as the West Bank. In order to legitimize the conquest the Israeli government created military posts on seized or abandoned land to create a “security zone for the protection of the state”. This of course was another way to justify expansion.
The original settlement wave, post the establishment of military compounds in outlying areas was started by the squatters of the Gush Emunim movement. They stressed the need to keep the whole of Israel intact by taking over land conquered during the Six Day War and creating armed encampments that could be expanded into towns to establish Jewish control. The Allon Plan, the intended plan of the state, sought to settle Israelis in the relatively unpopulated Jordan rift to create a buffer against future attack while consolidating Palestinian population centers into three mini-cantons. The Gush Emmunim, representing a more radical trend in settlement activity sought to position themselves near Palestinian population centers and holy sites under Palestinian control. Their activities were supported by the Begin government who legitimized widespread settlement activity and promised to help establish more upon coming to power in a landslide victory supported by the Sephardic Jews in 1977.
In order to establish a cold-peace with Egypt, Israel agreed to return the Sinai along with the settlements it had set up there. Israel had never before abandoned a settlement and the Begin government decided they would make up for the loss with a consolidation of the more ideologically significant West Bank. By the 1980’s the Memshala Yisrael said that it would create only ten settlements and enlarge the three existing ones, but the object was clear, consolidate a hold on the West bank by establishing settlements at strategic points that could be linked later and annexed into the state.
The Begin government held through the 1981 election by a slim margin by rapidly expanding the settlements before election day. At this time much of the population was greatly in favor of holding the settlements and the Begin government appealed to the people by promising to hold Judea and Samaria. They organized tours of the West Bank settlements and began a building project to expand them for thousands of families. The commuter settlement had been born.
The Drubles plan was put together by the World Zionist Organization called for an expansion of the settlements to accommodate 100,000 settlers. It was his belief that such an expansion could legitimize hold on the West Bank. This Program of 100,000 would become Israel’s new settlement policy. The problem was that Gush was running out of human resources and the state was short of volunteers. They created a land reclamation fund and began subsidizing immigrants move into the territories. Hebron became a heated center of settler activity as religious zealots more radical than even the Gush movement began violent efforts to reclaim the Tomb of the Patriarch starting in 1981. As the government moved immigrants into newly constructed settlements, the zealots sought to drive Palestinians out of the Hebron holy sites which resulted in various riots and inter-communal violence.
By 1986 the 100,000 mark had been met and the courts had opened up much of the seized land for development. The Likud party was strong with the settler lobby and many non ideological settlements had been established through the subsidies. While there was opposition on the basis of renewed attempts of land for the peace, by the early 1990’s the settlements were firmly established and had little intention of being removed by either Likud or Avodah governments.
The settlement strategy was piecemeal and waves would be followed by radical action and then by lulls. The settlements remain a crucial stumbling block for the peace process being that they are now at such a substantial population. Massive amounts of funding have gone into their creation and they must be defended against constant attack by the IDF. To Palestinians, they are a constant reminder of the permanent intent of the occupation and a prelude to finalized annexation.
Separation via Barrier
The security wall was not initially supported by the Sharon government due to the fact that it would harden a boundary that would allocate more land to the Palestinians than was considered desirable. As the Al-Aqsa Intifada intensified it became clear that pleasing the public and keeping hold of the land were not mutually exclusive. Israel’s far-left opposed the barrier on the grounds that such highhanded unilateralism would set back the peace process, but the political mainstream embraced the wall as a self-defensive measure to be implemented to stem the waves of suicide bombers largely emanating from the Nablus-Jenin-Tulkarm triangle.
The security wall was originally intended to seal out the West bank along the 1967 border, but plans soon changed. The actual construction of the wall runs deep into Palestinian territory to incorporate the settlements into is defensive boundary. While the barrier in the north initially follows the 1967 border path, albeit built on the Palestinian side, the farther south the barrier runs, the more it starts to swerve and dip eastwards to include the settlements. It is the extent and reach of these detours from the Green Line that convinces Palestinians that the barrier is both a project for Israel’s security, but more a means to realize the colonial ambitions of the settler movement and its supporters. Several Palestinian population centers are trapped between the Green Line and the barrier. The inhabitants of these areas will be prohibited from entering Israel to the west, and barred from reaching their lands, businesses, and extended families in the West Bank to the east. 30,000 Palestinian farmers who live on the east side of the barrier are now cut off from their orchards, groves and farms on the western side. The UN reports that 160,000 dunams (36,000 acres) or 2% of the West Bank’s total land area, now falls on the Israeli side of the barrier. This brings Israel in control of a full 80% of country should a unilateral break be affected giving the East Bank (of the Wall) and Gaza for some incorporation into a future state.
The Israeli government claims that the land has been seized for security reasons and that it is legitimized by law that they can utilize it until a threat no longer exists. To the Palestinians the wall looks less than temporary; an enormous investment has been made in it construction. The barrier is between 60 and 100 meters wide, built of concrete walls, electronic and razor-wire fences, trenches or ditches, and is surrounded by three roads: one to trace infiltrators, another for army patrols and a third wide one for tanks. The wall has cut many farmers off from their land and many have abandoned it. The Israelis use an old Ottoman law that states that if the land is abandoned for three years it can be claimed by the state. Since 1967, Israel has invoked this law to take over 60% of the West Bank as state land, to build 135 settlements and to transplant more3 than 500,000 of its Jewish citizens into occupied territory, including East Jerusalem. The wall and settlements will insure that a two state solution cannot be a viable reality as the “Palestinian State” will become little more than a patchwork isolated communities. Once this canonization reaches a critical juncture, disengagement will become politically impossible for any Israeli leader to accomplish.
Management of Civilian Casualties
It is in fact commendable to both the Israeli Defense Forces (and intelligence services of the Mossad and Shebac) as well as to the Parties of Palestinian Resistance that so much restraint has been used.
This is not discount the many tens of thousands maimed, the tens of thousands of homes and lives destroyed, or the incalculable human suffering caused. But measure via raw, unsentimental body count; less than 10,000 men, women and children have dies in the bloodiest decade of intra-communal fighting these two groups have seen.
Compared to the two separatist wars in Chechnya: most estimates give figures of between 3,500 and 7,500 Russian military dead, between 3,000 and 15,000 Chechen militants dead, and no fewer than 35,000 civilian deaths—a total of at least 41,500 dead. Others have cited figures in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 in a period between 1994 and 1996. Round two of the fighting from 1999 to present is placed at 3,643 Russian soldiers, 1,722 Interior ministry troops and 1,045 Chechen police officers killed, 113 militants killed. Chechen civilian deaths in the Second conflict run between 25,000 killed and up to 5,000 “disappeared in filtration camps” to as high as 50,000 killed in various stages of shelling..
Comparable death tolls of non-combatant deaths in Darfur are placed at 300,000, in Rwanda at 500,000 and Sri Lanka at 80,000. These conflicts all took place after the start of the first Intifada. The devil in the details is that the Palestinians and Israelis show incredible, incredible restraint.
Both Hamas and Memshala Yisrael accuse each other of war crimes and of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians; in fact both justify some of their more messy operations as retaliations for each other’s attacks. Israel claims that Hamas fighters hide weapons and command centers amid civilian neighborhoods and fire rockets from within civilian population centers (which they obviously do). And Hamas does not deny this at all claiming the basic principles of a guerrilla war. Hamas claims that suicide attacks and the firing of rockets at Israeli population centers is a reprisal for murdering Palestinian civilians and movement leadership. Hamas also contends that since virtually every member of Israeli society will be, is, or serving in reserve for the IDF; than the line between combatant and non-combatant is equally blurred in a fully war mobilized society. Israel thus finds itself in a difficult situation. It is dealing with a popularly supported guerrilla army shielded by a sophisticated Para-state apparatus (that is now the elected leadership of the PA) that is willingly shielded by the masses. Israel continues to engage in tactics that lead to the deaths of non-combatants further radicalizing the Palestinians in favor of the Islamic Resistance.
This latest tit-for-tat cycle of retaliatory violence (directed against civilians) appears to have stemmed from the Goldstein massacre of 1996 when a revisionist settler opened fire in the Mosque of the Patriarchs killing 32 unarmed women and children. Just as the massacre in Deir Yassin triggered the massacre of the Mt. Scopus medical column, each side has unlimited justifications for political violence and unrestricted willingness to turn that violence against non-combatants, even if both sides non-combatants are directly or indirectly engaged in the struggle. An Israeli would say little Muhammad Dura would have surely grown up to support Hamas, and a Palestinian would claim that while it is objectionable to kill children, they would one day go off to join the IDF.
As per recent reports by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, during the period of fighting from 2005 until 2008 116 Israelis, including both civilians and security forces were killed in both Israel and the Palestinian Territories involved in “direct conflict related incidents” and 1,509 were injured. During this same time, 1,735 Palestinians, including civilians and militants from various groups, were killed and 8,308 wounded in “direct conflict related incidents”.
As compared to previous rounds of war, the Israeli ability to inflict harm increases while that of the Palestinians decreases, this result is not purely determined by an advance in Israeli counter-insurgency. It is as much via a Hamas change in tactics.
Assassination of Leadership
Since Mid-2001, Hamas has lost three of its founding members- Ismail Abu Shanan, Sheikh Ahmed Yasin, and Abdel al-Aziz Rantisi- in addition to more than 300 cadres in Gaza and abroad. The assassinations increased popular support for Hamas which quickly recovered from the loss of its founders, although it became cautious about naming its new leader publically in an effort to protect their lives (Knudsen & Ezbidi, p.198).
There is probably no better example of a failed Israeli tactic in this regard. For each member of the Palestinian leadership, particularly Hamas, it terminates; the Israelis supply 100 more convicted zealots to the movement which so rewards the notion of martyrdom in the Jihad as if it were synonymous to charity or prayer.
During the first Intifada Israel sought to decapitate the movement by deporting its primary and secondary leadership to Lebanon. The 417 leaders (of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad) were in fact delivered right into the open arms of Hezbollah movement. While the round up and deportation of major players of the first Intifada briefly united Fatah and Hamas (as well as much of the international community) in outrage against Israel, it did little to neutralize the nascent movement. In fact, not only did a long and active partnership between Sunni Hamas and Shi’a Iran form out of this deportation, the street credibility of Hamas skyrocketed. In fact, each time Memshala Yisrael deports a Hamas leader or arrests one, or has them ‘liquidated’, the organization evolves to tighten security, more radical leaders emerge and the Palestinian street celebrates the sacrifice of the group.
Hamas has vast pool of trained recruits and cadre to re-coup its ranks from. Drawn from a large body of sources and supporters, the horizontal nature of their structure; external/internal leaderships, Shura Council support from clerics, wide ranging and diffuse pools of recruitment, autonomous military units; all of this makes the Israeli EBO strategy of liquidating leaders little more than a political maneuver to their own people.
Now with the Al-Aqsa Intifada underway a policy of liquidation, or what Israelis officially termed ‘targeted killing’, ‘pin-pointing attackers’, or ‘neutralizing the organizers of attacks’, namely Palestinian activists affiliated to Fatah, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, was approved by the Cabinet. The aim of the policy was threefold: to weaken the Palestinian command on the ground, to deter new potential Palestinian leaders from joining the ranks; and perhaps most importantly, to foil and pre-empt Palestinian attackers- suicide bombers and others from carrying out their missions in Israeli towns and cities (Bregman, p.220).
However, as best demonstrated with the botched assassination attempt in Jordan of Khaled Mish’al, the 200,000 plus Gaza City funeral procession for Sheik Yassin, or the countless instances of glorification within the Hamas ‘cult of martyrdom’; killing individual leaders (even on the highest level of command) has done the reverse of the intended effect. Rather than have an identifiable nemesis who might be brought to bargain, there are now multiple levels of leadership with varying influences (few of them moderate).
Each leader Memshala Yisrael kills fuels the commitment within the ranks to strike back harder and more aggressively. Next to settlement construction and prisoners it is assassinations that provide the greatest fuel to the fire of Islamic resistance ignited by Hamas.
Section 3: The Evolution of the Hamas Strategy
“I want to proclaim loudly to the world that we are not fighting Jews because they are Jews! We are fighting them because they assaulted us, they killed us, they took our land and our homes; they attacked our children and our women; they scattered us. All we want is our rights. We don’t want more.”
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin
Hamas Founder
Localization of Jihad
To date, Hamas has not carried out a single attack outside of Green Line Israel and the occupied territories, nor has it deliberately targeted Westerners or foreign nationals whose governments support Israel. This is not to indicate that when you ignite your own body in a blaze of c4 and ball bearings indiscriminately hoping to slaughter civilians that some foreigners have not been killed.
Hamas posits itself as the vanguard of Pan-Islamic revolution, but suffice to say it has very nationalistic goals that preclude its involvement in international Jihadist activities except in direct cooperation with Israel’s immediate enemies: Sudan, Syria, Hezbollah zones of control in Lebanon and of course Iran. While it may rhetorically support the actions of various international Jihadist groups, it hardly embraces an irrational utopianism akin to say, Al Qaeda. For that reason Hamas is loath to take symbolic of tactical acts of collaboration (such as those extended by Bin Laden and Chechen guerillas) for any cause not involving Israel and Palestine. It has a rational localized objective and does not distract itself with what it perceives as antagonistic actions (attacking the West and U.S.) that will only marginalize its fight with Israel.
Iran and Syria have long term policy interests in a strong and militarily formidable Hamas and both countries have been formative in nurturing and supplying both Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lebanese Hezbollah with anything they needs. Both Damascus and Tehran have facilitated various factions within the resistance as a means of power projection in the Levant and in pursuit of harming their common enemy Memshala Yisrael. Over the years Hamas as made use of both foreign aid and training working as military a surrogate while it maintains its long term goal of an Islamic state in Palestine.
Syria is not interested in another head-on military clash with Israel that it is certain to once again lose. Its support for Hamas and Hezbollah falls in three main areas of interest. First, Hamas serves as a thorn in Israel’s side and reminder over the annexed Golan Heights that Syria seeks to keep in the focus of any peace settlement with Israel. Second, cross border war is bad for the Lebanese economy which in turn could displace the hundreds of thousands of Syria workers in Lebanon and exacerbate the refugee problem the Syrians already have. War by proxy minimizes this risk. Third, Syrian provoked wars with Israel further tarnish the Syrian relationship with the Lebanese people while working through Hezbollah and Hamas promotes pro-Syrian policies from indigenous proxies.
From the very beginning in 1982 Iran’s Revolutionary Guards supplied Hezbollah with the material and ideological support it needed to grow as an organization. As Hezbollah’s skill and arsenal developed it continued to rely on Iran for the tools it needed for its war with Israel. A product of the “export the revolution” policies of Khomeini; Hezbollah is dependent on Iran for all of its arms and much of its funding. Lebanon is home to the largest Shi’a Arab community second to Iraq and Hezbollah gives Iranian policy a platform in Lebanon. Contact with Hamas was initiated in 1986 and beginning in 1987 Iran began an arms and money pipeline hoping to shore up Sunni Hamas and Islamic Jihad as allies in the common fight against Israel.
Both Syria in the way of movement logistics and Iran in the way of funding seek to use Hamas as their proxy in the war with Israel. Hamas over the years has exploited this reality to its advantage retain its own autonomy in voice and operations.
At times Israeli or American pundits and politicians attempt to claim that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are part of the larger ‘Islamo-fasciest’ constellation of ‘Global Jihadist’ groups united around the ideas of Al-Qaida. This mythology transforms the loosely affiliated, former-Mujahedeen of the Jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan into a shadowy transnational conspiracy. It (via the War on Terror) proceeds to lump a wide range of militant Islamic nationalist groups waging struggled with their near enemy (local corrupt regimes); with franchise type cellular networks willing to engage in indiscriminate violence against the far enemy (Israel and the West); along with state actors like North Korea, Iraq and Iran which endorse and fund terrorist insurgencies. This cluster of identities does not embrace a single world view, have a coordinated leadership, or share more than a wide constellation of perceived grievances. Periodically Memshala Yisrael and the U.S. assert that Hamas is linked within the broader Al-Qaida network: an irrational and expansionist Islamic regime.
It is true that Hamas has embraced terrorism since 1996. It is also true that numerous foreign nationals have been killed in its various attacks. It is further true that Hamas rhetorically makes statements in solidarity with various components of the Jihadist movement. It is true that Hamas receives state aid from Iran, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Libya in various degrees over time. It is true that Hamas has mutual aid and training alliances with Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and various wings of the Ikhwan. This does not mean that Hamas has ever, or will ever embrace indiscriminate violence against the West, nor will it materially support internationalist Islamist groups whose guns are not singularly turned on Israel. To that end Shi’a Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas, in sharing a common enemy (Israel) and common patrons (Iran and Syria) while not sharing a theological framework, engage in tactical mutual aid. Both however, clearly an explicitly denounced the 9/11 attacks on the trade center (while at the same time claiming the Pentagon was a valid military target). Both have not carried out a single attack (even against Israelis) on foreign soil. Both have limited nationalist goals (Shari’ah states in Lebanon and Palestine.)
While pariah states such as Syria, Sudan and Iran (for varying reasons) all provide vast degrees of support for Hamas, they too have only a limited interest in striking out at the Western far enemy. Sudan for ideological reasons provides Hamas supply conduits into Sinai but is more preoccupied with its internal civil war (read ethnic cleansing). Syria has a long term grievance over the Golan Heights that it fears will be permanently annexed to Israel in the event of any peace settlement. A long time enemy of Memshala Yisrael its capital Damascus is also a major base of operations for Hamas EXTERNAL leadership. Syria supplies land routes and training bases to move Iranian supplies into Palestine. However, as smuggling routes are far softer for infiltration via Sinai, Sudan and Syria are logistical bases for camps and smuggling, not financial powerhouses behind the movement. The real patron extraordinaire is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s leadership beyond its embrace of revolutionary Shi’ism remember the recent past of 1978 when it was Israel who trained and supported the Shah’s brutal internal security corps.
Memshala Yisrael and the world’s only Islamic republic are locked in a mortal combat of conflicting ideologies both with a road through Jerusalem. Hamas certainly embraces the old Chinese military adage that the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’, but that does not mean that the friend of Hamas’ enemy becomes its enemy. Hamas has no aspiration for a transnational Islamic revolution or a restoration of some golden aged Caliphate. It has a simple pragmatic aim; restoration of Palestine restored via localized nationalist resistance.
Sophisticated command Structure
The Hamas structure, post-interaction and training via the Iran revolutionary guards has taken on the form of a highly evolved Para-state apparatus. Its structure is both difficult for Memshala Yisrael to engage and even more difficult to infiltrate. After repeated waves of imprisonment, assassination and deportation Hamas has taken moves to secure its leaders and further neutralize the forces within Gaza and the West Bank that have supplied information on its members and branches.
Hamas is organized in four areas of operations. The Gaza Strip, under Hamas control since 2007 is at this stage their largest center for weapons caches, social services, recruitment and religious indoctrination. However, since their election to control of the PA and their armed seizure of the strip from the Fatah faction a year later, tight sanctions and security cordon has largely prevented members inside rte strip from leaving. The second area is the West Bank, now under the control of Mahmud Abbas led Fatah but Hamas still maintains vast organizational networks their via charities and Masjids, as well as numerous combat cells, particularly in the Jenin-Tulkarm-Nablus triangle. The third area is inside green-line Israel where Hamas enjoys varying degrees of logistical support and sympathy from the INSERT number Arab-Israelis. The fourth area are the training bases, regional command offices, fund raising fronts, and pipelines of arms that Hamas has established largely in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Egypt, and various cities in the West.
Hamas is led by and INTERNAL and an EXTERNAL leadership, guided by a carefully concealed Advisory Council called Majalis Shura. A Political Bureau (al-Maktab al-Siyasi) coordinates the various branches of the organization while shaping its poltical message and sanctioning its tactics. This Political Bureau is organized into five sub-division; Foreign Affairs, Finance, Propaganda, Internal Security, and Military Affairs. Both the internal leadership (residing within the territories) and the external leadership (abroad) hold various posts on the Political Bureau which relies on the Advisory Council for material support and theological rulings. While it is now fairly established who holds power on the Political Bureau, Hamas has managed to completely conceal both its leaders in the territories (Internal) and its secretive Shura Council. It is believed that this external leadership (which composes most of the Bureau) is at times at odds with leadership on the ground, but has classically exhibited more influence via access and coordination of foreign purse strings.
Directly subordinate to the Political Bureau are District Committees (five in the West Bank, seven in Gaza) which serve as local implementing bodies of Political Bureau (ie: external leadership) directives through intermediaries, largely unknown to Israel who are influential West Bank and Gazan organizers. These District Committees are largely political in nature, largely logistically autonomous and are only partially aware (beyond a few key spokes people in the Bureau) of the identities of other INTERNAL and EXTERNAL leadership. These Committees are organized into five sub-divisions: Education, Prisoner Support, Area Security, Publishing, and Finance. The Political Bureau operates in ‘informal affiliation’ with the multitude of Muslim Brotherhood controlled social services; particularly the Islamic Center (al-Mujumma al-Islami) the vast charity and mosque network founded by former Chairman Sheik Yassin; the Islamic University in Gaza which Hamas controls via its faculty and funding, a wide range of Hospitals, clinics, and professional associations; as well as the National Islamic Salvation Party (Hisb al-Khalas al-Witani al-Islmai).
The twelve localized District Committees aid in the political-charitable-military interface, but are largely to further legitimate political ends of the movement. Most charitable work is being performed under the auspices of an informally affiliated subsidiary and military operations are carried out via autonomous combat groups.
Apart from the victims of guerrillas, few still identify irregular paramilitary warfare with terrorism but the two activities do overlap a great deal in their operational characteristics. The tactical logic of guerrilla operations resembles that in terrorist attacks: the weaker rebels use stealth and the cover of the civilian society to concentrate their striking power against one among many of the stronger enemy’s dispersed assets; they strike quickly and eliminate the target before the defender can move forces from other areas to respond; they melt back into civilian society to avoid detection and re-concentrate against another target. The government or occupier has far superior strength in terms of conventional military power, but cannot counter-concentrate in time because it has to defend all points, while the insurgent attacker can pick its targets at will (Betts, p.8).
All Hamas fighters are mainly civilians that do not stay in the field outside of specific combat engagements. Thus, the Islamic Resistance is a reserve army that is sheltered by the population making it even harder for Israel to pinpoint specific members or sector leaders. Islamic Resistance fighters are students at universities, farmers, and professionals in the major cities. Sector leaders can instruct a fighting group’s members to report to an Operational Headquarters where they receive their instructions before deployment. Once assembled the group is instructed by a Sector Commander on the specific nature of the operation. Fighters are then armed, uniformed, and put into the field.
Hezbollah has a relatively flat and decentralized organizational structure, and compromises a network of territorial units operating almost autonomously and, generally, without the need for maneuvering forces or transporting supplies. The fighters, weapons, and supplies are deployed in the field in advance and blend easily within the civilian populations or in “nature reserves” (concealed bunker systems in valleys). On the other hand, Hezbollah does not have an operational center of gravity whose destruction would lead to the collapse of the organization’s other organs and obviate the need to destroy them individually (Tira, p.4).
And it is the Iranian Hezbollah modal Hamas has embraced.
During the Gaza war Hamas generally refused to wear uniforms and defend fixed positions, Islamic Resistance fighters then are indistinguishable from civilians. Each member only has knowledge of the few other men in his combat group although Hamas is attempting to build a popular army in a Gaza to keep roughly 40,000 fighters in reserve. Because the Israeli army is trained for large scale engagements with aggressive Arab armies fighting from fixed positions this structure makes it difficult for the IDF to effectively stop Hezbollah because they are not fighting on the same playing field. That is to say Hezbollah maintains an indirect defense.
Bunker Systems
Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 Hamas has wasted no time in constructing elaborate fortifications throughout the strip, building elaborate bunker complexes, supply tunnels, and underground attack corridors under Israel’s security barrier.
Although it was suspected that Hezbollah was building defensive fortifications, neither the UN peacekeepers nor the Israeli military had any idea as to the scale they had assisted the Palestinians. When Israeli troops discovered and dynamited one of the bunkers days after the cease-fire, they found a structure consisting of firing positions, operations rooms, medical facilities, lighting and ventilation systems, kitchens and bathrooms with hot water-sufficient for dozens of fighters to live underground for weeks (Blanford, p.7)
Not only do the numerous Hamas bunkers allow the Party to conceal its low-signature mobile fleet of short range Qassam and Katyusha rocket launchers, it allows the Islamic Resistance to move and remain hidden long before the IAF makes retaliatory strikes. That is to say these sophisticated bunkers build with Iranian funding and technical support prevent the IDF from effectively neutralizing the Gaza Strip command posts of the Islamic Resistance without a protracted occupation and an unacceptable amount of casualties.
The oddest deployment of ground forces took place in the last sixty hours of the fighting. The ground forces were deployed after the political campaign ended; in other words, the deployment was not intended to achieve any political objectives. The forces were deployed without the area being cleared of enemy combatants, i.e., the aim was not search, destroy, and inflict damage on Hezbollah’s firing capacity or its forces. When the ceasefire came into effect, IDF forces were interspersed with the enemy forces, and hence there were difficulties with land and air supplies (Tira, p.5).
Hamas ally Hezbollah was able to fire over 100 Katyusha rockets a day at Northern Israeli cities and Settlements because these bunkers allow them to unveil and quickly fire without the IAF being able to successfully pin point firing locations to neutralize the launcher and crew. Such installations once active in the Gaza Strip could target the reminder of Israel’s major population centers in the next round of hostilities. The bunker complexes also serve the vital function of concealing the Islamic Resistance Fighters. The approximately 20,000 fighters of the Izz Ed Din al-Qassam Brigades could never hope to withstand a direct confrontation with several Divisions of the IDF. In absence of centralized command or fixed fronts and positions the bunker complex allows fighter units to wait out Israeli advances and attack the Israeli supply lines once the IDF has passed deeper into urban territory. Basically, the Hezbollah inspired bunker system allows Hamas to make the best use of its guerrilla training and assets by forcing the IDF to fight on its terms in a theatre it controls and maintains civilian support.
Short Range Rockets
Hamas, under the tutelage of Hezbollah (and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard) has begun a compartmentalization of military action moving away from suicide bombings (which Hamas is surely cognizant are inexplicable and anathema to the West) towards use of short range Qassam rockets as resistance modus-operandi.
Integral to the balance of fear is the constant and unpredictable nature of where and when Hamas can strike. In utilizing rockets not suicide attacks Palestinian resistance factions, replicating lessons learned in Lebanon via Hezbollah instinctually realize how alienating the West via suicide bombings makes it harder to paint themselves as freedom fighters as opposed to terrorists. Rockets which don’t cost much to produce and fire (and rarely sacrifice trained operatives to do so) are a dual result of three factors, a) the effectiveness of the security barrier, b) a Hamas evolution and understanding of how the Western media views their ‘martyrdom operations’, and c) internal debate regarding the religious justification for sacrifice vs. suicide in Jihad.
During the Al-Aqsa Intifada Hamas began production (under Iranian ) tutelage of a domestic arms industry. The product was the Qassam-1 Rocket, a short range missile that could be built out of a wide range of household and construction items available in Gaza to fire a protracted battery of rockets over the wall into Israel proper. The early modals had a maximum range of 3 miles (4.5 kilometers). Most of the suicide attacks of the Al-Aqsa intifada occurred between 2000 and 2004, prior to the construction of the security barrier, largely using operatives form the West Bank. The Qassam missile strategy is to instill a renewed balance of fear, and enable besieged Gaza to strike at various surrounding areas. To date 15 Israelis have died from Qassam rocket attacks which have become increasingly sophisticated and longer in range. Thousands of these home made rockets have fallen on the Israeli town of Sderiot and during the 2008 Gaza War of Operation Cast Lead; Hamas demonstrated it could fire Qassam 3 and Katusha rockets as deep into Israel as the largest Southern City:(4th largest in Israel) Be’er Sheva.
The Qassam Rocket class 1-3 are quickly produced out of basic goods both available from the UN relief agencies and more sophisticated via smuggling operations through the Sinai tunnels. The Qassam is propelled via a mixture of sugar (available via relief organizations) and potassium nitrate (found in fertilizer). The explosive war head is packed with TNT (smuggled in) and urea nitrate (another readily available fertilizer). The rocket is constructed out of steel cylinders of varying sizes (UN relief or scavenged pipes) and a simple trigger mechanism is then built at the end out of a cartridge, spring and nail. The Qassam is impossible to aim and thus what it hits is purely up to probability and direction of firing. The manufacturers of the Qassam rocket class do not have canted nozzles (the rocket thus doesn’t spin), this is to simplify launch procedure at the expense of accuracy which is nil with home-made short range missiles to begin with. The Qassam’s basic components are highly unstable which prevents a stockpiling and barrage type tactic. Instead, missiles are built and quickly fired in order to create the low intensity version of the terror inflicted via their suicide attacks.
Suicide Terrorism
Suicide bombings are undoubtedly the most contentious element of Palestinian resistance. They merit equal condemnation with Israel’s killing of civilians; yet it is important to explain why some individuals carry out these acts, as well as why some groups promote their use. The explanation resides neither in the propagandized version of Islam (which says the bombers are brainwashed to believe that if they die martyred they will go to paradise, where some 72 virgins await them). Neither is it because they hate Jews and want to kill as many as possible. Fundamentally, the explanation is to be found in despair so overwhelming that these individuals believe they have no future and thus they are willing to sacrifice themselves. In the context of occupation, and the Israeli’s daily assaults on their families and friends, the despair combines with rage and an explosive desire for revenge fuels their actions (Rubenberg, pp.338-339.)
The Palestinians are in a comparable position to the Jews of the early 19th century, their homeland in the hands of a foreign power, their numbers divided among many continents and nations, their collective welfare in the hands of squabbling political factions. They live in ghettos, the bulk of their number in poverty with little chance for social and political advancement. The Israelis on the other hand possess international recognition by the world’s great powers, a modern conventional military capable of defeating all other forces in the region on the battlefield with the possible exception of the Islamic Republic of Iran; as well a vibrant economy, and the ability to strike at Palestinian leadership and population centers with near impunity.
Palestinian organizations that use martyrdom operations maintain that they never target children. They insist that they target predominantly army personnel, and that any attacks on civilians are either unintended or inevitable, as long as Israel continues to target Palestinian civilians. Additionally, they argue that Israel is a military state where every man and woman, part from the ultra-Orthodox Jews, serves in the army. They explain that they target buses because soldiers travel in them. They target bars and night clubs because these are meeting places for off-duty service men and women who earlier in the day would be actively engaged in military operations in the occupied territories (Tamimi, p.186).
A great body of scholarship has been done on the motivations for, psychology of and history behind suicide bombings, called by Hamas ‘martyrdom operations’. Hamas began utilizing this tactic operationally in 1996 and is to date the leading Palestinian faction in its prolific use. However, as documented a combination of a) Iranian influence, b) the separation and barrier and c) internal religious discourse has led to a discontinuation of suicide bombings in the past few years. Of course this does not preclude their total discontinuation, but it appears that Hamas seeks to develop more conventional military capabilities to achieve some degree of recognition as a guerrilla army, not as a terrorist group.
The Iranian influence is very important in this regard. Although Shi’a Hezbollah inflicted heavy causalities against France, America and Israel during the Lebanese Civil War via the use of suicide truck bombs, by and large Shi’a revolutionary groups draw a hard line between combatant and non-combatant which makes fatwa based justification of suicide bombings directed at civilian population centers impossible to justify on a religious grounds. Iran (next too foreign money raised to run al-Mujamma charities) is the largest financial contributor to the Hamas movement. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has provided engineering support, training facilities, weapons, and a whole range of contributions which lend the Hamas ear to the powers in Tehran. Hamas, as a keen student of history has evolved its tactics since 2000 to more closely resemble Hezbollah, the Shi’a Lebanese proxy of Iran.
It is far easier to rationalize a missile fired toward an enemy city as an act of war (albeit without a targeting system) than is a cross-dressed man in a lethal leisure suit lighting up a club of underage kids with ball bearings.
It is of importance to recognize that from the outset there has been a debate within Hamas as to whether these kinds of attacks are even permissible in Islam. Desperation being the mother of violent invention, it is clear that Hamas initially embraced these ‘martyrdom operations’ in the hopeless days of the first intifada and intensified them after the death of Oslo in the Al-Aqsa intifada of 2000. The Iranian embrace hands Hamas more deadly tools and training, but forges them into an army of resistance fighters who must then act like soldiers, not desperate terrorists eager for death and revenge.
Section 4: Hamas as a Partner in Separation
“I have also shown to you already that, in our submission, there is no question of ousting the Arabs. On the contrary, the idea is that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan should hold Arabs, their progeny and many millions of Jews. What I do not deny is that in that process the Arabs of Palestine will necessarily become a minority in the country of Palestine.
What I do deny is that it will be a hardship.”
Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky
Founder of Revisionist Zionism
There comes a time beyond outsider pontification, and insider political imagination when the forces on the ground most come to the realistic calculus that the end game for this conflict must be in separation. As we have outlined, militarily neither side’s strategy proves remarkably affective at eliminating the other, and certainly hardens the resolve of both confessions. Historically, each has a vague historical (and at the same time existentially immediate) claim to this land. Religious zeal aside there is overwhelming archeological proof of this being the historical Hebrew homeland, and suffice to say the Dome of the Rock occupies its place as Islam’s third holiest site. From a human rights perspective the Palestinian people, cognizant of a nationalist identity or not, were living on this land for at least the last 1,930 years.
The mindset and values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of bi-national statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds (Morris, p.187).
Surely Israeli society is an incredibly diverse one in both ethnicity and political perspective. It has vast potential to be an exporter of development, science and structural development of the third world once it can divest itself form this war. Surely Palestinian fundamentalisms and Hebrew fundamentalisms are not the desired ends of either peoples, but a part and parcel result of this war.
To end the war we must separate the combatants, but this task must fall upon the shoulders of the hardliners; the Revisionists and Hamas who can at present muster the poltical will to take this bold step. To cantonize and ghettoize the Gaza Strip and West Bank into inviable micro-states will not end this conflict. The separation must be implemented and development must follow.
Hamas has in recent years undergone an incremental process of political integration, a process mostly ignored by the movement’s foes and detractors. It has displayed political and tactical moderation, including keeping unilateral ceasefires until June 2006, abandoning the claim to mandatory Palestine and accepting a two-state solution comprising the 1967 territories. Hamas has not, however, complied with external pressures to abandon armed resistance, disarm and recognize Israel. The main reason for doing so is not only ideological, but strategic: complying with the demands would leave Hamas without any credible sanctions in the final-status negotiations that until now have been the only scenario for a lasting peace (Knudsen & Ezbidi, p. 204).
We are at the brink. The demographic realty is that within twenty years there will be an equal number of Arabs and Jews occupying the territorial space of Palestine, this will not broad well for either Israel’s commitment to democracy or the Palestinian’s already diminished human rights. The willingness of Iran to fuel violence by proxy as well as the total lack of dialogue and cultural exchange within the Middle East between the Muslim nations and the third Hebrew commonwealth leaves no lasting avenues for human exchange. Vultures swoop over Palestine and both the Christian and Muslim world have explicitly demonstrated their zeal to use both Jew and Palestinian as pawns in a game.
If Hamas will not put down its weapons (and who could rationally expect it to) or acknowledge the right of the Jews to occupy their land, then let us work with what they have offered for some time. The premise of Hudna: long term truce.
Hamas is silent about what happens when a notional long term Hudna signed with the Israelis comes to its appointed end. While Hamas’ leaders have left open the length of the term of the proposed Hudna, regarding this as subject of negotiation with the Israelis once they have accepted the principle, their general philosophy is that the future should be left up to future generations. It is usually assumed that a long term Hudna will probably last for a quarter of a century or more. That is viewed as too long a time for anyone now to predict what may happen afterward. There will always be a possibility that the Hudna will come to a premature end because of a breach. If that were to occur, it would be unlikely that the breach would come from the Hamas side. This is for the simple reason that it is a religious obligation on the Islamic side to honor such an agreement until the end, once made, unless violated by another party. Should the Hudna last until the proscribed date, one scenario is that those in charge then will simply negotiate a renewal (Azzam, p.168).
Were emerging, strong Israeli leaders able to the muster the will of their divided society to accept their sworn enemy Hamas as a partner in Hudna it might have lasting impacts that would shake the region to the core. The signing of such a truce need not happen on the Lawn of the White House or need be rewarded with some Nobel Prize. The proof of its worth would be in its results. The objective would be simple to grasp. The House of Israel and the House of Ishmael have been sixty years and more locked in bloody combat. To stop the war one need not peace, but instead the structural pursuit of lasting ceasefire coupled with a program to build two economically healthy nations with intertwined need.
Surely the Jewish radicals of the Kach underground and Gush Emunim would prefer a Jewish civil war to a lasting partition, surely no one on either side wishes to give an inch. But this program is an inch by inch reclamation coupled with one more territorial reality. Other than Egypt, Israel and Iran what county in the region has any claim to historical borders other than those imposed by Sykes-Picot. That is to say that the Palestinian Diaspora must surely be aware the extent to which the Arab regional powers owe them, have failed them and have despised them.
A Hudna, signed by a Zionist government and Hamas would be an act of covenant not international relations. To Hamas it would be a holy act and an existential necessity to prove the validity of Islamism in Palestine. To Memshala Israel it would mean a settlement of a prolonged drain on its nation’s coffers and moral and an opening of its society to the developing world. As per the Blue Print, not the Road Map: Jerusalem would be divided (the Palestinians would maintain control over the Temple Mount, Christian and Muslim Quarters and the East of the City as AL Quds). The West Bank and Gaza Strip would be supplemented by additional territories in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Sinai; settlements would be exchanged for Arab towns and land would be purchased (or simply seized) from neighboring countries unwilling to endorse this lasting truce. Refugees abroad would have the right to return to newly constituted Palestine and those with specific claims to land and property inside Israel proper would be bought out and compensated. Hamas would have free reign to Islamize Palestine in so far as it did so within a Democratic sphere and allowed secular space in its new society. But, even if it refused to moderate its zeal for religion, it would be empowered by Israel to dismantle the armed forces of all other factions and be the sole army on the ground.
The messy business of a population transfer must begin immediately at the off set of implementation. It goes without saying that Israel’s Arab Israeli population will seek and lobby to have their Palestinian cake and eat it too as it were. That is to say some will find it far easier to live as second class citizens in a multi-ethnic Hebrew dominated commonwealth, then as forced participants in a newly independent, Shari’ah dominated Palestinian nascent state. Suffice to say these are the painful realities of survival. Israel cannot maintain even a minute percentage of 20% Arab population within its borders; so-called Arab Israelis, Bedouin, and any Druze unwilling to serve in the armed forces will find themselves on the other side of the line.
This process must proceed in staged evacuations one for one; one settlement block for one Arab Israeli town, there will be misery, separation anxiety, and great soul searching as to moral justification and long term finality of peace. There will be obvious Palestinian anxiety on absorbing a largely secular, more affluent Arab-Israeli middle class, and finalizing the loss of sum 78% of their historic territory to the Zionists. The Israeli public will surely grieve the infighting of evacuating 200,000 plus settlers from the West Bank and ceding any claim to East Jerusalem, “Judea” and “Samaria”. But it is the very homes of the settlers, their infrastructure, their roads, their settlements into which the larger Arab Israeli evacuees must be placed.
I reiterate that this process will not be easy, nor will it be quickly accomplished. There will be resistance on the part of the settlers, anticipatively armed resistance; and there will be obvious international objection to the forced deportation of the Arab-Israeli into the newly created Gaza-West Bank Palestine.
The vital stage must be to insure that Memshala Yisrael and Hamas dominated PA work together to implement this transfer and maintain Hudna with the realization that territorial integrity of their respective nations is vital.
It is irrelevant as to whether Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist, or if the final treaty implementing the separation plan is one of ‘peace’ or instead ‘Hudna’. It is irrelevant if the two sides agree to a 10 year truce, a 60 year truce, or a 100 year truce. Phase 1 is separation in its most utter form, the sealing of each side behind their lines. As the Jew and Arab are separated from each other’s forced and hateful embrace the iron wall must be strengthened. The separation barrier must be built taller and its gates must be locked on both sides. For in the period of Hudna there must arise a new generation who does not remember the war or the blood spilled in repetition.
The common media adage suggests that the Arab world is particularly hostile to democracy. In virtually all but a single regional state a cruel military oligarchy rules with a junta and an iron fist. Surely, second to Israel the greatest acknowledged enemy of the Arab masses are their own governments. However, in both Israel and occupied Palestine the Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly demonstrated a zeal for both democratic process and a commitment to civic society. Although the election of the Hamas government was a seemingly critical blow to the trampled peace process, it has not been argued that this was not a supervised and legitimate expression of Palestinian democracy. Within Israel itself the Arab parties and the 1.3 million Arab-Israeli Palestinians participate in the regions only democracy, within the Jewish State.
We are not dealing with howling mullah unfamiliar with Western ideas of statecraft. The Blue Print as a plan is flexible and staged in its intricate redrafting of the Middle Eastern Map, its specifics are for another treatise at another time. Paramount to the survival of both people’s is a rational acknowledgment that they have failed for nearly 100 years at both peace and war. Surely some of the responsibility for rebuilding the Palestinian nation falls on the oil oligarchies and the European Union, just as surely does America have a long term relationship with Israel. But, before any realistic mobilization of these respective mini-states can be used to demonstrate Democratic Islamism and Zionist Universalism respectively; they must stop the war.
It has been found that social movements like those which are responsible for the modern concepts of Israel and Palestine thrive on ‘imagined community’, strictly defined identity, and symbols of some historical Golden Age. When coupled with religion a social movement has the ability to draw from a deep well of support and sustain a struggle indefinitely.
The acronym for Hamas translates to the word Zeal. There was once a group of Hebrew revolutionaries in the year 66 CE that carried the same name in their war with an occupying power the Roman Empire. Their faction, the Zealots and Sicarii carried out merciless acts of terrorism against their own people and the Roman occupiers. The Hebrew people are ‘stiff necked’ the Torah says, prone to stubborn arrogance as well as religious fervor. I am not a man of peace, but a man of pragmatism. If on this wide earth the Hebrew and Palestinian people have found no meaningful source of shelter and security for their respective kind; if locked in bloody struggle the sins of Europe and the sins of Arab oligarchy are channeling both out houses to cosmic, unending war; then we must separate and do so quickly.
If in a simple ten year Hudna both Houses can be made relatively homogenous and their peoples can, uninterrupted by siege and war build two nations, side by side. Then one day, as each subsequent Hudna is renewed the fundamentalists on both sides will find their grasp weakened, they will find blue jeans and art museums are more to the mass appeal than puritanical embrace of religion. The time to act is now. The leaderships of both houses are old men who know nothing but war. But old men die. Younger more visionary leaders who forge their respective nations in the prism of human rights not theological canon can from inside their war torn land and from its vast Diaspora bring both peoples apart and then raise them up side by side together.
Section 5: An Intervention Blueprint
Walter Sebastian Adler & Yousef Bashir
21 April 2014
Introduction
Conflicts around the world today are fully shaped by the lasting machinations & legacies of the former colonial powers. Denial of that is revisionist and irrational. National interests and the economic dependencies fostered in that period have paved the way for the inhabitants of those former colonies to remain entrenched in deep ethnic conflict and lasting hatreds fueled by the ongoing proxy conflicts of the great powers, or economic considerations. US-Russian Cold War calculations repeatedly fueled the major Arab-Israeli Wars. Iranian-Israeli relations repeatedly utilize Palestinians, Kurds and Lebanese in their proxy engagements. Arab Spring uprisings will continuously bring to power regimes that are increasingly anti-West and anti-Israel.
Peoples marginalized and displaced by the process of colonization hold lasting grievances that in new wars will continue to trigger violent engagements. The ongoing tensions and currently intractable low grade violence between the Jewish and Palestinian communities is certainly more complex than colonialism yet far more immediate than distant wars and expulsions with ancient Babylon or Rome. Moving forward it is less vital that root cause be debated conclusively, but instead that the proximate causes are understood and acted upon to secure a lasting settlement. The mechanisms of which we believe are outside the normative nation state framework.
This analysis will propose the rationale and series of interlinked tactical interventions to be carried out in Israel Palestine that will break the intractable deadlock of the failed peace negotiations. It will highlight the combination of renewed multi-track diplomatic efforts that will in harmonization produce three viable confederated states; coexistence; as well as peace and economic development between various peoples involved. Most importantly it will showcase a new intervention theory called Parallel State; the Para-State approach to seemingly endless inter-ethnic conflicts.
Section One
An analysis of the problem
Historic Grievances & Immediate Threats
The seemingly innumerous problems with the so-called peace process are founded in the complete lack of agreement on how and when the conflict began; who allowed this process to occur and ultimately who currently supports its continuation. This rhetoric and historic revisionism contributes to the lack of meaningful dialogue and subsequent action. Via a MSTC rapid historical phase analysis we observe highly divergent reference points and alignments of modern grievance.
Jewish/Israeli Perception:
a) Slavery in Egypt b) Canaanite Conquest, c) First Hebrew Commonwealth, d) Babylonian Exile, e) Second Hebrew Commonwealth, f) Roman Occupation, g) Judeo-Roman Wars, h) Diaspora, i) Zionist Congressional Organizing, j) Shoah, k) Independence War, l) Sinai War 1956, m) 1967 Six Day War, n) 1973 Yom Kippur War o) 1982 Lebanon War, p) Intifada One, q) Oslo Process, r) Intifada Two, s) post 2005 Separation Barrier, t) 2008 Hezbollah War, u) Gaza War 2010, v) Post 2010 Intractability.
Palestinian Perception:
Caliphate b) Ottoman Rule, c)Revolt of 1843 c) British Rule, d) 1948 Catastrophe, e) 1967 Occupation of West Bank and Gaza, f) Formation of PLO 1964 g)1967 Catastrophe h) Post-1967 Resistance Period, i) 1970 Black September Massacres in Jordan, j) 1982 Israeli-Lebanon War, k) Sabra-Shatilla Massacres, l) First Intifada One, m) Oslo, n) Second Intifada o) 2005 Hudna/ Apartheid Wall p) 2006 Hamas Electoral Victory/ Hamas/Fatah Civil Conflict q) 2010 Gaza War, r) post 2010 Intractability.
The contradictions of these clustered collective perspectives are virtually irreconcilable. But that is not as important as you may believe. We do not have to agree to a narrative only aims and indicators.
From the Palestinian historic narrative there occurred a series of grave injustices and failures of leadership that took place throughout Ottoman and British occupations. Working against their rightful existence in the state of Palestine; Arab, Turkish and English collaborators enabled a Jewish colonial presence which by the end of the Second World War; facilitated by Euro-American guilt over German atrocities allowed mass Jewish immigration to occur into historic Palestine which had not had any substantial Jewish population since 73 CE (Laqueur, 1972). Between 1936 and 1939 the Palestinians organized a large revolt against the British commission’s recommendations to divide Palestine. Deborah J. Gerner in Encyclopedia of 20th Century Ethnic Conflict stated that;
“Initially the rebellion was nonviolent; however after a British commission recommended splitting Palestine the revolt flared again in a much more violent form”.
Following a series of provocations, ethnic cleansing and the military defeats of Arab armies; by January 1949 Palestine was literally wiped off the map in order to give birth to the State of Israel. For many Palestinians the source of the conflict goes back to the end of the First World War when Palestine was conquered from the dissolving Ottoman Empire by Great Britain and France which via the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided up the Arab world to ensure there spheres of interest. During the same time period the Balfour Declaration was issued in Britain which promoted the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionist political manipulations in the United States fueled by the calculations of the Cold War enabled the State of Israel to expand rapidly past the boundaries established by the United Nations in 1948. Following the event called “the Catastrophe” (Nakba); Israel enraged in rapid annexation of all of historic Palestine in 1967. A series of wars with its neighbors; a series of atrocities inside Israel and other nations; and a continuous brutal occupation is now further compounded by daily expansions of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and a state of total siege and blockade in the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip.
A commonly held perception is that the Europeans and Americans helped the Jews build a Zionist colony on their historic homeland (Hroub, p.37). In many cases they fled to Arab nations that reduced them to permanent internal refugees and others that massacred and expelled them. After being betrayed by the other Arab leaderships they were forced into an extended exile that continues to this day. The Americans, controlled by the Zionist Lobby will arm and support the Israelis no matter what human rights violations are committed (Hroub, p. 110). Currently, not only has every Arab nation for the most part failed to help them or defeat Israel; the Americans have invaded Iraq and removed their primary ally Saddam Hussein, their political leadership has been completely divided between Hamas (Gaza Strip) and Fatah (West Bank); and Israeli settlement expansions in the West Banks are proceeding; displacing Palestinians from whatever bi-national settlement potentially is achieved (over 9% of West Bank has been settled).
The Jewish-Israeli historic narrative is around two thousand years longer in collective formation; reinforced by the annual retelling of the narrative within the religion itself. To Jews this is their historic homeland, given to them by their god after slavery in Egypt; from which they were exiled after three violent wars with the Roman Empire (66-135 CE). In the collective memory of the Jewish people they then lived in a series ghettos within Muslim and European countries that ended regularly with pogroms, rape, robbery, deportation and eventually the genocide of the Shoah (Holocaust) between 1939-1945. Inspired and motivated by the global Zionist movement and its founder Theodor Herzl; Jewish gradual colonization of Palestine had begun in the 1840’s but rapidly accelerated following the first world war in 1919. From the Jewish Zionist prospective Palestine was the only viable homeland for the Jewish people though settlements were offered and discussed in Sinai, Dominican Republic, Cyprus, Uganda and Argentina. The Zionist Movement had succeed by 1943 in purchasing nearly 400,000 acres, amounting to around 6% of the land for an estimated $560,000,000 paid to corrupt Ottoman officials, absentee Palestinian landlords living abroad and peasant Fellahin (Laquer/Rubenberg). This provoked a massive Palestinian Uprising in 1936-1939 which was crushed by the British Colonial Authority shattering prematurely any nascent resistance to the Zionist program. Jews entered the Allied forces en masse during both WW1 & 2 and gained military training throughout the war while virtually all Palestinians abstained from military service and some of Palestinian leadership openly collaborated with the Nazis (Khalidi, p.115).
It was of course vitally important to these planners that Zionism and later Israeli forces first overcome Palestinian resistance and then clear as much of the country as they could of its Palestinian population. They understood perfectly that otherwise the Jewish State called for by the partition plan would not have control of its internal lines of communication. Most importantly, they understood the well-established demographic calculus of Palestine, which meant that without ethnic cleansing, the new state would have nearly as many Arabs as Jews. But least as important as this objective was the driving forward and establishing of strategic lines on which the Arab armies could be confronted should they enter Palestine as they did on May 15th, 1948 (Khalidi, p.127).
In 1948 United Nations Resolution 181 divided Palestine into two new, highly unreasonable states; one Jewish and the other Palestinian Arab but this was rejected completely by the surrounding Arab countries who quickly decided to go to war with Israel which defeated them easily despite the mythology of six Arab armies v. Jewish partisans and holocaust survivors; it was militarily comparable match (Morris, 2009). For the Jewish people this was a historic victory and the beginning of modern Israel while for most Arabs and Palestinians this was an unjustified post-colonial war; an illegal partition of the land and a humanitarian catastrophe. Subsequent Arab-Israeli wars in 56, 67, 73, 82 and 08 only made the Palestinian political question less likely to be answered and expanded the size of the Zionist state. Egypt and Jordan pressured Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip not to challenge the status quo or engage in acts of resistance against Israel (Gerner). Palestinians were massacred by Arab armies in Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1982). Palestinians lacked any unifying, effective leadership for decades and lacked any formal political representation until the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964. In addition to this all most of the Palestinian leaders were expelled, assassinated or exiled once the Israeli 1967 occupation of Gaza and West Bank began.
According to UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) nearly 5,000,000 Palestinians are still refugees while the State of Israel has been fully recognized by all of the Global North and most non-Muslim nations. To the Palestinians this created a lasting hatred and feeling of betrayal by the international community but most importantly created a feeling of hostility towards the new citizens of Israel who were celebrating their victory and freedom at the expense of another nation.
The widespread Israeli belief is that without US military support and a strong military-industrial complex they will be annihilated by their Muslim neighbors. The Palestinians have never been an existential threat to Israel as compared to Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran, but they remain the most serious catalyst of organized political violence against Israel. Ultimately whatever political color Israelis hold three deep resentments will shape any peace process: A) there are dozens of Muslim States and this is the only Jewish State; their historic persecution necessitates a national home. B) Whatever they have done to the Palestinians is pale in comparison of what other groups have done in the same situation and continue to do. C) If this is nothing resolved in the next forty years the “Arab-Israeli” population (of 1.6 million) will grow inside pre-1967 Israel to point where ensuring a “Jewish State” will become impossible to maintain.
Critiques of UNRWA state that it fosters dependency, lacks fiscal transparency and is unusual as the UN’s only ethno-specific refugee organization (Berkowitz, 2008).
Romirowsky and Spyer in How UNRWA creates dependency state,
“As it stands, the self-perpetuating bureaucracy of UNRWA is one of the central factors offering day jobs to members of terror groups, propping up Palestinian dependency and perpetuating the myths and falsehoods about Israel which help prevent a solution to the conflict.”
To many Palestinians UNRWA is their only reliable existing para-state (Kimmerling/Migdal, p. 160). War failed, Intifada 1 & 2, Oslo failed; Track 1 & 2 has also failed. The result is a de facto one-state (or three-state) solution which is an incubator for a wider longer violence. Multi-track diplomacy is about all levels of engagement working on conjunction as a system, but due to the unfeasible nature of the previous engagements; we are proposing a more radical intervention package without necessitating recognition of anyone’s states.
“This grisly inventory finds the total number of deaths in conflicts since 1950 numbering about 85,000,000. Of that sum, the deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1950 include 32,000 deaths due to Arab state attacks and 19,000 due to Palestinian attacks, or 51,000 in all. Arabs make up roughly 35,000 of these dead and Jewish Israelis make up 16,000.
These figures mean that deaths in Arab-Israeli fighting since 1950 amount to just 0.06 percent of the total number of deaths in all conflicts in that period. More graphically, only 1 out of about 1,700 persons killed in conflicts since 1950 has died due to Arab-Israeli fighting.
Adding the 11,00g0 killed in the Israeli war of independence, 1947-49, made up of 5,000 Arabs and 6,000 Israeli Jews, does not significantly alter these figures.
In a different perspective, some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.” (Pipes, 2007)
After tallying the extent of specific civilian casualty inter-communal violence between Palestinians and Israelis since hostilities began in 1948 a total combined loss of life has been estimated at wide range between 14,000 to 21,500 civilians.
Section Two
An analysis and justification of an intervention(s) to address the problem(s), including theories of change to use.
Our underlying analysis is that Western imposed peace negotiations have completely failed, Palestinian statehood is inevitable; and demographic realities inside of Israel make the continuation of a Jewish state impossible if the status quo is maintained. This intervention package to be coordinated by the Palestinian & Jewish diaspora. It is geared to reinvigorate meaningful dialogue, foster functional reliance and allow three viable administrative division within a Palestinian-Israeli Confederation based on violence cessation, recognition of each other’s territorial claims and freedom of movement & rights attainment within the three territories (Gaza, Pre-1967 Israel, and the West Bank).
The four underlying theories of change are:
“Parastate Infrastructure”; the development of capacity via civil services, trade unions and social enterprises interlinking diaspora financing to community based organizations. Operating in a given nation wracked by failed state policies; a parallel state is built in the shadow of a failing one. This economic leverage is first utilized in the building the capability through Civil Society organizations to provide services to populations; then coordinating their functionality to mirror those attributed to best practices of developed countries. The Para State is build piecemeal out of CBS, SMO, NGOs and small businesses with a unified vision of human rights attainment for the communal identity they share. Successful demonstrations of Parallel State Development are the American Nation of Islam, the Kurdish national movement, the Irish Republican movement, the Bangladeshi mega “NGO” BRAC, Iranian built Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas and of course the Zionist Movement’s formation of the State of Israel.
“Trilateral cooperation” assumes triumvirate confidence building with full inclusion of Hamas, Fatah, and the Israeli Coalition government functioning as three cooperative administrative units assuming separate but coordinate jurisdiction over their zones of control. All confidence measures revolve on acceptance of Eight Core Agreements; 1) Israel’s’ right to exist in historic Palestine, 2) Palestine’s right to exist in modern Israel, 3) Agreement to a thirty year Hudna (ceasefire) that rewards security and development cooperation with a roll back of Israeli military presence to 1967 borders 4) Right to return of all foreign nationals with one Jewish or Palestinian grandparent to areas under respective tri-national control, 5) Palestinian (“Arab-Israeli”) populations centers inside pre-1967 Israel fall administratively under Palestinian Authority if 67% are Arab 6) Israeli settlement expansion freeze and 1 m3/ for 1m3 reciprocity of pre-1967 Israel in exchange for West Bank territory settled, 7) Bi-nationalization of Jerusalem 8) All political offices will be held based on democratic election; the peace process is to be governed by human rights indicators & tri-state administration of Gaza, Israel & West Bank.
“Multinationalization”; is economic and human rights centered development coupled with civil disobedience; utilizing battalions of foreign volunteers. Multi-nationalization is deliberate and strategic diversification of a project’s field team to recruit and include a composition of staff whereby harm directed against this staff is mitigated by their groupings of foreign nationals. This strategy plays directly to racist/ nationalist media tendencies and multiplies the “outsider Impact” of the field teams effort. Multi-nationalization is however completely subordinated to leadership directives of the CBOs the effort helps facilitate the impact of.
“Functional Reliance”: formation of strategic and economic partnerships that involve multi-ethnic enterprises to build solidarity via functionally relying on the other ethnic group to co-lead, manage and serve in programs. It also involves mass inclusion of belligerent populations within ethno-heterogeneous civil services functionally relying on peace to ensure development.
Our intervention recommendations involve measured, scalable responses in the following categories based on threat levels corresponding to rights violations in the 3 categories of Symmetric Indicators to be outlined in the fourth section. For the sake of vast simplification of the algorithm findings matrix here are the primary intervention recommendations by category:
Interventions to be taken by Non-State Actors
Multi-nationalizing the conflict decreases impunity of violent reprisals. Increasing overall levels of Developed-nation volunteers serving in territories as well as Arabs serving in Israel is ideal especially during escalations of conflict.
Gaza blockade naval flotillas should be launched periodically but attempt to enter Gaza from international waters only in response to symmetric indicator based events. .
Boycott, Divestment, Sanction campaigns directed against Israeli economic, educational and cultural sectors should be strengthened.
Refusals to serve in occupied territories and diversions to National Service should be encouraged. Mass Israeli dissident infiltration of National Service should mirror mass Palestinian infiltration of the UNRWA agencies.
Person-to-person correspondence campaigns increased. Social media ought to broadly utilized in order to increase the awareness of the other side’s perspectives and lives through a mass facilitation program.
“Seeds of Peace” style camps and activities should be rapidly stepped up and further established in Cyprus, Egypt and Jordan. These camps should be seen as vital organizational training grounds for this effort.
Joint Palestinian-Israeli economic ventures should be encouraged especially activities that link asset ownership and management. Palestinians should switch to their own currency pegged to the Jordanian Dinar.
Palestinian populations in diaspora should be organized into Parastate administrative units. Politically and industrially organized and administered by either Hamas, Fatah or an emergent Party. All States that have since 1948 not recognized benefits of citizenship of Palestinian diaspora ought to be viewed as hostile to peace. Factions are urged to pursue annexation efforts of territory into a Greater Palestine.
Mobilization of a Palestinian Lobby to harness Palestinian-American remittances and votes. This lobby like AIPAC must focus on all areas capable of social agency. It must mirror AIPAC’s tactics and organizational structure in every possible regard. It must also focus on reducing AIPAC monopoly of agency in regards to the Near East within the United States.
Occupational Annexes should never be excluded as they are based on precedent. Sykes Picot was the first precedent arbitrarily drawing up the borders of the region. Israel itself is of course the second occupying and annexing far beyond the 1948 agreed borders. Russia is the th third taking territory, basing soldiers there and annexing it via referendum. Valid occupational annexes include any territory bordering any of the three administrative zones Gaza, Israel, and West Bank containing a 67% majority population of Palestinians or Jews.
Interventions as Policy recommendations to State Actors
Recognition of Bi-partisan Palestinian State in exchange for recognition of Israeli Administrative control of pre-1967 borders excluding population centers with 67% Palestinian Arab majority. Further equalizing administrative land disputes proceed to equalize land holdings to 1m3/1m3, a 50/50 land and resource split involving trading taxation/ administration of Arab-Israeli population centers for Jewish Settlement in West Bank.
Settlement freezes/ and scheduled settlement turn-overs.
Prisoner amnesty for quarterly periods of violence cessation.
Israeli Development assistance in exchange for periods of violence cessation.
Institute full draft in Israel with enlargement of National Service to channel Arab-Israeli intuitional exclusion into capacity building via service in Gaza and West Bank.
Piecemeal, scheduled administrative turnovers proceed for periods of violence cessation.
Targeted kidnappings of soldiers are only to be traded one for one.
Scholarships for Palestinian students at Israeli universities.
Extension of Joint-Palestinian Israeli Civil Service inclusion.
Mashav will develop modules to teach Palestinians cooperative economic and organizational frameworks necessary for state capacity.
Mashav and UNRWA will fund the creation of joint Palestinian-Israeli peacekeeping and emergency relief brigades and deploy them under the UN peacekeeping architecture.
Joint Palestinian-Israeli kibbutzim and Moshaviim for collective living, industry and agriculture will be established in Gaza, West Bank, Israel proper and Sinai subsidized by American Jewish community, USAID, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Long Term Conflict Intervention Recommendations:
Political/Diplomatic tools
• Outsider Mediation for implementation of localized programs.
• Coexistence-Coordination Offices established in each village, town and city.
• Political Capacity and Aid assistance to all factions espousing peace and recognition.
• Hudna/Recognition/Normalization especially between Israel-Hamas; Israel-Iran, and Israel-Hezbollah.
• Human Rights Defense Missions increased inside of Syria along with continued non-military support for any Syrian factions that might recognize Israel.
• Dispute resolution mechanisms further established.
• Crisis Management Systems better implemented.
• Public Diplomacy/Pressure: U.S.A. must reduce military aid to Israel.
• Threat/Use of diplomatic sanctions: A regional arms embargo must be put in place to curtail weapons flow into a region that will be plagued by increasing civil unrest.
Legal/Constitutional tools
• Constitutional Reforms in place in both Israel & Palestine to better reflect Human Rights obligations.
• Formal power sharing mechanisms set in place to create a functional bi-partisan Palestinian State alongside an Israeli one.
• Human Rights monitoring must be carried out by outside multinationals.
• Police, judiciary, corrections capacity assistance must increase in Palestine.
Economic/Social tools
• Conflict-sensitive Israeli led Development Assistance via Mashav.
• Intergroup dialogue interactions stepped up on all four tracks.
• Restrictions on US financial flows.
• Conditional incentives/inducements: (debt relief, trade preferences, investment)
• Threat/Use of targeted economic sanctions (BDS): Although this has been viewed with controversy among countries like Israel and the USA but has received wide and major official and non-official support from many countries around the world such as England, Norway, Denmark, and others who imposed sanctions on Israeli banks that fund and have ties with the Israeli illegal settlements. We think that this is indeed an effective tool that can add more pressure on the Israeli refusal to accept and respect International Law but we also think that it can generate more awareness and more understanding among the public in Israel for example and not explaining the problems with an angry tone.
Military/Security tools
• Security guarantees including “Arab-Israeli” units of the IDF to help in security of West Bank and Gaza. Joint defense training between Israeli, Hamas, and Fatah fighters.
• Systematic Confidence-building measures
• Security Sector Reform: All Israelis and Palestinians to be drafted into either IDF or PDF (Palestinian Defense Force) regardless of ethnicity. Only way out universal draft will be enrolment in a revised National Service Corps to be radically expanded in scope to all civil services.
• Joint Israeli-Palestinian Military Observer/ Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Missions will be enhanced via the United Nations.
• Arms Embargoes will be encouraged between Russia and America to cut arms flow into the Middle East generally.
• Preventive Military/Police deployment will cease except by combined units. All Israeli security-intelligence forces will be pulled out of post-1967 borders except to facilitate settlement turn over.
• Threat of Force/Deterrence
Primary Resource Agreements:
Joint PA/Israeli control of Galilee water resource
Joint Administration of Hospitals and Universities
Doubling Israeli-Palestinian land mass via purchase/ annexation of Sinai and Transjordan
Palestinian control of Dead Sea
Security Parity (Demilitarization/ Arms transfers)
Israeli non-proliferation for Iranian non-proliferation
Demilitarized Golan (to be included in the Palestinian State)
Demilitarized Gaza Strip (to be connected to West Bank via a security corridor and train tunnel)
Demilitarization South of Litany River and North of Kishon River
Return of Sheba Farms to Lebanon
Golan Heights transfer to PA control
Implementation of a 2 Child maximum per family
Extension of West Bank PA down to Gulf of Aqaba
Triple Seacoast of PA (Akko, Gaza City, and a third site build between Aqaba and Eilat)
4 Separate Courts, Civil and Religious; 2 per polity
Separate Knesset/ Palestinian Congress both based in East and West Jerusalem respectively.
Release of all Palestinian political prisoners
Right of Return respective and regulated, parity in returning numbers negotiated to return to respective zones of control.
EU to aid Palestine (infrastructure only)
US to aid Israel (infrastructure only)
Bedouin autonomous region in Sinai or population transfer to Palestinian zone.
Structural dual citizenship benefits (tax credits, work visas, health care, educational)
Dismantling the barrier walls
Reduction of Israeli arsenal in exchange for greater aid, (Aid for decommissioned weapons program).
Structural reform from Knesset Parliamentary system to tri-territory Representative Democracy.
Section Three
Suggested partnerships that are required to develop the intervention(s) and how these might be obtained.
The concept of a Para-State is an intermediate tactic of development coupled with resistance to human rights violation meant to forge realities on the ground leading up to the changing of borders and setting of policies of governments the Parallel State exists beside. To achieve any of of our “unrealistic” demands and programs we of course accept that one cannot ignore the hard line of either side which is holding power. Fatah is awash with collaborators, opportunists and corrupt officials. Hamas is led by Islamist fundamentalists. Likud, Kadima and even Avodah have entrenched elite interests to serve.
Ceasefire and Separation
There comes a time beyond outsider pontification, and insider political imagination when the forces on the ground most come to the realistic calculus that the end game for this conflict must be in separation before there can be meaningful coexistence. As we have outlined, militarily neither side’s strategy proves effective at eliminating the other, and certainly hardens the resolve of both confessions. Historically, each has a vague (and at the same time existentially immediate) claim to this land. Religious zeal aside there is overwhelming archeological proof of this being the historical Hebrew homeland, and suffice to say the Dome of the Rock occupies its place as Islam’s third holiest site. From a human rights perspective the Palestinian people, cognizant of a nationalist identity or not, were living on this land for at least the last 1,930 years.
The mindset and values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of bi-national statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds (Morris, p.187).
Surely Israeli society is an incredibly diverse one in both ethnicity and political perspective. It has vast potential to be an exporter of development, medicine and technology to the developing world once it can divest itself from this ongoing war. Surely Palestinian fundamentalisms and Hebrew fundamentalisms are not the desired ends of either peoples, but a part and parcel result of this war.
To end the war we must separate the combatants, but this task must fall upon the shoulders of the hardliners; the Revisionists and Hamas who can at present muster the political will to take this bold step. To cantonize and ghettoized the Gaza Strip and West Bank into non-viable micro-states will not end this conflict. The separation must be implemented and development must follow.
Hamas has in recent years undergone an incremental process of political integration, a process mostly ignored by the movement’s foes and detractors. It has displayed political and tactical moderation, including keeping unilateral ceasefires until June 2006, abandoning the claim to mandatory Palestine and accepting a two-state solution comprising the 1967 territories. Hamas has not, however, complied with external pressures to abandon armed resistance, disarm and recognize Israel. The main reason for doing so is not only ideological, but strategic: complying with the demands would leave Hamas without any credible sanctions in the final-status negotiations that until now have been the only scenario for a lasting peace (Knudsen & Ezbidi, p. 204).
We are at the brink. The demographic reality is that within twenty years there will be an equal number of Arabs and Jews occupying the territorial space of Palestine, this will not broad well for either Israel’s commitment to democracy or the Palestinians already diminished human rights. The willingness of Iran to fuel violence by proxy as well as the total lack of dialogue and cultural exchange within the Middle East between the Muslim nations and the third Hebrew commonwealth leaves no lasting avenues for human exchange. Vultures swoop over Palestine and both the Christian and Muslim world have explicitly demonstrated their zeal to use both Jew and Palestinian as pawns in a game. If Hamas will not put down its guns (and who could rationally expect them to) or acknowledge the right of the Jews to occupy their land, then let us work with what they have offered for some time. The premise of Hudna: long term truce.
Hamas is silent about what happens when a notional long term Hudna signed with the Israelis comes to its appointed end. While Hamas’ leaders have left open the length of the term of the proposed Hudna, regarding this as subject of negotiation with the Israelis once they have accepted the principle, their general philosophy is that the future should be left up to future generations. It is usually assumed that a long term Hudna will probably last for a quarter of a century or more. That is viewed as too long a time for anyone now to predict what may happen afterward. There will always be a possibility that the Hudna will come to a premature end because of a breach. If that were to occur, it would be unlikely that the breach would come from the Hamas side. This is for the simple reason that it is a religious obligation on the Islamic side to honor such an agreement until the end, once made, unless violated by another party. Should the Hudna last until the prescribed date, one scenario is that those in charge then will simply negotiate a renewal (Azzam, p.168).
Were some emerging, strong Israeli leaders able to the muster the will of their divided society to accept their sworn enemy Hamas as a partner in Hudna it might have lasting impacts that would shake the region to the core. The signing of such a truce need not happen on the Lawn of the White House or need be rewarded with some Nobel Prize. The proof of its worth would be in its results. The objective would be simple to grasp. The House of Israel and the House of Palestine have been for around one hundred years locked in bloody combat. To stop the war one need not peace, but instead the structural pursuit of lasting ceasefire coupled with a program to build two economically healthy nations with intertwined need.
Surely the Jewish radicals of the Kach underground and Gush Emunim would prefer a Jewish civil war to a lasting partition, surely no one on either side wishes to give an inch. But this program is an inch by inch reclamation coupled with one more territorial reality. Other than Egypt, Israel and Iran what county in the region has any claim to historical borders other than those imposed by Sykes-Picot. That is to say that the Palestinian Diaspora must surely be aware the extent to which the Arab regional powers owe them, have failed them and have despised them.
A Hudna, signed by a Zionist government and Hamas would be an act of covenant not international relations. To Hamas it would be a holy act and an existential necessity to prove the validity of Islamism in Palestine. To Memshala Israel it would mean a settlement of a prolonged drain on its nation’s coffers and moral and an opening of its society to the developing world. As per the Blueprint, not the Road Map: Jerusalem would be bi-nationally controlled (the Palestinians would maintain control over the Temple Mount, Christian and Muslim Quarters and the East of the City as AL Quds). The West Bank and Gaza Strip would be supplemented by additional territories in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Sinai; settlements would be exchanged for Arab towns and land would be purchased (or simply seized) from neighboring countries unwilling to endorse this lasting truce. Refugees abroad would have the right to return to newly constituted Palestine and those with specific claims to land and property inside Israel proper would be bought out and compensated. Hamas would have free reign to Islamize Palestine in so far as it did so within a Democratic sphere and allowed secular space in its new society. But, even if it refused to moderate its zeal for religion, it would be empowered by Israel to dismantle the armed forces of all other factions and be the sole army on the ground.
The messy business of a population transfer must begin immediately at the offset of implementation. It goes without saying that Israel’s Arab Israeli population will seek and lobby to have their Palestinian cake and eat it too as it were. That is to say some will find it far easier to live as second class citizens in a multi-ethnic Hebrew dominated commonwealth, then as forced participants in a newly independent, Shar’iah dominated Palestinian nascent state. Suffice to say these are the painful realities of survival. Israel cannot maintain even a minute percentage of 20% Arab population within its borders; so-called Arab Israelis, Bedouin, and any Druze unwilling to serve in the armed forces will find themselves on the other side of the line.
This process must proceed in staged evacuations one for one; one settlement block for one Arab Israeli town, there will be misery, separation anxiety, and great soul searching as to moral justification and long term finality of peace. There will be obvious Palestinian anxiety on absorbing a largely secular, more affluent Arab-Israeli middle class, and finalizing the loss of their historic territory to the Zionists. The Israeli public will surely grieve the infighting of evacuating 600,000 plus settlers from the West Bank and ceding any claim to East Jerusalem, “Judea” and “Samaria”. But it is the very homes of the settlers, their infrastructure, their roads, their settlements into which the larger Arab Israeli evacuees must be placed.
We reiterate that this process will not be easy, nor will it be quickly accomplished. There will be resistance on the part of the settlers, anticipatively armed resistance; and there will be obvious international objection to the forced deportation of the Arab-Israeli into the newly created Gaza-West Bank Palestine.
The vital stage must be to insure the Israeli coalition government and Hamas dominated PA work together to implement this transfer and maintain Hudna with the realization that territorial integrity of their respective nations is vital.
It is irrelevant as to whether Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist, or if the final treaty implementing the separation plan is one of ‘peace’ or instead ‘Hudna’. It is irrelevant if the two sides agree to a 10 year truce, a 60 year truce, or a 100 year truce. Phase 1 is separation in its most utter form, the sealing of each side behind their lines. As the Jew and Arab are separated from each other’s forced and hateful embrace the iron wall must be strengthened. The separation barrier must be built taller and its gates must be locked on both sides until the time is correct. For in the period of Hudna there must arise a new generation who does not remember the war or the blood spilled in repetition.
The common media adage suggests that the Arab world is particularly hostile to democracy. In virtually all but a single regional state a cruel military oligarchy rules with a junta and an iron fist. Surely, second to Israel the greatest acknowledged enemy of the Arab masses are their own governments. However, in both Israel and occupied Palestine the Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly demonstrated a zeal for both democratic process and a commitment to civic society. Although the election of the Hamas government was a seemingly critical blow to the trampled peace process, it has not been argued that this was not a supervised and legitimate expression of Palestinian democracy. Within Israel itself the Arab parties and the 1.3 million Arab-Israeli Palestinians participate in the regions only democracy, within the Jewish State.
We are not dealing with howling mullah unfamiliar with Western ideas of statecraft. The BluePrint as a plan is flexible and staged in its intricate redrafting of the Middle Eastern Map, its specifics are for another treatise at another time. Paramount to the survival of both people’s is a rational acknowledgment that they have failed for nearly 100 years at both peace and war. Surely some of the responsibility for rebuilding the Palestinian nation falls on the oil oligarchies and the European Union, just as surely does America have a long term relationship with Israel. But, before any realistic mobilization of these respective mini-states can be used to demonstrate Democratic Islamism and Zionist Universalism respectively; they must stop the war.
It has been found that social movements like those which are responsible for the modern concepts of Israel and Palestine thrive on ‘imagined community’, strictly defined identity, and symbols of some historical Golden Age. When coupled with religion a social movement has the ability to draw from a deep well of support and sustain a struggle indefinitely.
The acronym for Hamas translates to the word Zeal. There was once a group of Hebrew revolutionaries in the year 66 CE that carried the same name in their war with an occupying power the Roman Empire. Their faction, the Zealots and Sicarii carried out merciless acts of terrorism against their own people and the Roman occupiers. The Hebrew people are ‘stiff necked’ the Torah says, prone to stubborn arrogance as well as religious fervor. I am not a man of peace, but a man of pragmatism. If on this wide earth the Hebrew and Palestinian people have found no meaningful source of shelter and security for their respective kind; if locked in bloody struggle the sins of Europe and the sins of Arab oligarchy are channeling both out houses to cosmic, unending war; then we must separate and do so quickly.
If in a simple ten year Hudna both Houses can be made relatively politically homogeneous and their peoples can, uninterrupted by siege and war build two nations, side by side. Then one day, as each subsequent Hudna is renewed the fundamentalists on both sides will find their grasp weakened, they will find blue jeans and art museums are more to the mass appeal than puritanical embrace of religion. The time to act is now. The leaderships of both houses are old men who know nothing but war. But old men die. Younger more visionary leaders who forge their respective nations in the prism of human rights not theological canon can from inside their war torn land and from its vast Diaspora bring both peoples apart and then raise them up side by side together.
What factions influence the ongoing conflict?
Israeli/ Jewish:
Sabra Ashkenazi Elite in Avodah/ Likud/ Kadima
American Jewish Diaspora via AIPAC umbrella
Sephardic Elite
Ultra-Orthodox Parties/ Sects
Russian-Israeli leadership/ Israel Betanyahu
Mizrahi Jews
Ladino Jews
Druse
Ethiopians
Bedouins
Non-Jewish Migrant workers
Non-Jewish African refugees
Palestinian/Arab/Iranian
Fatah (West Bank Palestinian Elites)
Hamas (Gaza leadership)
Palestinian Left Wing
“Arab-Israeli” Palestinians
Palestinian Euro-American Diaspora
Jordanian Palestinians
Palestinians in Syria/ Lebanon/ Iraq /Egypt
Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Hezbollah
The Core Track 1 Parties are obviously the State of Israel (Likud & Avodah), the Palestinian parties Fatah (discluding still Hamas); the United States, Russia, the European Union, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League. The core parties to implement Parastate Strategies however are the dissident and opposition parties that make up the adversarial political culture on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side in country and diaspora, the political construction on both sides have shown to add more complications and challenges in the face of finding any peaceful resolutions to the conflicts over the years via Track 1 & 2 because they revolve around intractable elite actors. On the Israeli side Israel is widely considered as one of the few democracies that exist in the Middle East region if not the only one. The political system in Israel is based on a multi-party participation in the Knesset which has 120 seats. The politics of Israel is full mix of right wing, left wing, center, and religious parties; but the current Likud government led by Netanyahu is the most conservative in Israeli history. There are a number of parties that represent the Arab population of Israel but such parties and other minority parties such Meretz, Balad, United Arab List, Hadash have limited seats in the Knesset.
There is more however to the Israeli politics as there groups who play a major role in the Israeli politics and it influences it a great deal such as the Israeli lobby in the United States AIPAC and other groups that help and promote to finance and help build the illegal settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip before 2005. The politics in Israel can be quite complicated and hard as the Prime Minister cannot act alone without the support and consent of the parties that are part of any political coalition. For example right now Prime Minister Netanyahu has been under heavy pressure from his religious allies in the Knesset and who played a major role in his win of 31 win seats in the parliament making it difficult for him to go ahead and make and deals with the Palestinians for example that could enable and help the “peace process” move right ahead.
For the Palestinians on the other hand it is quite different, since the removal of the Palestinian people and the UN mandated “State of Palestine” in 1948, politics among the Palestinians did not see the light until 1964 when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was established. Yasser Arafat who was born in the Gaza Strip, Khan Younis was elected chairman later that year making himself a lifelong representative on behalf of the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian cause. The PLO also engaged in military operations against Israel and other Arab regimes.
An important faction of the Palestinian politics is Hamas, a party that is enjoys a wide support from many Palestinian factions especially those among Palestinian who reside in refugee camps which make up the majority of the population in Gaza Strip for example. The party was founded by Sheik Ahmed Yassin who was viewed by Israel as fully peaceful and in fact Hamas was allowed and supported by Israel as Israel saw that the sole enemy of Israel was the secular nationalist party of Fatah. There are more parties that emerged throughout the Palestinian territories like the Third Way, The Future, Palestine Democratic Union, and Palestine Forum launched by Palestinian businessman Munib al-Masri. Much of the Palestinian political system only came through to the scene in the last 10 years while before it was the PLO and essentially the 1980’s were Hamas began to become Fatah’s main rival.
It is important to highlight that most of the parties involved receive support from outside parties. Hamas was supported by Israel at first then as its political agenda became to be more threatening to Israel it found support from countries that are considered enemies by Israel such as Iran and even countries like Saudi Arabia and most recently Qatar, one of the biggest donors and supporters of Hamas today. The same applies to Fatah, the primary party emerging from PLO that struggled ever since its creation by the Arab League to find a home as the organization had been forced to relocate from a number of countries either by international pressure promoted by Israel or by hosting Arab countries.
Many positive and negative changes happened since the beginning of the conflict in 1948. A major and notable change is the rise of Israeli human right groups that promote justice and peace for the Palestinian people as such groups did not appear when Israel was established for example and at the same time many Palestinian organizations that promote peace and co-existence have emerged recently as they also did not appear during war times with Israel and emerged increasingly after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords which is so far the biggest positive change that took place between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Before 1993 Israel has always defined the PLO as one that is responsible for “terrorist attacks” against Israeli targets in Israel and outside of Israel. And for the PLO and the Palestinian the idea of signing peace agreements with Israel was never an idea to be taken with much seriousness. This is a big positive change that added many positive points to the Palestinians and the Israelis at the same time as it increased and made a new kind of hope that perhaps and despite all the complications the Palestinians and the Israelis can still find a way to make true peace and live side by side in co-existence and respect. Also relevant are the New Historians; Israeli academics challenging long held beliefs about events within the context of the conflict.
The first Palestinian elections that took place in 2005 was also a major change as it showed a strong sign of the Palestinian readiness to run state and civil institutions sending a strong and powerful message to the world that it was time to help the Palestinian gain their right of a state. Unfortunately this message was negatively received by the International community and Israel as the major winner of such elections was the organization of Hamas and eventually leading to a full isolation of the organization and any decisions made by its government. In fact many of its democratically elected officials were simply arrested by the Israeli army. This lead to a major division among the Palestinians making it more difficult for any unity that can run a state if any and more sanction imposed by Israel especially on the Gaza Strip. Also after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the assassination the of the Israeli Prime Minister Rabin by Jewish extremists was a major blow to the peace process as it set the Oslo agreements in another direction that eventually lead to its collapse and the Palestinians uprising once against the occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 also played a major role in the politics among the Palestinians as the Fatah militias gradually began to lose control over the strip allowing the Hamas forces to eventually force them out of the strip and take over the governance of the Strip leaving the Palestinians under two governments one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip leaving Israel as a clear winner of such division as it became easy for the Israeli propaganda to argue that Palestinian lack for ability to manage and run a state on their own.
Effect of Third Parties
Third parties have played a big role in the conflict but unfortunately so far without much effectiveness because of client-patron relationship between American and Israeli. The uncanny relationship between Israel and the United States has hampered the US’s ability to serve as a so-called neutral mediator.
The United States has mixed interest with its efforts to make peace in the Middle East making it lose credibility not only among the Palestinians but also among the Israelis. For example, the US quickly condemned the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait while ignoring the obvious occupation of the Palestinian territories by the Israeli army. The United States played a major role in the birth of the Oslo Accords and the peace between Jordan, Egypt, and Israel. Russia and recently the European Union have played an important role in the management of the conflict but unfortunately with not much success due to the Israeli refusal of obeying international resolutions carried out by organizations such as the United Nations. Or the Russian support for the Syrian government in the vile Civil War no ongoing.
The role of mediation is essential to resolve this situation and to implement the broad package of interventions we are recommending. The superpowers have taken the role of the mediator over the years and since the 1948 war between Israel and the Arab States. It is important to understand that at least one side of the fighting groups would still find many reasons to think that the parties playing the role of mediation may have a highly biased, being biased can jeopardize any creation of an honest peace talk that aims to a lasting peace between Arabs and Jews.
To successful bring peace is not ever a matter of negotiations, but instead of the collective of the communities at war. Since elite interests in both Israel and Palestine so color this discourse we resolve that the Para-State will draw its operational strength from a variety of factions in Israel, Palestine and the Diaspora which do not feel bound to entrenched interests of the old rules of the game. They need not share ideology or end game view; instead three things hold this alliance of partnered organizations together: 1) understanding that the survival of both peoples relies on immediate resolution; 2) that state failure will be rectified with para-state tactics, and 3) to obtain the 8 core agreements and meaningful coexistence violence cessation via a Hudna and separation communities into functional administrative units is more relevant than high minded notions of peace.
Primary Organizational Partners:
As was demonstrated in the First 1987 Intifada and the Israeli Social Justice Demonstrations of 2011 there is a great deal of internal dissent within both communities that can be mobilized outside of the major power blocs and parties. These are the groups that we would involve in the early coalition to form the terms of the network applying Para-State strategies.
Peace Now (Shalom Achshav): is the largest Israeli SMO with the goal of promoting a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict utilizing mass mobilization and policy advocacy. They believe in Jerusalem as “two-capitals for two States”, the viability of land swaps, dismantling settlements which it views the key existential long term threat to state of Israel and Palestine.
Seeds of Peace: The group was founded in 1993 and was in presence of the signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House. The main idea of Seeds of Peace is to allow the future leaders of Palestine, Israel, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Cyprus, and other countries that experience conflict and ethnic disputes. It’s main program comes through the Seeds of Peace International Camp in the state of Maine, USA. Where teenagers from almost 27 countries are given a life changing experience in which they are able to interact with one another away from the conflict zone in order to provide them with a unique chance to see the world together from a coexistence point of view.
Hadash (The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality); is a Jewish and Arab socialist political party in Israel with four seats in Knesset.
Meretz is the largest of the left-wing, Zionist, social-democratic political parties with the greatest degree of electoral success (with 12 seats held b/t 1992-1996 and 6 seats currently). It was the result of 1992 merger of leftist Ratz, Mapam, and Shinui. The party emphasizes a two-state solution, social justice, human rights, freedom of religion.
Al-Haq: is an independent Palestinian human-rights organization founded in 1979 and based in Ramallah. Its main purpose and mission is to monitor and document human-rights violations by all parties involved in the conflict, it also provides regular reports on human right violations as well as research and studies the are related to the conflict.
B’Tselem: It was founded in 1989 and its main purpose is to monitor all the human rights violations that take place within the Palestinian Territories by multi-nationalizing the conflict with foreign volunteers. It also promotes for more peace efforts within the state of Israel. They have been very effective in developing a model for development coupled with non-violent resistance inside of Palestine.
International Solidarity Movement (ISM): is a Pro-Palestinian Rights organization founded by Israelis and Palestinians that works to resist the occupation peacefully and what they view as the long and unjustified oppression of the Palestinian people by what they view as the apartheid state of Israel. It was founded in 2001 and it’s main aim is to strengthen the Palestinian non-violent resistance by utilization of multi-national volunteers for development programs and non-violent resistance.
The New Israel Fund (NIF) is a U.S.-based non-profit organization established in 1979 which describes its aim as social justice and equality for all Israelis. It is credited with seed-funding “almost every significant cause-related progressive NGO in Israel”. Since its inception the fund has provided over US $250 million to more than 900 organizations. NIF states that while its position is that “Israel is and must be a Jewish and democratic state” it says it was “among the first organizations to see that civil, human and economic rights for Israeli Arabs is an issue crucial to the long-term survival of the state. Its “activist arm” Israeli NGO Shatil will be vital to this effort.
This list does not even begin to scratch the surface of the opposition movements in both communities, merely to provide a departure point from the Hamas/Fatah & Likud/Avodah leadership “consensus”.
Section Four
A process for Monitoring and Evaluating the success of the intervention.
We will plan to utilize an advanced hybrid conflict monitoring tool to track our work in Israel Palestine. Via the cumulative work of three coordinated, multi-nationalized teams; a “FAST” monitoring team, a “Harm/Benefit” intervention team advising interventions on the ground, and a “MSTC” research team in a secure location removed from conflict directing policy advocacy toward outside stakeholders and manipulating the public via the media; we will apply M&E to our interventions.
All three sections of this team are vital to comprehensive and meaningful analysis guiding targeted intervention. M&E operatives are to be non-politically aligned, human rights oriented coordinating directly with local staffs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Cyprus. There will not be a centralized base of country operations except in Greece. A policy advocacy office will be established in Washington D.C.
Swiss “FAST” will be used for predictive trending, CARE “Benefits/Harm Handbook” to rationalize intervention and “Making Sense of Turbulent Contexts” (MSTC) for long term contextual planning. Rather than identify one and invalidate others for approach we seek to make a base line conflict analysis using a fusion of three. None of them are complete enough for field level practitioners to comprehensively offer meaningful intervention solutions. But each offers possibility in hybrid for definitive action to interdict mass violence.
All Interventions supported with Information & Intelligence. That means that all participating partner organizations are incentivized via transparent data sharing and mutual aid based resource sharing agreements. It means that hundreds of small CBO, SMO, NGO, trade unions, religious groups and parties are cooperating and coordinating action on the same network. Events are interpreted using FAST and interventions are recommended via BHH. All interventions are monitored using universal human rights and supported with hard data.
Tool: FAST
“Rapid Interpretation of Meaningful Data”
Application purpose of FAST: An office staff is set up in Greece to monitor the following communications data coming out of the region. Their objective is to acquire qualitative data to determine “root, proximate, and intervening factors that can lead to the outbreak of a violent conflict or shape an existing conflict” and acquire quantitative data based on daily event indicators.
The tool allows a trained bi-national data collection team to selectively analyze big data trending from a) internet reports from factional monitoring groups, b) news/social media content from institutions of influence by faction c) monitor civilian radio communications in zones, d) collate incoming first hand field reports to flag indicators based on conflict variables.
Qualitative data methods: Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi language news/social media; reports from leading CBO monitoring groups; Benetech open source reports; data triangulation via UN and NGO reports; Palestinian & Israeli governmental data.
Primary Root: Physical integrity of bi-national territory.
Quantitative factors measurements: the following are primary tracking indicators. # Instances of mass violence reflected via hospitalizations/ reported casualties. # Instances of arrest. Weekly prison population. # of demonstrations/ funeral processions in approximate participating numbers. # targeted assassinations quarterly. # exchanges of fire with casualties. # Suicide attacks/Rocket attacks. Settlement expansion by m3. $ US aid/remittances to both sides civilian/ military per quarter. Quantity # of multinationals present in occupied territories. Quarterly demographic reviews.
Assumptions: Presence of bi-lingual, bi-national data analysis team. Operational relationship with understood mutual aid agreements with monitoring agencies based in Gaza, Israel, West Bank and United States. Open channels of communication with all major factions. Aggregate software to recommend daily threat levels and trend annual data in means that as politically useful for the peace process. All operational imperatives meet two decisive bottom lines; a) violence cessation and b) the right of both peoples to exist within the territory of Palestine within three administrative units; Gaza, Israel and West Bank as a confederated entity.
Resource Implications/ Availability: Office staff of 24 staff/ 24 volunteers to utilize tool 24/7 based in Greece. Regional administrative bases in Gaza, Jerusalem, & Nablus. Strategic Autonomous Partner Action Organizations in every population center above population 25,000 capable of monitoring and actionable effect.
Conflict intervention recommendations: The FAST team in Greece will issue daily reports to all allied Partner Organizations; make weekly ‘process threat’ advisories; hold monthly web briefings on findings and trends, and issue quarterly summaries directly to the communications/ diplomatic representatives of all Israeli/Palestinian/American Jewish factions. It will issue twitter and text message alerts in the event of imminent hostilities to all subscribers. It will maintain clear line of communication open between a) Hamas leadership, b) Fatah leadership, c) the Israeli party in power/ the 2nd and 3rd largest Israeli parties by seat in Knesset d) AIPAC e) U.S. State Department.
Intervention recommendations will proceed via three levels. A) Public Address via mass advisories, b) Partnership Network Alliance and 3) External Factions of influence. All will embrace free association, autonomous action, explicit non-violence and human rights based approach via Benefit/Harms Handbook (BHH) Tool.
Tool: BHH
Application of Benefits/Harms Handbook (BHH) in “Approximate benefit/harm of threat & intervention:
Application purpose is to “to help actors take responsibility for the impact of their work on people’s human rights. It offers a set of simple interrogative tools that help staff think more deeply and effectively about the impacts of their work, and taking responsibility for both positive and negative impacts. It also provides a framework for monitoring potential negative or unintended impacts, as well as ways to mitigate these.”(Action Alert, 2004).
BHH is centered on weighing the impact of ones interventions though three delineated categories of existing human rights: Security Rights (RR), Civil/Political Rights (CPR), and Economic/Social/Cultural Rights (ESCR) along with their indicators, impacts and logical framework outcomes.
The Tool applies a Human Rights Based Approach to the logical framework model. It best used in local operations and not well suited for conflict management at large short term.
Assumptions: Participation of organized Palestinian and Israeli NGOs with indigenous bases of support to accurately conduct Human Rights centered DME of recommended interventions is imperative. Each is operating autonomously in our network with daily operations, budgeting, and operational protocols independent of central authority. Symmetric Indicators agreed to by all parties in conflict utilized throughout engagement. Demographic disaggregation of quantitative data based on religion, ethnicity, political faction utilized in FAST are withheld as this system centers on overall human rights implications.
A focused BHH application to an intervention is up to discretion of the faction or operational body recommended too. Non-discrimination/ protected categories are selectively applied as needed. Broad Segment data is used to guide operational discretion on intervention usage. For our system we will have provided training to each of our allies to apply a Logical Framework Approach algorithm to assess use of an intervention based of level of potential war violation (harm) with level of peaceful rights advancement (benefit). The fundamental process revolves around ‘Symmetric Indicators’ being agreed to within the analytical process.
“The practice of human rights actors in development reveals little consistency in the formulation of indicators. A bewildering diversity prevails, whether actors are focusing on duty-bearer compliance at the macro-level or on performance of planned development change at the micro-level. One overriding challenge is therefore how to establish greater consistency in the design of indicators to facilitate horizontal comparisons between countries or between state parties” (Human Rights Indicators, WB p.15)
Analytical Framework: Main Steps and Suggested process
BHH contains “tools for situation analysis (profile tools), impact assessment (impact tools), and project (re)design (decision tools)” (Action Alert, 2004). Profile tools allow us to achieve a human rights centered, balanced assessment of the perceived impact an intervention will achieve. The objective supply of data to aid the best practice implementation of the tool will be supplied by the FAST team making the intervention recommendation. BHH will allow the local operational leadership to act.
Consultation with local contacts in community, organizational review of the FAST data and individual partner organizations’ information & intelligence capacities will ultimately guide the decision to select the intervention.
Guiding Questions / Pre-Arranged Indicators
Two quotes serve to illustrate the challenge and dilemma. In the OHCHR Draft Guidelines on a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction, from 2003, it was argued that “most of the indicators proposed in these Guidelines are standard indicators of socioeconomic progress, although it should be observed that some human rights indicators, especially those relating to civil and political rights, do not usually figure in measures of socio- economic progress. Essentially, what distinguishes a human rights indicator from a standard disaggregated indicator of socio-economic progress is less its substance than (a) its explicit derivation from a human rights norm and (b) the purpose to which it is put, namely human rights monitoring with a view to holding duty-bearers to account. (OHCHR Indicators Draft)
The Profile, Impact and Decision sub-tools are each organized according to the three categories of human rights:
Security Rights (SR):
Right to a) life b) liberty c) security of person d) Right not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
Civil/Political Rights (CPR):
Right to a) participate in public affairs, b) freedom of opinion/expression c) a fair trial
Economic, Social & Cultural Rights (ESCR):
Right to a) the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health b) to adequate food c) to adequate housing d) to education e) to social security f) to work with paid leave & ability to form trade unions.
Special Protective Categories: a) women, b) children, c) migrant workers, d) demographic minorities.
The tool addresses the full action impact of rights holders/ duty bearers and the underlying causes of the potential harm or benefit via action. Actions, Attitudes and Artifices are the focus of the tool.
Human rights-based approach to relief and development presupposes that all people are entitled to certain minimum conditions of living with dignity (human rights). Relief and development organizations aim to help people achieve these conditions, thereby acknowledging their human responsibility to do so. This implies they take responsibility for the human rights impact of their work –whether positive or negative. Human rights are therefore the central criteria for analyzing the overall impact of a project.” (Action Alert, 2004.)
Quantitative/ Quantitative data measurements: Agreed to “Symmetric Indicators for Separation & Economic Development in Israel Palestine 2020.”
Resource Implications/ Availability: Utilizing DME/BHH trained staff regional leadership assesses a threat and intervention response via 3 categories of benefit/harm to rights (Security, CPR, ESCR) posed by threat/event/action looking at its history-nature via PROFILE. That threat/event/action data is plugged into IMPACT TOOL algorithm which weighs the Benefit/Harm Level (potential rights violation) on a scale of 58. Each increment has corresponding intervention recommendations made via the DECISION. The 3 rights categories via benefits/harms are then again re-assessed and intervention is selected.
Conflict Intervention Recommendations: The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a multi-dimensional, ongoing low-intensity mass human rights violation that directly aids in fueling the instability of the region at large. One of the least understood aspects of the occupation and conflict has been the role of non-Israeli/ non-Palestinian multinational volunteers. Although comparatively low in overall casualty count compared to other global conflicts since the 1991 Palestinian Uprising a steady cohort of European, Latin American, American and Iranian volunteers have changed the overall strategic calculus.
Military intelligence officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have highly enhanced Palestinian capacity for military action and terrorism since the first intifada. Multi-nationalization actions via the International Solidarity Movement have smuggled thousands of Euro-American volunteers to serve in Palestinian development capacities as well as human shields in the occupied territories. The combination of capacity to inflict harm, European non-violent foreign volunteers embracing the BDS movement, the Israeli embrace of structural apartheid via the Security Wall and take over Gaza by Hamas have all worked to reduce the levels of violence that peaked in the Second Intifada (2000-2005). Surely track 1, 2, 3, & 4 peace work has contributed as well.
Our intervention recommendations involve measured, scalable responses in the following categories based on threat levels corresponding to rights violations in the 3 categories.
All interventions are reviewed once implemented via BHH Human Rights implications, impacts, and outcomes. Each side should adopt a 1 for 1 approach. Harm for Harm & Benefit for Benefit.
Application of “Making Sense of Turbulent Contexts” (MSTC) to “place the intervention in a wider context of outcomes that secure rights obligations and make complex ethno-political phenomena understandable to outside parties.” Most of the problem/ provocation data was detailed in section one.
Primary Purpose: The MSTC Tool’s primary purpose is to render highly complicated, protracted ethnic conflicts understandable to internal and external actors.
Conceptual Assumptions
“Turbulent Contexts” refers to “Situations of Chronic Political Instability (SCPI).” This term expands the notion of ‘complex humanitarian emergency’ to reflect the long-term, cyclical and political nature of many of these contexts. It covers phenomena such as cyclical conflict, violence against civilians, political unrest, extreme polarization of wealth, natural disasters over a number of years, population displacement, and the need for humanitarian assistance. The emphasis is on the chronic and political nature of these contexts. (Action Alert, 2004) The goals is to analyze greed/ grievance as well as historic and current perceptions in light of complicated political science/ identity driven variables.
Conclusion
We do not possess the arrogance to assume that all or many of these specific tactical or policy suggestions will result in coexistence or peace in the immediate future. We shall no longer be beholden to the European constructed state system, to international law forced upon us from the outside or the so-called norms of diplomacy and state building. To advocate for a Para-State is a revolutionary act as it inherently rejects the salvation of either people lies in a government imposed solution. It also conquers the means to attain human rights from those that perpetually violate them.
This blueprint, like the ones we wish to see emerge in every nation where governments and elites trample on the rights of humanity is an emerging vision. One subject to the free association and consensus of those it effects; to be led by social movement organizations that do not believe in the particularism of national origin or identity or the exclusionary determinism forced upon them by either history or an outside party.
A people without a land retuned to a land that still had people. This land has changed hands via blood and fire throughout the centuries and while “holy” to some and “strategic” to many; it is now the home of over 13 million people, Jews and Palestinians who respectively seek a solution that is based on Justice. That barrier to peace is never common people. It is always in the interests of those that rule to perpetuate war. The Parallel State’s aim is not one state, two state, three state; or to redraw a map that never reflected anyone’s wishes to begin with. Our aim is simple. Without violence or political office our aim is to seize control of those things that were our states obligation; freedom, security and development thus safe guarding our collective human rights without waiting for those that have trampled upon them of centuries to negotiate responsibly for their attainment.
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Appendix 1
Conflicts since 1950 with over 10,000 Fatalities (all figures rounded)*
| 1 | 40,000,000 | Communist China, 1949-76 (outright killing, man-made famine, Gulag) |
| 2 | 10,000,000 | Soviet Bloc: late Stalinism, 1950-53; post-Stalinism, to 1987 (mostly Gulag) |
| 3 | 4,000,000 | Ethiopia, 1962-92: Communists, artificial hunger, genocides |
| 4 | 5,400,000 | Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa): 1967-68; 1977-78; 1992-95; 1998-present |
| 5 | 2,800,000 | Korean war, 1950-53 |
| 6 | 1,900,000 | Sudan, 1955-72; 1983-2006 (civil wars, genocides) |
| 7 | 1,870,000 | Cambodia: Khmer Rouge 1975-79; civil war 1978-91 |
| 8 | 1,800,000 | Vietnam War, 1954-75 |
| 9 | 1,800,000 | Afghanistan: Soviet and internecine killings, Taliban 1980-2001 |
| 10 | 1,250,000 | West Pakistan massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh 1971) |
| 11 | 1,100,000 | Nigeria, 1966-79 (Biafra); 1993-present |
| 12 | 1,100,000 | Mozambique, 1964-70 (30,000) + after retreat of Portugal 1976-92 |
| 13 | 1,000,000 | Iran-Iraq-War, 1980-88 |
| 14 | 900,000 | Rwanda genocide, 1994 |
| 15 | 875,000 | Algeria: against France 1954-62 (675,000); between Islamists and the government 1991-2006 (200,000) |
| 16 | 850,000 | Uganda, 1971-79; 1981-85; 1994-present |
| 17 | 650,000 | Indonesia: Marxists 1965-66 (450,000); East Timor, Papua, Aceh etc, 1969-present (200,000) |
| 18 | 580,000 | Angola: war against Portugal 1961-72 (80,000); after Portugal’s retreat (1972-2002) |
| 19 | 500,000 | Brazil against its Indians, up to 1999 |
| 20 | 430,000 | Vietnam, after the war ended in 1975 (own people; boat refugees) |
| 21 | 400,000 | Indochina: against France, 1945-54 |
| 22 | 400,000 | Burundi, 1959-present (Tutsi/Hutu) |
| 23 | 400,000 | Somalia, 1991-present |
| 24 | 400,000 | North Korea up to 2006 (own people) |
| 25 | 300,000 | Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, 1980s-1990s |
| 26 | 300,000 | Iraq, 1970-2003 (Saddam against minorities) |
| 27 | 240,000 | Colombia, 1946-58; 1964-present |
| 28 | 200,000 | Yugoslavia, Tito regime, 1944-80 |
| 29 | 200,000 | Guatemala, 1960-96 |
| 30 | 190,000 | Laos, 1975-90 |
| 31 | 175,000 | Serbia against Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, 1991-1999 |
| 32 | 150,000 | Romania, 1949-99 (own people) |
| 33 | 150,000 | Liberia, 1989-97 |
| 34 | 140,000 | Russia against Chechnya, 1994-present |
| 35 | 150,000 | Lebanon civil war, 1975-90 |
| 36 | 140,000 | Kuwait War, 1990-91 |
| 37 | 130,000 | Philippines: 1946-54 (10,000); 1972-present (120,000) |
| 38 | 130,000 | Burma/Myanmar, 1948-present |
| 39 | 100,000 | North Yemen, 1962-70 |
| 40 | 100,000 | Sierra Leone, 1991-present |
| 41 | 100,000 | Albania, 1945-91 (own people) |
| 42 | 80,000 | Iran, 1978-79 (revolution) |
| 43 | 75,000 | Iraq, 2003-present (domestic) |
| 44 | 75,000 | El Salvador, 1975-92 |
| 45 | 70,000 | Eritrea against Ethiopia, 1998-2000 |
| 46 | 68,000 | Sri Lanka, 1997-present |
| 47 | 60,000 | Zimbabwe, 1966-79; 1980-present |
| 48 | 60,000 | Nicaragua, 1972-91 (Marxists/natives etc,) |
| 49 | 51,000 | Arab-Israeli conflict 1950-present |
| 50 | 50,000 | North Vietnam, 1954-75 (own people) |
| 51 | 50,000 | Tajikistan, 1992-96 (secularists against Islamists) |
| 52 | 50,000 | Equatorial Guinea, 1969-79 |
| 53 | 50,000 | Peru, 1980-2000 |
| 54 | 50,000 | Guinea, 1958-84 |
| 55 | 40,000 | Chad, 1982-90 |
| 56 | 30,000 | Bulgaria, 1948-89 (own people) |
| 57 | 30,000 | Rhodesia, 1972-79 |
| 58 | 30,000 | Argentina, 1976-83 (own people) |
| 59 | 27,000 | Hungary, 1948-89 (own people) |
| 60 | 26,000 | Kashmir independence, 1989-present |
| 61 | 25,000 | Jordan government vs. Palestinians, 1970-71 (Black September) |
| 62 | 22,000 | Poland, 1948-89 (own people) |
| 63 | 20,000 | Syria, 1982 (against Islamists in Hama) |
| 64 | 20,000 | Chinese-Vietnamese war, 1979 |
| 65 | 19,000 | Morocco: war against France, 1953-56 (3,000) and in Western Sahara, 1975-present (16,000) |
| 66 | 18,000 | Congo Republic, 1997-99 |
| 67 | 10,000 | South Yemen, 1986 (civil war) |
Sources: Z. Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, 1993; S. Courtois, Le Livre Noir du Communism, 1997; G. Heinsohn, Lexikon der Völkermorde, 1999, 2nd ed.; G. Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht, 2006, 8th ed.; R. Rummel, Death by Government, 1994; M. Small and J.D. Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816-1980, 1982; M. White, “Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century,” 2003.
Appendix 2
NINE TRACKS IN THE MULTI-TRACK SYSTEM
Track 1 – Government, or Peacemaking through Diplomacy. This is the world of official diplomacy, policy making, and peacebuilding as expressed through formal aspects of the governmental process.
Track 2 – Nongovernment/Professional, or Peacemaking through Conflict Resolution. This is the realm of professional nongovernmental action attempting to analyze, prevent, resolve, and manage international conflicts by non-state actors.
Track 3 – Business, or Peacemaking through Commerce. This is the field of business and its actual and potential effects on peacebuilding through the provision of economic opportunities, international friendship and understanding, informal channels of communication, and support for other peacemaking activities.
Track 4 – Private Citizen, or Peacemaking through Personal Involvement. This includes the various ways that individual citizens become involved in peace and development activities through citizen diplomacy, exchange programs, private voluntary organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and special-interest groups.
Track 5 – Research, Training, and Education, or peacemaking through Learning. This track includes three related worlds: research, as it is connected to university programs, think tanks, and special-interest research centers; training programs that seek to provide training in practitioner skills such as negotiation, mediation, conflict resolution, and third-party facilitation; and education, including kindergarten through PhD programs that cover various aspects of global or cross-cultural studies, peace and world order studies, and conflict analysis, management, and resolution.
Track 6 – Activism, or Peacemaking through Advocacy. This track covers the field of peace and environmental activism on such issues as disarmament, human rights, social and economic justice, and advocacy of special-interest groups regarding specific governmental policies.
Track 7 – Religion, or Peacemaking through Faith in action. This examines the beliefs and peace-oriented actions of spiritual and religious communities and such morality-based movements as pacifism, sanctuary, and nonviolence.
Track 8 – Funding, or Peacemaking through Providing Resources. This refers to the funding community-those foundations and individual philanthropists that provide the financial support for many of the activities undertaken by the other tracks.
Track 9 – Communications and the Media, or Peacemaking through Information. This is the realm of the voice of the people: how public opinion gets shaped and expressed by the media-print, film, video, radio, electronic systems, the arts.
Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy
Appendix 3
Summary of Appendices
Appendix 1: Maps of Israel Palestine
Appendix 2: Hamas Attacks by Year
Appendix 3: Assassinations carried out by Israel
Appendix 4: Total civilian/military casualties in Second Intifada
Appendix 5: ‘Road Map’ highlights and benchmarks
Appendix 6: ‘Blue Print 3’ highlights and benchmarks
Appendix 7: List of Israeli political parties and factions
Appendix 8: List of Palestinian parties and factions
Appendix 6: ‘Blue Print 3’ highlights and benchmarks
Primary Structural Tenets:
PHASE ONE: Separate Populations: Jewish Settlements for Arab Towns
PHASE TWO: Purchase of Sinai from Egypt
PHASE THREE: Purchase of portions of the East Bank from Jordan
PHASE FOUR: Partition of Jerusalem-Al Quds
PHASE FIVE: Free Trade Zones in Western Sinai and Saudi Coast
PHASE SIX: Implementation of Demilitarized Zones
PHASE SEVEN: Staggered return of Diaspora
PHASE EIGHT: Resource Sharing Agreements
Primary Resource Agreements:
Joint PA/Israeli control of Galilee water resource
Joint Administration of select Hospitals and 4 Universities
Doubling Israeli-Palestinian land mass via purchase of Sinai and parts of East Bank of the Jordan
Palestinian control of Dead Sea
Security Parity (Demilitarization/ Arms transfers)
Israeli non-proliferation for Iranian non-proliferation
Demilitarized Golan (to be included in the Palestinian State)
Demilitarized Gaza Strip (to be connected to West Bank via a security corridor and train tunnel)
Demilitarization South of Litany River and North of Kishon River. (to be filled with UN Peacekeeping forces).
Return of Sheba Farms to Lebanon
Golan Heights transfer to PA control
Implementation of a 2 Child maximum per family
Extension of West Bank PA down to Gulf of Aqaba
Triple Seacoast of PA (Acco, Gaza City, and a third site build between Aqaba and Eilat)
4 Separate Courts, Civil and Religious; 2 per polity
Separate Knesset/ Palestinian Congress both based in East and West Jerusalem respectively.
Release of all Palestinian political prisoners
Right of Return respective and regulated, parity in returning numbers negotiated to return to respective zones of control.
EU to aid Palestine (infrastructure only)
US to aid Israel (infrastructure only)
Bedouin autonomous region in Sinai or population transfer to Palestinian zone.
Structural dual citizenship benefits (tax credits, work visas, healthcare, educational)
Physically strengthening the barrier wall
Reduction of Israeli arsenal in exchange for greater aid, (Aid for decommissioned weapons program).
Structural reform from Parliamentary system to representative democracy.
Selected Bibliography
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Chehab, Z. (2007). Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement. Nation Books: New York.
Cleveland, W. L. (2004). A History of the Middle East: Third Edition.
Fanon, F. (1968). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
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Grayzel, S. (1968). A History of the Jews. New York: Mentor Books.
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Hamzeh, A. N. (2004). In the Path of Hezbollah. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
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La Guardia, A. (2003). War without End: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for a Promised Land. St. Martin’s Press.
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Mearsheimer, J.J. & Walt, S.M.(2007). The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Morris, B. (2009). One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict. Yale University Press: New Haven.
Mishal, S. (1986). The PLO Under Arafat: Between the Gun and Olive Branch. Yale University Press: New Haven.
Mishal, S. & Sela, A (2006).The Palestinian Hamas. Columbia University Press: New York.
Nasr, V. (2006). The Shi’a Revival. W.W. Norton & Company: New York
Ophir, N. (2006). Look Not to the Skies: The IAF vs. Surface-to-Surface Rocket Launchers. Strategic Assessment, Vol. 9, No. 3, November 2006. Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies: Tel Aviv.
Qassem, N. (2005). Hezbollah: The Qassem. Saqi: London.
Reinhart, T. (2002). Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. Seven Stories Press: New York
Richards, A. & Waterbury, J. (1998). A Political Economy of the Middle East. West View Press: Boulder.
Rubenberg, C. (2003). The Palestinians: In Search of a Just Peace. Lynne Reinner Publishers: Boulder.
Sayigh, R. (2007). The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries. Zed Books: New York.
Saad-Ghorayeb, A. (2002). Hizbu’llah Politics & Religion. Pluto Press: London
Said, E. (1992). The Question of Palestine. Vintage Books: New York
Schanzer, J (2008). Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine. Palgrave-Macmillan: New York.
Schweitzer, Y. (2006). Hezbollah and the Morning After: Guerrilla, Terror, and Psychological Warfare. Strategic Assessment, Vol. 9, No. 2, August 2006. Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies: Tel Aviv.
Schelling, T.C. (1966). Arms and Influence. Bookcrafters Inc: Fredericksburg.
Schultz, R.H. Jr. & Dew, A.J. (2006). Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Tamimi, A. (2007). Hamas: A History from Within. Olive Branch Press: Northhampton.
Tira, R. (2006). Breaking the Amoeba’s Bones. Strategic Assessment, Vol. 9, No. 3, November 2006. Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies: Tel Aviv.
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Bibliography:
1. Why America? The Globalization of Civil War, Martha Crenshaw, Current History, December 2001
2. Ghosts of Our Past, Karen Armstrong, AARP Modern Maturity, January/February 2002
3. The Fourth Wave: September 11 in the History of Terrorism, David C. Rapoport, Current History, December 2001
4. Nasty, Brutish, and Long: America’s War on Terrorism, Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, Current History, December 2001
5. The Tenets of Terror, Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2001
6. Killing Hope, William Blum, Common Courage Press, 1995
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 