Alvaro de Soto is not the first experienced diplomat to have entered the Middle East a moderate and to have left it two years later angry at the role of Israel and the United States in subverting the search for peace. Nor will he be the last.
In his confidential 53-page report, dated May 5 (just before De Soto stepped down as the United Nations’s Middle East envoy) and published by The Guardian this week, the former Peruvian foreign minister describes the reality of diplomacy. Informed observers already suspected that US pressure had ”pummelled into submission” the UN’s role as an impartial negotiator, that it had made the Middle East peace process subservient to wider policies on Iraq and Iran, and that the US had got the other members of the Quartet negotiating team — the European Union, Russia and the UN — to impose sanctions on the government formed after painful negotiations between Fatah and Hamas. The sanctions did not encourage the unity government to function properly. They killed it off.
De Soto does not spare Hamas either, with its ”abominable” charter, its links to Iran and its abysmal record on stopping violence directed at Israeli civilians. What makes his report so prescient is the full-scale civil war now raging in Gaza. Far from being a success, the international boycott of the Hamas-led national-unity government has proved to be a disaster.
Its bitter fruits could be seen in Khan Younis on Wednesday, when the Islamic militants demolished Fatah’s security headquarters and took over the town. On Wednesday night they began a fierce assault on security bases in Gaza City after members of the Fatah-allied Bakr clan encamped in a seaside neighbourhood surrendered. The clan, like many others in Gaza, has its own armed force of about 200 men. If the fighting is not stopped soon, the whole of Gaza could fall to Hamas.
In a broadcast on a Hamas radio station, the Islamist movement said it was preparing an offensive to seize Abbas’s presidential compound in Gaza City and the nearby national security headquarters. Hamas warned Fatah forces in northern Gaza to give up their weapons before Friday evening, while Fatah commanders told their forces to stay and fight. And on Thursday Abbas ordered his elite presidential guard into the conflict. Until now, the US-financed presidential guard had been told to maintain a defensive posture.
Setting aside the internal reasons for Palestinian blood-letting, the assumption on which Israel and the international community have been operating is that the longer the boycott is maintained, the more likely it is that Hamas will split and accept the three conditions that were imposed on it: ending violence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements including the road map. Israel has refused to pay the Palestinian government money it is owed in tax revenues, which would allow it to pay 160 000 workers. It has argued that this down payment would be seen as a sign of weakness, a sign that the rocket attacks on the Israeli town of Sderot had worked.
But, as De Soto argues, the three conditions for the lifting of the Israeli siege on Gaza were phrased in such a way as to make it impossible for Hamas to accept them. If they did, they would cease to be a militant Islamic movement and they would lose their core of 20% of the total vote. If there was little evidence of a carrot in the Quartet’s conditions, there was plenty of stick. Unable to pay its workforce, or to maintain control in Gaza, the national-unity government ceased to exist some time ago. Hamas has not changed heart, and if an election were to take place tomorrow the party would keep the 43% of the vote it won in January last year.
The Palestinians can be blamed for weak leadership, for allowing missile attacks that have no strategic value other than to harden the view in Israel that if they allowed the same thing to happen in the West Bank missiles would rain down on the runway of Ben Gurion airport.
But the impoverishment and fragmentation of Gaza is a result not just of tribal Palestinian politics but of the cumulative despair generated by living in an open-air prison. As Israel is the jailer it bears responsibility too for the conditions inside.
The election of Ehud Barak as the Labour Party’s leader may embolden Ehud Olmert to start a new initiative, such as talking to Syria. The return of the former prime minister bolsters the battered authority of Olmert’s government. But if there is no partner for peace, Israel has to start creating the conditions for one to emerge. If that means negotiating with Hamas before it relinquishes its rejectionist position then it has to do that. — Â