Which came first? Hamas or Gaza Siege

Pro-Palestinian rallies never call for peace, only for going after Israel

Fighters with Hamas, a terrorist group according to the US Department of State and most world governments. Western media, however, often calls the group “Palestinian militants.”

Ariel Sharon is the one Israeli person the Arabs hate the most. As a general, he was blamed for reversing the Arab tide in the 1973 war and leading an Israeli counterattack across the Suez Canal. As Israel’s Minister of Defense, he led the Lebanon War that ejected Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his militias from Beirut. As opposition leader, Sharon visited the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem, giving the brewing Second Intifada its spark. To the Arabs, Sharon was a criminal and a bully. He certainly enjoyed strong credentials with Israel’s Right wing and settler movement. When he left the Likud and formed Kadima, the new party was slated to win the election in a landslide, at the time Likud shrank into a minor player.

But when it came to peace with the Arabs, the hawkish Sharon had a vision and a plan, one that was never completed because of a sudden brain hemorrhage that resulted in his incapacitation in 2006. To the late Israeli prime minister, peace was impossible between a democracy, like Israel, and militias, like Arafat’s PLO or Lebanon’s armed factions.

When Sharon invaded Lebanon in 1982, his plan was to sponsor the election of a president and empower the weak state over the armed militias that had been engaged in civil war since 1975. Sharon ejected Arafat and the Palestinian militias, and supervised the election of Bashir Gemayel as president of Lebanon. Sharon wanted the state of Lebanon to stand up, reasoning that only then can Israel sign a lasting peace treaty with Lebanon.

Gemayel was elected, but before he could take office, the Syrian regime of Hafez Assad assassinated him. Sharon was also weakened at home amid an unpopular war in Lebanon and atrocities that accompanied the Israeli invasion, especially at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut. With Sharon and Bashir Gemayel out of the picture, Bashir’s brother Amin was elected president and tried to carry on with the plan. On May 17, 1983, Lebanon and Israel signed a peace treaty, which was later killed by Assad. Under international pressure, Israel eventually ended its occupation of Lebanon, which became the hotbed of pro-Iran Hezbollah, one of the most notorious terrorist groups on the planet. 

In 2006, Hezbollah started a war with Israel that lasted for 33 days and resulted in death and destruction in Israel, but exponentially much more death and destruction in Lebanon. Today, Hezbollah still dominates Lebanon, from which Israel withdrew 21 years ago, and there has been no peace between Lebanon and Israel, not even talks for the demarkation of the borders. Like Hamas, Hezbollah rejects peace wholesale and wants Israel destroyed. It imposes its maximalist view on the Lebanese forcing them to say that Israel is an illegitimate state, and to refer to the country instead as “Occupied Palestine.”

Twenty-one years after his failure in Lebanon, Sharon repeated the same experiment with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Sharon had given up on Arafat, seeing him as a weak and unreliable peace partner. With American assistance, the Israeli prime minister forced the Palestinian Authority to elect a prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who was supposed to eclipse the wily Arafat. Sharon hoped that an elected Israeli government and an elected Palestinian government could make comprehensive and lasting peace.

Sharon then put his money where his mouth was. In September 2005, against much anger from settlers, Sharon dismantled the Israeli settlements in Gaza, and handed the strip over to the Palestinian Authority’s Abbas, who had been elected president eight months prior, following the death of Arafat . Sharon was probably on his way to do the same in the West Bank when he was suddenly hospitalized in January 2006.

Sharon was succeeded by his deputy Ehud Olmert, a much less charismatic character, who tried to carry on with Sharon’s plan by offering Abbas a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in addition to the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and a promise to iron the remaining wrinkles. Abbas turned down Olmert’s peace proposal, and again turned down a similar Benjamin Netanyahu offer, which was made under the auspices of the Palestine-friendly US president Barack Obama. 

To spare readers all the details, the biggest obstacle to Abbas’s ability to say yes to any of the Israeli offers for a Palestinian state was that he could never sign on forgoing the “right of return” of Palestinians to Israel (not to the to-be-created Palestine). Abbas tested the waters by giving an interview in which he said that any peace deal with Israel would not mean his return to his birthplace in Safad, in northern Israel. Palestinians, especially hardliners like Hamas, immediately grilled Abbas, forcing him to retract his statement. 

Without the “right of return,” Palestinians will never sign on peace, and without dropping the demand of return, Israel will never sign on peace.

So what happened to Sharon’s peace plan that was never completed. It turned out to be an experiment, a preview of what would happen if Israel continued its unilateral withdrawal from the remaining Palestinian territories in the West Bank.

Shortly after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas ejected the Palestinian Authority in a coup that saw the organization kill over 200 of Abbas’s partisans in the streets. Having the strip all to itself, Hamas made Gaza into an Islamist Hamas-stan. 

Israel reacted to Hamas’s takeover by imposing a siege on the strip in a bid to ensure that architects of terrorism in the region, the likes of late Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, would not open shop in Gaza and turn it into an Iranian base that threatens the security, and even existence, of Israel.

Clearly, through tunnels and other smuggling operations, Hamas has managed to build a formidable missile arsenal, one that does not threaten the existence of Israel but that can give it a bloody nose. 

Many Palestinians and their friends around the world, especially in the US Congress and administration, have now reshuffled the timeline to make it look as if the Israeli uninterrupted occupation of Gaza is what brought Hamas into existence. These have enlisted the UN to extend the definition of occupation to make it include the Israeli siege of the strip. Such argument bestows immunity from blame on Hamas by turning it into the result, rather than the cause, of the Israeli siege.

To make matters worse, friends of the Palestinians in the US and the world rarely sound interested in peace. Their protests never call for peace, and are always “anti-Israel.” Add to those anti-Israel protesters all those wearing Saddam Hussein t-shirts, or those shouting anti-Semitic slogans, and you will understand that little of the solidarity with Palestinians is actually for humanitarian or ethical reasons, and most of it is about seeking the triumph of Muslims over Jews.

The friends of Palestinians, including the likes of US comedians John Oliver and Trevor Noah, want Israel to unilaterally end its occupation of the West Bank. If this happens, the probability of a repeat of Gaza — in the form of a Hamas takeover — becomes high. From the West Bank, which is geographically higher than the rest of Israel, lobbing missiles on Israelis will be much easier than it is now from Gaza. 

If Israel unilaterally withdraws from the West Bank, it will have to eventually besiege it like it does Gaza, and global voices will rise again shouting against the “open air prison.” If Israel then concedes to America pressure and removes its siege of Palestinian Territories, Hezbollah will be the first to open shop — including installing military infrastructure in the West Bank. Iran’s militias with then provoke war under the pretext of defending Palestinians, like they launched the most recent Gaza war under the pretext of defending Palestinians in Jerusalem. Iran’s militias, with help from US members of Congress, will then call for an  end to Israeli “apartheid.”

Empowered by the success of forcing Israel out of Lebanon, then Gaza and the West Bank, Iran and its militias will use their victories to call for the implementation of “the right of return” of Palestinians to Israel. If Israel does not comply, then missiles will start flying again. It will be a very short distance from there to completely annihilating Israel and replacing it with a failing state supervised by Iran, like Lebanon and Syria. Only then, America’s “progressives” will stop being bothered by violations of human rights, just like Hamas’s abuse of Palestinians does not matter to them, and just like the genocide in Syria and the assassinations in Lebanon never bother them. 

In the future, when called on to show solidarity with Palestinians and Jews suffering under the rule of Islamist Hamas in Palestine, America’s “progressives” will say that “America cannot be the policeman of the world.” Iran and the US anti-war movement will make sure that “progressives” continue insisting that Americans have to focus on their domestic issues and leave the world alone. Only when it comes to defending Iranian interests will these “progressives” find it ethically compelling to have the US government act globally.