The Gaza breakout: Jeremy Salt writes on the collective punishment of the Gazans and asks where it will lead.

The significance of the mass breakout from Gaza is still sinking in among all those affected, including the Palestinians themselves (the people, their legitimate government in Gaza and the quisling leadership in Ramallah), Israel, the United States, the European Union and the Arab governments that have supported the 'international community' in its strenuous efforts to put the Hamas government to death over the past two years. The so-called Quartet (the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia) reneged on their pledge to respect the outcome of elections held in January 2006 as soon as the results showed that Hamas was in and Fatah was out. Of its contributions to Middle East peace, Alvaro de Sotelo, the UN Secretary-General's delegate to the 'peace process', has written damningly: 'Whatever the Quartet was at the inception, let us be frank with ourselves: today, as a practical matter, the Quartet is pretty much a group of friends of the US--and the US doesn't feel the need to consult closely with the Quartet except when it suits it'. Indeed, the 'peace process', de Sotelo observes, 'has become strategically subservient to US policy', which means, too, subservient to Israeli policy. As long as this continues, for the next five years, the next ten or the next fifty, there can be no 'peace' process worthy of the name.

On 14 May Israel will celebrate its 60th birthday. For Palestinians everywhere this will naturally be a day of mourning. Gaza, home now to 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them not native Gazans but refugees or the descendants of refugees expelled from other parts of Palestine in 1948, has certainly taken its share of the punishment in these six decades. In the 1950s, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion launched one savage raid after another into Gaza in the hope of luring Egypt's President Nasser into a conflict in which he could be brought down. After the 1967 War, Ariel Sharon, the military commander of the northern (Syrian) front, and therefore the main architect of the provocations designed to end in war, was transferred to occupied Gaza. He carried out his responsibilities with his usual brutal relish, killing hundreds of civilians in the name of hunting down terrorists and bulldozing roads through refugee camps in the name of security.

It was in Gaza that the first intifada started in 1987. By the time it ended in 1993, 1,100 Palestinians had been killed and thousands of others wounded or maimed for life. The second intifada started in September 2000. By January 2005 another 3,135 Palestinians had been killed. Hundreds were children. Hundreds had been killed in 'extra-judicial executions', which included 'targeted assassinations' of 'militants' and political or religious figures (usually by missile strike from the air) and murder in the streets of West Bank towns by death squads.

On the see-saw of Palestinian politics, Hamas gained as Fatah faltered in the wake of a 'peace process' that was simply being used as another weapon of war. Caught off guard by the unexpected outcome of the 2006 elections, the Quartet immediately backed measures taken by Israel to strangle the Hamas government through economic and military measures. Tax revenue needed to pay the salaries of government employees, including teachers and doctors, was withheld. The import of food, medicine and other essentials was reduced to a trickle at the same time as the border gates were closed to the export of agricultural produce. Fishing boats that set out to sea were driven back to the coast. This collective punishment of the entire population was calculated to end in a revolt against the Hamas government. At the same time Israel intensified the air and land attacks under which the Gazans had lived for decades. Hundreds of civilians were killed, and much of the physical infrastructure of the Hamas government destroyed.

All of this was done in full view of the world and with the active or tacit consent of an 'international community' that says it regards collective punishment as a war crime. The Quartet watched and waited for the Hamas government to fall. One year passed and then two, with no sign that the Gazan Palestinians were about to turn on their democratically elected government. While they were being killed in missile strikes or denied the basic necessities of life, Mahmud Abbas continued to consort with his people's enemies. Millions of dollars of tax revenue withheld by Israel as part of attempt to force Gazan Palestinians to their knees was released and sent to Ramallah. The presidential guard was reinforced while the United States and Israel planned their next move, an attempt by Fatah 'security forces' to overthrow the Hamas government last June. It failed abysmally. In his chagrin, Abbas hurled abuse at the Hamas government, which he claimed was illegal although it was clearly he who had violated the Palestinian constitution in various places and exposed himself to charges of treason. The blockade and the Israeli missile strikes continued as before. Nearly 100 Palestinians, civilians and 'militants', were killed in the last two months of 2007. Dozens more were killed in January before the Palestinians took matters into their own hands, blew holes in the fence (erected by Israel) along the border with Egypt and stormed en masse into the town of Rafah to stock up on essential supplies.

The attempt to destroy the 'hostile entity'--Israel's phrase for the Hamas government--did not mean that attacks on the West Bank stopped. Israel has shown scant consideration for Mahmud Abbas' exposed position. Fatah members were among twenty-three Palestinians picked up in a military incursion into Nablus on 5 January. Others have been killed. Aggression has also continued through the expansion of existing settlements (at Har Homa and Maale Adumin, with a land area bigger than Tel Aviv's, while hundreds more housing units are to be built in the upper-class Palestinian district of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem); the construction of new ones; and the establishment of 'illegal' settler outposts whose well-publicised dismantling gives the Israeli government the opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to the 'peace process'. It is hard to imagine that the lives of Palestinians in Hebron could become any worse, but with the announcement of a new Jewish settlement in the Ras district, linking the settlement of Kiryat Arba on the outskirts of the city with the settler enclave at Tal Rumeidah, the screw is being turned still further. Hebron is being subjected to urbanicide. Since the 1980s the town has been slowly put to death, beginning with the closure of the central bus station and continuing through the closure of the central market area and the emptying of the houses around it in the name of security. The daily harassment of Palestinians by Jewish settlers and their children in the Tal Rumeidah district is nothing less than a continuing pogrom (the word used to describe it by the Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy) that has the sole purpose of making their lives so intolerable that they will leave. The government of Ehud Olmert likes to distance itself from the actions of 'extremist' settlers for which it is in fact directly responsible.

In the wake of the disastrous Lebanese war and the resignation of the Israeli Defence Minister, responsibility for Gaza fell into the hands of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whom the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery recently described as 'a man of many ideas and few scruples, a man whose whole turn of mind is basically inhuman' and, furthermore, someone who is now 'perhaps the most dangerous person in Israel, more dangerous than Ehud Olmert or Binyamin Netanyahu, dangerous to the very existence of Israel in the long run'. Basically, three choices lay ahead of Barak. The first was negotiations with the Hamas government, which had said on numerous occasions that it was prepared to agree to a long-term truce and to end the Qassam rocket attacks if Israel ended its land and air attacks. This was dismissed out of hand. The second was a large-scale ground operation to destroy the Hamas government with one devastating blow. This was rejected (or at least put off) because of the inevitability of heavy Israeli casualties inside Gaza city and other urban areas. The third was to tighten the screws on Gaza still further, and this was the option Barak finally picked. All border crossings were closed to the supply of food, medicine, fuel and other basic necessities of civilian life. Electricity--fundamental to hospital operations and water and sewage pumping stations--was cut off. Military operations were simultaneously stepped up. On 15 January, even as George Bush was being received by the Saudi King in Riyadh's Al Murabba palace and given an Order of Merit, nineteen Palestinians (thirteen 'militants' and six bystanders) were killed in a land and air assault on the Zeytun district. The dead included the son of a senior Hamas minister, Mahmud al Zahar, who had already lost one son during an attempt to assassinate him three years ago. He accused Abbas of complicity. Within days dozens of other Palestinians had been killed.

On 22 January, thousands of Gazan women, young and old, many of them waving the green Hamas flag, converged on the Rafah crossing to demand that Egypt take in seriously ill patients from hospitals now running on emergency generators. Police used water cannon, dogs and clubs to drive them back. Two days later seventeen land mines were exploded under the seven-kilometre long fence, surreptitiously weakened ahead of time so it would come down quickly. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured through the gaps in the next two days, empting Rafah's shops of basic foodstuffs as well as heating oil and items not so necessary for survival, including cigarettes, television sets and mobile phones. Several Palestinians in wheelchairs were pushed through the gaps and moved on to the nearby town of El Arish for medical treatment. Egypt's President Mubarak ordered the border resealed but on the same day that was supposed to happen, a bulldozer rammed through the fence and created a new crossing point. A week later the closing of the border was accompanied by clashes between hundreds of Gazans and Egyptian police in which one Palestinian was shot dead. This mass breakout from their open prison empowered the Palestinians and strengthened the standing of Hamas inside and outside Gaza. In Damascus, Palestinian factions demanded that Abbas break off his dealings with Israel, which of course he will not do.

For the United States, Israel and Egypt, the Gaza breakout cannot be allowed to become a precedent. Israelis are now wondering what they will do if several hundred thousand determined Palestinians march on the Erez crossing. How would they stop them, even if they could? With police, water cannon, capsicum spray, tear gas, dogs, rubber bullets, real bullets, missiles, tank fire, artillery--or with something new that will immobilise the Palestinians, perhaps a 'pain ray', as a writer in the Jerusalem Post recently suggested?

The presence of Palestinians inside Sinai prompted Olmert to recommend that Israelis holidaying at Egyptian Red Sea resorts come home in case of terrorist attacks. Mubarak was no less disconcerted. He immediately summoned both Hamas and Fatah leaders to Cairo for talks, receiving Abbas with all the trappings reserved for a visiting head of state and consigning the care of Ismail Haniyeh, the Prime Minister, to second level officials. He made it clear that if the Palestinians were to be brought into new border policing arrangements, only Fatah would be acceptable. This does not seem practicable unless Fatah is to operate from the safety of the Egyptian side of the border. It has never had less support in Gaza and the stocks of the Hamas government have never been higher. On the West Bank the killing of 'militants' will inexorably close the gap between Hamas and the Fatah groups that have refused orders from Abbas to put down their weapons. Mubarak knows popular feeling in Egypt and across the Arab world is behind Hamas and not the rump leadership in Ramallah. He is being compelled by force of circumstances on the ground, as well as pressure from the United States and Israel, to take greater responsibility for Gaza. At the same time he will strive to drive Gaza back out of the mainstream of domestic politics in the interests of containing and isolating it as before. But Hamas will resist a return to the status quo, knowing that a new phase has opened up in the Palestinian struggle.

Jeremy Salt teaches the history of the modern Middle East in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University, Turkey.