Akiva Eldar, very senior Israeli commentator, writes in Haaretz:
Sharon’s Dream

If Ariel Sharon were able to hear the news from the Gaza Strip and West Bank, he would call his loyal aide, Dov Weissglas, and say with a big laugh: “We did it, Dubi.” Sharon is in a coma, but his plan is alive and kicking. Everyone is now talking about the state of Hamastan. In his house, they called it a bantustan, after the South African protectorates designed to perpetuate apartheid.
Just as in the Palestinian territories, blacks and colored people in South Africa were given limited autonomy in the country’s least fertile areas. Those who remained outside these isolated enclaves, which were disconnected from each other, received the status of foreign workers, without civil rights. A few years ago, Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema told Israeli friends that shortly before he was elected prime minister, Sharon told him that the bantustan plan was the most suitable solution to our conflict.
The right and the settlers feared that the disengagement from the entire Gaza Strip was no more than a down payment on a withdrawal from most of the West Bank. The left and the international community similarly believed that if the evacuation of Israeli soldiers and civilians from Gaza went well, the way would be paved for a two-state solution; but there were also some who feared that Sharon did not intend merely to sever Gaza from Israel, thereby erasing 1.4 million Arabs from the demographic balance, but also to drive a wedge between Gaza and the West Bank.
Exactly two years ago, in June 2005, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit warned Shimon Peres during a visit to Israel that if the disengagement were not accompanied by progress toward a solution in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip “would explode,” in his words. The then vice premier told his guest that he agreed with every word, but took care to point out that his statements did not necessarily reflect the views of prime minister Sharon.
Israel’s violation of the Agreement on Movement and Access, which was signed by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, strengthened suspicions that Sharon was plotting to sever Gaza from the West Bank. The order that the dogs could bark, but the caravans would not move between the Palestinian Authority’s two sections had already been quietly issued by the end of 2005. That was a few months before Hamas’ victory in the PA parliamentary elections provided the winning excuse for sealing off Gaza. Following the political upset in the territories, the severance policy became official. Israel imposed a sweeping ban on Gaza residents entering the West Bank, which even applied to students with no record of security offenses. Even as it was protesting the Hamas government’s refusal to commit itself to previous agreements, Israel was disavowing the interim agreement (Oslo II) that it signed in Washington in September 1995, under which the West Bank and Gaza constitute a “single territorial unit.”
Alongside the severance of Gaza from the West Bank, a policy now called “isolation,” the Sharon-Peres government and the Olmert-Peres government that succeeded it carried out the bantustan program in the West Bank. The Jordan Valley was separated from the rest of the West Bank; the south was severed from the north; and all three areas were severed from East Jerusalem. The “two states for two peoples” plan gave way to a “five states for two peoples” plan: one contiguous state, surrounded by settlement blocs, for Israel, and four isolated enclaves for the Palestinians. This plan was implemented on the ground via the intrusive route of the separation fence, a network of roadblocks deep inside the West Bank, settlement expansion and arbitrary orders by military commanders. The cantonized map that these dictated left no chance for the road map or the “gestures” that Israel promised to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the Americans.
But the hope that Hamas’ thugs and Fatah’s good-for-nothings will finish the work of that well-known righteous man, Sharon, and his flunkies in the government and army is no more than a warped delusion. Eight years of rioting and terror ended in the liquidation of South Africa’s bantustans and their inclusion in a unified state governed by the black majority. This dream of Palestinian protectorates – Hamastan in Gaza and the Fatahland enclaves in the West Bank – is similarly the end of any solution based on dividing the land: Israel in agreed-upon borders based on the Green Line and Palestine on the other side. If we do not quickly wake up from this dream and rescue what remains of the two-state vision, we will truly be left with a choice between the plague – an apartheid regime – and the cholera: the Jewish state’s replacement with a binational state between the Jordan River and the sea. Including the Gaza Strip.

Posted by: Bea | Jun 18 2007 16:08 utc | 3

“The Palestinians are certainly not dumb”. Why not?. I think Palestinians are acting as idiots. If they believe in the values of the Homeland and Patriotic figth against their enemies, like all other morons in the world, they get what they plant and grow. Death and Desperation. The actual jews of Israel, at the same time have lose the Admiration and Respect of the honest people of the world. The same can be said for the north-american peole who believe in the force of the guns.
I think the opossite is true. Nobody as your own goverment can do more pain on you and your family. I see the Palestinian and Jews as dumb people, like childs fighting for a broken toy.
I dont know whar to do. Probably the best is do nothing.If the Jews Win at all, the world will lose the memory of past nazi attrocities , and the history, and the stories will change for the worst.
Again and again and again….

Posted by: curious | Jun 18 2007 20:00 utc | 5

@curious – I didn’t get that rant. Can you explain?

Posted by: b | Jun 18 2007 20:21 utc | 7

I am sorry B. If you think is convenient, pls edit and erase my bad writed rant.
I understand.

Posted by: curious | Jun 18 2007 20:45 utc | 9

@curious – this is certainly not about “convinious”, I do value your comnments.
But are people “dumb” unless they give in to anyone that claims superiority?
I certainly have a different view on that. Again – I didn’t get your comment. Please explain.

Posted by: b | Jun 18 2007 21:01 utc | 11

Two excellent historical perspective pieces on this, one from an Israeli, the other from a Palestinian (apologies for the long excerpts but they help to set the developments of the past week in context):
Ilan Pappe: Towards a Geography of Peace: Whither Gaza?
~Snip

The Gaza Strip is a little bit more than two percent of Palestine. This small detail is never mentioned whenever the Strip is in the news nor has it been mentioned in the present Western media coverage of the dramatic events unfolding in Gaza in the last few weeks. Indeed it is such a small part of the country that it never existed as a separate region in the past. Gaza’s history before the Zionization of Palestine was not unique and it was always connected administratively and politically to the rest of Palestine. It was until 1948 for all intents and purposes an integral and natural part of the country. As one of Palestine’s principal land and sea gates to the world, it tended to develop a more flexible and cosmopolitan way of life; not dissimilar to other gateways societies in the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era. This location near the sea and on the Via Maris to Egypt and Lebanon brought with it prosperity and stability until this life was disrupted and nearly destroyed by the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.
In between 1948 and 1967, Gaza became a huge refugee camp restricted severely by the respective Israeli and Egyptian policies: both states disallowed any movement out of the Strip. Living conditions were already harsh then as the victims of the 1948 Israeli politics of dispossession doubled the number of the inhabitants who lived there for centuries. On the eve of the Israeli occupation in 1967, the catastrophic nature of this enforced demographic transformation was evident all over the Strip. This once pastoral coastal part of southern Palesine became within two decades one of the world’s densest areas of habitation; without any adequate economic infrastructure to support it.
The first twenty years of Israeli occupation at least allowed some movement outside an area that was closed off as a war zone in the years 1948 to 1967. Tens of thousand of Palestinians were permitted to join the Israeli labor market as unskilled and underpaid workers. The price Israel demanded for this slavery market was a total surrender of any national struggle or agenda. When this was not complied with — the ‘gift’ of laborers’ movement was denied and abolished. All these years leading to the Oslo accord in 1993 were marked by an Israeli attempt to construct the Strip as an enclave, which the Peace Camp hoped would be either autonomous or part of Egypt and the Nationalist camp wished to include in the Greater Eretz Israel they dreamed of establishing instead of Palestine.
The Oslo agreement enabled the Israelis to reaffirm the Strip’s status as a separate geo-political entity — not just outside of Palestine as a whole, but also cut apart from the West Bank. Ostensibly, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were under the Palestinian Authority but any human movement between them depended on Israel’s good will; a rare Israeli trait and which almost disappeared when Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996. Moreover, Israel held, as it still does today, the water and electricity infrastructure. Since 1993 it used, or rather abused, this possession in order to ensure on the one hand the well-being of the Jewish settler community there and on the other in order to blackmail the Palestinian population into submission and surrender. The people of the Gaza Strip thus vacillated in the last sixty years between being internees, hostages or prisoners in an impossible human space.
It is within this historical context that we should view the violence raging today in Gaza and reject the reference to the events there as a campaign in the ‘war against terror,’ an instance of Islamic revivalism, a further proof for al-Qadia’s expansionism, a seditious Iranian penetration into this part of the world or another arena in the dreaded Clash of Civilizations (I picked here only few out of many frequent adjectives used in the Western media for describing the present crisis in Gaza)….

Karma Nabulsi: The People of Palestine Must Finally Be Allowed to Determine Their Own Fate
~Snip

How did we get here? The institutions created in occupied Palestine in the 1990s were shaped to bring us to this very point of collapse. The Palestinian Authority, created through negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, was not meant to last more than five years – just until the institutions of an independent state were built. Instead, its capacities were frozen and it was co-opted into performing the role of a security agency for the Israelis, who were still occupying Palestine by military force, and serving as a disbursement agency for the US and EU’s funding of that occupation. The PA had not attained a single one of the freedoms it was meant to provide, including the most important one, the political liberty of a self-determining sovereign body.
Why did we get here? Once the exact nature of its purpose emerged, the Palestinians began to resist this form of external control. Israel then invaded the West Bank cities again and put President Yasser Arafat’s compound under a two-year siege, which ended with his death. Under those conditions of siege the international “reform” process created a new institution of a prime minister’s office and attempted to unify the security apparatus under it, rather than that of the president, whom they could no longer control. Mahmoud Abbas was the first prime minister, and the Israeli- and US-backed Fatah strongman, Mohammed Dahlan, was appointed head of security. After the death of Arafat, Abbas was nominated to the leadership of the PLO, and directly elected as the president of the PA.
Arafat had followed the strategy of all successful liberation movements: a combination of resistance and negotiation until the conclusion of a comprehensive peace treaty. Abbas’s strategy was of an entirely different order: no resistance in any form and a complete reliance on the good faith of the Israelis. After a year of achieving nothing – indeed Ariel Sharon refused to negotiate with him and Israeli colonisation was intensified – the Palestinian people’s support for this humiliating policy of submission wore thin. Hamas, polling about 20% in previous years, suddenly won 43% of the vote in 2006.
This popular reaction was a response to the failure of Abbas’s strategy as much as the failure of Fatah to present any plausible national programme whatsoever. The Palestinians thus sought representation that would at least reflect their condition of occupation and dispossession….
The US administration continued to treat Fatah as if it had won the election rather than lost it – funding, arming, and directly encouraging agents within it to reverse the outcome of that democratic election by force….

Posted by: Bea | Jun 18 2007 23:01 utc | 13

Rick, I’d say the key word in Rice’s statement is “plans”. The Bush regime had “plans” to spend huge amounts on AIDS prevention and treatment — and somehow that never happened. Likewise with its “plans” for Millenium Challenge anti-poverty spending.
Between the talk for public consumption and the walk of implementation there’s usually a pretty large gap, in any government. Under this regime, it’s a freaking chasm.

Posted by: Nell | Jun 19 2007 12:35 utc | 15

US aid to Israel:
Annual amounts since 1948, broken down by type, and total, as reported by the Jewish Virtual Library
Analysis and commentary by Miftah, a Palestinian think tank
The Bottom Line: As of 2006, the Israeli population was just over 7 million (of which 80%, or 5.3 million, were Jews, 20% Arabs, and 4% other). Between the years 1949 and 2006, the US has provided a total of nearly $97 billion in aid to Israel, which exceeds that given to all countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean combined, with a total population of about 1.054 billion people. [Source: A paragraph from the Miftah analysis, updated to reflect 2006 figures, except for the other countries’ total population, which dates from 1998.]

Posted by: Anonymous | Jun 19 2007 18:41 utc | 17

Thanks Bea,
The amount of aid that has been given to Israel is staggering. And when one considers how even the poor here in America are treated (remember Katrina?) it is more than sickening, it is criminal.

Posted by: Rick | Jun 19 2007 23:44 utc | 19