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EDITORIAL: Outrage in Gaza and war against terrorism

Israel killed 280 people in Gaza on Saturday in retaliation against some rocket-fire from Gaza into the Israeli neighbourhood which killed no one. Many of the 300 critically wounded will die in the days to come, stoking the Islamist rage that the US President-elect Barack Obama was supposed to assuage. The Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, said, “The battle will be long and difficult, but the time has come to act and to fight”. But the world, including the European Union, Russia, Britain and France, has urged both sides to stop fighting.

The Gazans under Hamas have long forgotten how to believe the world when it says Israel can be persuaded to seek peace in Palestine. The exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, has now called on the Palestinians to wage a new intifada against Israel, including a return to suicide missions. Realising the impact of the mangled, bloodied and often charred corpses littering the pavement around Hamas’s security compounds, the US has asked Israel to avoid killing innocent people. The Arab League has reacted the way it usually does, and a foreign ministers’ emergency meeting of the OIC has been called.

The news of the outrage will spread and figure in the pronouncements of those carrying out acts of terrorism around the world in the name of Islam; and, tragically but understandably, their victim states and populations will speak in unison with them. The injustice of the past years is so stark that few will take into account that Palestine is divided; and that as long as this division remains, no peace negotiations with Israel can be fruitful. The Israeli policy of starving Gaza out through an economic siege since June 2007, when Hamas evicted the secular Fatah movement from the Strip, has actually forced the Gazans to resort to rocket-fire on Israeli settlements.

Israel’s negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) for a Palestinian state have not made headway because Israel is not interested in empowering Al Fatah against Hamas by offering some concessions to the Palestinian demand. The truth is that the PA is under siege in its own territory from Hamas because of Israel’s refusal to budge from its position on the borders, Jerusalem and on the question of the refugees. The Israeli prime minister is a lame duck since he is expected to leave after the elections that are coming up in February; and Hamas sneers at the PA President Mahmoud Abbas, calling him a lame duck after his four-year term expires in January. Factually, Mr Abbas no longer speaks for Gaza where Hamas dominates.

The world has not been able to stop Israel from violating the occupied territory through illegal Jewish settlements. The supposed Palestinian state is being eroded even as the world waits for the day of its inauguration. The PA recognised Israel’s right to exist long ago but the lack of progress made on peace is turning the West Bank away from that position. Hamas will not say plainly that it will ever accept the permanence of Israel. What was a possibility a decade ago is now being rolled back by the prevalence of Hamas’s understandable rejectionism.

If the idea was that Hamas would come to heel through an economic squeeze, it has failed miserably. Life in Gaza has become not very different from death and people no longer care if they live or die. They go on supporting Hamas’s rejectionism because they no longer believe that Israel will let them live or that the world in general, and the US in particular, will be able to pressure Israel into behaving humanely. The people in the rest of the Islamic world have gradually ditched the PA and adopted the desperate stance of Hamas. Iran has made Palestine its cause number one in foreign policy, and supports it materially, simply because a radical Sunni Hamas has nowhere else to go for survival.

President-elect Obama was supposed to approach Israel with the traditional American position: “two states sharing Jerusalem, with a border very close to the pre-1967 armistice line, not one that lets Israel keep its settlement blocks deep in the West Bank”. Now commentators think he may delay it beyond February. He was also supposed to change his predecessor’s tough policy on Iran, which would have had a positive effect on Palestine. But will Israel and its lobby in the US let him do it? Islamist radicals and terrorists refer to Palestine as their cause. Muslims all over the world say if you want to end terrorism, remove its causes; and the most prominent cause, they say in unison with the terrorists, is Palestine. The latest Israeli outrage has seriously dented America’s war against global terror. *

SECOND EDITORIAL: Samuel Huntington (1927-2008)

The man who shook the world with his book The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order (1996) at the end of the 20th century is dead at the age of 81. He retired as a professor at Harvard University in 2007 after teaching for 58 years. His thesis offended scholars in both the civilisations he thought would clash. It violated the long-standing optimistic view that wars happened because of the narrow interests of the nation-states but that civilisations remained free of this power tussle and had actually contributed to one another. The European Enlightenment was most responsible for this view as it sought to study civilisations without applying the judgemental yardsticks of the past.

Mr Huntington was attacked by scholars in the West who feared that his prognostications might actually come true. He was attacked by Muslim scholars also because they feared the Muslims might treat his work as a prescription of action against the West. As the most disliked book of the late 20th century, his Clash of Civilisations remains an extremely competent piece of scholarly writing. He also wrote on other topics like government, democratisation, military politics, civil-military relations and political development. Indeed, his two books, The Soldier and the State: The Theory of Politics and Civil-Military Relations (1957) and The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Politics (1976) should be translated into Urdu and made compulsory reading at the institutions of higher learning in Pakistan. *

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