Eight Palestinians lay dead on the beach in Gaza last Friday.
Families, who had been denied access to the seaside for years by Israeli settlements, have only just started to enjoy picnics and swimming trips: one of the few ways to get away from the squalor and enforced boredom of life in the open air prison camp that is the Gaza strip. Now one family, including children aged two and four, has been exterminated. Others are scarred for life, with 30 seriously wounded.
Eyewitness and journalist Sami Yousef told the BBC, “It was a terrible scene, with blood everywhere. We could see a gunship in the middle of the sea, so we knew what had happened.”
News footage of the scene brought messages of concern and calls for justice from around the world. Britain’s new foreign secretary Margaret Beckett said she was “deeply concerned by reports of the deaths from Israeli shelling of civilians, including children, on a Gaza beach". Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, issued a blunt statement:
“No doubt what’s going on in Gaza is a bloody massacre against our people, our civilians, without discrimination. I call upon the international community, the UN security council, the quartet [the EU, the US, Russia and the UN], to put an end to this Israeli killing policy."
Even the Israeli Defence Force was momentarily taken aback. “We regret any harm caused to innocent civilians,” said Captain Jacob Dallal, an army spokesman.
However, the ensuing few days proved how quickly Israel – and its imperialist backers, USA and the UK – can sweep aside any concern about the human costs of its policy objectives to steal Palestinian land and subjugate its people. An IDF inquiry into the incident declared, the following Tuesday, that Hamas had blown up the bathers with a landmine; no Israeli missiles had been fired.
Defence Secretary Amir Peretz used the fact that Hamas declared an end to its 16-month-long ceasefire in response to the beach massacre to call his own two-day policy of “restraint” to an end. A rocket killed two Hamas militants on Saturday and two militants from Islamic Jihad on Tuesday. Each time civilians, who ran to rescue the dead and the injured, were caught by follow-up strikes.
“By negotiations or other ways”
Behind the recent upsurge in violence is prime minister Ehud Olmert’s plan to unilaterally withdraw from parts of the West Bank in order to incorporate other large – and illegal – Jewish settlements into Israel. This policy of “making facts on the land” is backed up by the “apartheid wall”, snaking through the West Bank, cutting farmers off from their markets and villagers from their farms.
Although this has long been Ariel Sharon’s project, it has taken the March election victory and a recent tour of the USA and UK to embolden his successor, Olmert. Although neither George Bush nor Tony Blair went so far as to give their overt backing to his policy, their carefully chosen words had the effect of implicitly endorsing the project.
“Then we’re in a stalemate that Israel is necessarily and realistically going to unlock. This thing either moves forward by negotiations or other ways have to be found,” said Blair. When asked specifically whether Israel should deal with the Hamas government, which Blair and the European Union have isolated diplomatically and financially, he replied, “You can only negotiate with people, who are prepared to accept your existence and stop violence.” The irony that such a description applied also, indeed more appropriately, to the Israelis escaped him.
However, he certainly is aware of what such “other ways” entail. The Kadima-led government has connived with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah to sidestep the Hamas government with a referendum. Abbas is determined to go straight to the Palestinian people on 26th July for a popular mandate to negotiate a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The question on the ballot paper is likely to be worded in such a way that Palestinians do not have to positively recognise the right of Israel to the Palestinian land it seized in the second intifada, in 1967 or in 1948. A two-state solution could be sold as a first step to liberation, just as Michael Collins signed up for a 26-county Ireland as a preliminary agreement. But it will effectively abandon the fight for the right of return for the Palestinian diaspora and the rights of the Israeli Arabs trapped inside the racist state.
The signs are that Hamas has not, until recently, been averse to this strategy. Ever since it was elected into government in January, the most bourgeois wing of Hamas has been searching for a way in which it could negotiate with Israel without losing face or, more importantly, provoking a split within its militant armed wing and leading to defections to Islamic Jihad.
Apparently, a Hamas prisoner even wrote the original draft of the referendum, though he has now disowned it. Hamas has condemned the referendum and is refusing to co-operate with it.
So, why has near civil war broken out between Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade and Hamas?
Ramallah rampage
Inter-Palestinian violence erupted, when, on Monday 12th June, two mourners were shot during the funeral of a Hamas militant in Rafah, a Fatah stronghold on the southern tip of the Gaza strip. Hamas militiamen immediately retaliated by firing anti-tank guns and RPGs at the police station, killing at least one Fatah militant.
Several hundred Fatah militiamen then went on a rampage through Ramallah, firing on parliament and the cabinet offices, before bursting in, smashing up computers and furniture, and setting the buildings on fire. A Hamas MP was briefly kidnapped before being released.
This latest outburst is part of a two-month simmering war between the two factions. More than 20 have died in the conflict. How long it will last is hard to predict. Prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Abbas could engineer a truce and even agree to support the referendum. Or Hamas’ high command could consider such a policy too dangerous because it makes it impossible to ‘hold the line’ amongst its radicals.
Either way, the Palestinian people should recognise that recent events have revealed that Hamas is getting closer and closer to abandoning its position of fighting for a single Palestinian state. The Hamas notion of the single state always contained an anti-semitic denial of the right of Jewish people to live with equal rights inside such a state, and therefore was simply a prelude to another bloody communal war. As Karl Marx said, no nation that oppresses another can itself be free.
Nevertheless, Hamas’ readiness to abandon the rights of Palestinians would be no step forward. As in Ireland, it too would merely lead to more oppression and bloodshed.
Palestinians need to prepare to reject the 26th July referendum and denounce it for the trick that it is. But, at the same time, they also need to take Olmert’s threatened unilateral “other ways” seriously. Israel is preparing to repartition Palestine by force. Civil war between Fatah and Hamas would suit its purpose perfectly, giving it a pretext for further military intervention.
The Palestinians urgently need an alternative to the bourgeois politics of Fatah and Hamas: one committed to a working class struggle against occupation, and for a single, secular, socialist state of Palestine.