Posted By Amina Anderson

April 19, 2008

Life in the Gaza Strip has never been easy. It's a narrow, overcrowded piece of land that hosts 1.4 million Palestinians, most of whom are refugees from the land Israel seized in 1948.

But life in the impoverished strip has got much worse in the last few years, with bouts of violence plaguing it and a deadly siege slowly killing its people.

Last Wednesday, at least 22 people died in Gaza's worst day of violence since the Israeli incursion in early March. Israel says its attacks near the Bureiji refugee camp were in response to a Hamas ambush that left three Israeli troops dead. But the air strikes killed at least 18 Palestinians, most of them civilians including five children and a Reuters cameraman.

In addition to the continued violence, Gaza is being cut off from the rest of the world. Ever since Hamas won the parliamentary elections in 2006, the U.S., EU and Israel have been pursuing all possible policies to isolate the resistance group, which they view as a terrorist organization. They imposed sanctions against Hamas because it refuses to recognize Israel, give up armed resistance and accept past peace accords with the Israelis.

Since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip from President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party last year, Israel has only allowed the barest essentials into Gaza, a policy of collective punishment that pushed Gaza to the brink of a humanitarian disaster.

According to an article on the BBC, most Gazans describe their home as the biggest prison on earth. There is very little fuel. The economy has collapsed - 87% of private businesses have closed down. One million Palestinians, or 70% of Gaza's population, live on UN food aid.

John Ging, who manages the Gaza operations of UNRWA, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees, expressed frustration about the international policy of isolating Gaza.

"The policy is failing because it is creating conditions on the ground that are not conducive to a peace process.

"The mindset of the people here is becoming more and more frustrated, more and more desperate, more and more radical and it is all so predictable - that is the tragedy."

Time for change?

Israel claims that the pain it's inflicting on Gaza is "necessary" to protect its own people from the Palestinians’ improvised home-made rockets. But the Israeli siege did not stop the rockets, and the pain on both sides of the border is actually growing.

Many voices are now saying that it's time for a change, for a different policy that would achieve a mutual and lasting ceasefire, and lead to the reopening of Gaza's borders.

But the main reason this is almost impossible now is that any such deal would require Israel to deal with Hamas, directly or indirectly, and accept its control of Gaza as a fact of life.

"Well, isn't it fact of life in the Middle East?" asked Yuli Tamir, the Israeli minister of education and one of the founders of the campaign group Peace Now.

"Both sides", she said, "are not achieving their goals. Hamas sees that Israel is not going to surrender because of the Qassams (rockets), we know that what we did so far did not stop the Qassams, and in the middle there are people who are suffering every day.

"So I think that both sides realise we have to do something to save the sanity of the region and bring a little more peace and quiet."

Ms Tamir says she can't speak for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, but she believes that many Israelis share her views that talks with the Palestinians need to be expanded.

Carter’s peace initiative

But Israel seems determined to pursue its policy of isolating Hamas. The government has shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for his plan to meet Hamas officials.

Mr Carter is on a tour of the Middle East and has met Hamas officials in Egypt. He is now in Syria to meet Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal, and he's also expected to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during his visit. After Syria, he is due to travel to Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Mr Carter says he's not trying to mediate in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but believes peace will not be achieved without talking to Hamas and Syria.

Mr Carter brokered the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the first in between Israel and an Arab state. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development".

Despite this, the United States has distanced itself from Mr Carter's trip, saying it is in a personal capacity and not helpful to the peace process!

In Israel, only one cabinet member, industry minister Eli Yeshai, expressed his intentions to meet with Hamas in order to negotiate the release of an Israeli soldier who has been kidnapped by the group two years ago, although Yishai's colleagues said he wouldn't be allowed to negotiate a prisoner deal alone.

Egyptian officials have already brokered indirect contacts between Hamas and Israel. So far, they have focused on a prisoner exchange to swap hundreds of Palestinians for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

"Israel rejects all proposals”

Meanwhile, Meshaal, who survived an assassination attempt by Israeli agents in 1997, told the BBC that he accepts that Arab peace initiative, which offers peace and recognition to Israel in return for a full withdrawal from the land seized in 1967 in the West Bank, the dismantling of Jewish settlements and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with a capital in east Jerusalem.

He also said he had been approached about the idea of secret back channel talks with Israel, but that he had rejected the proposal.

Still, the indirect talks brokered by Egypt have included a ceasefire, though they could not agree how it would work.

Mr Meshaal stressed that Hamas wants a mutual ceasefire, that would also include the occupied West Bank and which would reopen Gaza's borders.

Anything else, he said, would be Israel dictating a Palestinian "surrender".

"We said that if Israel commits itself to a comprehensive and mutual calm we are ready to co-operate - but Israel said no."

"Israel rejects all proposals. It sent us a message that the calm can only be in Gaza and not be related to the siege. Israel's demanding that Hamas stops the rockets. Then it will decide what it will do."

It seems that sane voices would continue to call for direct or indirect talks between Israel and Hamas in order to stop the bloodshed and the Palestinian suffering in Gaza. This wouldn’t be achieved with the isolation policy that has proved to be a failure.

Perhaps one day Israel will accept reality, respect the choice of the Palestinian people, and adopt policies that would really save its people, instead of using tanks, machine guns and war drones.

©  EsinIslam.Com

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