Our Life and Times
By Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

In recent weeks, negotiations have taken place between Israel and Syria, the Palestinians, and possibly Lebanon as well. Syria and Israel are discussing a full peace agreement, mediated by Turkey, in which Israel would finally return the Golan Heights, seized in 1973. In addition, Israel and the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, have announced a six-month truce. All of this reflects the weakened position of the U.S. and Israel after the catastrophic war in Iraq and Israel’s disastrous war in Lebanon in 2006.

The truce between Israel and Hamas comes a year after Hamas wrested control the Gaza from the secular nationalist Palestinian Authority. During that year, Israel has cordoned off Gaza, visiting collective punishment on its 1.4 million people. It has violated international law by cutting off basic supplies like gasoline and electricity for weeks at a time.

During this period, Israel has also bombed and raided Gaza over and over again, killing some 800 Palestinians. For their part, Hamas and other militant groups have lobbed hundreds of rockets into Israeli border towns in a series of largely symbolic attacks that have killed a handful of Israelis over the past year.

For the truce, Hamas has promised to stop all attacks into Israel from Gaza, while Israel has agreed to cease all attacks on Gaza and to gradually reopen the border crossings. This represents a defeat for the U.S., Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, each of which had hoped that squeezing Gaza would undermine Hamas’s authority.

Instead, Hamas’s power has only grown. This highly disciplined fundamentalist group has eliminated the warlordism and violent feuds that had roiled Gaza under Palestinian Authority rule. It has also curtailed corruption and created a rationing system, while blaming all the territory’s economic problems on the Israeli blockade.

At the same time, Hamas has banned alcohol and even kissing in public. More women are covering their heads and more men have grown beards, but Hamas has not imposed the type of restrictions on personal freedoms found in Iran. To some extent, Hamas has evolved, moderating both its fundamentalist cultural agenda and its rejectionism toward Israel. This has led to bitter denunciations from the more extreme fundamentalists of Al Qaeda. Nonetheless, Hamas remains an authoritarian fundamentalist movement with a deeply conservative ideology.

While Israel and the U.S. have finally given tacit recognition to Hamas, something they said they would never do, their overall stance toward a peace settlement with the Palestinians is still very far away from the type of concessions needed to really achieve that. In principle, the U.S. supports a Palestinian state, more or less on the basis of the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But in practice, the U.S. political establishment -- whether conservative or liberal -- has tacitly accepted Israel’s aim for a rump Palestinian state.

This was illustrated most recently in Barack Obama’s June speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most important force in the Israel lobby. In words that astounded his progressive supporters, Obama stated: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” For its part, Israel seems to believe that its military superiority and U.S. support will allow it to dictate peace terms to the Palestinians.

According to Mohammad Shtayyeh, a top negotiator for the Palestinian Authority, Israel has insisted on three things in secret negotiations, all of them totally unacceptable to Palestinians: 1) Israel would keep all the land behind the West Bank barrier, thus slicing away about 8% more of the West Bank. 2) Israel would hold onto a “security strip” along the Jordan River, thus controlling the eastern border of the Palestinian state as well. 3) Israel would keep all of Jerusalem and the surrounding settlements.

Reality on the ground has been forcing Israel and the U.S. to budge a bit, however, and it is unclear whether such outrageous demands are real. Not only have Israel and the U.S. had to acknowledge Hamas, but they also have been forced by events to recognize the power of the Shia fundamentalist Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. In 2006, Israel’s ill-fated attack on Lebanon not only strengthened Hezbollah, but also pulled the rug out from under the nascent democratic movement inside Lebanon.

The Lebanese democratic movement had been swept to power in elections held after Syria’s 2005 assassination of the popular Sunni Arab politician Rafik Hariri. It had forced Syria to withdraw all of its troops from Lebanon. The 2006 Lebanon war also injected Iran, Hezbollah’s main supporter, directly into the Arab-Israeli confrontation in a totally unprecedented manner (see Peter Hudis, “In the Aftermath of Israel’s War in Lebanon,” News & Letters, October-November 2006).

After the brutal Israeli attacks of 2006, which left millions of cluster bombs all over Lebanon for years to come, Hezbollah started to confront Lebanon’s secular democratic movement. Flushed with support for having stood its ground in the face of Israeli attacks, and with the democratic movement undermined due to its ties to the U.S. and France, Hezbollah sent thousands of its supporters to occupy downtown Beirut, demanding veto power over cabinet posts.

This stalemate continued until May, when Hezbollah, seizing on supposed threats from the much-weakened Lebanese government, suddenly deployed its militia in the heart of Beirut. Within less than a day, it routed its opponents, especially in the Sunni neighborhoods of Beirut, which it briefly occupied. In effect, this was a military coup, covered over by subsequent negotiations in which the government gave into all of Hezbollah’s demands.

Sunni Arab, Druse, and Christian communities, who compose about half the population, are outraged by Hezbollah’s’ actions. Since then, an uneasy peace has settled over Lebanon, with Hezbollah clearly dominant militarily now, given the fact that it has more modern arms than the Lebanese Army and the fact that the army has a policy of remaining neutral during sectarian conflicts. Even the U.S. has signaled support for the peace deal with Hezbollah, this in statements by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her recent visit to Lebanon.

If successful, the negotiations between Syria and Israel would surely impact both Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which use Syria as a base of support and a source of arms. Iran does not border Lebanon and its aid to Hezbollah comes mostly through Syria. But until Israel and the U.S. allow the creation of a real Palestinian state, militantly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel but socially reactionary groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are likely to continue to grow in the region at the expense of more secular, democratic, or leftist forces.