Long Read in today's Guardian Israel/Gaza
Now that the Susan Hall thread has been 'hijacked' I thought I would begin a new thread specifically about Israel and Hamas/Gaza. Firstly my cousin, a British journalist, has just left Israel after a fact finding visit and told me the following with regard to humanitarian aid reaching the people of Gaza:'We had a long discussion on the food situation with the lawyer who represented Israel at the ICJ. Basically Hamas controls how food is distributed. He said a UN inspector who had been there said Hamas took 90 per cent of the food from a truck that he saw going in but the UN cannot criticise Hamas because otherwise Hamas will kill their people.''It’s so complicated. These are the things that complicate it:1) israel needs to check all the vans for smuggled weapons, that takes time2) Gaza has become a lawless place3) Hamas and other militias steal the aid and sell it for a profit to fund their activities4) there is enough food in southern Gaza5) Israel was trying to force non combatants out of northern Gaza - people that didnt leave may be suffering from a famine as the aid is going via the south6) Israel is still on Oct 8 - there are some people who don’t want to feed the enemy still holding onto hostages7) there are more food aid trucks going into Gaza than ever.'From the Guardian:In late October 2023, the veteran Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin published an open letter denouncing a man he had long called a friend – Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official. Baskin, an architect of the deal that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in 2011, is one of the only Israeli citizens who has maintained consistent contact with leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement. Hamad, a former journalist with a degree in veterinary medicine, was also involved in the Shalit negotiations and served as deputy foreign minister in the 2012 Hamas government. Prior to the 7 October attacks, for more than a decade and a half, Hamad and Baskin had exchanged frequent phone calls and text messages. These mainly concerned negotiations around prisoner swap deals, and sometimes the possibility of a long-term truce between Israel and Hamas. The pair developed a warm working relationship based on mutual trust.After 7 October and the start of Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, that relationship started to unravel. Hamad insisted that the attacks were entirely justified, and denied that Hamas fighters had carried out atrocities during their incursion into Israel. On 24 October, in an interview for a Lebanese TV channel, Hamad vowed that Hamas would commit the same acts “again and again”. He said that “Al-Aqsa Flood”, Hamas’s name for its armed offensive, “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth”. Once considered a thoughtful observer of Palestinian politics, Hamad now declared that “nobody should blame us for what we do – on 7 October, on 10 October, on October 1,000,000. Everything we do is justified.”To Baskin, this did not sound like the man he had come to know. The proclamations by Hamad, “thought to be one of the most moderate people in Hamas”, Baskin noted, landed like a betrayal. Baskin had long argued that it was possible to broker an agreement with Hamas for a “hudna”, or a fixed-term armistice, in exchange for opening the land, air, and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, which Israel has enforced, with Egypt’s support, since Hamas came to power in 2007. Baskin had believed that Hamad could help move Hamas toward acceding to a two-state solution. In the months before 7 October, Baskin had been trying to organise a meeting with him in Europe to discuss the prospect of a long-term truce.But after 7 October, Baskin, too, shifted his position. “Hamas has forfeited its right to exist as a government of any territory and especially the territory next to Israel,” he wrote in an article for the Times of Israel on 28 October. “Hamas now fully deserves the determination of Israel to eliminate them as the political and military body that controls Gaza.” More recently, Baskin has proposed exiling Hamas leaders such as Yahya Sinwar from Gaza as part of a potential ceasefire deal. He has also proposed that Hamas be barred from contesting future Palestinian elections unless they renounce violence. It is not that Baskin has given up on peace – he remains a fixture in international media coverage as a lonely, even desperate Israeli voice calling for an end to the war. It is that he no longer believes Hamas can be part of the equation. Since October, many Israelis, even or perhaps especially on the centre left, have gone on a similar journey.In late December, I sat with Baskin in the basement of his home, in a quiet, leafy neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Born in New York, Baskin is a stocky, energetic man in his late 60s. He answered the door wearing the silver dog tag engraved with the words “Bring them Home”, which has become an emblem of the movement calling for the return of the more than 100 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas.One question looms over the story of Baskin’s exchange with Hamad: did Hamas change, or did Baskin simply misunderstand the group all along? Baskin believes it was the former. “Most of the years previous to 7 October, there was a willingness to explore pragmatic, long-term ceasefires,” he told me. “In retrospect it became clear – there were signs, but none of us read them – that from two years before 7 October, Hamas had made a decision that there was a no-go on a long-term modus vivendi [with Israel] and that they were beginning to make their plans for an eventual attack.”Baskin recalled his final exchange with Hamad in late October. “During the early days of the war, when I heard that his house was bombed, and I didn’t know he wasn’t in Gaza, I said to him: ‘Ghazi, if they’re going after you, there is no one in Hamas who is safe.’” (Ahead of the war, Hamad had departed for Beirut.) “He responded to me: ‘We have lots of surprises, and we will kill lots of Israelis.’”That was when Baskin posted his open letter to Hamad on social media. “I’m sorry to say that you were someone who I actually trusted and thought that we could help bring a better future to our peoples. But you and your friends have brought the Palestinian cause back 75 years,” he wrote. “I think you have lost your mind and you have lost your moral code.” And with that, Baskin severed their ties.*******The disintegration of Baskin and Hamad’s relationship thus reflects a larger and older debate about Hamas, one that has only become more urgent. At its core is a question about the essence of the organisation: whether it is primarily a nationalist group with an Islamist character, which could be a constructive player in a meaningful peace process, or whether it is a more radical, fundamentalist group, whose hostility to Israel is so unwavering that it can only play the role of violent opposition.
Lucille Grant ● 43d16 Comments