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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, July 6, 2018
Sisi holds key to Trump's Sinai plan for Palestinians
Reports
suggest Trump could be about to unveil massive relief programme, but on
condition Palestinians work in Egypt under Israel's 'Greater Gaza' plan
Israel and the US are in a race against time with Gaza. The conundrum is
stark: how to continue isolating the tiny coastal enclave from the
outside world and from the West Bank – to sabotage any danger of a
Palestinian state emerging – without stoking a mass revolt from Gaza's
two million Palestinians?
In
Gaza, Israel does not have the luxury of time it enjoys in the West
Bank and East Jerusalem, the two additional Palestinian territories it
occupies. In those areas, it can keep chipping away at the Palestinian
presence, using the Israeli army, Jewish settlers and tight restrictions
on Palestinian movement to take over key resources like land and water.
Gaza: A death camp
While
Israel is engaged in a war of attrition with the West Bank's
population, a similar, gradualist approach in Gaza is rapidly becoming
untenable. The United Nations has warned that
the enclave may be only two years away from becoming “uninhabitable”,
its economy in ruins and its water supplies unpotable.
More than a decade of a severe
Israeli blockade as well as a series of military assaults have plunged
much of Gaza into the dark ages. Israel desperately needs a
solution, before Gaza's prison turns into a death camp. And now, under
cover of Donald Trump's "ultimate peace plan", Israel appears to be on
the brink of an answer.
More than a decade of a severe Israeli blockade and a series of military assaults have plunged much of Gaza into the dark ages. Israel desperately needs a solution, before Gaza's prison turns into a death camp
Recent
weeks have been rife with reports in the Israeli and Arab media of
moves by Washington and Israel to pressure Egypt into turning over a
swath of territory in northern Sinai, next to Gaza, for infrastructure
projects designed to alleviate the enclave’s "humanitarian crisis".
Late last month Hamas, which rules Gaza, sent a delegation to
Cairo to discuss the measures. This followed hot on the heels of a
visit to Egypt by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law who is
overseeing the Middle East peace plan.
Exploiting Egyptian fears
According to reports,
Trump hopes soon to unveil a package – associated with his "deal of the
century" peace-making – that will commit to the construction of a
solar-power grid, desalination plant, seaport and airport in Sinai, as
well as a free trade zone with five industrial areas. Most of the
financing will come from the oil-rich Gulf states.
Egyptian diplomatic sources appear to have confirmed the
reports. The programme has the potential to help relieve the immense
suffering in Gaza, where electricity, clean water and freedom of
movement are in short supply. Palestinians and Egyptians would jointly
work on these projects, providing desperately needed jobs. In Gaza,
youth unemployment stands at over 60 per cent.
It has been left unclear whether Palestinians from Gaza would be
encouraged to live close to the Sinai projects in migrant workers'
towns. Israel will doubtless hope that Palestinian workers would
gradually make Sinai their permanent home.
Egypt,
meanwhile, will benefit both from the huge injection of capital in an
economy currently in crisis, as well as from new infrastructure that can
be used for its own population in the restive Sinai peninsula.
It is worth noting that for more than a year an Israeli cabinet minister has been proposing similar
infrastructure projects for Gaza located on an artificial island to be
established in Palestinian territorial waters. Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly baulked at the proposal.
Locating
the scheme instead in Egypt, under Cairo’s control, will tie Egyptian
security concerns about Gaza to Israel's, and serve to kill the
Palestinian national cause of statehood.
A decade of arm-twisting
It
is important to understand that the Sinai plan is not simply evidence
of wishful thinking by an inexperienced or deluded Trump administration.
All the signs are that it has enjoyed long and vigorous support from
the Washington policy establishment for more than a decade.
In
fact, four years ago, when Barack Obama was firmly ensconced in the
White House, Middle East Eye charted the course of attempts by Israel
and the US to arm-twist a succession of Egyptian leaders into opening Sinai to Gaza’s Palestinians.
This
has been a key Israeli ambition since it pulled several thousand
settlers out of Gaza in the so-called disengagement of 2005 and claimed
afterwards – falsely – that the enclave’s occupation was over.
Washington
has reportedly been on board since 2007, when the Islamist faction
Hamas took control of Gaza, ousting the Fatah movement of Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas. It was then that Israel, backed by the US,
intensified its severe blockade that has destroyed Gaza’s economy and
prevented key goods from entering.
A Palestinian statelet
The advantages of the Sinai plan are self-evident to Israel and the US. It would:
*
make permanent the territorial division between Gaza and the West Bank,
and the ideological split between the rival factions of Fatah and
Hamas;
* downgrade Gaza from a diplomatic issue to a humanitarian one;
*
gradually lead to the establishment of a de facto Palestinian statelet
in Sinai and Gaza, mostly outside the borders of historic Palestine;
*
encourage the eventual settlement of potentially millions of
Palestinian refugees in Egyptian territory, stripping them of their
right in international law to return to their homes, now in Israel;
*
weaken the claims of Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, located in
the West Bank, to represent the Palestinian cause and undermine their
moves to win recognition of statehood at the United Nations;
*
and lift opprobrium from Israel by shifting responsibility for
repressing Gaza’s Palestinians to Egypt and the wider Arab world.
'Greater Gaza' plan
In
summer 2014, Israel’s media reported that, with Washington’s blessing,
Israeli officials had been working on a plan dubbed “Greater Gaza” that
would attach the enclave to a large slice of northern Sinai. The reports
suggested that Israel had made headway with Cairo on the idea.
Egyptian and Palestinians officials publicly responded to the leaks by denouncing the plan as "fabricated". But, whether Cairo was privately receptive or not, it provided yet further confirmation of a decade-long Israeli strategy in Gaza.
A
bulldozer demolishes the houses of settlers as part of Israel's
disengagement plan in the southern Gaza Strip on 22 August 2005 (AFP)
At around the same time, an Arab newspaper interviewed a former
anonymous official close to Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president ousted
in 2011. He said Egypt
had come under concerted pressure from 2007 onwards to annex Gaza to
northern Sinai, after Hamas took control of the enclave following
Palestinian elections.
Five
years later, according to the same source, Mohamed Morsi, who led a
short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government, sent a delegation to
Washington where the Americans proposed that "Egypt cede a third of the
Sinai to Gaza in a two-stage process spanning four to five years".
And since 2014, it appears, Morsi’s successor, General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, has faced similar lobbying.
Carrots and sticks
Suspicions
that Sisi might have been close to capitulating four years ago were
fuelled at that time by Abbas himself. In an interview on Egyptian TV,
he said Israel’s Sinai plan had been "unfortunately accepted by some here [in Egypt]. Don’t ask me more about that. We abolished it."
Israel's
neoconservative cheerleaders in Washington who reportedly leant on
Mubarak in 2007 during George W Bush’s presidency, are now influencing
Middle East policy again in the Trump administration.
And
although Sisi appears to have stood his ground in 2014, subsequent
dramatic changes in the region are likely to have weakened his hand.
Both
Abbas and Hamas are more isolated than ever, and the situation in Gaza
more desperate. Israel has cultivated much closer ties to the Gulf
states as they fashion joint opposition to Iran. And the Trump
administration has dropped even the pretence of neutrality in resolving
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In
fact, Trump's Middle East team led by Kushner adopted from the outset
Israel’s so-called "outside-in" paradigm for arriving at a peace
agreement.
Netanyahu and Sisi in New York on 18 September 2017 (AFP)
The idea is to use a carrot-and-stick approach – a mix of financial
inducements and punitive sanctions – to bully Abbas and Hamas into
making yet more major concessions to Israel that would void any
meaningful idea of Palestinian statehood. Key to this idea is that Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can be recruited to help Israel in
its efforts to force the Palestinian leadership’s hand.
Egypt,
current reports indicate, has come under similar pressure from the Gulf
to concede territory in Sinai to help Trump with his long-delayed "deal
of the century".
Muslim Brotherhood threat
Sisi
and his generals have good reason to be reluctant to help. After they
grabbed power from Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government, they have done
everything possible to crush homegrown Islamist movements, but have
faced a backlash in Sinai.
Hamas,
which rules Gaza, is the sister organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egypt’s generals have worried that opening the Rafah border crossing
between Sinai and Gaza could bolster Islamist attacks that Egypt has
struggled to contain. There are fears too in Cairo that the Sinai option would shift the burden of Gaza onto Egypt’s shoulders.
This is where Trump and Kushner may hope their skills at wheeler-dealing can achieve a breakthrough.
READ MORE ►
Egypt’s susceptibility to financial inducements from the Gulf were on display last year when Sisi’s government agreedeffectively
to sell off to Saudi Arabia two strategic Red Sea islands, Tiran and
Sanafir. They guard the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez
canal.
In
return, Egypt received billions of dollars in loans and investments
from the kingdom, including large-scale infrastructure projects in
Sinai. Israel reportedly approved the deal.
Analysts have suggested that
the handover of the islands to Saudi Arabia was intended to strengthen
security and intelligence cooperation between Israel, Egypt and Saudi
Arabia in dealing with Islamic militants in Sinai.
This now looks suspiciously like the prelude to Trump’s reported Sinai plan.
Over the Palestinians' heads
In
March, the White House hosted 19 countries in a conference to consider
new ideas for dealing with Gaza’s mounting crisis. As well as Israel,
participants included representatives from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The Palestinians boycotted the meeting.
Much favoured by the Trump team was a paper delivered
by Yoav Mordechai, an Israeli general and key official overseeing
Israel's strategy in the occupied territories. Many of his proposals –
for a free trade zone and infrastructure projects in Sinai – are now
being advanced.
The
Sinai plan will weaken the claims of Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian
Authority in Ramallah to represent the Palestinian cause at the United
Nations (AFP)
Last month Kushner visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan to drum up support. According to interviews in the Israel Hayom daily, all four Arab states are on board with the peace plan, even if it means bypassing Abbas.
Jackie Khoury, a Palestinian analyst for the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, summed up the
plan’s Gaza elements: “Egypt, which has a vital interest in calming
Gaza down because of the territory’s impact on Sinai, will play the
policeman who restrains Hamas. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and perhaps the
United Arab Emirates will pay for the projects, which will be under
United Nations auspices.”
Israel’s efforts to secure compliance from Hamas may be indicated by recent threats to invade Gaza and dissect it in two, reported through veteran Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai. The US has also moved to deepen the crisis in
Gaza by withholding payments to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for
Palestinian refugees. A majority of Gaza's population are refugees
dependent on UN handouts.
An advantage for Hamas in agreeing to the Sinai plan is that it would
finally be freed of Israeli and Palestinian Authority controls over
Gaza. It would be in a better able to sustain its rule, as long as it
did not provoke Egyptian ire.
Oslo's pacification model
Israel
and Washington's plans for Gaza have strong echoes of the "economic
pacification" model that was the framework for the Oslo peace process of
the late 1990s.
For
Israel, Oslo represented a cynical chance to destroy the largely rural
economy of the West Bank that Palestinians have depended on for
centuries. Israel has long coveted the territory both for its economic
potential and its Biblical associations.
READ MORE ►
Hundreds
of Palestinian communities in the West Bank rely on these lands for
agriculture, rooting them to historic locations through economic need
and tradition. But uprooting the villagers – forcing them into a handful
of Palestinian cities, and clearing the land for Jewish settlers –
required an alternative economic model.
As
part of the the Oslo process, Israel began establishing a series of
industrial areas – paid for by international donors – on the so-called
"seam zone" between Israel and the West Bank.
Israeli and international
companies were to open factories there, employing cheap Palestinian
labour with minimal safeguards. Palestinians would be transformed from
farmers with a strong attachment to their lands into a casual labour
force concentrated in the cities.
An additional advantage for Israel was that it would make the
Palestinians the ultimate “precariat”. Should they start demanding a
state or even protest for rights, Israel could simply block entry to the
industrial areas, allowing hunger to pacify the population.
New prison wardens
There
is every reason to believe that is now the goal of an Israeli-Trump
initiative to gradually relocate Palestinians to Sinai through
investment in infrastructure projects.
With the two countries' security interests safely aligned, Israel can
then rely on Egypt to pacify the Palestinians of Gaza on its behalf.
Under such a scheme, Cairo will have many ways to teach its new
workforce of migrant labourers a lesson.
It can temporarily shut down the infrastructure projects, laying off the
workforce, until there is quiet. It can close off the sole Rafah border
crossing between Gaza and Sinai. It can shutter the electricity and
desalination plants, depriving Gaza of power and clean water.
This
way Gaza can be kept under Israel's thumb without Israel sharing any
blame. Egypt will become Gaza's visible prison wardens, just as Abbas
and his Palestinian Authority have shouldered the burden of serving as
jailers in much of the West Bank.
This is Israel's model for Gaza. We may soon find out whether it is shared too by Egypt and the Gulf states.
- Jonathan Cook,
a British journalist based in Nazareth since 2001, is the author of
three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a past winner of
the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog
can be found at: www.jonathan-cook.net
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: A Palestinian child holds a poster during a protest against the siege on the Gaza Strip, on 6 February, 2018 (AFP)