Peace Talks Versus Daily Strife: Israelis & Palestinians

From the World & Comment section of the Toronto Star, Tuesday, December 18, 2007, pages AA, AA5, an article about the irony of Israeli-Palestinian skirmishes while there are international efforts for peace:


TALK OF PEACE DOES NOTHING TO BRING END TO DAILY STRIFE
Israeli-Palestinian tit-for-tat skirmishes remain out of sight and mind for many

Oakland Ross
Middle East Bureau

Jerusalem - It was another autumn morning in the Holy Land, and it began in the usual way, with a mixture of sunshine and clouds, mild temperatures, and a deadly strike by the Israeli air force.

The target was a group of suspected Hamas militants gathered in the town of Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip. Completed almost as soon as it began, the aerial attack left three Palestinians dead and four others wounded.

It was 8:34 a.m. on Wednesday Dec. 5 and the war had resumed for another day.

It's a strange kind of war, at once distant and familiar, a deadly battle that is oddly unobtrusive for most people here, most Israelis anyway. The conflict barely gets covered in the local media and instead persists, like an annoying background drone, something that's unpleasant but bearable and that won't go away.

Lately, the air waves have been filled with talk of peace - skeptical talk, for the most part - but nontheless the subject has been harmony, or the hope of harmony, and the focus has been the recent resumption of international efforts to put an end to six decades of armed strife between Israelis and Palestinians.

But words are one thing. Weapons are another.

The harsh daily reality lived by many people here - mostly Palestinians but some Israelis, too - has not changed much, if at all, and it feels a lot less like peace than it does like war.

"There are incursions every day," said Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, equivalent to the Red Cross. "Perhaps you have heard that, in Bethlehem, one man was killed today, and three were killed in Gaza."

He was speaking to a reporter near the end of another day of life and death in this realm of prophets, miracles, and saints, a day marred instead by rocket salvoes and mortar attacks, by rifle-fire exchanges and attempted bombings - a litany of hostilities that left approximately eight people dead, all of them Palestinian.

Yesterday, Israel killed a senior Islamic Jihad commander and at least four other militants in the Gaza Strip, prompting the group to threaten suicide bombings within the Jewish state.

Many terms are used to describe these daily clashes, and they vary according to which side is doing the talking - "resistance struggle," "security operations," assassinations," "jihad," "terrorism."

Unlike the many other conflagrations that have inflamed the Middle East in recent decades, this particular conflict does not really have a name, and it takes place largely out of sight and mind of most people here.

It's a low-intensity confrontation between asymmetrical sides, and it is typically fought in locations where few Israeli civilians would dare to venture.

But, invisible or not, a war is being waged in the Holy Land, under cover of darkness or by the light of day, splintering wooden doors, smashing cinderblock walls, puncturing steel panels, zinc roofs, and human flesh. Its chief characteristic - apart from bloodshed and woe - is its remarkable obduracy.

It just won't quit.

"Every night, Israeli troops go into Ramallah or Hebron to catch some of the activists," said a Palestinian woman who did not wish her name to be published. She was referring to several Palestinian cities in the West Bank which, unlike Gaza, is still under formal Israeli military occupation. "In Nablus, every night, the Israelis are in the old city to arrest some people."

But the conflict cuts both ways, and not all of the victims are Palestinian, although the majority are.

Since the Islamist militants of Hamas took power by force in Gaza in mid-June, paramilitary organizations there have fired more than 353 rockets and 554 mortar shells at Israeli targets, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose figures were last updated on Nov. 30.

During this period, the Palestinian rockets - home-made contraptions, known as Qassams - have killed two Israelis, injured many others and drive thousands more to flee the southern town of Sderot, target of most of these attacks. The mortars, by contrast, are aimed mainly at Israeli military sites.

"I think they would like to kill more people if they could," said Ephraim Kam, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has written extensively about the Palestinian conflict.

For its part, Hamas insists the not-very-accurate, short-range rockets that soar daily out of Gaza "do little damage compared to Israeli firepower" and "have turned out to be a more acceptable tactic in the West than martyrdom operations," according to a brief penned by Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

"Martyrdom operations" is a term some Palestinians use to describe a form of attack better known in the West as "suicide bombings," a tactic now largely abandoned by Palestinian militant organizations.

Following its eruption in September 2000, a Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada caused shocking levels of violence that affected both sides, killing combatants and innocents alike.

In April 2002 alone, Palestinians suffered 245 fatalities, their worst single month. That same year, 451 Israelis were killed.

The carnage has subsided dramatically since then. Last year, 30 Israelis were killed in political violence. So far this year, eight have lost their lives.

Palestinian deaths are far higher than this but still vastly reduced from the early years of the intifada. This past May, for example, 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. In June, 27 Palestinians died.

In all, more than 4,500 Palestinians have perished in fighting since the intifada began a little more than 1,100 lives in the same period.

For all practical purposes,the intifada is over now. But an intractable and bloody war of attrition grinds on in its place. Almost daily, more attacks are carried out or attempted, triggering reprisals, leading to further attacks.

Every day, more people die.

Now many worry that this low-intensity conflict may soon explode again into a high-octane war should Israeli forces launch a large-scale invasion of Gaza to halt suspected arms smuggling form Egypt and to cripple the territory's military infrastructure.

"Violence," said Sari Bashi,a Palestinian human-rights activist, "does not help the peace process."