The New Middle East (21 page)

‘Every day he would play here and watch his brother go around with his bicycle,’ said Jehad Misharawi. We were standing in the hallway of the small single-storey breezeblock living area of his family home in Gaza. Omar was a beautiful eleven-month-old boy. In the picture Jehad showed me on his mobile phone Omar was wearing dungarees, a blue top and a wide, chubby, toothless smile. He had light almond-coloured skin and wispy brown hair which, because it was a little too long, had been brushed across his forehead away from his big brown eyes. ‘He only knew how to smile,’ said his father lovingly.

In the next picture Jehad scrolled to, Omar didn’t even have a face. It had been burned off along with all his clothes and most of his skin by a missile that had burst through the roof of his house the day before. ‘Look what they did to my Omar,’ Jehad said quietly.

In war, seconds and inches are the difference between life and death. Omar was one step behind his mother, who was carrying his four-year-old brother Ali. Omar was in the arms of his uncle Ahmad. The missile crashed through the corrugated iron hallway roof and hit the wall above the outside door. Omar’s mother Ahlam had just walked out over the threshold. Ahmad Misharawi, a step behind her, carrying Omar, had not. They were both engulfed in flames. The front door was reduced to charcoal. The neat rows of family shoes opposite were melted onto the rack they had been placed on.

This was 14 November, the first day of the war. Israel had just killed Hamas’s military commander, Ahmed Jabari, and now it was bombing what it believed were missile sites and warehouses and Hamas was firing back. A missile went astray and hit the Misharawi home. The family and human rights groups said it was an Israeli airstrike. Privately, at the time, so too did Israeli officials. Publically, for months afterwards, the Israeli Defence Force, IDF, said it could not confirm or deny whether it had hit the house.
¹
Then in March 2013 the UN Human Rights Council said that it was probably a Palestinian rocket falling short. The next month an investigation by the Israeli Military Advocate General reached the same conclusion.
²
Jehad dismissed the UN claims as ‘rubbish’, as did Hamas. Like much else in this corner of the Middle East the cause of the fireball that ripped through the family home was fodder for the competing lobby groups and they argued viciously over it. But the effect of the missile was indisputable.

Omar lived just an hour before his tiny body gave in to the terrible injuries it had sustained. His uncle Ahmad lived a few days beyond the announcement of a ceasefire before he too succumbed to the burns that covered him. His aunt who was also in the house was killed too. Jehad was a colleague of mine at the BBC. He was doing his job as a picture editor in our Gaza office when the rocket struck. We hugged outside the wreckage of his charred home just after Omar’s funeral. ‘God will look after your little boy,’ I whispered to him. ‘I should have been there to protect him,’ he wept.

The Gaza war of 2012 was the first test of how the New Middle East would tackle the problems of the old. It also revealed for the first time how the Arab Spring had changed the balance of power on the ground. Before the uprisings the Islamists in the Gaza Strip were politically marginalised and confined by a blockade imposed on all sides by Israel and, against the wishes of his people, Mubarak’s Egypt. The peace process between Israel and the moderate Palestinian leadership on the West Bank had been going nowhere for years, but security was under control, and that was what mattered to the Israelis and their friends in America. But once the Brotherhood was in power in Egypt, Hamas’s isolation came to an end. During the November conflict a parade of Arab League ministers visited the besieged Strip offering their support for the Palestinian people. They stood side by side with the Islamist leadership of Hamas and condemned Israel as the aggressor. ‘Egypt will not leave Gaza alone,’ said President Mohamed Morsi to a crowd in Cairo during the conflict. ‘I speak on behalf of all of the Egyptian people in saying that Egypt today is different from Egypt yesterday, and the Arabs today are different from the Arabs of yesterday.’
³

‘Hamas’ is the acronym of ‘Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah’, which means ‘the Islamic Resistance Movement’. It began life in 1987 as a wing of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in the territories in the 1930s. It was essentially a Palestinian version of the Special Apparatus wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

In Egypt the Brotherhood leadership eventually won back control of the wider movement from its militant wing. In the Palestinian territories the opposite happened. Hamas, which soon had an armed wing, replaced the Muslim Brotherhood, subsuming its identity and all its functions within it. The Hamas leadership runs everything from the military campaign against Israel to the social welfare programmes. In effect Hamas is what the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood would have looked like if the Special Apparatus had won that fight. In Egypt the moderates eventually triumphed because their circumstances began to change after the death of Nasser. Hamas has not given up its armed struggle because as far as it is concerned the situation in the Palestinian territories has not changed. Hamas refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist and it pours scorn on the idea that negotiations alone with Israel will ever win concessions.

Mahmoud al-Zahar is one of the most powerful men in Gaza. He is a co-founder of Hamas and one of its hardliners. He is officially only Hamas’s foreign minister, but that belies his real influence. As far as Israel is concerned al-Zahar is a high-ranking terrorist.

When I met al-Zahar on a chilly spring morning in 2013 he was sitting in the only sunny corner of his sandy courtyard. Outside the house the main street was blocked off and armed guards stood on each corner. They checked my bags on the way in, though the real threat to al-Zahar is always going to come from the air. In 2003 the Israelis tried to kill him by dropping a huge bomb on the compound we were now sitting in. He was slightly injured but his eldest son Khaled was killed and al-Zahar’s wife was left paralysed. His youngest son Hussam was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2008 during an operation to fire rockets into Israel. Al-Zahar, who is now in his seventies, told me he thought in contrast to the present Palestinian leadership in the West Bank: ‘The crucial point about the people in the Hamas leadership is they have been seen to make sacrifices just like the ordinary people.’ I asked him what Hamas’s relationship with the Brotherhood in Egypt was, now that the Ikhwan were in control there.

‘We are not taking our orders from anyone outside Palestine. Don’t believe that,’ he told me.

The Muslim Brotherhood left each region to deal with their internal and external affairs according to their situation. So ideologically we are the Muslim Brotherhood, but we are not taking our orders from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Syria or elsewhere. Here we are running a policy against the [Israeli] occupation. In Egypt they did not consider the [Mubarak regime] to be occupiers, so they challenged them by peaceful protest. But we were forced to deal with the occupation, once the peaceful method failed, by resorting to an armed struggle.

Which is why the West has tried to marginalise his group. However, the Arab Spring began to overturn decades of Western mediation by weakening the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, that the West had made so much effort to control, and strengthening an Islamist group that it could not. Hamas was a terrorist group in the eyes of most Western governments, whose diplomats were forbidden to officially meet with them. That meant the US and Europe, like Israel, had to deal through third parties. Which meant working through then Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt and Qatar, both of whom sympathised with Hamas much more than they did with the PLO, which is dominated by Abbas’ Fatah movement. In 1974 the Arab League recognised the PLO as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. Now that the Arab Spring has brought Islamist governments to power, it is quite clearly not seen that way by Egypt, the Arab League or even Israel any more.

The Arab Spring had forced Hamas to take a gamble. As it became increasingly clear that most of the victims of the Syrian government’s violence were Sunni Muslims, Hamas began to lose credibility by sitting quietly in Damascus. The shift out of Syria, followed by a public declaration of support for the uprisings, brought them under the more moderate influence of Turkey and Qatar, which became their primary funders. Politically they moved closer to the new Egyptian government led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The rise of political Islam meant Hamas once again had friends among the Sunni Muslim Arab states. This clearly infuriated the man in charge of Israel’s ‘Egypt file’, Amos Gilad, a former major general and seasoned intelligence officer who now advises the minister of defence on policy towards Egypt. ‘There is no dialogue between Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and Israel’s political echelon and there won’t be. He won’t talk to us,’ he complained just before the Gaza war. ‘Out of the desire for democracy, an appalling dictatorship has emerged in Egypt.’
⁴

‘This cycle of violence has definitely strengthened the political legitimacy of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and in the Palestinian territories in general,’ Professor Mokhaimer Abu Sada from Gaza’s Al Azhar University told me while the Israeli airstrikes could still be heard rumbling around us. ‘President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah are irrelevant. No one is talking to them.’ That wasn’t quite true: America was. The then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, had gone that week to the city of Ramallah in the West Bank to consult with the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. It was a desperate attempt to make the Obama administration’s only Palestinian ‘partner for peace’ look as if it was still a player.

President Mahmoud Abbas runs the Palestinian Authority. He is the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, and he heads the most important Palestinian faction in the PLO, and Hamas’s arch-rival, Fatah. But he is ultimately in control of nothing. He ended up with all these titles because George W. Bush hated his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, and would only deal with the Palestinians after they elected someone else. Abbas was, wrote President Bush, ‘a friendly man who seemed to genuinely want peace’.
⁵
Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, as he is also known from his Arab world honorific, which means literally father of Mazen, his son, was promised that if he led these various institutions away from violence, and suppressed the Islamists, he would eventually be remembered as the man who got the Palestinians an internationally recognised state. Instead he has been humiliated by Israel, often abandoned by the US, and sidelined by events. Now, despite the odd dramatic flourish at the UN, he and the institutions he created to provide for the longed-for state have lost the faith of his people.

‘Shame, shame, we can’t live like this’ had been the chant from the crowd of Palestinians in Ramallah on a bright autumn morning a few weeks before the Gaza war broke out. For more than a generation these streets have echoed with indignation and defiance against the Israeli occupation and expansion of Jewish settlements – homes built by Jews on occupied Palestinian territory. The West Bank has been the scene of an epic battle between two peoples over the ownership of land, with claims that go back to the time of the First Testament.

The problem for the Palestinians in general and Abu Mazen in particular is that it is a struggle with which the Western world is now largely bored.

‘The international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome.’ On 19 May 2011 President Barack Obama delivered these words during his first speech on the Arab Spring revolutions. His address was ‘to mark a new chapter in American diplomacy’. His speech was full of hope and tales of courage and freedom until he came to the old chapters of American diplomacy: ‘The world looks at a conflict that has grinded on and on and on, and sees nothing but stalemate.’
⁶

That stalemate was over long before the missile crashed into the roof above little Omar. During his short life the aftermath of the Arab Spring accelerated – something that before had been too incremental to see. The peace process is dying. That is because the premise behind it, the ‘two-state solution’, may already be dead.

The Palestinians insist that the bare minimum they will settle for from the ‘two-state solution’ is ‘the independence of the state of Palestine, with east Jerusalem as its capital, on all the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, to live in peace and security alongside the State of Israel, and a solution for the refugee issue on the basis of [UN] Resolution 194’.
⁷
Resolution 194 relates to the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes in the 1948 war. It says: ‘Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date.’
⁸

The Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu had reluctantly accepted the idea of the two-state solution for the first time in 2009, but he had added: ‘the Palestinian area must be demilitarised. No army, no control of air space. Real effective measures to prevent arms coming in, not what’s going on now in Gaza.’ The Palestinians must ‘truly recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people . . . with Jerusalem remaining the united capital of Israel’ and ‘the problem of the Palestinian refugees must be solved outside the borders of the State of Israel’.
⁹