Genesis Of The Gaza Crisis – OpEd

In the midst of World War I, the question arose of what would happen to the Ottoman territories if the war led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was out of the need for the Triple Entente to secure their respective interests in West Asia that the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreement was reached in May 1916.

By this secret convention, the three powers – Britain, France and Russia – decided to divide Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine amongst themselves. Russia would get Constantinople (Istanbul) and the areas around it, which would provide her access to the Mediterranean Sea. France would get the areas around Aleppo (Syria) where they had economic and strategic interests, and Britain would get Palestine. Britain had hoped that by settling the pro-British Jewish people in Palestine, it might help her in securing maritime access to its most vital possession – India – through the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf.

The Balfour Declaration of 02 November 1917 was thus the British statement of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The declaration was endorsed by the Allied Powers and was included in the British mandate over Palestine. Approved by the League of Nations on 24 July 1922, Israel was created within Palestine in 1948. 

‘Aliyah,’ or Jewish migration from Europe to Ottoman Palestine started in the mid 19^th century partly due to the persecution of Jews in Europe, and partly because of the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire. During the interwar period, migration gathered pace. The Arab revolt in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 was triggered by the rising tide of Jewish influx into Palestine, which was suppressed by British forces and Jewish paramilitary groups.

By the time the World War II was over in 1945, Jews, now a sizeable community in British Palestine, had established a parallel administration called the Jewish Agency for Palestine, led by David Ben-Gurion from 1935 onwards. After the war, a weakened Britain referred the Palestine issue to the UN. The UNSC Resolution 181 called for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem placed under an international regime. Jews welcomed the plan, but the Arabs rejected it. India voted against it. 

In May 1948, just before the British mandate expired, the state of Israel was declared. Five Arab countries declared war on Israel. In the war, Israel captured 23% more territories, including West Jerusalem, than what the UN had proposed. Some seven lakh Palestinian Arabs became refugees. Again in the 1967 war, Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria within six days. The whole of Palestine came under Israeli control. Israel’s writ still runs in these areas except Sinai. Israel has been building settlements in the occupied areas since its victory in the Six Day War. These settlements proved to be a major impediment to peace. 

From the mid-1960s, the PLO started violent resistance against Israeli occupation. Israel’s initial policy was to crush the PLO, for which it invaded Lebanon twice, in 1978 and 1982. Later, it reached a peace deal with the PLO at Oslo in 1993, and accepted the idea of Palestinian self-rule. Oslo collapsed because the Palestinians, who had been promised self-rule within 5 years, felt deprived by the whims of Israeli politics, while the Israelis lost hope on the PLO leadership’s ability to deliver peace.

When the Oslo accord collapsed, Hamas which had opposed the deal began to rise as a major force in Palestinian politics. Starting in 1979, the Israeli government led by Golda Meir decided that they wanted a radical Islamist “counterweight” to the PLO, which was run by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah Party. Israelis believed that if the Palestinians were trapped in a factional feud, they wouldn’t be able to fight Israel. Tel Aviv provided direct funding to a fringe group of radicals led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, who had formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, and was one of the founders of Hamas. 

In 2005, after the Second Intifada, Israel withdrew settlers and troops from Gaza. Hamas won the 2006 vote and following a brief war with Fatah, it seized Gaza in 2007. Even the Annapolis Conference of November 2007 could not revive the Palestinian peace process due to differences over the map of the proposed Palestinian state. Since then, Gaza has been under Israeli blockade, while the West Bank was under Israeli occupation. Turkey has floated the idea to establish a system where regional countries would be security guarantors for Palestine, and the West for Israel to stop further conflicts.

However, for a two-state solution, three issues must be addressed – border, capital, and the refugees’ right to return. Palestinians want their state based on the 1967 border with East Jerusalem as the capital. However, settlement of these core issues now looks remote.

The Gaza crisis has come as a big relief for Russia, looking to divert America’s focus away from Ukraine. Moscow had hosted the delegations of Hamas and Hezbollah in March, and another Hamas delegation in October this year. Before the attacks on Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had obtained large monetary transfers through the Garantex cryptocurency exchange in Moscow. Russia had been kept out of the loop of the US-brokered Israel-Saudi peace deal. If this deal took shape, then Washington would be encouraged to try its hand in fashioning a similar normalization deal between arch rivals Iran and Israel. In that case, Moscow stands to lose its historic leverage in the Arab world and by extension its implicit leverage over Hamas and Hezbollah. In the long-running Arab-Israeli discord, Russia has often sided with the Arabs. Moscow has had a tumultuous relationship with Tel Aviv since the days of Stalin following his rejection of Golda Meir’s appeal to let the Russian Jews return to their homeland.

South Caucasus is considered as the soft underbelly of the Russian state. For some years now, Israel has been meddling in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia. For Israel, Azerbaijan is a source for oil and gas, and a market for its defense products. With the backing of Israel and Turkey, Azerbaijan has twice waged wars against Armenia in recent times, disrupting the peace process brokered by Russia. Due to lack of Russia’s firm support, Armenia is gradually weaning itself away from Russia’s sphere of influence, and drawing closer to the Anglosphere. This means possible NATO presence in Armenia, in future, which gives Russia the jitters to play its game in the Gaza strip. Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to restrict the power of the judiciary were being challenged on a national scale, leading to one of the most serious political schisms in the nation’s history. Hamas took advantage of the internal political turmoil in Israel prodded by its foreign patrons.