To some of us, Israel's recent actions in Gaza have actually served as a poignant reminder of the ways things could have been. Look at a photograph of Gaza in the 1940s and you might be in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria, with its palm-lined beaches and pretty, belle époque buildings. After the first Israeli withdrawal from Gaza City in 1994, both the West Bank and Gaza indulged in a brief honeymoon. The Oslo accords had been signed a year earlier and Arafat had returned to Gaza. I remember sitting under parasols on the beach drinking coffee with local journalists. Gazans had not been allowed on the beaches for years and suddenly the atmosphere was one of carnival. Israeli settlements were still in place but the Israeli army was rarely seen.
Gazans prepared themselves for a real independence in which the city and the beautiful shoreline would be theirs again. The port and airport would open and they would export their fruit, vegetables and flowers once more. The Japanese would set up car factories, bringing jobs. Some people even believed Gaza could become a little Hong Kong (and this, they argued, was what Israel truly feared, more than terrorism). Wherever I went in the city or in the Shati (beach) refugee camp, grievances against Israel seemed almost forgotten. Gazan ire was directed at the recently arrived, arrogant Fatah men from Tunis who moved into the big villas along the coast. Hamas was rarely mentioned, its popularity minimal. Nobody appeared interested in suicide bombers. I visited that grand old man Haidar Abdul Shafi, the highly-respected Gazan physician and leader who had fought in the British-Jordanian army during the second world war. Over coffee and cakes in his conservatory, we discussed how Gaza would blossom again.
Sadly, it soon became clear that the new Palestine, made up of only 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine, was a mirage. Settlements, settler-only roads and checkpoints went up all over the West Bank and the settlements inside Gaza were protected by the might of the Israeli military. Israeli gunboats patrolled the shoreline and the port was closed. Hamas, nurtured by Israel in its infancy in 1987 as a foil against Fatah, began to win popular support as the misery intensified. Far from a viable independent Palestinian state emerging, the situation was becoming far worse than before. Consequently, Hamas's popularity increased, just as it is continuing to do today.
When Hamas won the elections in January 2006, it was a victory for their moderates (but most of the big names have since been assassinated). Although the newly elected Hamas government was unwilling to recognise of Israel as a Jewish state, it did agree to the principle of a ten-year ceasefire—the next generation, it said, would decide on long-term strategy—and agreed to abide by resolutions reached by the Palestinian Authority. These included UN security council resolution 242, which recognised Israel. In practice, therefore, Hamas recognised Israel.
But the west turned its back on Hamas, which had won what were arguably the freest and fairest election ever held in the Arab world, on the grounds that a terrorist organisation could not form a legitimate government. Had the outside world agreed to talk to the new government instead of launching a crippling blockade against it, the usual responsibilities of governance would have prevented Hamas from launching even primitive rockets into Israel.
This is a "what might have been" story. If Israel had offered the Palestinians genuine and viable independence in the West Bank and Gaza after 1993, the Palestinians would arguably in time have become its friends. Israel would have become a secure economic superpower in the region, no longer financially dependent on the US. If Palestinians had themselves renounced their struggle, countries like Iran would have had trouble constructing an argument against Israel. Once the occupation had ended, outstanding issues such as the status of Jerusalem and the Palestinian "right of return" would have followed, with Hamas rockets and suicide bombers things of the past. Is this is a dream? Perhaps so—but it is a dream that is now unlikely ever to be dreamed again.
