The farce of the ceasefire

Israel is playing a cynical game. It makes phased agreements with the Palestinians that guarantee it will immediately get what it wants. Then it violates all the subsequent phases and resumes its military attack.

CHRIS HEDGES

For decades, Israel has been playing tricks. It signs an agreement with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants – in this case, the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza – but Israel routinely fails to implement the subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace. In the end, it provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed attacks to get them to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation, and abrogates the ceasefire agreement to reignite the killing.

If this latest three-phase ceasefire agreement is ratified - and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel - it will, I hope, be little more than a pause in the bombing of the presidential inauguration. Israel has no intention of stopping its merry-go-round of death.

The Israeli cabinet has postponed a vote on the ceasefire proposal as it continues to bombard Gaza. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours.

The morning after the announcement of a ceasefire agreement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the agreement “in an attempt to extort last-minute concessions.” He warned that his cabinet would not meet “until mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”

Hamas rejected Netanyahu's claims and reiterated its commitment to the ceasefire agreed with mediators.

The agreement includes three phases. In the first, which will last 42 days, hostilities will cease. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages – 33 Israelis who were captured on October 7, 2023, including the remaining five women, those over 50 and the sick – in exchange for up to 1.000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

The Israeli army will withdraw from populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians will be allowed to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks containing food and medical supplies to enter Gaza every day.

In the second phase, which begins on Day 16 of the ceasefire, the remaining Israeli hostages will be released. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining its presence in parts of the Philadelphia corridor, which runs along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. Israel will relinquish control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

In the third phase, the definitive end of the war will be negotiated.

But it is Netanyahu’s office that appears to have already reneged on the agreement. It has issued a statement rejecting the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Philadelphia corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire. “In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphia Corridor until further notice,” while claiming that the Palestinians are trying to violate the agreement. Throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations, the Palestinians have demanded the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. Egypt has condemned Israel’s seizure of its border crossings.

The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even if the Israelis eventually accept the deal, threaten to implode it. Hamas seeks a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily. There is no consensus on who will rule Gaza. Israel has made clear that Hamas’s continued hold on power is unacceptable. There is no mention of the status of UNRWA, the UN agency outlawed by Israel that provides most humanitarian aid to Palestinians, 95% of whom have been displaced. There is no agreement on rebuilding Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no path in the deal to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

Israeli mendacity and manipulation are unfortunately predictable.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1979 by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin without the involvement of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt. But subsequent phases, which included Israel's promise to resolve the Palestinian question together with Jordan and Egypt, allow Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never fulfilled.

Take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, in which the PLO recognised Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognised the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, were both stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be deferred until “final” status talks, by which time Israel’s military withdrawal from the occupied West Bank was to be completed. Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C. The PA has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C – over 60% of the West Bank.

PLO leader Yasser Arafat renounced the right of Palestinian refugees to return to historic lands taken from them in 1948 when Israel was created, a right enshrined in international law, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, where 75% are refugees or descendants of refugees. Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The Israeli military withdrawals planned in Oslo never took place. There was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish settlement, only a ban on “unilateral steps.” There were some 250.000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have grown to at least 700.000. A final treaty was never concluded.

Journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo "a farce, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandoning everything they had sought and fought for for more than a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hopes in order to emasculate the aspiration to statehood."

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on 4 November 1995 after a rally in support of the agreement by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's current Minister of National Security, was one of many right-wing politicians who made threats against Rabin. Rabin's widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters - who distributed leaflets at political rallies depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform - for her husband's murder.

Israel has carried out a series of murderous attacks on Gaza since then, cynically calling the bombings “mowing the grass.” These attacks, which leave dozens dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).

Israel violated the June 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, by launching a cross-border raid that killed six Hamas members. The raid provoked, as Israel intended, a retaliatory attack by Hamas, which fired rockets and mortar shells into Israel. Hamas's barrage provided the pretext for a massive Israeli attack. Israel, as it always does, justified its military attack on the basis of the right to defend itself.

Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009), in which Israel carried out a 22-day ground and air assault, with the Israeli air force dropping more than 1.000 tons of explosives on Gaza, claimed 1.385 lives – according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem – of whom at least 762 were civilians, including 300 children. Four Israelis were killed in the same period by Hamas rockets and nine Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza, four of them victims of "friendly fire". The Israeli newspaper Haaretz would later report that "Operation Cast Lead" had been in preparation for the previous six months.

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who served in the Israeli army, wrote that:

The brutality of Israeli soldiers is matched by the mendacity of their spokesman… their propaganda is a pack of lies… It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. They did so with an incursion into Gaza on November 4 in which six Hamas men were killed. Israel's goal is not only the defense of its population, but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the population against its rulers.

This series of attacks on Gaza was followed by Israeli assaults in November 2012, known as Operation Pillar of Defense, and in July and August 2014 in Operation Protective Edge, a seven-week campaign that left 2.251 Palestinians dead, along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.

These Israeli army assaults were followed in 2018 by largely peaceful protests by Palestinians, known as the Great March of Return, along the Gaza barrier fence. More than 266 Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers and another 30.000 were injured. In May 2021, Israel killed more than 256 Palestinians in Gaza following Israeli police attacks on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Further attacks on worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque occurred in April 2023.

And then, on October 7, 2023, the breach of the security barriers enclosing Gaza, where Palestinians had languished under a blockade for more than 16 years in an open-air prison. The attacks by Palestinian gunmen left some 1.200 Israelis dead – including hundreds killed by Israel itself – and gave Israel the excuse it had long sought to raze Gaza, in its Iron Sword War.

This horrific saga is not over. Israel's goals remain the same: to wipe the Palestinians off their land. This ceasefire proposal is yet another cynical chapter. There are many ways it can fall apart, and I suspect it will.

But let us pray, at least for the moment, that the mass killing will cease.

Chris Hedges He is an American journalist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He was an international correspondent for 15 years for the New York Times and headed that newspaper's Middle East and Balkan bureaus. Currently, he hosts the weekly internet television program The Chris Hedges Report. Your work can be followed here.