Accepting Crumbs?

By Steve Hynd

Earlier today, Marc Lynch posted a piece entitled "A Good Deal For Gaza" in which he noted reports that the Israeli government is to "significantly ease the blockade of Gaza in exchange for American support for a whitewash of the investigation of the flotilla incident" and argued that " trading off the investigation for the blockade was the right move" for Gazans.

Newshoggers' pal Tehranchick writes in an email published with her kind permission:

Palestine has been invaded, occupied, oppressed, squeezed and split for 60 years. We watch the proof everyday from eyewitness accounts, videos and writings from experts. Olive groves are bulldozed and burned. Houses are invaded and taken over by anyone of israeli descent who feels like it. Settlers are encroaching past government limits (remember settlement freeze) without consequence. Why is this? How is this? netanyahu is a useless bag of wind. He can turn the lights off and on at will and he knows it.

60 years is a long time to have lived in these conditions. 60 years is a long time to be, as a group, labeled terrorists when fighting for your lives. Did anyone call the folks in South Africa terrorists when they fought the oppressive regime in charge there? No! The media screams every time there is a rocket out of Gaza ~ bfd!

Throwing a few crumbs in their (Palestinians) direction isn't going to help when we know that the israeli government can just as easily stop with the crumbs. I see this issue of 'easing' as nothing more than concession and appeasement after murderous attack on the flotilla. So please, convince me that Palestinians are going to get real help from 'the easing.' Convince me that netanyahu is serious about change.

That these "crumbs" can be stopped and started at Israeli whim is something Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist worries about too.

you have to treat anything that comes from a government that has lied and weaseled its way out of its treaties and international obligations for decades with a grain of salt. The devil will be in the details, such as the list of allowed goods Israel still has to publish and the character and length of the border procedures for people and goods moving in and out. It's crucial to wait to see what this means and how it's implemented.

El Amrani obviously worries that despite the reconstruction the easing of the blockade will bring, as he puts it:

It still leaves impunity for Israel for its actions during that war, and efforts to get the Goldstone Report and other attempts to hold it accountable should be redoubled. But some of the basic rights of the Palestinians, such moving within their country (that is, between the West Bank and Gaza) are still curtailed. They now all have unrepresentative governments that have outlived their mandates, and a leadership that not only appears reluctant to reconcile but may be actively prevented from outside powers from doing so.  

And he believes that it will take another crisis and another Israeli PR disaster to move the Obama administration into positive action.

To be honest, I think it will take more than one. But I also think that the Gaza Flotilla episode has undermined something crucial in the united-we-stand wall that the US and Israeli have presented to the world. Such crises will come easier and can be smaller now, garnering positive publicity gradually through events that will not all be as shocking as the Flotilla attack. By forcing this small retreat, future Israeli and U.S. retreats will come easier and faster. Thus, although it sticks in my craw to countenance a lack of legal accountability for the Flotilla assault, I'll reluctantly take the product, if that leads to a wall being tore down, instead. That position, of course, may turn out to be woefully optimistic depending on Israel's future actions and international reaction to them. Still, it's worth a try because if Israel is determined to be recalcitrant then there's no way short of a US led invasion to change that - and I'm so done with that kind of thing, even were it a remote possibility.