Way to Win Hearts and Minds

Something extraordinary happened last week. The State Department had originally granted seven Palestinian students in the Gaza Strip Fulbright scholarships to come to the United States for higher education. But last week, the students received e-mails from the State Department, saying that the grants were being "redirected" to other students because Israel had refused to allow the students to leave the strip in accordance with the Berlin-type blockade it has imposed on Gaza for about a year now.

This has puzzled many experts in the region. They point to Israel's grandiose statements about the importance of education, civil society and moderation as a necessity to achieve peace. Furthermore, the Israeli government often portrays Palestinians as the ones who have a monopoly on lacking these elements. Ever since HAMAS took over the government in Gaza, Israel has imposed a collective punishment on the lives of 1.5 million Palestinians that is sucking life out of the people.

One may wonder what it is exactly that Israel wants to achieve. It is true that HAMAS has sent hundreds of rockets into Israel and has vowed never to recognize the Jewish state. Regardless of one's belief about Israel, violence is not the answer and both HAMAS and Israel need to be condemned for their appeal to violence to advance their cause. But the stated purpose of the Gaza blockade is self-defeating.

Israel states that the main purpose of this policy is to cause the kind of hardship so unimaginable that it would lead the people to conclude that the result of their hardship is due to HAMAS's incompetence. Let's imagine that that is indeed what's happening. But what is it that Israel -- or the United States, which has kept silent on the blockade -- expects the people to do? HAMAS is a militant organization that has shown its willingness to use violence to protect its interests. How can Israel want the Palestinian population to be moderate and concern themselves with creating a civil society and at the same time take on a militant organization that is well-armed and supported by outside actors?

Now coming back to the issue of students, any objective observer sees support for education among Palestinians an obvious component of Israel's stated purpose to promote civil society and denounce radical elements. These objective observers, then, wonder why Israel is unwilling to allow the students to leave.

The fact is that Israel's blockade is not one-way; it only prevents Palestinians from leaving Gaza; they also prevent Westerners from going inside, even for humanitarian purposes. In a way, Gaza has become a more extreme and more miserably failed version of America's policy toward Cuba; Isolating a region in order to create the kind of hardship that would leave the people to blame their government instead of the main culprit. Of course the Gaza situation is direr as the land-air-sea blockade prevents Palestinians from trading and interacting with any country or outside group rather than just Israel. Nonetheless, in both cases, the isolation has led to somewhat of the opposite effect.

So why continue with the blockade or prevent investment in even the brightest elements in the Palestinian society? The reason is less than obvious, but it is also the answer to why Israel prevents the United States from talking to Iran or Syria. Israeli hardliners understand that any meaningful avenue for dialogue between the West and Israel's foes may lead the United States to begin taking a more objective and even-handed look at the sixty-year-long struggle. Especially, they understands that allowing the students to come to the United States to be educated would likely lead many of them to become personally engaged in dialogue with intellectuals and journalists and make cases in support of the Palestinian cause with the kind of legitimacy that can be comparable to those made in support of Israeli policies and undercut the influence of the hardliners' lobby on the American government.

Such a dialogue between Americans and Palestinians would defeat a fundamental purpose of Ehud Olmert and other hardline elements within Israel's government. In order for these hardliners to justify violence, occupation and other atrocities, they need to portray all of Palestinians as radical or prone to elements of radicalism. While in theory, hardliners always talk about the importance of promoting civil values, their actions consistently show that is the last thing they want.

This week, AIPAC is holding a conference here in Washington DC that feature the corrupt and unpopular Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and all of our presidential candidates. This is probably the only conference that both Barack Obama and William Kristol attend together. In light of Israel's sixtieth birthday, there will undoubtedly be a lot of reflection on the extent to which Israel's policies have or have not been successful. But in order to answer that question, one has to understand what Israel's real intentions throughout these years have been.

The conventional view is that Israel wants peace and has always been willing to compromise to achieve it. Believers of this view will undoubtedly express their frustration about the lack of progress to achieve that purpose and will blame everybody else -- including HAMAS, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, UN, EU and anti-Semitism in general -- but themselves. However, if one sees Israel's main goal over the years as one that aims to prevent dialogue between its foes and the United States in an effort to dehumanize the foes and justify violence and atrocities in the name of defending itself or its "right to exist," Israelis have been quite successful.

This blogger is pleased to see the baby that was born after World War II reach 60. But perhaps Israel needs to use this cause for celebration with some real reflection on the effect of its policies on its own long-term security. This reflection has to lead Israel to live up to its stated rhetoric and support the moderate and intellectual elements within the Palestinian society. Doing so would at least guarantee that we won't be celebrating Israel's retirement in five years.

Comments

[courtb]

I understand the sentiment (I think) behind Sam Sedaei's article.

First of all, he is 100% right that it is in the best interest of Israel for Palestinian students to become more educated, especially in Western universities. It was such a disappointment to hear that the Israeli gov't, at first, would not grant these students exit visas. It's even more disenheartening to hear about all the Palestinians still waiting for permission to study abroad.

But I digress. There are a few points I'd like to call attention to. What the author downplays is that the reason the blockade is currently so harsh is due to the thousands, not hundreds, of rockets that have fallen onto Israel in the past few years. What's more is that Palestinian militias constantly bomb border crossings that aid, fuel, and supplies come through; making it very difficult to get any sort of humatarian aid into Gaza.

Also, the author has something else backwards. It's hardliners in America that are preventing America and Israel from talking to Iran and Syria. Bush's speech on appeasement was not only directed at Democrats but the Israeli politicians, who have restarted talking to Syria. I've personally heard the editor-in-chief of Ha'aretz complain that the US was preventing Israel from talking to Syria, which would most likely harm Israel in the future.

The Middle East has been a failure all around, and will continue to be a failure if we keep playing the blame game.

[Palspal]

courtb - Israel is in no moral or legal position to dictate ingress and egress from Occupied Palestine. It is not their business anymore than it is the business of say, Canada determining who leaves or arrives in the US. Its NOT their country. But Palestinian student troubles are the least of it. Gaza is Israel's Dachau on the Mediterranean. It's not 'harsh,' it;s genocide. That Israel has to endure home-made rockets (how many Israelis have been killed in all the years - 9? 18? - a good day's kill for the Israeli stormtroopers) is a price it is willing to pay to insure a failed Palestinian entity. Humanitarian aid does not have to come through Israel. It can come thru Egypt or the Mediterranean - but Israel forbids it. A few rockets is the least Israel should endure. If Israel lifts its all-points siege of the native natural people of that region, then no humanitarian aid is needed.
Syria is no harm to Israel. Israel occupies Syria not vice-versa. Just give it back. 22 Arab states guarantee Israel's security. What more do you want? Let me guess - the rest of Palestine.

[reelcobra]

Nice try.

Only the most anti-Semitic HuffPo reader (which is a lot of them) would see equivilance between HAMAS ( a terrorist gang devoted to the destruction of the State of Israel) and the State of Israel itself.

As for the blockade - you mischaracterize it.

Israel is keeping murderers and would be murderers out.

To do less would be suicidal for the nation.

But then, to a lot of you, that might not be bad.

After all, the author is the crank who tried to clean up the Iranian nutcase's statement that Israeal should be "wiped off the map" That tells you where he's coming from.

Now let's see how fast comments on this get closed down...

[Palspal]

HuffPost's Pick

Reel - Anti-semitism, shmanti-shmemitism. Hamas was formed as an antidote to Fatah which had not gained one dunam of land from their Jewish occupiers. Israel was formed as a guilt-ridden gift of the West and as a product of Jewish terrorists who ethnically cleansed the country of its native natural population. Israel raises its children to leave the country and murder the children of others - all in the name of land expansion. How moral is that?

Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' nor for its destruction. That Israel should be replaced with a secular democracy of ALL its citizens is a good idea. And Ahmadinejad would agree - that's all.

[wm1066]

Since Munich I have supported the Jewish state. And the actions of Arafat, who plotted Munich, made me support Israel even more. Then Baruch Goldman (Goldstien?) killed all those muslims during thier prayer service in the 90's,and I started to notice some Israelies were treating thier neighbors badly.
And that the Palestinians had grievences. And the hardliners in the government were the cause. I don't believe the jewish citizen is responsable for this, I take issue with Olmerts government.
I don't think the founders of the Jewish state would approve of Olmert and his policies.

[Palspal]

wm - the founders of Israel are the direct political ancestors of Olmert and Barak and Netanyahu and Sharon. They would not only approve of Israel's behavior, they are the originators of it. Who do you think carried out the ethnic cleansing of '47 - '49? There are no hardliners in the Israeli govt - the Israeli govt is the hardliner - and put in by its Jewish population on a repeated basis. If they wanted peace more than land, they would have vacated the rest of Palestine decades ago.

[Lon]

There are a lot of good points in this post. It is hard to see anything more self defeating for Israel than keeping Palestinian students from taking Fulbright scholarships. If the Israelis are waiting for the Palestinians to rebuild their civil society then they can't stand in the way of them doing so.

That said, Sedaie manages to create some false impressions here. First, there has not been a 60 year push by the Israelis to shut down Palestinian intellectualism. Prior to the first intifada the occupied territories had some of the best universities in the arab world. While the attacks on the University system have been a bad reaction to the violence in the region, it seems clear that they were in fact a reaction to uprisings.

And it is not Israel that is stopping the US from talking to Iran and Syria. If anything we are seeing with Syria that it is the opposite. Israel's talks with Syria have had to get around US objections.