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.