Vol. 73/No. 6      February 16, 2009

Until the Israeli assault, which ended in a political and military defeat for Hamas, Cairo had been reluctant to allow foreign forces to participate in controlling the Egypt-Gaza border.

The Palestinian daily al-Ayyam reported that Egyptian security forces blew up several tunnels near the Rafah crossing February 1.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported February 4 that an agreement was near to reopen the crossings in exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israel Defense Forces soldier held by Hamas since 2006. The agreement would include Hamas rival Fatah, which governs Palestinian areas of the West Bank, retaking control of Gaza crossings along with European monitors.

According to the Palestinian Federation of Industries, some 215 factories and workshops in Gaza were destroyed or seriously damaged during the assault, andthe continuing embargo makes it difficult for others to function.

Tel Aviv is holding Hamas responsible for any mortars or rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, even if launched by groups opposed to Hamas. Israeli air strikes hit Gaza at least three times since the end of January in response to mortar and rocket fire.

Not only did the Israeli assault destroy much of Hamas’s military infrastructure and force it to end its rocket and mortar attacks on Israel, it also accelerated a shift in Hamas’s admitted goals. Three Hamas leaders in Gaza told the Associated Press they would give up their “resistance” in exchange for a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. “We accept a state in the ‘67 borders,” Ghazi Hamad, one of the three, said January 29 in a reference to Israel’s borders before the 1967 war in which Tel Aviv seized parts of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. “We are not talking about the destruction of Israel.”

The aftermath of the assault on Gaza, a popular war among Jewish Israelis, is the biggest issue in Israel’s upcoming February 10 elections.

Just two weeks before the election some 30 percent of Israeli voters were still undecided. Until recently the main candidates were former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from Likud, along with two of the three key architects of the war, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni from the Kadima party and Defense Minister Ehud Barak from the Labor Party.

Front runner Netanyahu says that the Israeli government ended the offensive in Gaza too soon and should “overthrow the Hamas rule in Gaza.” Although he says that “any Palestinian state that would be formed under the current conditions would become an Iranian state,” Netanyahu refused to sign a loyalty oath backed by four other right-wing parties pledging to rule out forever the formation of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu calls for more aggressive action against Iran’s nuclear program. Accusing Tehran of backing Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, he said, “We are going to have to deal with neutralizing the power of the mother regime.”  
 
‘Peace’ candidate
Livni, who is in second place according to polls, portrays herself as the “peace” candidate. She says she is for creation of a Palestinian state as a way to ensure that Israel remains a Jewish state. That way Livni can go to “Israeli Arabs and say to them ‘you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere,’” she told high school students in Tel Aviv. Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Arab and they have demanded an end to discrimination in jobs, housing, education, and government services.

Defense Minister Barak, who is a distant third in polls, vows that Israel will “keep one hand on the pistol.” Barak criticizes the economic policies of both Likud and Kadima. Kadima’s policy “is filled with confusion,” he said, while “Netanyahu is the ultimate representative of the sweeping capitalist outlook which is collapsing everywhere.”

As election day approaches, some polls show the extreme right Yisrael Beiteinu even with Barak’s Labor Party.  
 
Arab parties run in election
On January 21 Israel’s High Court of Justice overturned the central election commission’s decision to ban two Israeli-Arab parties, the United Arab List and Balad. The ban was instigated by Yisrael Beiteinu.

The Israeli assault on Gaza and the continuing restriction on aid to Palestinians there is not popular among Israel’s Arab citizens.

“Our message is to go out and vote,” said United Arab List chairman Ahmed Tibi, in answer to some organizations of Israeli Arabs that call for an election boycott. This is necessary, Tibi said, “to avoid rewarding the right, which wants a Knesset without Arabs and wants the whole country to be without Arabs.”

Balad held one campaign rally in Hebrew and plans another for February 4 in an attempt to win more Jewish support for its platform of “full civil equality” and “a state for all its citizens.”  
 
 
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