The political leader of Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas has warned of an explosion of regional instability from the international "siege" imposed on his party. Speaking a few days before the fortieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Six-Day War, Khaled Mashaal told London's Guardian newspaper that the Palestinians were "steadfast" and "right" and warned of "an explosion that will be in the face of the Israeli occupation".
"The siege is a collective punishment, and a crime", he was quoted as saying in the May 30 edition of the paper, referring to the economic isolation of Hamas, which has struck a power-sharing deal with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fateh movement.
"Now the international community is trying to undermine Hamas. This will lead to an explosion that will be in the face of the Israeli occupation. The damage will affect the stability of the entire region."
Hamas is considered a terrorist group in Israel, the European Union and the United States.
Mashaal blamed "negative foreign intervention, especially by the US and Israel" for deadly internal conflicts between his movement and Fateh.
Israel has stepped up air strikes on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another radical group, in retaliation for cross-border rocket attacks over the past two weeks. The raids have so far killed at least 13 civilians and 37 militants, mostly from Hamas.
But the strikes have failed to halt rockets attacks against Israel. Some 250 missiles have been launched into Southern Israel since May 15, according to the army, killing two civilians and wounding 20 others.
"The Palestinians are steadfast and there are many ways of resisting according to opportunities and conditions", Mashaal told the paper.
He said armed resistance would eventually help the Palestinians overcome Israeli occupation. "What caused Sharon to leave Gaza, Barak to leave Lebanon in 2000?" he asked.
"And look what's going on in Iraq, where the greatest power in the world is facing confusion because of Iraqi resistance.
"Time is on the side of the Palestinian people. We are right, and our cause is just, despite the appeasement of Israel by most powerful members of the international community".
40 years of occupation and Palestinians never worse off
Crushed militarily, hamstrung diplomatically and utterly divided, 40 years after Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, Palestinians have never had it so bad.
Israel's stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War humiliated the Arab world and galvanized Palestinian resistance as the Jewish state came to control Palestinians' daily lives in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In a bid to wrest international attention to their cause, the 1970s gave birth to the Palestinian tactics of plane hijackings and the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
In the Palestinian Territories, armed groups staged attacks against Israeli occupation troops in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
After 20 years, the fight to overthrow Israel in the occupied territories, orchestrated by the Palestine Liberation Organization under the late Yasser Arafat, culminated in the first Intifada or uprising of 1987 to 1993.
An armed Intifada since September 2000 has featured suicide attacks and plunged the region into violence, seriously complicating the quest for a negotiated solution.
Palestinians, however, thought the end of occupation was near with the 1993 Oslo accords ushering in West Bank and Gaza autonomy after Arafat renounced "terrorism", recognized Israel and nullified the PLO charter calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.
But hopes were quickly dashed. "In Oslo, the main issues such as settlements, water, the fate of Jerusalem and refugees were left aside. It was a clever Israeli tactic to neutralize the first Intifada", argues Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti.
The number of Jewish settlers living on Palestinian territory has doubled since the Oslo accords, reaching its current 260,000 -- with an additional estimated 200,000 in occupied East Jerusalem.
The collapse of Oslo, which Barghouti blames on Israel, has allowed radical Palestinian factions, namely Hamas, to strengthen its position, he says.
Israel's election of the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu to power in 1996 after a series of Palestinian attacks, and more recently the construction of Israel's separation barrier carving up and isolating the West Bank, have sunk them.
At the height of the second uprising, Israel boycotted Arafat, who returned to the Palestinian Territories in 1994, declared him an obstacle to peace and accused him of doing nothing to prevent attacks. The peace process has never recovered.
Mahmoud Abbas's election as Palestinian president in 2005 revived hopes but no concrete progress was made. The election to government of Hamas has deepened the stalemate.
While defending the Palestinians' right to resistance "in all its forms", Barghouti admits that suicide bombings in Israel have tarnished its image.
"These attacks have put us in the wrong and have been exploited by Israel to show the uprising as a conflict between two military powers.
"The popular pacifist resistance we saw at the start of the first uprising is the most appropriate form of struggle for the Palestinians. That was the high point of our resistance", he maintained, accusing Israel of maintaining a "loathsome apartheid regime" to maintain its occupation in the territories.
Ahmad Abdelrahman, presidential adviser and former Arafat aide, admits that suicide attacks inside Israel have "turned world public opinion against us", but that resistance within the territories has borne fruit.
"The first Intifada opened the way to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The second Intifada cleared the way to the vision of two states. If the Israelis don't withdraw, a third Intifada will force them", he predicted.
The two-state vision is enshrined in the so-called "road map", the latest international peace plan, which has basically languished as dead since its launch in 2003.
Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but it continues to control its borders, transforming the territory "into a big prison", according to Barghouti.
The ensuing chaos, however, has strengthened right-wingers' opposition to further pullouts and charges that Palestinians are unfit for statehood.
"Abu Ammar's [Arafat's] historic achievement was to erect the Palestinian flag over part of Palestine. The workings of an independent state that he set up are irreversible despite the present difficulties", says Abdelrahman.
Political columnist Samih Shbeib sees the attacks carried out by Hamas in Israel after the advent of the Palestinian Authority in the context of the power struggle between the Islamist movement and Fateh, the secularist party created by Arafat.
Since March, the two parties have been seated around the same cabinet table in a fragile unity government set up under Saudi auspices to resolve deadly infighting between their supporters, the political crisis, economic meltdown and diplomatic isolation.
"Arafat was busy with politics and Hamas with attacks. That sparked an internal conflict that continues to this day", he says.
A conflict that changed the face of Middle East
A full 40 years on, the six-day war that rocked the Middle East in 1967 still sends tremors through the region after dramatically reshaping the lives of Israelis, Palestinians and their neighbors.
After weeks of belligerency and brinkmanship by regional and international players, Israel launched what it called a preemptive strike in the early hours of June 5, 1967 and quickly faced off Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
Six days later, the war ended with Israel the clear winner, its people brimming with joy, the Palestinians in shock and the regional geopolitical map crucially changed.
The 19-year-old Jewish state conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan from Syria, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt -- an area three and a half times larger than the state of Israel itself.
The meticulously-planned war marked what some in Israel have called its brightest moment, as the young state established military superiority and enlarged its borders.
But others see the war as its biggest mistake, as it turned into an occupying power lording it over one million Palestinians -- nearly half the population of Israel proper at the time.
For Israelis, the image of their soldiers overrunning East Jerusalem -- and with it Judaism's holiest site, the Western Wall which Jews had been prohibited from visiting since the creation of the state 1948 -- was all-powerful. "There was this perception of invincibility and the return to the sources of Jewish history", recalled Ilan Greilsammer, an Israeli political analyst.
But The Economist wrote in a commentary in its May 26-June 1 issue that the military triumph has been made to look like "one of history's Pyrrhic victories" and has turned into "a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors".
For Palestinians, the war marked the nadir of despair since the creation of the Jewish state: they came under Israeli occupation and their dream of a state of their own seemed to slip out of reach.
"The hated enemy, who had driven the Palestinians from their homes in 1948, was now in control of their lives, lands, and property", Israeli historian Benny Morris has written.
But it also mobilized their resistance movement and propelled it onto the world stage.
"The traumatic demolition of the status quo reawakened Palestinian identity and quickened nationalist aspirations in the conquered territories and in the Arab states", Morris wrote in Righteous Victims.
And it paved the way for the majority of Israelis to eventually come to grips with the fact that Palestinians were owed a state of their own and for the two sides to sign the 1993 Oslo autonomy accords.
"The moment Jordan lost the West Bank and Egypt lost Gaza, such a possibility was born", Peres said.
And Greilsammer commented, "After two Intifadas, political and military reversals, the Israelis have learned to admit the idea of retreat and the creation of a Palestinian state, something that was unthinkable in 1967 and 20 years ago".
The Economist said Israel has finally "at least abandoned the dream of a Greater Israel that bewitched it after the great victory of 1967".
On the international stage, the war thrust the Arab-Israeli conflict back to the forefront, placing it smack in the middle of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union.
The war still haunts US diplomacy, with Washington uneasily navigating between its staunch support for Israel and a desire to build bridges to the Arab world.
Facing above all the need to pacify Iraq, the US government today has been reaching out to regional Arab powers like Egypt, but is constrained by the popular view that it is an unquestioning ally of Israel.
"The [Arab] public still looks at the US and the world largely through the prism of the Arab-Israeli issue", observed Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at Washington's Brookings Institution.
In October 1967, four months after the decisive Israeli victory over the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the US Administration of President Lyndon Johnson began a massive program of arms supplies to the Jewish state.
Declared US policy beforehand had been to stay even-handed, with an isolated Israel surrounded by hostile Arab powers and Palestinian refugees clamoring to return to their pre-1948 lands.
The United States had sold a batch of missiles to Israel in 1962 but three years later, Deputy Defense Secretary Peter Solbert wrote: "In no case, however, will the US contribute to providing one state in the area a military advantage against another".
All that changed after the Six-Day War as the United States stepped in to become Israel's leading military supplier in place of France, which as a result of the conflict imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state.
The United States was motivated also by the Cold War need to counter hefty arms supplies by the Soviet Union to Egypt and Syria.
The June war led to Israel's only peace treaties with Arab countries: the 1979 treaty with Egypt, with the return of the Sinai, and in 1994 with Jordan after the Palestinian autonomy deal.
But the war also planted the seeds of the many deep-rooted problems that generations of diplomats have found impossible to untangle in their search for peace -- from the Jewish settler movement to sovereignty over Jerusalem, sacred to Christians and Muslims as well as to Jews.
And it is East Jerusalem that the Palestinians firmly intend to make the capital of their future state.
The war still casts a shadow over American diplomacy, with Washington struggling to navigate between its support for Israel and desire to build bridges to the Arab world.
It has also defied decades-old UN resolutions 242 and 338, which laid down the land-for-peace principles that has yet to be implemented with the Palestinians or the Syrians.
"It is scandalous the occupation has persisted since 1967. This conflict should have been resolved long ago, and its continuation is an indictment of all involved", from the warring parties to the big powers, wrote The Economist.
On several occasions, Washington has tried to balance its military support by acting as an "honest broker" in peace efforts, notably in the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt and the Oslo accords of 1993.
But Scott Lasensky, senior researcher at the United States Institute For Peace, said: "In the most recent period, the US has been surprisingly absent from Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
"It's shocking that 40 years have passed and yet the US and the international community as well has not put forward a specific vision for what a two-state solution could look like".
Resolution 242 called for Israeli forces to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and for Arab non-aggression against the Jewish state as the basis of a lasting peace.
That "land for peace" formula remains the bedrock of peace initiatives today, and still provides an opening if President George W. Bush's Administration were serious about mediation, Telhami said.
In polls of Arab public opinion, the desire remains for the United States to take a decisive role in pushing the Palestinians and Israelis to a comprehensive peace accord that would encompass all regional powers.
"You can see that by far the number-one answer is brokering Arab-Israeli peace based on the 1967 borders. By far that is the issue that they see as most important [for US policy]", Telhami said.
© Monday Morning 2007
