'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Memories of the truce that failed

I've just about finished (let's hope!) reviewing the final edit of the long piece I've written for Boston Review since I got back from Israel/Palestine. It should be in the upcoming issue.

Anyway, here's one little bit of data I pulled together for the piece, that I've been pondering on quite a lot since. This does not attempt to be a complete description and analysis of Palestinian-initiated hudna (truce) of last year. It just presents some of the basic casualty figure for that period. You'll have to read the BR piece to find the longer version (and a lot more, too.)

When Mahmoud Abbas became Palestinian Prime Minister in May 2003, one of his first priorities was to persuade Hamas and Islamic Jihad to agree to the broad Palestinian hudna vis-a-vis Israel that was required from the Palestinians under the terms of the Road Map. By late June, he and his main negotiator on this front, Ziad Abu Amr, had won the support of all the Palestinian factions for a three-month truce. The truce went almost immediately into effect.

Here are the casualty figures for that period:

Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in Israel or the occupied territories:

May 2003--13
June--28
July--2

Ariel Sharon's government in Israel never felt itself bound any commitment to any kind of reciprocal ceasefire. Nevertheless, many Israelis were extremely eager to see an easing of the tensions, particularly with the annual tourist season about to peak. So, though Sharon reserved the right to carry on with actions like the extrajudicial killings he ordered against suspected Palestinian militants and the use of excessively lethal fire against demonstrators, still, the Palestinians' announcement and indeed enactment of the truce in late June 2003 evidently had an effect on Israel's behavior, too:

Number of Palestinians killed by Israelis in Israel or the occupied territories:

May 2003--60
June--60
July--4

(All these figures are from B'tselem, collated from this table .)

Throughout August, the truce started to unravel. It is hard to pinpoint exact responsibility for this: certainly, acts of major escalation were undertaken by both the Israeli forces and the Palestinian militants, with each side claiming that its acts were undertaken purely "in retaliation for" the prior acts of the other side. Crucially there was no truce-monitoring mechanism on the ground that could (like the one, for example, that for many years operated in South Lebanon) help to establish the precise sequence, course, and consequences of all sides' actions. Crucially, too, the Bush White House did nothing throughout July or August to push forward a political process that could help to calm things down.

Number of people killed by people from the "opposing" community in August 2003:

Israelis killed--23
Palestinians killed--24

On September 6, Abbas resigned. In his resignation speech to the Palestinian Legislative Council he told the legislators that he had been prevented from carrying out his goals as PM by the Israelis, the Americans--and by Arafat.

So now, eight months after Abbas's amazing conclusion of that hudna, it seems to me appropriate to spend a little time appreciating what he and his team achieved in terms of bringing those casualty tolls down so successfully, even if only for one month. And also regretting, oh how deeply regretting, that Sharon, Bush, and Arafat were so little focused on that goal of casualty reduction or, even better, casualty termination that they quite wantonly allowed the hudna to slip away.