The Gaza Problem

Gaza is mostly sand, but things grow there, just as they do in Israel, the land the enclave’s residents remember as their own. Back in 1956, Israeli military hero General Moshe Dayan urged his countrymen to keep that history in mind at the funeral of a young kibbutz commander killed by Arabs who had sneaked out of the coastal strip, already brimming with people and hard feelings. “For eight years now,” said Dayan, “they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.” He predicted the enmity would last for generations, and it has.

But half a century of history has allowed the cycle of violence to settle into a routine. In an Israel that has put down roots, some officials describe dealing with Gaza as “cutting the grass.” The phrase refers to the business of launching military assaults into the Gaza Strip every so often, whacking away at the militants who have grown too bold, in their eyes, like weeds. What the rest of the world regards as war–Israeli officials prefer to call it an “operation”–has become a chore, more than a little dangerous but not to be avoided.

Except that the issues at its root have not gone away. And the missiles are flying farther and farther. More than a million Israelis live within range of the smaller rockets–homemade projectiles and Soviet-era Grads–that militants routinely launch from Gaza, and a million or two more reside within the Tel Aviv environs reached by a handful of longer-range missiles in the latest fighting. The sirens sound, and even if the country’s Iron Dome antimissile system knocks 9 out of 10 rockets from the sky, there is that 10th one. You still have to run to the shelter or dive under a table. Schools close. Work is missed.

For Gazans, it’s far worse. There are 1.6 million people crammed in a space twice the size of Washington, D.C., and the noise of Israel’s mower is terrifying. In the first six days of Operation Pillar of Defense, the Israelis sent more than 1,500 shells and missiles into Gaza and exploded tons of ordnance, blackening an urban environment that already resembled Baghdad. Despite Israel’s emphasis on surgical strikes, civilian casualties have jerked upward. A family of nine was crushed in a single searing blast. According to Gazan officials, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the operation thus far. (Five Israelis have died.) President Obama, who gave the Israeli air campaign his blessing, saying, “No country on earth … would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens,” cautioned against a ground assault and sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the region even as Egypt tried to negotiate a cease-fire.

The proposed terms, like everything else in the cycle of conflict, had the ring of familiarity. If Hamas ceased firing the rockets, Israel would stop targeting the group’s leaders with missiles and drones, and the 45,000 Israeli reservists gathered just outside Gaza would return to their lives as clerks and fathers. Until next time.

Since 2005, Israel has done all sorts of landscaping in Gaza, ranging from routine air strikes on missile-launch crews to two full-scale operations, including Cast Lead in 2008–a campaign that cost the lives of 1,400 Palestinians and won Israel much opprobrium. It is all part of the essential problem of dealing with Gaza: there has always been a next time.

History’s Stepchild

Gaza is a stepchild of history. It has been ruled by both Egypt and Israel and is beloved by neither, which is a problem for all. Gazans are emphatically Palestinian, a national identity forged from the trauma of losing their land to Jewish armies in 1948, the year Israel was established. Many defeated Arab landowners fled to Gaza, where 3 out of 4 residents are classified as refugees. Hamas’ top official there, Ismail Haniya, lives in a Gaza City refugee settlement called Beach Camp. The Jews initially made no claim to Gaza, and the strip of coast became a holding pen administered by Egypt’s military. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan.

So things stood until the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel swept over both areas. It took control as an occupying power, and for almost four decades that arrangement remained in place. Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank even went to work each day in Israel.

The process of setting Gaza apart was gradual. Until 1991, after the first intifadeh, or uprising, Palestinians could move freely between Gaza and the West Bank. Four years later, Israel began building a fence around Gaza. In 2000, when the far more violent second intifadeh began, Israel closed the gate. Hundreds of thousands of people who had traveled daily to work in Israel found themselves locked in the enclave.

In September 2005, Israel pulled out completely from the territory, gathering up 8,000 settlers and all its troops and leaving behind–so it says–all its obligations as an occupying power. It left the lights on (Gaza’s sputtering electricity is attached to Israel’s grid) and sends in food, but it has no intention of going back except to perform its grass cutting, which is invariably mediated by Egypt. After all, Gaza is on Egypt’s doorstep too. “Most fundamentally,” says Ofer Zalzberg, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, “the problem of Gaza is that it is a hot potato that Israel and Egypt basically try to throw to the other’s lap.”

This time the biggest surprise is how much it’s like all the other times. The Arab Spring barely dented Gaza. The enclave remains under the rule of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, which, after winning legislative elections in 2006, drove out the secular Fatah party once led by Yasser Arafat. Today, Fatah dominates in the West Bank, where about 2.3 million Palestinians reside, and Hamas governs Gaza, which has become such a haven for militants that even Israel regards Hamas as a moderating influence. Pillar of Defense was launched–with a missile strike on a car carrying the head of Hamas’ military wing–to “restore deterrence,” in Israeli parlance. It was pointed retaliation for Hamas’ failing to prevent more-radical militants from launching missiles.

Egypt, of course, was altered by its revolution. The land of the pharaohs is now ostensibly a democracy. Egyptians forced a longtime dictator from power and replaced him, after a long electoral process that ended in June, with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood–which, by the way, is the same Islamist organization that spawned Hamas. But if Hamas’ leaders expected Egypt’s revolution to alter the Gaza Strip’s dynamics with Israel, recent events have provided a lesson in the primacy of national interest and the stubborn depth of Gaza’s dilemma. Under former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Gaza’s door to Egypt–the dusty border crossing at Rafah, on the strip’s western edge–was mostly kept shut. The doors have not opened more than a few inches since the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsy became President. The reason is simple enough: Egypt does not want to take responsibility for 1.6 million more people; it already has 80 million mostly impoverished citizens. Nor is Cairo keen to absorb Gaza’s Islamic extremists. Egypt’s largely lawless Sinai peninsula is riddled with jihadis, some inspired by al-Qaeda.

Israel would have fewer problems if Egypt annexed Gaza and Cairo became responsible for keeping the peace. “The irony here is that Israel and Hamas have the same objective: both Israel and Hamas want to see a more normalized border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt,” says Mouin Rabbani, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. “The ones who have so far been dead set against this are the Egyptians.”

Despite Morsy’s proclamations of Islamist solidarity with Hamas, he’s got domestic issues. Egyptians may care about the Palestinian cause–they fought four wars against Israel before the 1979 peace treaty–but like the people of almost every other Arab nation, they remain jealous of their nationhood. Gazans permitted into Egypt complain of bureaucratic harassment, especially at the Cairo airport. Among workaday Egyptians, the mistrust may be rooted in Mubarak-era caricatures of Gazans as extremists and thugs, but the coolness remains.

The Cage by the Sea

If visitors could pass through the long metal shed from Israel into Gaza–the tunnel that Gazans once used to get to and return from work–they would depart what feels like Europe and emerge, after a long walk in the dark, in what feels like the third world, only caged. Just past the wall, within range of automated machine guns, children scavenge concrete rubble to load onto donkey carts. In a tally kept by the Swiss advocacy group Defence for Children International, 30 times in the space of 19 months a child was shot by an Israeli sniper for straying too close to the wall. Aid became one of the few cash industries after Hamas took over and Israel sealed the area off entirely.

“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger,” a senior Israeli official said in 2006, when Israel limited the amount of food going into Gaza. The formula allowed 2,784 daily calories for an adult man, 2,162 for an adult woman and 1,758 for a child up to age 10, according to a document unearthed by Gisha, a group that advocates for freedom of movement for Gazans. The policy was abandoned in the international uproar following a Turkish ship’s effort to break the Israeli naval blockade in May 2010.

The siege transformed Gaza into a man-made ecosystem of outrage and despair. As in Baghdad, Gaza City’s streets roar with the sound of Honda generators; downtown sidewalks are a snarl of extension cords. The beach is beautiful but parceled into sections by sewage drains and patrolled by Israeli gunboats. A U.N. report warns that without change, in eight years Gaza will cease to be “a livable place.” Its economy depends significantly on tunnels from Egypt, through which come not just missiles and arms but also consumer goods and commodities. The tunnels became Israeli targets in the current fighting.

“I don’t remember a good day,” Lina al-Sharif told me last year on the waterfront. She was 22 and blogged about life in Gaza. “It makes you feel less deserving as a human being,” she said. “The feeling of being trapped is becoming something from inside you. Because when you go outside your house, you know there is nothing for you. I believe the siege is becoming internalized.”

The Arab Spring was fresh then, and al-Sharif had promoted a demonstration demanding that Hamas and Fatah bury their differences. But Hamas thugs broke up the protest, and an announced reconciliation fell apart. The latest violence is marginalizing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his effort to win state status at the U.N. on Nov. 29. Palestinians were asking why he did not journey to Gaza during the fighting, as officials from Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey did.

Those pilgrimages were the one new element in the old story, signaling not only recognition of Hamas but also an important realignment flowing from the Arab Spring. Hamas is now separated from its old non-Sunni Muslim sponsors, Shi’ite Iran and Alawite-ruled Syria, and its most prominent backers have become Qatar, Turkey and, within limits, Egypt. All three are Sunni, and all three are allied with the U.S., as, of course, is Israel. In the lull that follows each cycle of fighting as reliably as spring follows winter, that new reality may hold the possibility of escaping the cycle, perhaps to plant a new idea. Before the soil is exhausted.

GET BEHIND THE STORY WITH JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF KARL VICK AT time.com/gaza