At least Netanyahu has ordered a 10-month freeze on settlements, something no other Israeli prime minister has done. Wouldn’t it be your turn now to take a step in his direction?

It isn’t a real moratorium, because a few thousand housing units are still being built in the West Bank, and Jerusalem is completely exempted from the settlement freeze.

You negotiated with Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, even though settlement construction was continuing without restrictions at the time. Aren’t you applying a double standard here?

In a way, yes. But I have asked Olmert to freeze settlement construction every time we met. Besides, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in the interim. In his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, he called for a complete freeze on settlements. When the American president does this, I cannot accept anything less.

But now Obama is only talking about Israeli “restraint” in building settlements. At his request, you even agreed to a symbolic handshake with Netanyahu in New York.

I was initially very optimistic after Obama won the election. His Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, kept coming to us and promised to urge the Israelis to stop settlement construction completely. Mitchell said that the negotiations would only resume after a moratorium. The American government suddenly backed away from this position in September.

Are you saying that it’s the Americans’ fault that things aren’t progressing?

Naturally, I’m not pleased with the Americans’ change of course. But I will not back down.

What do you expect from Obama?

I still hope that he will revive the peace process. At least he has to convince the Israelis to announce a complete freeze on construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem for a few months.

Apparently the pressure Obama has exerted on Israel until now hasn’t been very effective.

It isn’t my job to tell the Americans how to deal with Israel. But they have options. They are, after all, the most powerful country in the world. Obama said that a Palestinian state constitutes a vital American interest. The president is under an obligation to apply all of his energy to achieving peace and the vision of a Palestinian state.

Could it be that the real reason for the current standstill is that you don’t trust Netanyahu?

What he has said so far, at any rate, leads me to question whether he really wants a solution. He has not expressly accepted the two-state solution.

In a speech at Bar-Ilan University in June 2009, Netanyahu said: “If the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, we are ready to agree to a real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state.”

You see, he’s the one who is setting preconditions. He declares Jerusalem as the “undivided and eternal capital of the State of Israel.” He refuses to discuss the question of Palestinian refugees. And he insists that we accept Israel in advance as a Jewish state.

But the principle of the two-state solution must mean that the one state is for the Palestinians and the other is for the Jews. Why do you have a problem with recognizing Israel as a Jewish state?

We recognized the State of Israel within the 1967 borders. Whether it defines itself as a Jewish state, a Hebrew state or a Zionist state is its business. As far as I’m concerned, it can call itself what it pleases. But he cannot force me to agree with this definition.

Israel wouldn’t be Israel without a Jewish majority.

It is a fact that the majority of the citizens of the State of Israel are Jews. But it isn’t within my power to define Israel’s character.

But with such remarks, you create the suspicion among Israelis that you actually hope to eventually overcome this Jewish majority, particularly when you continue to insist that all Palestinians expelled in 1948 have the right of return.

I understand these concerns. Today, there are 5 million Palestinian refugees. I’m not saying that they all have to return, but we need a fair solution. United Nations Resolution 194 …

… of Dec. 11, 1948 …

… states that those who relinquish their right of return must receive appropriate financial compensation for doing so. In other words, the solution has been on the table for 60 years, so what’s the problem?

Netanyahu’s predecessor Ehud Olmert made you the best offer: The establishment of a Palestinian state on far more than 90 percent of the West Bank, a division of Jerusalem and the return of a few thousand refugees to Israel. Why did you reject it?

I didn’t reject it. Olmert resigned from office because of his personal problems.

You waited too long. If you had accepted, most Israelis would probably have been willing to ignore the corruption charges against Olmert. Former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban once said that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity …

 … to miss an opportunity. Yes, I’m familiar with the quote. But we did seize the opportunity when Olmert was in office. We negotiated very seriously with him. We exchanged maps showing the locations of the borders. Then he left office. His successor Tzipi Livni lost the subsequent election. So where is the opportunity that we missed?

If you had accepted Olmert’s offer early enough, it would have strengthened those who support the peace process. Instead, you now have to make do with Messrs. Netanyahu and Lieberman.

That’s right. We were in a race against time to reach a solution. But I wasn’t the one who thwarted an agreement. Olmert resigned from office shortly before the finish line.

Mr. President, the Palestinian camp is deeply divided. Your Fatah movement was unable to prevent Hamas’s violent takeover in the Gaza Strip in 2007. How do you intend to guarantee that the same thing won’t happen in the West Bank?

We have complete control over the security apparatus in the West Bank. The situation is 100 percent stabile. We will not allow the same thing to happen in the West Bank that happened in Gaza.

As long as Hamas controls Gaza, Israel will never agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

We spent two-and-a-half years conducting a dialogue sponsored by Egypt to seek reconciliation. It culminated in a document that we, representing Fatah, signed on Oct. 15, 2009. To this day, Hamas refuses to sign this document.

How can reconciliation be possible between the secular outlook of your Fatah movement and the Islamist worldview of Hamas?

We are a people with different religious and political sentiments. Some are extremely religious, some are strictly secular and others are moderate. But we have been accustomed to living together for the past 60 years. All of these movements exist within the PLO.

Would Marwan Barghuti, the hero of the second Intifada, who is imprisoned in Israel, be someone who could bring about reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas?

Marwan Barghuti is part of the leadership of Fatah. He is a member of the central committee of our movement. If he were released, it would be very advantageous for us. But not even Barghuti will be able to bring about reconciliation on his own. There is an external reason why Hamas isn’t signing the document.

You are referring to Iran.

That’s what you said.

Mr. President, you have announced that you will not run again for the office of president of the Autonomous Authority. Is this an admission that you will no longer be able to make the Palestinian dream of a sovereign state a reality?

That’s absolutely correct. The road to a political solution is blocked. For that reason, I see no purpose in remaining president of the Autonomous Authority. And I also have a warning for the world: Do not drive the Palestinians to the point of total hopelessness.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

There had been persistent rumors that the Israelis wanted to release Barghouti from prison, hoping to pave the way for him to become a potential “Palestinian Nelson Mandela.” But when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist right-wing government came into power five months ago, the chances of that experiment coming to fruition seemed reduced to almost nothing. But now Israel’s hawkish premier has the opportunity to release the man from cell 28 without losing face among his supporters. In exchange for turning over Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier abducted three years ago, radical Islamist Hamas is demanding the release of 450 Palestinians it has listed by name.

Somewhat surprisingly, Barghouti is on the list. The Fatah leader has been a vocal critic of what he calls Hamas radicals’ “coup” in the Gaza Strip, and he has also called for reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, which have clashed violently in the past. If Palestinian unification is even conceivable, it will require Barghouti’s participation. With German mediation, the Shalit deal, long in the making and hampered several times by various details, could be completed successfully in the coming weeks.

Watching from Washington

Officials in Washington are also keeping a close eye on — and apparently taking a favorable view of — the potential prisoner exchange deal and the prospect of changing the face of the Middle East. U.S. President Barack Obama is pursuing ambitious goals in the Middle East, and the comprehensive peace plan he has been developing is now taking shape. Obama is tying together the region’s two main problems, which are widely viewed as intractable: the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and the threat of Iran becoming a nuclear power. At the same time, he is applying tremendous pressure to all sides to achieve simultaneous progress on both fronts, progress that could lead to an overall solution.

But isn’t it naïve for the U.S. president to hold out the prospect of a peace treaty in two years, in a region where radical Islamists remain determined to destroy Israel and radical Zionists create new provocations every day by expanding the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories? Can the Iranian leadership still be dissuaded from pursuing its nuclear ambitions? “The explicit linkage is, in any case, a dangerous gambit,” concludes the British daily the Guardian.

The way Obama’s new approach works was in evidence during the Israeli premier’s trip to Europe last week. Although Obama was not physically present, his presence was nonetheless felt, as were his demands. On the one hand, he wants the Israelis to halt settlement construction in the occupied territories and negotiate with the Fatah leadership. On the other hand, Obama’s plans call for tougher sanctions on the Iranians, beginning this autumn, if they do not accept Washington’s offer of comprehensive nuclear talks by the end of September. Netanyahu was intent on preventing the parallel treatment of these two sets of demands — and, above all, the establishment of a link between the two subjects — but failed to do so during his European trip.

When the Israeli prime minister stood next to his British counterpart, Gordon Brown, at No. 10 Downing Street on Tuesday, there was a palpable distance between the two men. The construction of Jewish settlements, Brown said, is an ” obstacle” and must be stopped. At the same time, Brown threatened Tehran with tougher sanctions. In Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy seconded Brown’s demands and, in addition to agreeing with his call for a tougher approach, fundamentally questioned Tehran’s reliability and willingness to compromise. “These are the same leaders, in Iran, who tell us that the nuclear program is peaceful and that the elections were honest. Frankly, who believes them?”

On Wednesday, also in London, Netanyahu met with Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East. For weeks, George Mitchell has been repeating Washington’s call for a “complete halt to settlements” like a mantra. Behind the scenes, there was apparently even talk of Washington suspending its deliveries of military equipment and its billions in aid if Israel refused to cooperate.

Western action bears fruit

Probably the biggest disappointment for Netanyahu came on Wednesday. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Netanyahu’s predecessor Ehud Olmert had called Israel’s “best friend in Europe,” and who has taken an extremely mild stance toward Israel’s occupation policy in the past, joined the chorus of critics when she said unambiguously that a halt to settlement construction was a “key condition” of comprehensive peace, and that “substantial changes” on the part of the Israelis were needed on this issue. “Time is the essence,” the chancellor cautioned her guest, while at the same time stressing the need to increase pressure on Tehran. But Netanyahu did not address Merkel’s demands in Berlin, and instead limited himself to emphasizing Israel’s good relations with Germany.

The West’s concerted action seems to be bearing fruit. The stalemate, which is the status quo in the Middle East, is beginning to change. Apparently all it takes is a lot of pressure for politicians on all sides to react.

In May Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’ Damascus-based political leader who is known for his uncompromising demands, surprisingly declared that his “goal” was the establishment of a Palestinian nation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This cautious overture is unlikely to be enough to convince the West to enter into talks with Hamas. However, if Mashaal meant what he said, it would amount to a de facto recognition of the existence of Israel. Even Fatah, with which both the West and Israel are negotiating, has not gone much further.

Could ultra-conservatives derail the peace talk plan?

There are signals coming from Iran that at least nourish vague hope that even the Iranians have grasped the signs of the times. According to information from diplomatic circles, a group of Iranian politicians in the “pragmatists’ camp” has proposed a “limited suspension of uranium enrichment” that would approximate United Nations demands. The government has rejected such proposals, but because it was previously assumed that Iranians are united on the nuclear issue, Western observers believe that the episode is at least noteworthy.

Besides, Iran has just told the weapons inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it is willing to allow more thorough inspections of a few particularly “suspicious” nuclear facilities, such as the plant in Natanz, which is being used to make fuel, and the heavy-water reactor in Arak, which is capable of producing plutonium. In its latest, not-yet-published report, the IAEA notes that Iran hasn’t increased the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium since May. Of course, experts believe that an Iranian change of heart is highly unlikely. Tehran has reduced its pace of development several times in the past and made concessions to the UN inspectors when it seemed tactically opportune. To date, Iran has weathered three rounds of UN sanctions relatively unscathed. However, a possible fourth round of sanctions in October that would entail a ban on fuel imports would deal a heavy blow to the economy.

A new round of peace negotiations

Netanyahu is already believed to have quietly agreed to some of Obama’s demands, albeit with great reluctance. He now plans to impose a nine-month moratorium on new construction in the settlements, with the exception of East Jerusalem. Although this falls short of Obama’s expectations, it is probably sufficient as the basis for a new round of Mideast peace negotiations the U.S. president plans to launch, and attend, in the fall — especially since Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, responding to pressure from Washington, is believed to be willing to meet with Netanyahu. Obama plans to explain details of the revival of the peace process to leaders of other major nations and as many representatives of the Arab world as possible on the sidelines of the next session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Netanyahu’s cabinet of unpredictable ultra-conservatives could thwart these efforts to achieve rapprochement. One of those conservatives is Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz, who has described Obama’s positions as “borderline anti-Semitic.” The national security advisor, known for his irascibility and his peculiar understanding of democracy, has also triggered alarm. Before Netanyahu’s European visit, Uzi Arad called upon Merkel not to openly discuss the issue of settlement construction. He also insisted that steps should be taken to prevent journalists from asking related questions.

Sadly, another politician can be counted on to stir the pot in times of crumbling convictions or at least shifting political positions: Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. The agitator, who repeatedly draws attention to himself with his racist comments, said early last week that he did not believe in peace with the Palestinians, and that Obama’s ideas were “unrealistic.” Referring to the Oslo Accords, he said: “Sixteen years have passed since then. Even in another 16 years, we won’t have an agreement.”

The Lieberman problem could very well resolve itself soon. The Israeli judiciary is investigating the foreign minister for money laundering, embezzlement and corruption, charges he denies. Nevertheless, Lieberman has promised that, if indicted, he will resign.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

Avigdor Lieberman, 50, squeezes his bulky frame into a chair at the head of the table, facing a tray of sticky chocolate croissants and soft drinks. “We have achieved a lot,” he says, in his Russian-accented Hebrew, pronouncing his O’s as A’s and rolling his R’s. A yellowed map of the faded Soviet Union hangs on the wall.

Lieberman founded and shaped his party. For him, an immigrant from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, a new era is about to begin. He intends to be Israel’s new foreign minister. It will be a historic moment, and he can hardly wait. “The faster a government is formed, the better for the country,” he tells the media patriotically.

The man who is set to become Israel’s chief diplomat is known for many things, but not his talent for diplomacy. Words like “compromise” or “consideration” have been absent from his vocabulary so far. When then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed releasing 350 Palestinian prisoners in 2003, Lieberman uttered one of his notorious sentences: “It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea.”

His words have the force of cluster bombs. He spares no one. He once proposed executing Arab members of the Knesset with ties to Hamas or Hezbollah as “Nazi collaborators.” Later he suggested that Israel should proceed in the Gaza Strip the way Russia did in Chechnya — without consideration for losses or civilians. This remark gained him a reputation as a virulent racist.

If Lieberman had his way, perhaps Tehran would have been obliterated as a punishment for Iran’s refusal to shut down its nuclear program. Years ago he threatened Egypt — Israel’s key ally in the Arab world — with the bombardment of the Aswan Dam unless the regime withdrew support for then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He also had one of his typical remarks at the ready for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. It was about time the president paid a visit to Jerusalem, Lieberman said, “and if he doesn’t want to come, he can go to hell.”

Cairo has made it clear that the foreign minister-designate remains persona non grata in Egypt and that he won’t be received unless he issues an apology first. To protest the Lieberman choice, the Egyptian ambassador in Tel Aviv may not attend a celebration in Jerusalem this week to mark the 30th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal.

For many Arab governments the thought of Lieberman as foreign minister is tantamount to a declaration of war. In the United States, where President Barack Obama wants to pursue an “aggressive” policy of peace in the Middle East, the declared foe of the negotiation process may face a cool reception. The European Union will probably not behave any differently. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana calls Lieberman “a man with whom I have been at odds for my entire life.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, who will soon become Israel’s prime minister for the second time, would have preferred to avoid such problems. He wanted to place the warhorse into a lower-profile position, such as finance minister. But Lieberman is set on being foreign minister. Netanyahu managed to forge a government on Tuesday with Ehud Barak’s Labor Party — but not without first closing coalition deals with two of Israel’s right-wing parties, including Lieberman’s.

It’s an irony of history that Lieberman can now dictate terms to the man who paved his way in politics. Lieberman started his career in the right-wing Likud Party as an activist for the party’s student wing. Netanyahu appointed him party secretary in 1993, and in 1996 Lieberman ran Netanyahu’s first successful campaign for prime minister. He was then named director-general of the prime minister’s office. But he left Likud in 1999 to found a competing nationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, or Israel Our Home — which immediately secured four seats in the Knesset.

Since then, Lieberman has been part of almost every administration, but he has always found an excuse to leave the government and join the opposition. As transportation minister under Ariel Sharon, he resigned to protest Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The next prime minister, Ehud Olmert, invented a new post for him, the Ministry of Strategic Planning, but Lieberman resigned because of the peace talks in Annapolis, one of the many unsuccessful attempts to bring permanent peace to the Israelis and Palestinians.

Lieberman dressed up each of his resignations as the result of his unwillingness to compromise — out of pure conviction, of course — but in fact he wanted to shine a favorable light on his party before the next election, a strategy that almost always succeeded.

But now he will be Israel’s next foreign minister — an unbelievable step up the ladder, even by Israeli standards. Never before has an immigrant from the former Soviet Union made it so far.

“Vladimir the Thug”
Lieberman was 20 when he arrived in Israel in 1978. At first he made ends meet by working as a baggage handler for the national airline, El Al, then — famously — as a nightclub bouncer. He is said to have literally hunted down Arabs in his student days, a rumor he denies. According to official records, however, he was charged with having hit a boy in the face who had beaten up his son. Lieberman confessed to the crime in a court two years later and was fined and ordered to pay compensation. The satirical television show “Hartzufim,” the Israeli version of the British satirical puppet show “Spitting Image,” named a doll after him: Vladimir the Thug.

The name fits. Lieberman wants to turn all of Israel into a virtually exclusive club for Jews. He sees minorities as a threat, and in the election campaign he demanded that Arab Israelis should take a “loyalty test” to ensure their patriotism. He bluntly expresses ideas many Israelis may think but won’t venture to say out loud.

Even Tzipi Livni, the current foreign minister, who is respectable and moderate compared with Lieberman, recently suggested that Israeli Arabs should seek their “national identity” in a Palestinian state. The tenor of her remarks was that in Israel, at any rate, they were not about to accommodate any Arab nationalism.

Lieberman used to align himself with advocates of a Greater Israel, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. But he’s no fundamentalist Jew for whom the partition of the country would constitute a sacrilege. He lives in a settlement on the West Bank, but he would give up his house for peace, he said recently. “I support a viable Palestinian state,” he claims.

Lieberman is fond of combining ideas from the right and the left. For instance, he proposes redrawing the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories, thereby annexing groups of settlements while ceding Arab cities near the border. For this reason, even some moderate Palestinians see Lieberman as a thug who can be a pragmatist.

The former negotiator Mohammed Dahlan has called Lieberman a “key to peace,” at least according to Jossi Beilin, one of the architects of the Oslo Agreement in the early 1990s. In his recent book “Innocent Abroad,” Martin Indyk, one of the U.S. negotiators at the failed Camp David talks in 2000, describes a secret channel of communication between Lieberman and an envoy of then-PLO President Yasser Arafat. According to Indyk, Lieberman agreed in principle to the Barak administration’s territorial concessions.

So is Lieberman a thug with pragmatist tendencies? Such transformations can never be completely ruled out in Israel, the land of extremes. Sharon, the father of settlement construction on Palestinian soil, later withdrew Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. His successor, Olmert, wanted to “Judaize” Arab East Jerusalem. Today he advocates dividing the city.

Even Lieberman is starting to exhibit symptoms of prudence. A few weeks ago, he paid a visit to a well-known Israeli geographer, who used maps to show Lieberman how Jerusalem, the Holy City, could be divided up between the Jews and the Palestinians. “He was very interested,” the geographer said after the meeting.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, visit Spiegel Online or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

Appropriately serious and yet relaxed, the 38-year-old major was probably selected by the Israeli army press office for the meeting with Spiegel because he comes across as being so intelligent and urbane.

Israel makes a distinction between terrorists and civilians — that, at least, is the message the reservist keeps repeating in various forms. He shows an Israeli Air Force video that depicts Palestinian fighters taking cover behind a tree, firing off a rocket and then quickly driving away in a jeep. Black cross hairs can be seen following them. No other people are visible. Suddenly the jeep turns into the garage of an apartment building.

Then the cross hairs move away from the house and come to rest over an empty field. A bomb strikes the field a few seconds later. “We did everything possible in the war to protect the lives of innocent civilians,” says Major I.

It is precisely statements like this that are being called into doubt, now that the Gaza campaign has come to an end. Each new image of destroyed residential buildings and every mother’s complaint about the killing of her children puts Israel under growing pressure. Was the scale of the Israeli attacks justified? Did the Israelis take sufficient steps to protect the innocent? Were aid organizations prevented from evacuating civilians?

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a “full investigation,” Amnesty International is accusing Israel of “war crimes,” and Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: “It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law.”

Officially, Israel vehemently denies such accusations, but its leadership is getting nervous. The office of the prosecutor general in Jerusalem is gearing up for a wave of lawsuits from around the world. The military is currently compiling a set of documentation for each complaint. Internal investigations have begun, and soldiers have been instructed not to comment on specific allegations.

It is a continuation of the war with legal means. The principal charge against Israel is that it reacted to shelling by Hamas fighters with disproportionate firepower, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. Some of the facilities the Israelis fired upon include a hospital, schools run by the United Nations and the U.N. headquarters building in Gaza City.

Palestinians across the board insist that Hamas would never have used these buildings as hiding places. But this argument crumbled last week, when it was revealed that Hamas had fired one of its rockets from the shelter of the Al-Shuruk tower in Gaza City, where many international television broadcasters had rented offices.

A recording that a correspondent for the Al-Arabiya Arab television network showed shortly before a live broadcast provides proof. In the tape, which was sent to the Israeli media, the sound of a rocket being fired can be heard, and the correspondent confirmed that “it was fired from below our office.”

But even if Hamas fighters did fire rockets from the safety of mosques and schools, Israel’s critics argue, bombing these buildings was excessive. The numbers speak more clearly than any accusation: 13 dead Israelis and 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including large numbers of civilians. Even if one takes the Israeli figure for Palestinian casualties — about 700 dead — the high death toll still raises a fundamental question: Can the laws of war even be applied to a conflict that has ended with such an overwhelmingly one-sided death toll?

Israel’s huge military superiority, it seems, ran roughshod over not only the people of the Gaza Strip, but also the conventional laws of war. But is International Humanitarian Law (IHL), as it was essentially stipulated under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, even suited to protect the population in Gaza?

IHL, the benchmark for the treatment of war crimes, as well as the obligations of a country at war and its military, was developed for classic warfare between nations — symmetrical shows of strength between two national armies that are essentially well-matched and clearly recognizable. But the conflict in the Gaza Strip was obviously asymmetrical. Israel’s enemy is a group of terrorists that fights while in hiding and uses the civilian population as human shields. This alone is impermissible under the rules of the Geneva Conventions.

The asymmetrical wars of recent years, in the Middle East, in Africa or in Afghanistan, have led to the practice of the IHL rules being applied to such cases, albeit in modified form. If it is not possible — be it from the air or the ground — to identify exactly where the enemy is located and who is protected as a civilian under IHL, how can it be possible to strictly limit hostilities to combatants fighting for that enemy?

As brutal as it may sound, it would be unreasonable to expect a country to accept any legal restrictions that put it at a serious military disadvantage. A law of war that, within the framework of acceptable practices, requires the Israelis to exercise restraint on the level of force they use would not be enforceable. After all, an international law that is not accepted by individual countries is a law in name only.

In war, say most legal experts, each side must have the right to seek victory. Is Israel, for example, required to spare the bakery of a good citizen of Gaza who pulls out his bazooka from behind his oven at night to secretly take part in the fighting? It is not, because international law defines this citizen as an enemy. But how can this be verified? And who should make that decision before an attack?

Thus, the so-called principle of proportionality in war, even asymmetrical warfare, has only limited applicability. It does not cover the lives of enemies. In war, anyone can be killed who is considered part of the enemy, even if he bakes bread during the day. Although civilians who cannot be considered part of an enemy’s forces cannot be targeted directly, many experts believe that that party’s enemies can accept their deaths as “collateral damage” — but only if the number of deaths is not blatantly disproportionate to the military value of the operation.

Part 2: No Fear of Conviction

The principle of proportionality in war sounds like an inhuman calculation performed by cynical opportunists. But war is war.

Or is it? Is it possible to ignore moral criteria altogether? When former U.S. President Bill Clinton had to decide whether to launch a particular rocket attack as part of the hunt for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, he chose not to, because he had seen a children’s swing on one of the reconnaissance photos. At the time, however, the United States was not officially at war with bin Laden. In a comparable situation, the human rights of the affected citizens must be respected — and this is also the position taken by the Israeli Supreme Court in its rulings.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that soldiers need not fear prosecution for war crimes abroad. “The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the state of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,” he said.

The Israelis can argue that they have imposed strict restrictions on their army, especially for their asymmetrical war against terrorists. Asa Kascher of the University of Tel Aviv calls the charges of supposed war crimes “nonsense.” Kascher, a philosophy professor, wrote the code of ethics for the Israeli armed forces and developed a set of central questions for the war against terrorism. Under his guidelines, Israeli officers are first required to determine:

• how immediate is the threat from a particular terrorist,
• how “involved” the suspect is, i.e., whether the suspect is a sympathizer, an informer or a combatant,
• how reliable the intelligence information about the location of terrorists is, and what weapons, ammunition and explosives are deemed appropriate for a mission.

Israel takes great pains to avoid civilian casualties, claims Kascher. But he also says that it is impossible to fight terrorism without collateral damage. “If I were to categorically rule out killing a terrorist if he is holding a child,” says the philosopher, “I could no longer defend myself.”

Off the record, however, Israeli soldiers admit that the units involved in Operation Cast Lead faced fewer restrictions than in past operations. This, they say, was mainly the result of lessons learned in the 2006 Lebanon war, where many Israeli soldiers died after being lured into ambushes.

Israel is also suspected of having used ammunition that causes particularly horrible injuries. The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) is looking into charges that Israel used ammunition that contained depleted uranium. The Israeli army itself is already investigating a claim that 20 white phosphorus grenades were fired, in violation of military regulations, into residential areas in the northern Gaza Strip. Doctors in Gaza are also reporting previously unknown symptoms in some of their patients, including people who showed no visible damage but had severe internal injuries. Such injuries could have been caused by micro-shrapnel from so-called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs.

Last week Israeli officers were instructed to consult with the office of Israel’s chief public prosecutor before traveling abroad. Now that many countries, especially in Europe, have enacted their own national legal codes regarding war crimes, they could face arrest abroad.

That was what happened to Maj. Gen. Doron Almog in 2005. As the head of the Israeli military’s Southern Command, Almog had signed off on various “targeted killings,” including an operation on July 23, 2002, when 15 people died after a 1,000-kilo bomb was dropped over Gaza City. When Almog, now retired, flew to London, he discovered at the airport there that an arrest warrant for war crimes had been issued against him. The major general never left the aircraft, and returned to Israel without incident.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

As head of the preventive security forces of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in the 1990s, Dahlan, 46, took a heavy-handed approach to punishing members of the rival Hamas faction, locking many of its leaders in prison. Current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas named Dahlan coordinator of the Palestinian security forces in March of this year. Dahlan stands for everything the Hamas extremists hate: He took part in the secret peace negotiations between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel. He has long maintained contacts with U.S. and Israeli intelligence, placing him at the top of Hamas’ death list as a collaborator and traitor to the Palestinian cause. Early this year he was asked whether he was afraid. “Forget it,” he answered, “not for a second.” Dahlan insisted that he stood behind his men 100 percent. “We will do everything, I repeat, everything, to protect the Fatah activists,” he said at the time.

But when the Islamists in Hamas began the last stage of their fratricidal war against Fatah secularists last week, there was no trace of Dahlan. He had gone abroad weeks earlier, officially to undergo knee surgery, and seemed in no hurry to return. He was in Cairo when he learned of the first casualties within Fatah. Instead of hurrying back to the Gaza Strip to lead a counteroffensive, he went into hiding in the West Bank.

It was the second time in 18 months that Hamas took the world by surprise. In January 2006, contrary to all expectations, the party won a parliamentary election in the Palestinian territories. Fatah went on as if nothing had happened, but now, more than two and a half years after its founding leader’s death, the party of Yasser Arafat has been driven from the Gaza Strip.

Israeli intelligence agencies had been warning for months that Hamas was arming itself with new weapons and ammunition through clandestine tunnels. Informants had reported that the Islamists were sending fighters to Lebanon and Iran for training.

The power struggle — which a “government of national unity” under Hamas’ prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was meant to avert — erupted with unprecedented violence. Early in the week, Hamas militias abducted a cook from Abbas’ presidential guard and hurled him from the roof of a 15-story building. They stormed the apartments of Fatah members with hand grenades and automatic weapons, mowing down everyone in their path, including old women and small children. More than 100 people were killed and 200 were wounded in the fighting.

President Abbas abandoned the Gaza Strip and declared the government of national unity a failure. On Sunday he swore in a new emergency cabinet with Salam Fayyad, his finance minister, as interim prime minister. Abbas dismissed Haniyeh from government, but Haniyeh still insists he leads a legitimate Palestinian cabinet. The result is two geographically separate Palestinian regions, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — politically separate and even hostile entities.

The takeover in Gaza is sending rumbles throughout the Middle East. Hamas has links to radical groups in other countries, particularly Egypt. Sixty percent of the residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees or the descendants of refugees, and many young Palestinians from Gaza have studied in Cairo, where they were inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood. A number of these radicalized young men founded an Islamic resistance movement in 1987 called Harakat al-Mukawama al-Islamiya, or Hamas for short.

Now, a subgroup of the Muslim Brotherhood controls its own territory for the first time. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has managed to keep the Brotherhood under control in his country through brutal tactics — but now Gaza may become a breeding ground for anti-Mubarak radicals. In Lebanon, the Shiite group Hezbollah has acted as a state within a state for years, demonstrating its military strength in a war with Israel last summer. Even Jordan’s King Abdullah may feel unsafe, because a large percentage of his country’s population is of Palestinian origin, and some of the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan are under de facto Hamas control.

The division of the Palestinian territories into a “Hamastan” on the Mediterranean and a “Fatahstan” on the West Bank of the Jordan River puts an end, for now, to the dream of an independent Palestinian state. This fraternal strife is the most recent example of the Palestinians’ habit of “not missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban put it. The Palestinians refused to accept the UN’s partition plan in 1947, which would have given them 45 percent of the former British mandate of Palestine. In 2000, then-PLO leader Arafat rejected the offer of Israel’s then-prime minister, Ehud Barak, to establish a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the territories occupied in 1967. When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in August 2005, Fatah and Hamas had a chance to demonstrate their capacity for ruling their own people. But the militias opted for civil war instead.

Israel has contributed to the escalation in the Gaza Strip. Immediately after Hamas’ takeover of the government, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert froze Israel’s monthly payments of sales tax and customs revenues to the Palestinians. These funds stemmed from the export of Palestinian goods and, according to an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, were collected by the Israeli authorities. The funds in question amount to about $54 million, which is about a third of the Palestinian Authority’s budget. On Sunday, Olmert promised to shore up the West Bank government by releasing these funds to Abbas and his new prime minister.

Israel has repeatedly sealed off Gaza, and important staples like milk and flour have grown scarce. Exports come to a periodic standstill; flowers spoil behind border checkpoints and tomatoes rot in Palestinian greenhouses. Unemployment has led to growing frustration — providing a recruiting pool for the military arm of Hamas, the so-called Qassam Brigades. “For many people, this was the only way to make money,” says Fatah official Abdallah Frangi, wearily. Because the Palestinian government was no longer able to pay salaries, some members of the security forces even led a double life, serving the Fatah-affiliated police units by day and the Hamas militia by night.

The so-called Middle East Quartet, consisting of the U.N., the United States, Russia and the European Union, has also given mixed messages over the last year and a half. First the group managed to secure Hamas’s participation in the 2006 parliamentary election (over Israeli opposition), but after Hamas won, it severed ties with the new government and made talks with Hamas contingent upon three conditions: The Islamists would have to recognize Israel, renounce violence and adhere to existing peace deals. Hamas refused, which led to its international isolation.

The United States, in particular, worked to undermine Hamas, supplying Abbas with money, weapons and ammunition. “The Americans clearly encouraged a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas,” wrote Alvaro de Soto, the U.N.’s recently resigned Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, in a recent report.

Now the Palestinian movement is split, suddenly, under two leaderships; and once calm returns to Gaza, the militants may be expected to return their attention to Israel and resume firing Qassam rockets across the border. Israel fears not just a new terror offensive but also growing Iranian influence in the Gaza Strip. (Tehran already funds and supports Hamas’ military operations.) The government of Prime Minister Olmert wants to prevent the conflict from spilling over to the West Bank at all costs. This explains its promise on Sunday to unfreeze Palestinian tax revenue. Now — according to the strategy — Palestinians in Gaza will come to realize how much better off their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank are under Fatah.

Hamas has also been attempting to maneuver beyond the violent streets of Gaza. As a gesture to the West, it announced last Friday that it would take steps to secure the release of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who has been held by kidnappers in the Gaza Strip for the last 14 weeks.

Meanwhile, a new humanitarian crisis has begun to take shape there. The territory has been sealed off, and aid organizations estimate that food and fuel supplies will last for about another two weeks. According to reports on Monday, an Israeli fuel company, Dor Alon, lifted a gasoline embargo placed on Gaza last week, but it’s hard to see how ordinary Palestinians there will avoid feeling isolated. “If there is a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, we cannot abandon the people there in their misery,” said Hans-Gert Pöttering, the German president of the European Parliament.

Ironically, the crisis may lead to something Israel has refused for the year and a half since Hamas won power at the polls — diplomacy. Even the government in Jerusalem realizes that it will have to open Gaza’s borders as soon as starvation becomes a real possibility. “Then we will be forced,” predicts a senior government official, “to talk to the new leaders.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

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