MIDDLE EAST: In an atmosphere of mutual distrust and bad faith, Nuala Haughey argues that neither side in the Middle East conflict is in a position to cast the first stone.
After marathon negotiations in a Jerusalem hotel last November, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice brokered an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians aimed at opening Gaza's borders, boosting its shattered economy and allowing its besieged residents to taste some limited freedom.
Fresh from clinching the overnight deal, a beaming but exhausted Dr Rice announced at a news conference that the pact was "intended to give Palestinian people the freedom to move, to trade, to live ordinary lives". Two and a half months later, the agreement has faltered, dashing hopes for a rekindling of peace talks in the wake of Israel's withdrawal last summer of 8,000 illegal Jewish settlers and troops from the sand dunes of the coastal strip after 38 years of occupation.
Israel has reneged on its undertaking to allow Karni terminal - the sole agreed crossing point for goods entering and leaving Gaza - to operate at full capacity.
In fact, at Israel's insistence, Karni has been closed for almost three weeks, and Palestinian officials warned this week that Gaza is losing €414,000 ($500,000) a day in exports of fruit, vegetables and flowers which are spoiling at the border or being dumped.
The UN reported this week that the 1.3 million residents of the fenced-in 365 sq km enclave are also facing crucial shortages of vital medicines as well as basic foodstuffs and diary products. Israel insists Karni's closure is due to "a concrete security threat" from militant groups digging tunnels in the area. At the behest of the Israelis, Palestinian security forces have dug three large trenches to intercept any subterranean passageways over the past month, but found nothing more than a small hole, which Israel said was the start of a tunnel.
Equally upsetting for Palestinians is Israel's decision - also based on security threats - to almost immediately renege on an undertaking extracted by Dr Rice which would have seen the introduction last December of passenger and cargo convoys between the disconnected territories of the West Bank and Gaza. The collapsed Gaza deal can be now filed alongside a raft of other aspirational agreements paraded enthusiastically on the world stage before perishing amid the bitter recriminations that are the currency of this entrenched conflict. The mutual reproaches have intensified in the past week following the emergence on the Palestinian national political scene of the Islamic militant group Hamas which gained a startling victory in parliamentary polls. Israel wasted no time in announcing that in light of this development it would flout a signed agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) by withholding from it some €37 million it owes in customs revenue for this month.
Acting Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert also urged the world to boycott a Hamas-led government unless the radical group renounces its blatantly anti-Semitic founding charter, recognises the right of the Jewish state to exist, disarms, commits to solely peaceful means and agrees to honour all outstanding agreements between the PA and Israel, including the failed Oslo Accords of the 1990s and the still-born 2003 Roadmap. Then, and only then, might Israel even consider talks with a future Palestinian government which will likely still include the PA chairman, President Mahmoud Abbas, who Israel for the past year decried as an unsuitable peace partner because of his inability to reign in militants.
Some analysts point to the ironic fact that Palestinians turned to the radicals of Hamas partly because of Israel's very failure to engage with moderates like Abbas, who needed negotiated achievements to build domestic support.
Why, Palestinians are now asking, should the world bear down on Hamas to honour past obligations when an increasingly unilateralist Israel has abrogated so many itself, including its failure only this week to pay the Palestinian Authority money it owes under Oslo commitments? Israel berates the Palestinians for failing to live up to their Roadmap commitments to dismantle terror organisations. Yet not only has it wilfully reneged on its own undertakings to immediately freeze illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, it has in fact continued to enlarge them.
Building houses and settler-only roads is hardly the same as dispatching suicide bombers. But Israel's relentless expansion of settlements combined with the acknowledged land grab that is its illegal West Bank barrier are seriously jeopardising prospects of a fair and viable territorial basis for any future Palestinian state.
"If I was to advise Hamas I would not advise them to repeat the mistakes of the Palestinian Authority without getting some concessions in return," says Ziad Abu Amr, a newly elected moderate lawmaker in Gaza whose campaign was supported by Hamas.
"Fatah made all their concessions and Israel continued expanding its settlements, incursions, assassinations, denying national rights, blocking people's movements, building walls and stalling on negotiations. The Palestinians renounced the armed struggle and recognised Israel's right to exist, and what did they get in return? Recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation? Big deal." For their part, Hamas leaders have spent the days since their electoral victory countering Israel's polished rhetoric with some home truths of their own.
The unrepentant terrorist organisation, which dispatched more than 50 suicide bombings since 2000, points out that it has adhered to a unilateral truce agreed by the Palestinian factions last March. Since then, Israel has killed more than 190 Palestinians, including several Hamas members and, in the past week alone, two children. Palestinian militants, including Islamic Jihad, which rejected the March truce, have killed 35 Israelis in rocket attacks and suicide bombs in the same period. Israel blames Hamas for only one of these deaths.
Hamas has also rejected as "blackmail" threats of international aid cuts, and replies to journalists' questions with questions of its own.
Why should we recognise the Jewish state's right to exist, its leaders ask, while successive Israeli governments have in practical terms thwarted the statehood ambitions of their people? Hamas has not forgotten that Ariel Sharon, Israel's hardline prime minister who currently lies in a coma, rose to power within a Likud Party whose platform of support for settlement expansion in the biblical "Land of Israel" was an explicit denial of Palestinian aspirations for statehood in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Israeli parliament includes religious Zionist parties who maintain that there can only be one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and that Arabs should be transferred from the West Bank and Gaza to other Arab countries.
Sharon, who spent many years vigorously rejecting Oslo's planned two-state solution, even had in his cabinet a tourism minister who once referred to Arabs working illegally in Israel as "lice" and "cancer".
And Olmert himself attracted only mild international censure when he declared in June 2003 that the then elected PA chairman and Oslo signatory, Yasser Arafat, "can no longer be a factor in what happens here. Expulsion is certainly one of the options; killing is also one of the options".
But however inflammatory and racist such remarks, they are well matched by Hamas's charter which advocates the elimination of Israel and telling its people that "when our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, Jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims".
The murky reality of this conflict is that neither side is entirely in a position to cast the first stone.