Scott McConnell writes: If a man from Mars descended to observe Israel’s attack on the Gaza strip, he would have seen one group of humans trapped in a densely populated area, largely defenseless while a modern air force destroyed their buildings at will. He might have learned that the people in Gaza had been essentially enclosed for several years in a sort of ghetto, deprived by the Israeli navy of access to the fish in their sea, generally unable to travel or to trade with the outside world, barred by Israeli forces from much of their arable land, all the while surveyed continuously from the sky by a foe which could assassinate their leaders at will and often did.
This Martian also might learn that the residents of Gaza — most of them descendants of refugees who had fled or been driven from Israel in 1948 — had been under Israeli occupation for 46 years, and intensified closure for six, a policy described by Israeli officials as “economic warfare” and privately by American diplomats as intended to keep Gaza “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” He might note that Gaza’s water supply is failing, as Israel blocks the entry of materials that could be used to repair and upgrade its sewage and water-treatment infrastructure. That ten percent of its children suffer from malnutrition and that cancer and birth defects are on the rise. That the fighting had started after a long standing truce had broken down after a series of tit-for-tat incidents, followed by the Israeli assassination of an Hamas leader, and the typical Hamas response of firing inaccurate rockets, which do Israel little damage.
But our man from Mars is certainly not an American. And while empathy for the underdog is said to be an American trait, this is not true if the underdog is Palestinian.
Among the chief milestones of Washington’s reaction to Israel’s military campaign were: President Obama stated from Bangkok that America supported Israel’s right “to defend itself” and “no country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens” while national-security aide Benjamin Rhodes added “the reason there is a conflict in Gaza is because of the rocket fire that’s been launched at Israeli civilians indiscriminately for many months now.” Congress took time off from partisan wrangling about the fiscal cliff to pass unanimously two resolutions, in the Senate and House, expressing its “unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel” and backing its “inherent right to protect its citizens against acts of terrorism.” Its members could further inform themselves by attending a closed briefing by Israel’s ambassador Michael Oren on November 28, the only figure invited by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to testify.
As the fighting continued, Walter Russell Mead, a prominent political scientist, conveyed impatience with the just-war tradition seemed to inhibit Israeli air attacks, which by then had killed and wounded scores of people. Mead asserted that Americans would back an Israeli response of “unlimited ferocity.” [Continue reading…]
Adam Shatz writes: The ceasefire agreed by Israel and Hamas in Cairo after eight days of fighting is merely a pause in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It promises to ease movement at all border crossings with the Gaza Strip, but will not lift the blockade. It requires Israel to end its assault on the Strip, and Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets at southern Israel, but it leaves Gaza as miserable as ever: according to a recent UN report, the Strip will be ‘uninhabitable’ by 2020. And this is to speak only of Gaza. How easily one is made to forget that Gaza is only a part – a very brutalised part – of the ‘future Palestinian state’ that once seemed inevitable, and which now seems to exist mainly in the lullabies of Western peace processors. None of the core issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict – the Occupation, borders, water rights, repatriation and compensation of refugees – is addressed by this agreement.
The fighting will erupt again, because Hamas will come under continued pressure from its members and from other militant factions, and because Israel has never needed much pretext to go to war. In 1982, it broke its ceasefire with Arafat’s PLO and invaded Lebanon, citing the attempted assassination of its ambassador to London, even though the attack was the work of Arafat’s sworn enemy, the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal. In 1996, during a period of relative calm, it assassinated Hamas’s bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, the ‘Engineer’, leading Hamas to strike back with a wave of suicide attacks in Israeli cities. When, a year later, Hamas proposed a thirty-year hudna, or truce, Binyamin Netanyahu dispatched a team of Mossad agents to poison the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman; under pressure from Jordan and the US, Israel was forced to provide the antidote, and Meshaal is now the head of Hamas’s political bureau – and an ally of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi.
Operation Pillar of Defence, Israel’s latest war, began just as Hamas was cobbling together an agreement for a long-term ceasefire. Its military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, was assassinated only hours after he reviewed the draft proposal. Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, could have had a ceasefire – probably on more favourable terms – without the deaths of more than 160 Palestinians and five Israelis, but then they would have missed a chance to test their new missile defence shield, Iron Dome, whose performance was Israel’s main success in the war. They would also have missed a chance to remind the people of Gaza of their weakness in the face of Israeli military might. The destruction in Gaza was less extensive than it had been in Operation Cast Lead, but on this occasion too the aim, as Gilad Sharon, Ariel’s son, put it in the Jerusalem Post, was to send out ‘a Tarzan-like cry that lets the entire jungle know in no uncertain terms just who won, and just who was defeated’.
Victory in war is not measured solely in terms of body counts, however. And the ‘jungle’ – the Israeli word not just for the Palestinians but for the Arabs as a whole – may have the last laugh. Not only did Hamas put up a better fight than it had in the last war, it averted an Israeli ground offensive, won implicit recognition as a legitimate actor from the United States (which helped to broker the talks in Cairo), and achieved concrete gains, above all an end to targeted assassinations and the easing of restrictions on the movement of people and the transfer of goods at the crossings. [Continue reading…]
Meir Javedanfar writes: After eight days of fighting, on the 21st of November, Israel and Hamas declared a ceasefire.
One of the questions which has been addressed since the start of the recent round of fighting has been: what has been the role of Iran?
Iran’s role has mainly been that of a weapon supplier and not much else. According to a statement made by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards chief, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, Iran provided technological know-how to the “Palestinian resistance movement.” Although Jafari said that Iran had only supplied the technology, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement’s deputy leader stated that the Fajr missiles fired at Israel were produced by Iran.
On the day of the ceasefire, the Iranian government through parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani went a step further by stating that as well as military assistance, Iran “proudly” also provided financial assistance to Palestinian groups.
Such declarations by Gen. Jafari and Ali Larijani had their own logic. The Iranian regime is feeling isolated and threatened in the region. The regime’s domestic legitimacy is at one of its lowest since the start of the revolution while infighting between its ranks rages on. It needs to show muscle and openly declaring that it had managed to get weapons and money into Gaza is a show of strength to its own population and its allies in the region.
However, by making such a public declaration, Mr. Larijani and Gen. Jafari have also provided a major strategic gift to the government of the state of Israel and others in the region who want to see the Iranian regime isolated, namely Saudi Arabia. For years, both governments have accused Iran of providing assistance to militant groups, however lack of evidence has been one of their major handicaps. The fact that Iran played a sophisticated cat and mouse game whereby it succeeded in not leaving its fingerprints made the job for Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US government all the more frustrating.
Now that such high-ranking officials openly admit to having supplied weapons to groups in Gaza, the job of isolating Iran will be even easier than before. This is a gift from Tehran which the Israeli government and AIPAC will loathe to see go to waste. It’s not difficult to imagine that armed with such evidence they are now going to call for more sanctions against the Iranian regime, and thanks to the evidence from Tehran, they will have a higher chance of success.
The Saudis are also likely to use the admissions of support for Gaza groups as evidence to place pressure on the Morsi government to control the weapons supply tunnels into Gaza. So far, since coming to power, Morsi has already destroyed many Gaza tunnels. It’s quite possible that now more pressure will be placed on him by the Saudis to stem the flow of weapons into Gaza. With Egypt’s economy requiring much-needed financial support from various sources including the Saudis, it’s very possible that in the future Morsi will try to stem the flow of weapons into Gaza with more vigor.
Apart from supplying weapons, Iran did not have any other influence. If it did, and Hamas was acting as its proxy, the latter would not have agreed to a cease-fire and instead done everything to force Israel to launch a land invasion in Gaza. Such an outcome would have many benefits for Iran and, in fact, this is what Iran’s military and political leaders wanted. They wanted to see Israel stuck in a quagmire in Gaza, with its economy and diplomatic standing suffering heavily while its relations with Egypt reached breaking point. Unfortunately for the Iranian regime, it did not get its wish precisely because Hamas is not its proxy, nor does it have any political influence over Hamas. Otherwise, the story would have been different. [Continue reading…]
That Egypt’s new president has emerged from this episode strengthened both internally and externally appears to be something of a consensus. Mohammed Morsi is being widely praised for having struck the right balance between a pragmatism that enabled him to deliver the goods on a ceasefire and a principled stand in support of the Palestinians, which guaranteed that he could not be cast as Mubarak II. Unsurprisingly, there is domestic criticism of Morsi’s role suggesting both that Morsi was back to playing Egypt’s old role as America’s policeman and/or that he was insufficiently focused on Egypt’s needs at home. Neither critique, though, is likely to gain much traction. If anything, the timing of the criticism also worked rather well for Morsi, enabling him to claim a win against the backdrop of a difficult domestic climate with the tragic train crash in southern Egypt (which otherwise would have dominated the news and led to severe criticism of the government), with revolutionaries and police clashing in Cairo, and with a potential constitutional crisis still in the offing (which just deepened today).
Morsi emerges from his mediating role with increased credit in the bank, both metaphorically — the international community relied on Morsi’s team to broker the truce — and literally, with the IMF approving a $4.8 billion loan to Egypt, coincidentally on the same day of this diplomatic achievement (and on terms which would make many a European state green with envy). Much has been made of the close Egyptian-U.S. coordination throughout the crisis and especially of the six phone calls held between the Egyptian and American presidents during the past week. Morsi was able to manage the U.S. relationship, the Hamas relationship and to have his security officials broker an arrangement with Israeli counterparts while at the same time expressing unequivocal and distinctly un-Mubarak support for the Palestinian cause, and opposition to Israeli policies, recalling his ambassador from Israel and dispatching his Prime Minister to appear with Gazan Prime Minster Haniyeh in a show of solidarity with a Gaza from where rockets were being launched at Israel.
All of which does not add up to a trouble-free future for Morsi’s Egypt in the Israel-Palestine arena. Egypt now has a degree of responsibility for preventing violence between two actors over which its control is very, very limited (Hamas and Israel). It also still has the headache of security in the Sinai to address. But Morsi is likely to remind his Western friends that if they are unable to use a period of quiet to deliver broader progress on Israeli de-occupation, then he cannot be held fully responsible for the consequences later on. [Continue reading…]
Rami Zurayk and Anne Gough write: Since its creation in 1948, Israel has used food and nutrition as a means to entrench its military and territorial occupation of Palestine. While all eyes are turned today to the savage eradication of children and entire families in Gaza through operation “Pillar of Cloud”, Israel pursues its long-term goal of decimating the means of food production, livelihoods and the ability of those in Gaza to make economic and political decisions about what they grow and what they eat.
Gaza and the rest of Occupied Palestine is being restructured as an entity where malnutrition is endemic, access to food is denied and people are forced to live under the constant fear of not having enough to eat.
In the last eight days, the food and farming sector in Gaza has been severely maimed, worsening the condition of an agricultural sector impaired by six years of Israeli imposed siege, military campaigns and decades of occupation.
In the first five days of the assault, the Ministry of Agriculture in Gaza estimated losses to the agriculture and fishing sectors to be above US $50 million.
According to our colleague Mohammad El Bakri, who is with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, and other agricultural specialists in Gaza, farmers are in the midst of the crucial olive harvest and olive oil production season and the destruction is a disastrous blow for food and economic security in Gaza. [Continue reading…]
Colin Dayan writes: Talking about Gaza is like talking about God. We face the ineffable. We cannot talk about what we see. Or if we do, we are accused of lacking common sense, failing to take a realistic approach to an unmanageable problem.
What is that problem? Palestinians are the problem. Like so many others in our world today, Palestinians are labeled as “terrorists” by the powerful, so that lethal force is the rule and extreme violence — or exemplary disregard — may be directed indiscriminately against civilians and non-civilians alike. The problem is not a simple one. If we pretend it is, then we risk validating those who hold Israel to an unfair standard, or worse, who question its right to exist. And in protesting Israeli government policy, expressing horror at its brutal excesses, we risk being condemned as “anti-Semitic” or worse, as “self-hating Jews.”
The tired debates about the history of Zionism and the threat of the Palestinian national movement—or, put more bluntly, about the end of Israel and what Jonathan S. Tobin calls “a war with Palestinian Islamists that has no end in sight” — ignore what is specific about more than four decades of Israeli domination in the Occupied Territories. Especially masked in these debates are the unique and various forms of violence used to control the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000. In the name of “security,” Israel has implemented something like a permanent state of emergency. Brute force coexists with, to a sometimes-calamitous degree, a systematic practice of discrimination, surveillance, and disappearance. Behind the barriers — and they are everywhere — live the confined, sealed off from the zone of inclusion, the Israeli state. [Continue reading…]
And, the blockade on exports is almost complete, with some minor exceptions, and is devastating to the Gaza economy. Real per capita income among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is less today than in the early 1990s!
These Israeli policies are a form of collective punishment imposed by an Occupying power on a noncombatant occupied population. Israel also imposes restrictions on Palestinian travel outside the Strip (even, sometimes, unconscionable delays for patients seeking specialist medical care– delays that lead to their deaths). Collective punishment, obstacles to free movement as part of an Apartheid regime, and occasional Israeli attacks that show blatant disregard for civilian life are not only illegal in international law but constitute a set of systematic war crimes that rise to the level of crimes against humanity as defined by the Rome Statutes.
While it is unfortunate that small homemade rockets are sometimes fired by small militant groups from Gaza into Israel, it is impossible to expect social peace from a people being economically strangled. [Continue reading…]
In July, Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, met Egypt's newly elected President Mohamed Morsy and hailed Morsy's election as the start of a "new era" for Egypt and the Palestinians.
Tony Karon writes: When a civilian bus was bombed in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, many feared the incident would derail negotiations for a truce in the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas. That proved not to be the case. The other anxiety was that an Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood is in power would somehow jinx the prospects for peace. That fear proved to be groundless too. Indeed, the government of President Mohamed Morsy took the lead role in brokering the Gaza truce announced in Cairo Wednesday night, and will reportedly act as its guarantor. “It was unknown how Egypt would react,” Likud party legislator Yohanan Plesner told Britain’s Telegraph. “When the moment of truth came, the Egyptian leadership moved responsibly and clearly said they were trying to restore stability.” Not only that, says analyst Michael Wahid Hanna at the Century Foundation, “Egypt’s government has put its own international credibility on the line by effectively undertaking to ensure that Hamas observes the terms of its ceasefire — that’s a subtle but profoundly important change.”
Egypt’s Gaza role reflects the emerging contours of a Middle East profoundly changed by the Arab Spring, yet forced to confront decades-old challenges. The essential partnership in tamping down the Gaza violence, notes former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, is the one “between the United States and Egypt — one using its influence with Israel, the other with Hamas — to put together a ceasefire package as the foundation for a wider resolution of the conflict.” Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have played an important part in finessing the deal, Morsy and the Egyptians provide a service Washington cannot in dealing with Gaza. The U.S. is officially sworn to avoid engagement with Hamas — a movement it defines as a terrorist organization. And while Washington has a preferred Palestinian interlocutor–President Mahmoud Abbas who is based in the West Bank–Abbas has no influence over events in Gaza, where his rivals in Hamas hold sway. And so, the Obama Administration turned to Egypt, urging it to use the Muslim Brotherhood’s political ties with Hamas and the Egyptian intelligence service’s long-established relationship with its Israeli counterparts to broker a truce.
Unlike former President Hosni Mubarak who deemed Hamas an enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood government sees the movement as its own political progeny, and is therefore not shackled by a need to prevent Hamas making political gains from a truce. On the contrary, while Egypt seeks a cease-fire that ends Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza and Israeli air strikes on the territory, Cairo’s mediation also offers Hamas a pathway out of the blockade that has choked off Gaza’s economy for the past five years. Even Israeli leaders have praised the response from Cairo, notwithstanding Egypt’s unprecedented public acts of solidarity with Hamas.
Morsy had made clear, when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly in September, that his government would both abide by the 1978 Camp David peace treaty with Israel but also challenge the status quo in the Palestinian territories. “I say it loudly to those wondering about our position vis-a-vis the international agreements and conventions that we have previously adhered to: we are committed to what we have signed on,” Morsy said at the time. “We also support the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and are determined to pursue all efforts side by side with them until they regain their rights.” [Continue reading…]
A ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza was due to go into effect at 2pm Eastern, 9pm local time. With a de facto end to the siege — the Rafah border will now stay open — Hamas can reasonably declare victory.
Following is the verbatim English text of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza that was reached on Wednesday with Egyptian mediation. The text was distributed by the Egyptian presidency.
Agreement of Understanding For a Ceasefire in the Gaza Strip
1: (no title given for this section)
A. Israel should stop all hostilities in the Gaza Strip land, sea and air including incursions and targeting of individuals.
B. All Palestinian factions shall stop all hostilities from the Gaza Strip against Israel including rocket attacks and all attacks along the border.
C. Opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas and procedures of implementation shall be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the ceasefire.
D. Other matters as may be requested shall be addressed.
2: Implementation mechanisms:
A. Setting up the zero hour for the ceasefire understanding to enter into effect.
B. Egypt shall receive assurances from each party that the party commits to what was agreed upon.
C. Each party shall commit itself not to perform any acts that would breach this understanding. In case of any observations Egypt as the sponsor of this understanding shall be informed to follow up.
The Guardian reports: The agreed truce was mediated by Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and his spy chief Mohamed Shehata after days of talks and frantic shuttle diplomacy involving regional leaders, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and Clinton.
Clinton had been engaged in talks with Netanyahu in Jerusalem and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah before flying to Cairo to meet Morsi.
President Obama also intervened during a tour of Asia to call both Israel and Morsi to encourage them to find a solution.
After the announcement Obama called the Israeli PM to commend him for agreeing to the Egyptian proposal, and to promise to seek funding for a joint missile defence programme.
The agreement appeared to consist of nothing more than a simple truce and failed to address other security issues, let alone the longer-term question of reviving a long-moribund peace process.
However, an Israeli government source said that following the ceasefire agreement, an “ongoing dialogue will start within 24 hours covering underlying issues of concern to both parties”.
They include the further relaxation of border restrictions and targeted assassinations.
On borders, he said: “These restrictions were imposed in the framework of hostilities.” In the absence of hostilities, they may no longer be necessary.
Targeted assassinations, he added, were “an irrelevant question”. “If they are not attacking us, we don’t need to shoot them.”
Two other issues to be discussed in further talks were the re-arming of militant groups and the Israeli-imposed buffer zone inside the Gaza border. “The buffer zone was only introduced in the framework of hostilities,” the source said.
Peter Beaumont reports from Cairo: As frantic diplomatic efforts continued to secure a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, which saw the US secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, arrive in Cairo on Wednesday vowing to work to find an end to the latest conflict, details of the stumbling blocks in the negotiations began to emerge.
On Tuesday evening, despite the continuing violence, an imminent ceasefire appeared certain to many close to the negotiations.
One diplomat who attended an event in Cairo with a number of prominent Islamist politicians was assured a truce “was in the bag” and went to sleep expecting to wake to news of a ceasefire.
But what happened in the period between when Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, and a senior Hamas spokesman indicated a truce would be in force by Tuesday night is instructive of the profound problems that lie ahead in attempting to secure a meaningful long-term ceasefire.
According to those familiar with the negotiations being mediated on the Egyptian side by Morsi and General Mohamed Shehata, head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate, talks had originally focused on a two- to three-stage ceasefire.
The first stage was to have been what is known as a “temporary lull” or tahdiya in Arabic followed by a hudna – a truce or calming period which it had been hoped would set the scene for a longer-term agreement on issues relating both to the blockade of Gaza and assassinations of Hamas figures on one side and Israeli security demands regarding rocket fire on the other.
During Tuesday afternoon and evening that process began unravelling as both sides came under internal pressure to achieve what has proved so difficult before: to come to a comprehensive settlement in one go. [Continue reading…]
The Economist‘s Middle East blog: In Cities across the West Bank, Palestinian youth inspired by the fighting in Gaza have been skirmishing with Israeli forces as a new spirit of activism takes hold. Clouds of tear-gas hang over the night-time streets of Bethlehem and Qalandia, the main terminal blocking the West Bank’s access to East Jerusalem, as Israeli soldiers seek to disperse demonstrators. Increasingly, the army resorts to lethal force to repel Palestinians hurling Molotov cocktails so numerous they are reaching intifada levels. Casualties are rising as the army deploys reservists, often ill-trained in crowd control to replace soldiers transferred from the West Bank to the Gaza front. Two Palestinians have been killed following clashes in Hebron, a southern West Bank city and the stronghold of the clan of Ahmad Jabari, the head of Hamas’s military wing, whose assassination on November 14th led to the Israeli offensive, and Nabi Saleh, a village near Ramallah.
With Palestinians in the West Bank rallying in support of Gaza, West Bank politicians talk of an approaching intifada to match those that began in 1987 and in 2000. Israeli observers speak of mounting concern that their country’s assault on Gaza could precipitate a new wave of West Bank unrest. In an attempt to contain it, Israel’s security forces have detained dozens, including in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians have also rallied in support of Hamas. The streets of the old city and the adjoining neighbourhood of Silwan echoed with gunfire in the evening of November 16th as police sought to disperse protesters distributing sweets in celebration of a rocket that landed on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Hamas possesses only a minute fraction of Israel’s fire power, but its rocket attacks on Israel’s cities, including its commercial capital, Tel Aviv, are winning it renewed support amongst Palestinians, gleeful that in however small a measure, their armed militias are redressing the balance of fear.
“No longer are we just helpless refugees,” says Mahmoud, a shopkeeper on Saladin Street, the main shopping district of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. “After years of going nowhere, we are starting to look as if we have an army of our own.” Elsewhere on the street, moneychangers put out bowls of sweets for their customers. My normally dour falafel-fryer shook my hand in delight. “Now it is not only Palestinians who are afraid,” he said. [Continue reading…]
Ynet reports: Hamas’ Deputy Politburo chief Mousa Abu Marzook posted a message on his Facebook page condemning the execution of six people accused of being Israel collaborators.
He demanded that those behind the act be tried. “The way these collaborators were killed and the images after their death are totally unacceptable and those responsible must be indicted. These events must never repeat themselves,” he wrote.
Abu Marzook further added, “We endorse punishments to spies and especially to those who took part in the death of our commander and undermine our resistance but they should only be punished by law.”
Palestinian gunmen shot dead six alleged collaborators in the Gaza Strip who “were caught red-handed,” according to a security source quoted by Hamas’ Aqsa radio on Tuesday.
Seumas Milne writes: The way western politicians and media have pontificated about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, you’d think it was facing an unprovoked attack from a well-armed foreign power. Israel had every “right to defend itself”, Barack Obama declared. “No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”
He was echoed by Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, who declared that the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas bore “principal responsibility” for Israel’s bombardment of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, most western media have echoed Israel’s claim that its assault is in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks; the BBC speaks wearisomely of a conflict of “ancient hatreds”.
In fact, an examination of the sequence of events over the last month shows that Israel played the decisive role in the military escalation: from its attack on a Khartoum arms factory reportedly supplying arms to Hamas and the killing of 15 Palestinian fighters in late October, to the shooting of a mentally disabled Palestinian in early November, the killing of a 13 year-old in an Israeli incursion and, crucially, the assassination of the Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari last Wednesday during negotiations over a temporary truce.
Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, had plenty of motivation to unleash a new round of bloodletting. There was the imminence of Israeli elections (military attacks on the Palestinians are par for the course before Israeli polls); the need to test Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, and pressure Hamas to bring other Palestinian guerrilla groups to heel; and the chance to destroy missile caches before any confrontation with Iran, and test Israel’s new Iron Dome anti-missile system.
So after six days of sustained assault by the world’s fourth largest military power on one of its most wretched and overcrowded territories, at least 130 Palestinians had been killed, an estimated half of them civilians, along with five Israelis. The goal, Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yeshai, insisted, had been to “send Gaza back to the middle ages”.
True, the bloodshed hasn’t so far been on the scale of Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, which left 1,400 Palestinians dead in three weeks. But the issue isn’t just who started and escalated it, or even the grinding “disproportionality” of yet another Israeli military battering (even before last month’s flareups, 314 Palestinians had been killed since 2009, as against 20 Israelis).
It’s that to portray Israel as some kind of victim with every right to “defend itself” from attack from “outside its borders” is a grotesque inversion of reality. Israel has after all been in illegal occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza, where most of the population are the families of refugees who were driven out of what is now Israel in 1948, for the past 45 years.
People like to repeat this claim that Israel has the “fourth largest military power” in the world. I have no idea what if any metric that description is based on. In terms of military spending, Israel ranks #17. In terms of number of troops it ranks #30. But in terms of the Global Militarization Index, it ranks #1.
For the purposes of political rhetoric, maybe “most militarized nation on earth” should replace “fourth largest military power” — at least it has a factual basis.
The Gaza Parkour Team show off their moves during training on October 26. (Music: “Speaking in Tongues” by Hilltop Hoods.)
A few days ago as they continued their training in Khan Younis at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, Israeli bombs started to fall.
“We did this video to convey message to the world that we, despite all what is happening in the Gaza Strip killing and bombing and destruction of facilities there is hope in life.”
Whatever fears Israelis may have had about the president’s re-election have all been duly pacified. Indeed, his popularity in the Jewish state has probably never been higher.
Obama’s response to Operation Pillar of Defense has been impeccable, from an Israeli point of view: sympathetic, supportive and understanding. The right-wing Zionist Organization of America tried to salvage some remains from Obama’s alleged anti-Israel animus by complaining that he hadn’t “personally” condemned Hamas, but even that grievance lasted only 24 hours after Obama stated his position on-camera during the first leg of his tour of Asia.
If there’s been any “daylight” between Israel and the U.S., it has been only a small sliver. Obama has upheld Israel’s right to self-defense and has refrained from any outright criticism of the assault on Gaza, even after an entire 12 member Palestinian family was wiped out as a result of an erroneous air force attack. He has remained steadfast in his support for almost a week, surprising many of his right-wing critics and dismaying some of his supporters on the left.
True, Obama has been urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refrain from a ground assault, but most Israelis, including Netanyahu himself, share Obama’s apprehension that such a development would inflict much heavy casualties on both sides, inflame the volatile Arab world and possibly expand the conflict to other arenas. In this regard, Obama was simply preaching to the converted.
More importantly, Obama is also the beneficiary of Israel’s starry-eyed love affair with its Iron Dome anti-missile system, which has enjoyed spectacular success in protecting Israeli citizens from Hamas missiles. The ingenious Israeli development, which could potentially change the ground rules of modern warfare, was bankrolled by the Obama Administration to the tune of $274 million, with over $600 million pledged for the next three years.
Obama has expressed his commitment to Israel’s security with such insistence it appears to be a priority of no less importance than his duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Likewise, the idea that Israel’s security serves American interests is viewed within Washington’s establishment as an axiomatic truth and a pillar of global peace. Like many religious beliefs it is held unquestioned in the absence of any supporting evidence. In the six decades of its existence, Israel’s security has grown inexorably yet from its inception this has remained a state in near-perpetual war.
For decades, the ideas put forward by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” have shaped the way that many Israelis have approached their relationship with the Palestinians. Jabotinsky, the ideological forefather of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing Likud party, believed that it was naïve to think that the native Arabs would ever accept what he identified as “Zionist colonization.” Thus, he concluded, the only way that the Zionist project could succeed was through the use of force—“an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.”
What has transpired in Gaza over the past several days, and what has transpired in Palestine over the last century, has proven Jabotinsky and his modern day protégés both right and wrong. They are right to believe that the native Palestinian Arabs will not give up their right to the land or to full equality; they are not simply going to go away. But they are wrong to believe that this challenge can be solved by force.
Over the course of a twenty-three-day campaign four years ago, Israel embarked on operation “Cast Lead” to end projectile fire from Gaza. Then, fourteen hundred Palestinians were killed and thousands more were wounded, most of them civilians. Gaza was devastated, and Hamas was temporarily weakened, as its leadership was aggressively targeted for assassination. (Thirteen Israelis died, too.) Yet the resistance was not broken; this time, projectiles reached Tel Aviv.
What is most disturbing is the way that the Israeli leadership has taken to seeing this not as a failure, but as a lifestyle. In Israel, they talk of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza, a callous idiom used to refer to the periodic bombardment of a besieged territory in the hopes of reducing the capacity of militant groups every few years. Each time they “mow,” however, they sow seeds of hatred for the next generation. How successful, morally or militarily, is a war whose repetition is planned?
If success is measured by the ability to prevent future wars, then Israel’s wars have clearly all been failures.
But where is the evidence that Israel has ever believed it could exist in peace? On the contrary, if wars might have once seemed to be a regrettable necessity for a nation that sees itself existing in a sea of enmity, war-making has indeed become part of the Israeli lifestyle. And thanks to America’s commitment to Israel’s security, this lifestyle is one which involves ever diminishing risks.
As the Instagram pictures circulating among young Israeli soldiers attest, the prospect of heading to Gaza provokes more glee than fear — and with good reason. During Operation Cast Lead in which 1,400 Palestinians lost their lives, after 20,000 Israeli soldiers entered Gaza just six were killed by enemy fire.
'We're coming for you gaza!'
For the world’s most militarized nation, the strength and invulnerability that has derived in large part from the unfettered supply of U.S. aid and U.S. commitment to ensuring Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge has provided the physical buttress to a religious conviction: that Israel is protected by God.
Ariel Siegelman, the Israeli-American soldier who features in the video above, writes:
After the Second Lebanon War, we learned some very valuable lessons. We learned that we had been living in an imaginary world and that the most dangerous type of war is the one that you call peace. We learned that we are not in fact in a ‘peace process’ at all. We are at war.
Today the question is still asked, ‘But how do we WIN?’ And that is another question coming directly from a Western mindset. There is no such thing as winning in this new kind of war. The war is ongoing, with periods of more violence and periods of less violence, during which the enemy regroups and plans his next attack. When we feel the enemy is getting strong, we must be prepared to make preemptive strikes, hard and fast at key targets, with viciousness, as the enemy would do to us. Only then can we acquire, not peace, but sustained periods of relative calm.
The lesson from Operation Cast Lead has been that Israel has no need to destroy Hamas or even prevent rocket fire from Gaza. All it needs is sustained American support — support which Obama duly provided without hesitation upon the launch of Operation Pillar of Cloud — and once every few years a new generation of Israelis can go through a rite of passage in which they are anointed as the newest members of the state’s warrior caste. Such rites of passage will remain popular among the participants and the Israeli public at large so long as Israel’s military continues to improve its ability to inflict pain without sustaining pain. Thus, while Israelis overwhelmingly support the current assault on Gaza only a minority favor sending troops in on the ground.
What American commitment to Israel’s security has done is not to protect a vulnerable state in a dangerous neighborhood, but rather to empower a sense of divinely ordained invulnerability: the sense that Israel can strike its enemies with impunity.
The successful testing of its defensive shields, rather than merely ensuring that Israelis can live without fear of attack, will inevitably lower the threshold for Israel’s own acts of aggression. The safer Israel becomes, the greater the threat it poses to everyone else.
Wasseem El Sarraj writes: The bombing started on al-Hijriyah (the first day of the Muslim New Year); I was off of work because of the associated national holidays and was looking forward to a four-day long weekend. I have since spent those four days trapped in my home, in Remal, Gaza, an affluent neighborhood inside Gaza City. I am fortunate to not be living in the border areas nor in one of the densely populated—and Hamas-affiliated—camps. None of this means I feel safe.
From the moment the bombing started I cursed the newly built shopping mall that towers over our house. Not only did it break all of Gaza’s lax zoning laws, but its owner was known to be a Hamas sympathizer: each day I have been afraid that it could be one of Israel’s bombing targets. Israel’s target list will be inspected and debated in the aftermath of this operation; at present it seems to be a mixture of rocket-launching sites, pre-identified militants, weapons caches, and then there are the “symbolic” targets. Each of which carries a different strategic calculation for Israel, but from where we sit, the symbolic targeting of government buildings is as baffling as the decision to fight homemade rockets with bombs dropped from F-16s. And all of these risk civilian casualties, the “collateral damage” that rolls much too easily off too many tongues.
In the early morning hours on Saturday, Jawazat, a large police compound just a few minutes away from my house, and next to my favorite pizzeria, was destroyed. A deceptive lull in violence followed, creating hours of silence and waiting during which we dared not venture out. I sat at home with my family, speculating about the possibility of a ceasefire agreement: our fears and our hopes revealed themselves as we began to think that our leaders might be close to reaching an agreement that would bring an end to this horror. Then, in an instant, four heart-stopping explosions, one after the other, shook our once untouchable house. As the deafening explosions subsided I tried to regain some composure; you want to be stoic when the children catch your gaze. But then I realized that it’s me who is the child; I am the one who is the war amateur. My half-brother, who is seven, and my step-brother, who is twelve, are the veterans in surviving wars, for in 2008 they survived Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s bombardment and invasion, whilst I was absent and secure in London. We were only on day three of Operation Pillar of Defense by this Saturday; my young siblings had already undergone all of this for twenty-eight days, thirty-one if you include this operation. [Continue reading…]
Robert Wright writes: President Obama and Bibi Netanyahu are on the same page when it comes to the justification for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Netanyahu: “No country in the world would agree to a situation in which its population lives under a constant missile threat.” Obama: “There’s no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”
It’s true that if, say, Canada were lobbing missiles into the US, the US wouldn’t tolerate it. But here’s another thing the US wouldn’t tolerate: If Canada imposed a crippling economic blockade, denying America the import of essential goods and hugely restricting American exports. That would be taken as an act of war, and America would if necessary respond with force–by, perhaps, lobbing missiles into Canada.
This is the situation Gaza has faced for years: a crippling economic blockade imposed by Israel. Under international pressure, Israel has relaxed the import restrictions, but even so such basic things as cement, gravel, and steel are prohibited from entering Gaza. The rationale is that these items are “dual use” and could be put to military ends. But this logic doesn’t explain the most devastating part of the blockade–the severe restrictions on Gaza’s exports.
Gazans can’t export anything to anyone by sea or air, and there are extensive constraints on what they can export by land. They can’t even sell things to their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank. [Continue reading…]
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