Netanyahu’s bankrupt strategy
The Nation
By demonizing the Palestinian leadership, the Israeli prime
minister raised expectations for a decisive victory and opened the door
for attacks from the right.
Launching military campaigns in Israel is easy: the public idolizes
the army and tends to support whatever measures it takes, and the
parliamentary opposition rallies behind the government at such moments.
Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu’s second campaign in Gaza as prime
minister—and the third the country has launched in less than five
years—was true to form, enjoying nearly unanimous support in Israel,
despite heavy civilian casualties on the Palestinian side and the
disruption to daily life caused by hundreds of rockets launched by
Hamas, including at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Israel’s international
airport.
As the military campaign enters its second week, with more than 1,500
tons of explosives already dropped on the heavily populated Strip, an
end game in Gaza is nowhere in sight. Egypt has offered a cease-fire
similar to the one reached after the November 2012 military campaign,
and a fragile truce might indeed emerge, but none of the core issues in
Gaza will be addressed—leading most observers to conclude that the clock
is already ticking toward the next escalation.
Unlike operation Cast Lead in 2008–09, Operation Protective Edge
didn’t open with a “shock and awe” strike, which took the lives of
hundreds in just the first few days, but rather escalated gradually,
giving the sense that Israel would have rather avoided this round, if
only Hamas ceased to fire rockets on Israeli towns.
Yet there is a wider context that should be considered: following the
kidnapping of three Israeli teens on June 12, the government arrested
hundreds of Hamas members in the West Bank, most of them from the
political leadership who had nothing to do with the attack (which in all
likelihood was carried out by rogue freelancers). Dozens of prisoners
who had been released in the prisoner exchange deal for Israeli soldier
Gilad Shalit were detained again, as a purely punitive measure and
without any evidence that they had returned to militant activities.
Since the accord between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Israel
has also prevented the transfer of funds that pay the salaries of public
officials in Gaza. In fact, when UN envoy Robert Serry sought an
arrangement with Israeli officials that would allow the salaries to be
transferred, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened to expel
Serry for “aiding Hamas.” And, not least, Israel had stepped up its own
military activities in Gaza before the latest escalation,
claiming the lives of several militants and at least one boy, who was
injured on June 11 and died three days later.
The denial of funds, along with the closing of the tunnels from Egypt
to Gaza by the new regime in Cairo, which is overtly hostile to Hamas,
has caused a political and economic crisis in the Strip, and thus left
Hamas—whose main political currency is its image of “resistance”—with
little reason to avoid escalation.
These facts, which have been largely ignored by the Israeli media, do
not justify Hamas’s tactics, which deliberately target civilians in
clear violation of international law. They suggest, however, the
existence of alternative courses of action that Israel could have taken
in the weeks preceding the current crisis. But the Israeli government
has refused for years to address the fundamental problems in Gaza—the
siege and its separation from the rest of the Palestinian population in
Israel and the West Bank being the most obvious ones. The Hamas-PA
accord actually presented Jerusalem with an opportunity to deal with
Hamas politically; instead, Israel decided to cut ties with the newly
formed government and even demanded that the international community
follow suit.
Hamas entered this round of violence considerably weakened, having
lost its allies in Cairo and having seen many of the tunnels under the
Egyptian border destroyed, and its rocket attacks allowed Israel to
portray its military campaign to the West as a legitimate self-defense
measure. This very same freedom of maneuver, however, reveals the limits
of Israeli strategy—or, some would argue, the lack of a strategy at
all. Israeli could easily conquer Gaza, but it doesn’t want to hold it,
and what might seem like the ultimate Israeli goal—the destruction of
Hamas—doesn’t make much sense, since it’s pretty clear that the ensuing
anarchy would not serve Israel’s interests. Far more extreme groups are
waiting at the gate.
If Israel does end the war now, Prime Minister Netanyahu will face
attacks from his political base on the right and among the settlers. The
hard right, with its echo chamber in the media, already senses an
opportunity. Amos Regev, the editor of the pro-Netanyahu daily Yisrael Hayom,
called in an editorial for bombing Gaza “back to the stone age.”
Avigdor Lieberman went as far as saying that Israel should seize direct
control of the Strip again, and on the eve of the military operation he
broke his political pact with Netanyahu and the Likud, though he remains
a part of the government. In a cabinet vote on Tuesday morning, settler
leader Naftali Bennett opposed the Egyptian offer, and so did
Lieberman. “The assumption is that whatever happens in this war,
Netanyahu loses ground,” an adviser to a senior Israeli politician told
me this week, before details of the cease-fire offer were known.
Netanyahu can only blame himself for his political troubles. By
demonizing the Palestinian leadership—Abbas just the same as Hamas—he
raised expectations in the Israeli public for a decisive victory and
opened the door for attacks from the right. His refusal to commit to a
meaningful political process with the Palestinians, along with his
insistence on maintaining the status quo through military superiority
alone, will pretty much guarantee that this cycle of violent escalations
continues in years to come.
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