The Israel Calculus On Gaza
November 12, 2012 § 11 Comments
Israel has been dealing with a constant barrage of rockets and shelling from Gaza since last week, and despite Egyptian claims to have mediated a ceasefire yesterday, it has apparently had no effect as the rockets have continued unabated today. Bibi Netanyahu warned foreign ambassadors yesterday that Israel might have no choice but to launch a ground operation into Gaza, and the Israeli press is rife with speculation that Cast Lead redux is about to begin.
On the face of it this may seem like a risky move. A ground operation into Gaza is bound to lead to civilian casualties and international opprobrium, along with the inevitable resulting Israeli investigatory commission. Also factoring in is that this is the second day in a row that Israel has fired at Syria in response to Syrian shooting at Israeli positions in its attempt to hit rebel fighters – the same dynamic that has been occurring along the Turkish border. If Israel goes after Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza, the possibility always exists for Hizballah to seize on Israel’s preoccupation in the south and launch its own rockets in the north, and between Palestinian armed groups in Gaza and Hizballah, it is the latter that is the far graver danger and more serious threat. Looming in the background of all of this is Iran, and how a large scale operation in Gaza might danger Israel’s diplomatic efforts to keep the pressure on the regime in Tehran. And of course, with elections coming in January, Netanyahu might be loathe to undertake any big risks right now that will endanger his presumptive reelection, and any large operation into Gaza is undoubtedly a big risk.
Despite all this, unless Egypt is actually successful and the rockets stop in the next two or three days, I think we are going to see Israel go into Gaza with air strikes and ground forces. To begin with, Israel has never been hesitant to do what it must to establish deterrence against Hamas, and the IDF is probably concluding right now that any hint of deterrence it might have created following Cast Lead is gone. It is an open question as to whether such deterrence ever existed, but the rocket escalation leaves little doubt that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other armed groups in Gaza have zero qualms right now about targeting Israel civilians with rocket fire. No government can afford to let such attacks continue, and certainly the Israel government has not historically been shy about going after Hamas when it feels it is necessary.
The security angle is prominent, but there is a political angle as well. Netanyahu has been campaigning on security issues pretty much his entire political life, and the current campaign is no different. His focus on security is so strong that Kadima, in what can only be described as a last ditch effort amongst its death throes, has adopted as its campaign slogan “Bibi is endangering us” superimposed against a backdrop of a mushroom cloud. The irony of Netanyahu’s hawkish public persona is that he has never presided over a large military operation during either of his two tenures as prime minister, but as risky as it may be to send ground forces into Gaza right now, he cannot afford to just sit on his hands. A man running for prime minister whose primary rationale for reelection is that only he is prepared to do what is necessary to keep Israel safe cannot sit idly by as rockets rain down on southern Israeli towns and have any hope of winning the election. From an electoral standpoint, I don’t think Netanyahu has any choice but to respond with force and hope that the IDF is prepared for what it will encounter in the streets and warrens of Gaza City. If Netanyahu cannot deal with the threat emanating from his own backyard, he cannot credibly claim to be able to deal with the threat coming from Iran.
Compounding this situation is the fact that the other Israeli political parties are egging Netanyahu and Likud on. Kadima, Yisrael Beiteinu, Yesh Atid, and Habayit Hayehudi have all called for military operations hitting Hamas or the resumption of targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders, and even Labor has made a nebulous recommendation for “military and diplomatic pressure.” The only significant party urging a ceasefire is Meretz. This means that the longer Netanyahu waits to move on Gaza, the longer he will have to face calls from political rivals urging immediate actions, and every day this goes on endangers Netanyahu’s electoral prospects. It is one thing to take your time when the other parties are calling for calm, but quite another when elections are coming up and nearly every party across the political spectrum is calling for some form of action. As an aside, this also goes to show just how dead the peace camp is in Israel, and why Ehud Olmert’s apparent plan to reenter politics and campaign on the basis of reaching a peace deal with the Palestinians is going to be a disastrous miscalculation (more on that later this week).
As I noted yesterday on twitter, I think Israeli military action has crossed the threshold of being a lot more likely than not. As historically risk-averse as he might be, Netanyahu is not going to just wait this out. Security necessity and political calculations are both moving in the same direction here, and I think that we are about to see a Cast Lead-type incursion.
P.S. If this does indeed happen, I am going to be a busy man given what it will do to Turkish-Israeli relations in light of Erdoğan’s embrace of Hamas and imminent trip to Gaza.
Exposing the Lie of Hamas Moderation
June 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Hamas seems to be begging Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead, The Sequel. 45 rockets were fired by Hamas into Israel on Tuesday following the cross-border attack from Egyptian territory on Monday, confining much of southern Israel to bomb shelters. There is never an excuse for rockets directed toward civilians, and Hamas is barely even pretending to have a justification this time around. Hamas claims that the rocket barrage is a response to Israeli airstrikes, but the real reason Hamas is now returning to its strategy of indiscriminately targeting Israeli civilians is that it is beginning to feel squeezed by other groups that are questioning Hamas’s commitment to armed resistance. As pointed out in the New York Times, Islamic Jihad’s more militant approach has garnered it growing popularity and Hamas does not want to be eclipsed by its smaller competitors. More saliently though, the attack on Monday coming from the Sinai and for which a group claiming to be affiliated with al-Qaida has claimed responsibility put even more pressure on Hamas, since it cannot afford to be seen sitting on the sidelines while an outside non-Palestinian group carries the banner of resistance against Israel. Hamas is madly trying to reestablish its credentials of taking the fight to Israel, and it does so by firing rockets from Gaza because it has no other long term strategy and no interest in a productive solution. It is being tarred as too compliant and willing to live with the status quo, and so Israeli civilians have to bear the brunt of it reflexing its muscles. Let’s also not pretend that any of this is a “legitimate response to Israeli aggression” since it’s pretty clear who made the first move here, not to mention that purposely targeting civilian communities with rockets is never a legitimate response to anything.
Hamas is gambling that with Israeli tanks moving toward the Egyptian border and Iran presumably occupying the Israeli defense ministry’s attention, the IDF will have neither the time or the inclination to bother with a large scale response to rocket fire that has thankfully not killed any Israelis yet. This is a bad miscalculation on Hamas’s part. Israel’s first priority is protecting its citizens from attack, and should this rocket fire continue, I fully expect to see an IDF incursion into Gaza. Israel is not going to be frightened off by a Morsi victory in Egypt, and is also unlikely to sit back and absorb rocket fire as a favor to the Egyptian military, which does not want to be pressured by public opinion into fighting Hamas’s battles. This is not destined to end well for Hamas should it provoke a real Israeli response, and yet Hamas is bafflingly more concerned with not being outshined by smaller resistance groups.
In this vein, the most important takeaway from this episode is that it is time to lay to rest forever the idea that Hamas is moderating or will moderate. When Israel pulled out of Gaza and Hamas took control of the strip from the Palestinian Authority, I thought there was a small but legitimate chance that Hamas would begin to transition away from terrorizing Israeli civilians and start focusing on governance. Any hopes I had on this front have been thoroughly dashed. Despite the recent relative quiet, it is clear that Hamas is not changing. It remains a revanchist group dedicated not to building a state but to seeking the elimination of Israel entirely, and it continues to be a hostage to small bore thinking without seeing the larger trends at work in the region. Islamist groups throughout the Middle East, from Ennahda in Tunisia to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are devoting their attention to governing, and while they are not necessarily forces for moderation or social progress, they recognize that the key to long term survival and relevance is basic party politics and the nitty gritty of learning how to run a state. Hamas evinces zero interest in following this path, which should permanently kill the notion that it is a legitimate Islamist political party that also happens to have a military wing. It is everlastingly obsessed with the idea of resistance above state building, purity above compromise. Is there anyone left still so naive as to think that a complete and total Israeli pullout from the West Bank would put an end to Hamas rockets, attacks on civilians, and efforts to abduct Israeli soldiers? Rather than prepare its constituents to live with the inevitability of Israel and attempt to improve their lot, Hamas is more concerned with looking tough and whether other groups are damaging its street cred. What a terrible and pathetic representative for the people of Gaza.
Look at the revolutionary trends rocking the rest of the Arab world, and then compare that to the stale stasis that grips Hamas as it remains impervious to change or adaptation and refuses to embrace any new role other than resistance in the form of barbarism. It is as it always was: an opaque organization with a super secretive process for selecting its leaders and making decisions, with the only difference that it now shoots rockets at Israeli civilians rather than blowing them up on buses or in cafes. I desperately think that Israel needs to deal with the Palestinian Authority to end the occupation of the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state, but Hamas is an altogether different breed and its actions yesterday were the latest abundantly clear demonstration of this. The attack from the Sinai and the rockets from Gaza are an important reminder that Israel lives in a nasty neighborhood and that there are some things which it will never be able to inoculate itself against no matter how it resolves the Palestinian issue. Nobody argues that Israel is threatening or occupying any part of Egypt and yet it still faces attacks coming from the Sinai, which pose a terrible dilemma for Jerusalem since it does not want to enter into any hostilities with the Egyptians but cannot afford to just let these provocations continue. This is where the double standard that governs all things Israeli kicks in, since every country in the world has the absolute right to respond to cross-border attacks (and this applies both to Egypt and Gaza) but by doing so Israel walks into an inevitable public relations trap. If Israel goes back into Gaza, every Palestinian civilian life that is lost will be an unqualified tragedy, but it will be entirely on Hamas’s head.
This Is Not A Recipe For Hamas Moderation
April 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Top Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk gave an interview to the Forward – and the more I read that sentence, the funnier it seems – in which he staked out a number of hardline positions to the right of his rival Khaled Meshaal. Most importantly, he said that any agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel will be considered a temporary hudna rather than a permanent peace treaty once Hamas is in power, and that he and his organization would feel free to unilaterally modify any deals that were previously struck. He also reiterated his position that Hamas would never recognize Israel, nor will it accept the Quartet’s conditions for negotiations. None of this, of course, is at all surprising.
While there will undoubtedly be much ink spilled over the fact that Abu Marzouk is pushing for a hudna rather than eternal armed conflict, the contents of the interview do not provide cause for optimism. Abu Marzouk implied that a temporary truce would not be a confidence building measure leading toward negotiations but an opportunity for Hamas to build up its capabilities without being hassled. He also scorned the idea that armed resistance should be abandoned in favor of mass non-violent resistance, and gave conflicting signals over the issue of killing civilians, defending past attacks on Israelis but then saying that targeting civilians is not Hamas policy. In addition, he disavowed the notion that Jews everywhere are responsible for anything that Israel does and tacitly acknowledged the Holocaust (“If you look carefully at what happened to the Jews in Moscow or Madrid, in Spain or in Germany or Poland, that’s very bad…. Anyone who historically his father or grandfather did something like that [to the Jews], he should be ashamed.”).
Evidence of moderation on targeting civilians, absence of Holocaust denial, giving an interview to a Jewish newspaper…I’m not really buying it. This interview is a classic example of Abu Marzouk saying a bunch of things to appeal to a Western audience without giving in on the important stuff. The only question that actually matters is whether Hamas will honor PA agreements, because given the attempt at a unity deal between it and Fatah and the possibility that it may one day soon control the PA, Hamas has to be trusted to make credible commitments. If Abu Marzouk is to be believed, Hamas cannot be trusted on that score. Netanyahu gets plenty of flack for not actually wanting to negotiate a deal that the Palestinians will be able to accept, but with all of the Fatah infighting and now a clear statement from one of Hamas’s top three officials that it won’t abide by any deals anyway, what’s the point of the entire peace process exercise? I think that Israel needs to get out of the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state, but it is madness to think that it is only the Israeli side that is obstructing such an outcome.
Meshaal’s position as political director is not assured, and Abu Marzouk’s tacking to the right on the question of accepting a permanent treaty – something that Meshaal has said he is willing to do following a Palestinian referendum – has got to be seen as campaign maneuvering. Nobody really knows what is going on in Hamas internal politics and what the Shura Council’s members are thinking, but to give an interview like this that is designed to attract attention from a number of distinct audiences says a couple of things. First, Abu Marzouk thinks that Meshaal is playing to public opinion with his embrace of the Arab Spring rather than worrying about the Shura Council, which is the only audience that matters in terms of deciding who is going to lead Hamas. His staking out positions that conflict with Meshaal’s is deliberate, and he must suspect that a more hardline position is going to be popular with the folks who matter. Second, he thinks that he stands a good chance of beating Meshaal and is already looking ahead to convincing Western audiences that he should not be shunned, which explains his position on Jews vs. Israelis and sympathy for Holocaust (and pogrom and Inquisition) victims. Expressing moderation on those issues is not going to win him accolades with Hamas’s leadership or rank and file, and I suspect that giving an interview to the Forward falls under the same category, and the only reason for someone like Abu Marzouk to try to curry favor with Westerners is because he plans on dealing with them in the future.
Assuming that Abu Marzouk’s thinking is correct and that a harder line is going to be more popular, it is also not going to do any wonders for Hamas’s alleged moderation. Just like in presidential primaries, a hardline position will bring everyone else along, including Meshaal. Hamas is not moderate or accommodationist, and there are plenty of good reasons to doubt that it will ever follow Fatah’s path in recognizing Israel, but at least it has been relatively quiet militarily lately. Abu Marzouk is not advocating in this interview for an immediate resumption of unrelenting hostilities as he thinks that a hudna is a good idea, but the rejection of a permanent peace treaty at any point and no matter the circumstance is designed to send the message that at the end of the day, Hamas is a military organization. This not so subtle reminder can only push Hamas toward its most extreme tendencies, and signals that Hamas’s version of Salam Fayyad is nowhere on the horizon.
A Study in Contrasts
April 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
Omar al-Hayeb is a member of a legendary Bedouin family in Israel. The al-Hayebs were founding members of the IDF’s Desert Reconnaissance Battalion, which is composed of Bedouin volunteers (Bedouins are exempt from serving in the IDF) who serve as expert trackers, and Omar al-Hayeb was the highest ranking Bedouin member of the IDF while serving as a tracker along the northern border. In 2006, he was found guilty of espionage and drug trafficking on behalf of Hizballah after being caught in 2002 with classified maps of IDF troop positions and lists of IDF communications channels while on his way to a meeting with Hizballah members. Al-Hayeb’s story is a sad one in that he was severely injured by a Hizballah roadside bomb in 1996 and lost an eye as a result, and he ended up selling drugs supplied by the same organization that was responsible for his injury in order to make ends meet. Yesterday, Israel released al-Hayeb from prison after his sentence had already been commuted once before because he is in poor health and is deemed not to be a threat to the state.
On Saturday, Hamas hanged three men in Gaza, one of whom was convicted of spying for Israel. Palestinian law imposes the death penalty for treason and for drug trafficking, so if al-Hayeb had been a Palestinian subject to either Hamas’s or the PA’s jurisdiction, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. Israel is far from perfect, but its behavior in the West Bank sometimes makes people forget that its liberal democratic ethos stands in stark contrast to that of its neighbors. This is one of those times.
