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 theJerusalem 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.
November 25, 2012
Why Israel Didn’t Win
Adam Shatz in the LRB:
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.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 05:22 AM | Permalink
Comments
These miserable, cheating bastards deserve each other.
Posted by: mr.ed | Nov 25, 2012 6:49:49 AM
Iron Dome could be tested a lot before. 12,000 rockets were fired into civilian areas of Israel during the past three years, intended to kill and maim as many as possible. Iron Dome's interception rate could be raised from 75 percent in 2011 to 90 percent in 2012.
There's only one side who does everything to protect their children.
New Fajr-5 rockets from Iran are already on their way to the Gaza Strip.
Posted by: zat | Nov 25, 2012 8:20:52 AM
zat:
Don't be so naive.
Israel offers up its southern towns to rocket fire, while the Elite sit pretty in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Make no mistake, if Hamas had the advanced weaponry Israel had (thanks to the US in large part), they would prefer targetted airstrikes on top brass, installations, bases, barracks, weapons caches, etc. Do you really expect Hamas to gather all together in some large open field so Israel can incinerate them in a flash? There is nothing moral or civilised about how Israel conducts itself. If they were in Hamas' position, I'm sure they would conduct a resistance with whatever means were available; crappy rockets, suicide attacks, and the like. It could be that Hamas obtaining more advanced weaponry, is the only language that Israelis will respond to?
Posted by: Mike | Nov 25, 2012 1:43:55 PM
One thing I do agree with, Palestinians are going to have to find a way to unify under one clear authority. Otherwise, Israel will use this division, right or wrong, to argue that a 2 state agreement would be pointless unless the PLO (or whichever decided entity) can speak with one voice, and guarantee the conditions can be met, particularly on the security front.
Posted by: Mike | Nov 25, 2012 1:48:45 PM
The slow death of the inmates in concentration camp Gaza is not fast enough “We need to flatten all of Gaza. The American’s didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough – so they hit Nagasaki too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire"
-Ariel Sharon.
Posted by: Georg | Nov 27, 2012 11:25:45 PM
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