Published: November 19, 2012
HOW does it end in Gaza?
This has been the issue with all the self-defeating Israeli military
offensives of the past 16 years — Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon,
Operation Cast Lead in Gaza and now Operation Pillar of Defense, all of
them, not coincidentally, initiated on the eve of national elections in
Israel.
Gilad Sharon, the son of Ariel Sharon who orchestrated Israel’s
withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, has an idea for an ending. He expressed it
this way in The Jerusalem Post:
“We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.
The Americans 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 cease-fire.”
Atomic bombs, blackness, stillness, nothingness — Sharon allows himself
to indulge the old Israeli dream that the Palestinian people should just
disappear. But of course they do not. They regroup. They find new
leaders. They endure with hatred of Israel reignited by loss.
This is an old story. As early as 1907, Yitzhak Epstein, a Zionist,
wrote an article called “A Hidden Question” in which he observed: “We
have forgotten one small matter: There is in our beloved land an entire
nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never
thought to leave it.” Zionism, Epstein warned, would have to face and
solve “The Arab Question.”
The specific question for Israel in the run-up to this operation was
what to do about rockets launched from Gaza at its citizens. No government can accept having its civilians subjected to regular rocket attacks from a neighboring territory.
As usual, the prelude was messy — a rocket fired from Gaza hitting
southern Israel on Nov. 3; a Palestinian killed near the border on Nov.
4; three Israeli soldiers wounded in a blast at the border on Nov. 6; a
Palestinian boy killed by Israeli machine-gun fire on Nov. 8; four
Israelis soldiers wounded by an anti-tank missile on Nov. 10; four
Palestinian teenagers killed when Israel fires back; steadily increasing
rocket fire from Gaza. (That is just a rough summary, and of course
each side has a different version.)
The question for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was what to do:
Escalate or pursue the cease-fire negotiations then being conducted on
an unofficial basis through Egyptian good offices with Ahmed al-Jabari,
the head of the military wing of Hamas and the man responsible both for
the abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and his release a year
ago. The aim of the cease-fire talks, in the words of the independent
Israeli negotiator Gershon Baskin, “was to move beyond the patterns of
the past.”
On Nov. 14 Netanyahu made his decision: Jabari was assassinated,
with accompanying video of his exploding car. (One imagines the
reaction of a kid seeing it: “Dad, I did that yesterday!”)
And here we are in the patterns of the past: Palestinian children among
at least 90 people already killed in Gaza, three Israelis dead from
rocket fire, Palestinian government buildings being blown up, diplomats
scrambling for a cease-fire, the U.S. Congress isolated in its blanket
approval, Israel casting around for a plausible endgame as regional fury
mounts.
Is all this good for Israel? No. Unless good is defined as policies that
radicalize the situation, erode middle ground, demonstrate the
impossibility of agreement, and so facilitate continued Israeli
occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of settlements there and the
steady eclipse of the idea of a two-state peace. This may well be
Netanyahu’s criteria for a tactical victory from Operation Pillar of
Defense (along with victory for Likud on Jan. 22.)
There will be no other Israeli “victory.” As Aluf Benn, editor in chief
of the Israeli daily Haaretz, commented, “The assassination of Jabari
will go down in history as another showy military action initiated by an
outgoing government on the eve of an election.” Jabari, Benn argued,
was in effect Israel’s point man in a money-for-truce exchange that
worked imperfectly. Now, “Israel will have to find a new subcontractor
to replace Ahmed Jabari as its border guard in the south.”
In other words Hamas will not go away. It will have to be dealt with.
The United States now deals with the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent of
Hamas) and Salafis in the new Egypt. Dealing with reality is a good
thing.
Israel, I learn from my colleague Ethan Bronner, has a preferred metaphor for its repetitive security operations: “Cutting the grass,”
as in “a task that must be performed regularly and has no end.” But of
course bombing Gaza is potent fertilizer to the grasses of hatred.
What, I wonder, does Shalit think? His Hamas tormentor freed him in the end.
The Middle East has opened up. Young Arabs are thinking about their own
societies. Israel, stuck in the patterns of the past, has another
option: Testing Palestinian good will rather than punishing Palestinian
bad faith. Under Netanyahu, it has not even tried. Until it does the
endings will be bad.
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