Peace Process
Last week, I noted that Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza has cost the lives of more Israeli soldiers than remaining in Gaza would have. But no less significant is the fact that Israel’s pullout has cost the lives of far more Palestinians than remaining in Gaza would have.
Here, too, a comparison to the second intifada is instructive. According to B’Tselem’s statistics, 1,727 Palestinians were killed in Gaza between September 2000, when the intifada began, and the August 2005 pullout. Since then, the numbers have soared. Another 1,271 Palestinians were killed between the pullout and December 2008, when the first Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began; 1,391 were killed during that war, and 481 between then and the start of the current war. That’s 3,143 Palestinian fatalities in total, and Palestinians claim another 1,600 or so have been killed during this war. So even if you assume, which I do, that B’Tselem’s numbers are exaggerated (it tends to believe Palestinian reports far too uncritically), the trend is undeniable: Since the pullout, Israeli-Palestinian fighting has produced more than twice as many Palestinian fatalities as the peak years of the second intifada did.
Moreover, as in the case of Israeli fatalities, this increase represents a sharp contrast to the trend in the West Bank, which the Israel Defense Forces still control: There, Palestinian fatalities have fallen from 1,491 between September 2000 and August 2005 to 395 in the nine years since August 2005, meaning annual fatalities have fallen by more than 85 percent (they haven’t dropped to zero because neither has Palestinian terror; terror attacks still kill Israelis every year, but the level is dramatically lower than at the height of the intifada).
The question is why Palestinian fatalities in Gaza have risen so sharply. The anti-Israel crowd will doubtless cite this fact as “proof” that recent Israeli premiers are even more bloodthirsty than “the butcher of Beirut,” as they fondly dubbed Ariel Sharon, the prime minister during the second intifada. But anyone not convinced that Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu are simply monsters who like eating Palestinian children for breakfast will have to consider the obvious alternative: Palestinian casualties have soared because the IDF’s departure from Gaza allowed terrorist organizations to entrench their rockets, tunnels, and explosives among the civilian population in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.
In the current war, Palestinians have stored rockets in schools and launched them from hospitals and from amid civilian houses. They have built cross-border tunnels to attack Israel that pass under civilian houses and emerge straight into a mosque. They have booby-trapped civilian houses and even health clinics. In short, by embedding their war material among the civilian population, Hamas and other terrorist organizations have made it impossible for the IDF to target them without also hitting civilians.
This Hamas strategy increases Palestinian casualties in another way as well: by magnifying the impact of any Israeli strike. Precision bombs can sometimes take out a building without touching the ones next to it. But precision strikes don’t work when the building they hit is booby-trapped or serves as a rocket warehouse; in that case, secondary explosions will create a much broader swathe of destruction. And Israel has no way of knowing when a target has been booby-trapped; Hamas doesn’t provide it with maps.
Problems like this didn’t arise when the IDF still controlled Gaza, because it could take preventive action to keep Hamas from entrenching war material in civilian areas to begin with. And that’s precisely why counterterrorism operations in the IDF-controlled West Bank have produced vastly lower Palestinian casualties.
Hamas certainly isn’t going to abandon its “dead baby strategy” voluntarily; conducting operations from amid a civilian population so as to maximize civilian casualties has proven wildly successful in turning the world against Israel. The conclusion is thus inescapable: Should the IDF ever leave the West Bank, the pullout won’t just result in more dead Israelis. It will certainly result in more dead Palestinians as well.
Originally published in Commentary
Has anyone noticed that the last remaining justification for Israel’s unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip has just disappeared? Proponents’ claims that the pullout would bring peace, security, and international support have long since been disproven; what it actually brought was 16,500 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza–including 13,800 before the current war began–and unprecedented international vitriol every time Israel tried to fight back (see the current anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe or the infamous Goldstone Report). Yet disengagement supporters still had one trump card to play: “At least our soldiers aren’t dying in Gaza anymore.” And to many Israelis, that gain was worth the terrible price.
But now, Israeli soldiers are once again dying in Gaza, at a rate that wipes out all the gains of the previous few years. Here are the figures, compiled from B’Tselem statistics:
Between the start of the second intifada, in September 2000, and the pullout in August 2005, 87 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza. Over the next eight years, it’s not true that no soldiers died in Gaza, but military fatalities did drop significantly: Altogether, 33 soldiers were killed either in Gaza or in southern Israel by fire from Gaza.
Even that “achievement” is actually an indictment of the disengagement, because in the West Bank, which Israel didn’t quit, military fatalities fell far more sharply: from 136 between September 2000 and August 2005 to just 13 in the subsequent nine years. But since Operation Protective Edge began earlier this month, even this meager gain has disappeared: 53 soldiers have so far been killed in or by attacks from Gaza, and the number will likely continue climbing as the operation progresses. In other words, Gaza has now claimed 86 military fatalities from Israel since the pullout–almost identical to the 87 it claimed during the second intifada–even as military fatalities have fallen sharply in the West Bank.
In contrast, had the Israel Defense Forces remained in Gaza, military fatalities would almost certainly have registered a decline similar to that in the West Bank, because Hamas wouldn’t have been able do either of the two things that are now costing so many soldiers their lives: smuggle in vast quantities of sophisticated weaponry or build an extensive network of attack tunnels.
The bottom line, therefore, is that the last remaining “achievement” of the Gaza pullout has proved as chimerical as all its other vaunted achievements: The pullout hasn’t saved soldiers’ lives; it has almost certainly cost them.
To be clear, I never liked the argument that saving soldiers’ lives was worth the cost of incessant rocket fire on the south; soldiers are supposed to put their lives on the line to protect civilians, not the other way around. But I understand why it was so persuasive to many Israelis: Almost every Israeli has a father, husband, brother, or son in the army, while far fewer have relatives and friends in rocket-battered southern communities; thus many Israelis felt they personally benefited from the tradeoff, even if other Israelis were paying the price.
Now, however, even that illusion is gone: By quitting Gaza, not only has Israel gotten 16,500 rockets and mortars on its country, but it hasn’t saved the life of a single soldier. In fact, it has almost certainly lost more soldiers than it would have had it stayed.
Israel may have no choice but to reoccupy Gaza someday. But whether it does or not, one thing is crystal clear: It would be insane to repeat this experiment in the West Bank.
Originally published in Commentary
To truly understand the current fighting in Gaza, it’s important to listen to Jamal Zakout. Zakout, a secular resident of Ramallah, is no fan of Hamas, as Amira Hass noted in her report in Haaretz last week (Hebrew only): He has held various positions in the Palestinian Authority, including spokesman for former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, took part in the Geneva Initiative (a nongovernmental effort to draft an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement), and opposed the “militarization” of the second intifada. Nevertheless, Hass writes, the fighting is bolstering Hamas’s status even among Palestinians like him, because “when Hamas manages, despite everything, to continue launching missiles at Israel and disrupting normal life there, Zakout says this restores their feeling of human dignity.”
This, in a nutshell, is why the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains unsolvable, and why it produces spasms of violence with monotonous regularity: For too many Palestinians, including “moderates” like Zakout, “human dignity” derives from hurting Israelis–even knowing full well that the resultant Israeli counterstrikes will cause far greater harm to Palestinians.
This is something you would simply never hear an Israeli say, because Israelis see human dignity as stemming from saving life, not taking it. This doesn’t mean they oppose using military force in self-defense. Indeed, they overwhelmingly support the current operation: After absorbing 13,000 rockets from Gaza over the last nine years, they want the rockets stopped; they want children in the south to be able to grow up normally, instead having 45 percent suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder due to constant rocket fire, and they want people all over Israel to be able to lead their lives without disruption. But they would never say that dropping bombs on Gaza enhances their “human dignity”; they view war as an unpleasant necessity which they would much rather not have to engage in.
This difference in Palestinian and Israeli attitudes is epitomized by two technological developments that have become the darlings of their respective peoples: the Iron Dome anti-missile system and the M-75 rocket.
The M-75 is a technological marvel–a homemade medium-range rocket capable of striking Tel Aviv, developed despite stringent Israeli import restrictions aimed at preventing Hamas from doing just that. It’s a purely offensive weapon with no defensive purpose, and Palestinians love it. An enterprising Gaza merchant even named a perfume after it two years ago, when it was first deployed, and Reuters reported that sales promptly soared.
Iron Dome is also a homegrown technological marvel. But it’s the M-75’s mirror image: a purely defensive weapon with no offensive purpose. And that’s precisely why Israelis love it: Its purpose is to save lives rather than take them.
It’s not that Israel lacks homegrown, technologically marvelous offensive weapons. But while killing people who seek to kill you is sometimes necessary for self-defense, and most Israelis have no qualms about employing offensive weapons for that purpose, they would never love them. They view taking life as an unpleasant necessity that they would much rather be spared.
Palestinians, to be fair, have no defensive weaponry to love; they don’t even have basic civil-defense measures such as shelters. But that, as Jonathan Tobin wrote last week, is because Hamas deliberately opted to invest all its efforts in offensive capabilities rather than measures to protect its own people. It prefers taking Israeli lives to saving Palestinian ones. And this preference has only bolstered Hamas’s popularity.
This seeming anomaly is explained by Zakout’s insight: To many Palestinians, human dignity comes not from bettering their own lives, but from worsening Israelis’ lives. Or as a Hamas parliamentarian succinctly put it, “We desire Death, as you desire Life.”
And as long as Palestinians derive their sense of human dignity from killing Israelis, peace will never be possible.
Originally published in Commentary
It often feels as if Israel can never win the public diplomacy war. After all, how do you compete with hundreds of dead Palestinians, other than through the one thing Israel will always do its utmost to prevent – even more dead Israelis? But while there’s no easy solution, two developments of the current war in Gaza offer hope that over time, this uphill battle can be won.
The first is a fascinating Gallup poll published last week on how Americans view the Hamas-Israel conflict. Unsurprisingly, most respondents deemed Hamas’s actions unjustified (70% to 11%). But they split almost evenly over Israel’s actions, with 42% considering them justified and 39% unjustified. At first glance, that doesn’t seem encouraging. But Gallup’s breakdown of the results is illuminating.
First, shockingly, the poll revealed that the more closely people follow “news about the situation,” the more they support Israel. Those who follow the news “very closely” overwhelmingly view Israel’s actions as justified, by a margin of 71% to 24%. Those who follow it “somewhat closely” consider Israel’s actions justified by a smaller but still significant margin, 51-42. Only among those who don’t follow the news closely did a plurality consider Israel’s actions unjustified (43-18).
The educational breakdown was equally surprising. The people most likely to consider Israel’s actions justified are those with postgraduate education (53% to 27%), followed respectively by those with first degrees (49-33) and those with some college (43-38). Only among people with a high-school education or less did a plurality consider Israel’s actions unjustified (45-34).
The first statistic is surprising because the media has focused overwhelmingly on the “disproportionate” Palestinian casualties, while blindly parroting the UN’s highly dubiousclaim that most are innocent civilians. Thus one would expect people who follow the news closely to be more convinced that Israel is massacring innocents than those who haven’t been deluged with daily pictures of dead Palestinians.
The second statistic is surprising because, like every other recent poll on American attitudes toward Israel, this one shows a clear partisan split: Republicans consider Israel’s actions justified by a 65-21 margin while Democrats consider them unjustified by a 47-31 margin. Thus one would expect traditional Democratic constituencies to tilt against Israel. But as Gallup noted, people with postgraduate educations “are the most likely education group to endorse Israel’s actions” even though they “tend to be politically Democratic.”
Granted, Jews are disproportionately represented among both people who follow the news closely and those with postgraduate educations. But at only 2% of the American population, Jews remain minorities even when they’re disproportionately represented. And while non-Jewish Israel supporters are also disproportionately represented among people who follow the news closely, so are Palestinian supporters. Thus even after adjusting for these factors, is seems likely that Israel is winning both among people who follow the news closely and people with more education because these are precisely the groups most likely to look behind simplistic comparisons of casualty statistics, whether by visiting Israeli news sites, listening to Israeli officials, exploring information available on social networks or any other means.
In short, the poll indicates that Israel’s justifications for its actions really can convince people who – despite the meager amount of time, effort and money Israel invests in public diplomacy – actually manage to hear them. Thus upping this investment in order to reach more people would likely pay handsome dividends.
The other stunning development has been the sea change in Egypt’s behavior. For 35 years, Israeli-Egyptian peace ranged from cold to frigid. But in the current war, Egypt has been acting like a real ally. Cairo coordinated its cease-fire proposals with Israel rather than Hamas, enabling a united Israeli-Arab front against the Obama Administration’s disgraceful pro-Hamas line. When America and much of Europe suspended flights to Israel last week, Air Sinai kept flying. Egypt’s military boasted last week of stopping two terror attacks against Israel (since when have Arab countries bragged about saving Israeli lives rather than taking them?). And many Egyptians are siding openly with Israel. “Thank you Netanyahu and may God give us more like you to destroy Hamas,” one journalist wrote. “May God make the State of Israel victorious in its war against the terrorist movement Hamas,” added an Internet commenter on a different Egyptian news site.
Egyptians don’t love Israel. But they’ve discovered that radical Islamist groups like Hamas are far more dangerous to them than Israel is. Not only did the Muslim Brotherhood – of which Hamas is a branch – subject Egypt to devastating misrule during its year in power, but Sinai-based jihadists, who receive training, weaponry and other assistance from Islamist groups in Gaza, have perpetrated numerous attacks inside Egypt. Egypt now views Hamas as its enemy, and is following the ancient adage that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
I don’t know what critical mass of attacks is required to produce this mindset change. But with radical groups like the Islamic State posing an ever greater threat to other Mideast countries, and thousands of Western jihadists in Syria threatening to attack Europe once they return, it’s plausible to think other countries might experience similar epiphanies in the coming years.
In one of the most fatuous statements of all time, Shimon Peres once said that Israel doesn’t need public diplomacy, because good policies are self-explanatory and bad ones can’t be explained. Nothing better proves the fallacy of his argument than the current war. Virtually every Israeli, Peres included, considers Israel’s conduct justified, yet it’s far from self-explanatory; as the Gallup poll shows, Israel’s support comes mainly from those prepared to delve beyond the casualty statistics into complex explanations.
But the poll shows that Israel can convince people if it can get them to listen. And Egypt’s example shows that growing Islamic extremism may well make people worldwide more willing to listen. These two facts lead to an unequivocal conclusion: Israel must start investing far more resources than ever before in public diplomacy. The battle for international public opinion is no less important than the one in Gaza. And like the military one, it can’t be won without investing the requisite resources.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
Much of the world appears to view the current fighting in eastern Ukraine as totally unconnected to the fighting in Gaza. And since the Ukrainian government is desperately seeking support from both Europe and the Obama administration, neither of which is enamored of Israel’s Gaza operation, one could have forgiven Ukrainian officials for seeking to nurture this illusion. Instead, they have repeatedly gone out of their way to dispel it.
Three weeks ago, Andriy Parubiy, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, compared eastern Ukraine’s situation to what Israel faces and warned that terrorists would likely adopt similar tactics in other countries if the West didn’t take a firm stance against them.
“We, of course, studied the experience of both Croatia and Israel, but here a lot of new features are added,” Parubiy said. “And, if Russia sees that this experience is successful, this experience can very easily be used in any Baltic countries, and even in Belarus and Kazakhstan.”
Yesterday, Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Henadii Nadolenko made both the comparison and the warning even more explicit in an op-ed in Haaretz. Unambiguously titled “Ukraine and Israel: Together in fighting terrorism,” it declared, “We, the representatives of Ukraine, have, together with the people of the State of Israel, personally felt the totality of the threat posed to civilians by the criminal activities of the terrorists.”
After enumerating the losses both countries have suffered, Nadolenko continued, “I am convinced that the huge loss of civilian and military life might have been avoided had the activities of terrorist organizations had been condemned by the international community.” Then, citing the recent downing of a civilian airliner over eastern Ukraine, he drove the point home:
I would like to emphasize once again that the crime, which killed 298 innocent civilians from around the world, is another confirmation of the fact that today’s terrorism is not constrained by borders…
In this regard, once again I would like to appeal to the thinking and caring people of the world to demonstrate their support for these peoples, who came upon a fight with an evil that threatens the security of everyone, regardless of nationality or place of residence.
I believe that the countries that are faced with terrorism and who try to fight this evil should support each other, and should join their efforts in order to draw the world’s attention to our cause. We must begin to receive real help and support from international organizations in order to combat this threat.
Clearly, Nadolenko understands what too many European and American officials seem to have missed: The West’s fine shades of distinction–under which some terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda, are utterly shunned; others, like Hamas, are denounced but deemed to have “legitimate grievances that must be addressed”; while still others are positively feted, like Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, whose Gaza branch boasts of its contribution to the rocket fire at Israel–are meaningless. All terrorists are equally enemies of the civilized world, and all of them learn from each other’s tactics. Thus if the West rewards a given tactic in one location, terrorists in other countries will soon replicate it.
For Hamas, launching rockets at Israel has so far paid handsome dividends: No less a personage than U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has pledged that if it ceases its fire, he will personally see to it that all its economic demands are met–including opening the border crossings, paying Hamas employees’ salaries, “ensuring the social and economic livelihood” of Gaza residents and providing “major humanitarian assistance”–while not insisting that it forfeit any of its military capabilities (all Kerry offered Israel was a vague promise to “address all security issues”).
Kerry clearly hasn’t grasped that if targeting Israeli civilians with rockets pays economic and diplomatic dividends for Hamas, this will encourage other terrorists worldwide to adopt similar tactics. Nadolenko and his fellow Ukrainians, in contrast, understand this very well. The question is whether anyone in the West is listening to them.
On Friday, the always perceptive Walter Russell Mead termed the FAA’s decision to suspend flights to Israel last week “the biggest political mistake of the war so far.” Mead was referring to the decision’s impact on a cease-fire, but it actually has far larger political implications. In one fell swoop, it destroyed the main diplomatic return the Obama Administration hoped to earn on its years of generous support for the Iron Dome anti-missile system: increased Israeli willingness to withdraw from the West Bank.
While Congress’s motive in supporting Iron Dome was mainly to save Israeli lives, the Obama administration always had an additional motive: countering Israeli fears that ceding the West Bank would lead to “rockets from Nablus, Ramallah and Jenin onto Ben-Gurion Airport,” as Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon put it, just as leaving Gaza resulted in massive rocket fire on Israel’s south. If Iron Dome could protect Israel from rocket fire, the argument went, then Israel needn’t fear a West Bank withdrawal.
Until last week, that argument might have had a chance: True, Hamas was sending rocket barrages all over Israel and forcing Israelis into shelters several times a day, but the combination of Iron Dome and civil defense measures kept Israeli casualties negligible.
Last week, however, Israelis learned that even Iron Dome can’t keep their main airport open when their neighbors are launching rockets at it. No anti-missile system is foolproof, and one intentionally missed rocket proved enough for most of the world to suspend flights to Israel.
As Mead correctly noted, the discovery that Hamas’s rockets can threaten its main transportation link to the outside world makes it much harder for Israel to end the fighting without eliminating Hamas’s rocket capabilities. But it also makes it much harder for Israel to quit the West Bank as long as there’s any chance of it turning into a rocket launching pad like Gaza has.
The vast majority of Israel’s foreign investment and trade comes from the West, and Israel’s geographic distance from the West means this commerce depends on aerial traffic. With its airport shuttered, investors can’t come in and time-sensitive exports can’t go out. Thus Israel simply cannot afford to have its air links with the West at the mercy of a terrorist organization. Its economy wouldn’t survive.
Whether the FAA’s decision was actually political I don’t know. Perhaps the agency was merely spooked by the previous week’s downing of a commercial airliner over Ukraine. Yet the fact that the ban was reversed two days later even though the security situation hadn’t changed, combined with the fact that major airlines like British Airways never suspended flights to begin with, support the contention that the decision, as Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel put it, “had no substantive professional basis,” and was intended primarily to browbeat Israel into accepting Secretary of State John Kerry’s completely unacceptable cease-fire proposal.
If so, to quote Harel again, it reflected “a fundamental lack of understanding of the Israeli mindset”–and not just about the cease-fire. That single FAA decision did more than any political argument ever could to ensure that Israel won’t be leaving the West Bank anytime soon.
Having long argued that such a withdrawal would be untenably dangerous, I’m certainly not sorry. But for the Obama administration, it was definitely an own goal.
If it weren’t so much his own fault, I’d feel deeply sorry for Mahmoud Abbas right now. A few weeks ago, the Palestinian Authority president was handily beating Hamas in the polls; now, his popularity is at a nadir. A whopping 85 percent of West Bank Palestinians approve of Hamas’s performance during the current fighting with Israel, while only 13 percent approve of Abbas’s performance. His own people have held stormy demonstrations denouncing him as a “traitor”; he was concerned enough to send his wife and grandchildren to Jordan for safety. And what heinous crime did he commit to merit this opprobrium? He urged Hamas to accept an immediate cease-fire in Gaza in order to save Palestinian lives.
In short, Abbas forgot the ironclad rule of Palestinian politics: Taking Israeli lives is always more popular that saving Palestinian lives. The martyrdom culture Palestinian political and religious leaders have nurtured for generations means that even if a war kills far more Palestinians than Israelis, waging it “restores their feeling of human dignity,” as one former PA official said last week. And while Abbas didn’t create this culture, he has not only made no effort to wean his people off it in almost 10 years as PA president; he has actively reinforced it. Day in and day out, he has told his people that those who murder Israelis are the Palestinians’ greatest heroes, the model every Palestinian should strive to emulate.
On May 31, 2012, for instance, he presided over an official state ceremony to honor 91 terrorists whose bodies had just been returned by Israel. Collectively, these terrorists killed over 100 Israeli civilians; many were suicide bombers. As Abbas laid wreaths on their coffins, the secretary-general of his office and the PA-appointed mufti both gave eulogies saying the souls of the deceased were urging other Palestinians to “follow in their path.”
That’s one example out of hundreds; here’s some more from the last few months: In June, Abbas awarded the order of merit to the planner of several deadly suicide bombings, “in appreciation of his role in the struggle and his commitment to defending the Palestinian people.” In May, at a ceremony honoring another man responsible for several deadly attacks on Israeli civilians, Abbas’s representative declared, “Our Martyrs and prisoners will remain the beacon of our magnificent glory … We must be loyal to these heroes in all aspects.” In February, Abbas awarded the Star of Honor to yet another terrorist responsible for numerous attacks on Israeli civilians.
Under his leadership, the PA has named city squares, summer camps, and sports tournaments after terrorists; its official television station has broadcast videos and programs glorifying terrorism; his Fatah party has handed out candy to celebrate terror attacks and exalted terrorists as role models on its Facebook page; and much more.
In every possible way, Abbas has told his people for 10 years that the true heroes, the ones to be emulated, are those who kill Israelis, whatever the cost. And it’s worked so well that now, when he tries to tell them shooting rockets at Israel isn’t worth the price in Palestinian lives, they denounce him as a traitor.
So yesterday, he gave up. After days of trying to prevent Israeli-Palestinian clashes in the West Bank, he let his Fatah party organize a violent demonstration in which some 10,000 Palestinians threw rocks and firebombs at Israeli police guarding the main checkpoint into Jerusalem, thereby producing yet more martyrs for the Palestinian cause: one Palestinian killed and 200 injured, three of them critically. That, after all, is what the Palestinians wanted.
And that’s also why Abbas never has and never will sign a peace agreement with Israel. You can’t sign an agreement ending the conflict when your own people denounce you as a traitor even for trying to arrange a cease-fire. And you can’t persuade your people to accept such an agreement as long as they consider saving Palestinian lives lower priority than taking Israeli ones.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the current war with Hamas is the mantra endlessly repeated by senior military officials: Terror from Gaza has “no military solution.” Former air force pilot Reuven Ben-Shalom, for instance, reported that during a visit to air force headquarters last week, he found “a deep understanding of the limitations of military might. Everyone knows that the military’s goal in asymmetric warfare is not to win a decisive victory, but to bring about a reality which will enable the political echelons to shape the strategic environment.” Similarly, a senior Israel Defense Forces officer declared last week that military action can’t defeat Hamas; the army’s job is merely “to create conditions for the political echelon so that the political process will work.”
True, terrorist organizations still exist in the West Bank; they still try to perpetrate attacks, and sometimes they even succeed. So if you define “victory” as the total elimination of every last terrorist and every last terror attack, then victory wasn’t achieved in the West Bank either. But that’s an unreasonable definition of victory; no society in history has ever completely eliminated murder.
By that definition, Israel has unquestionably defeated terror in the West Bank. The suicide bombings that paralyzed life from 2000-2004 have virtually disappeared, and the tactics Hamas employs in Gaza never started: Not one rocket has ever been fired at Israel from the West Bank, compared to over 13,000 from Gaza, nor has there been a single “terrorist tunnel” of the kind Hamas uses in cross-border attacks from Gaza. Thus despite claiming a handful of casualties every year, terror from the West Bank has been low enough that for the past ten years, Israelis have been able to lead completely normal lives.
In other words, while West Bank terrorists have lost their ability to terrorize, Gazan terrorists are still terrorizing Israel quite successfully. Normal life has been impossible in southern Israel for years, unless you consider it “normal” to have 45% of children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder due to constant rocket fire. And while normal life is possible for other Israelis in between wars, there’s nothing “normal” about having a war shut down much of the country for weeks on end every two to three years.
Defeating terror in Gaza obviously wouldn’t be cost-free; 18 soldiers have already been killed in the current operation. Former Shin Bet security service chief Avi Dichter – who, as a leading architect of Israel’s victory over terror in the West Bank, is one of the most credible experts on the subject – says Israeli forces would have to stay in Gaza for a year or two to do the job. Others think the IDF would have to remain permanently in part or even all of Gaza, though that seems less essential now that Egypt’s government is finally cracking down on Hamas smuggling tunnels to Sinai, thereby making it much harder for Hamas to rebuild its capabilities once the IDF destroys them. Either way, it’s a price many Israelis might be unwilling to pay, and that’s a legitimate decision, even if I disagree.
Given that Israel so obviously did defeat terror in the West Bank ten years ago, there are only two possible explanations for this dogged insistence that there’s no military solution to terror in Gaza. First, these senior officers are so short-sighted that either they can’t recognize the parallel to the West Bank, or they can’t figure out how to apply similar tactics to Gaza. Or second, they don’t think Israel should pay the price a military solution entails, and are forcing their view on the government by refusing to present plans for such a solution. In other words, they’re carrying out a soft coup, just as they did when they prevented the government from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010.
I’m not sure which explanation is scarier. But neither bodes well for Israel.
(originally published on July 18, 2014)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted desperately to avoid a ground operation in Gaza. He ordered it only 10 days into Operation Protective Edge, following the failure of two separate cease-fire proposals that Israel accepted and honored–an Egyptian one that Hamas simply ignored and a UN-sponsored one that it swiftly abrogated. Yet now that he’s been forced into it, it would be a criminal waste to confine it to the very limited goal he set.
Netanyahu’s goal–destroying the network of cross-border tunnels Hamas has built to carry out attacks in Israel–is undeniably important. It was through such tunnel that Hamas kidnapped Gilad Shalit in 2006 and subsequently traded him for 1,027 vicious terrorists, some of whom have since resumed killing; Israel has good reason to seek to prevent a repeat. But destroying the tunnels will do nothing to prevent a repeat of the kind of rocket war Israel has already suffered three times in the nine years since its 2005 Gaza pullout, and it simply can’t afford to keep having such wars every few years: While Iron Dome and extensive civil defense measures have kept Israeli casualties near zero, the economic costs are already nontrivial, and as David Rosenberg noted in Haaretz last week, one lucky hit on, say, Ben-Gurion Airport or Intel’s production facility could suffice to send the economy into a tailspin. Thus Israel must seize the opportunity to completely dismantle Hamas’s rocket capabilities–because for the first time since it quit Gaza, there’s a real chance Hamas won’t be able to rebuild them.
It’s impossible to stop Hamas from launching another war without dismantling its capabilities; recently history amply proves that deterrence doesn’t work. The significant damage Hamas suffered in both previous Gaza wars, in 2009 and 2012, didn’t stop it from launching new wars a few years later, and there’s no reason to think the current war–which has done it no more damage than the previous ones–will produce a different result.
Nor is there any way to destroy Hamas’s capabilities other than by a ground operation. Even according to the Israel Air Force’s possibly over-optimistic statistics, the intensive airstrikes of Operation Protective Edge’s first week destroyed fewer than 3,000 of Hamas’s estimated 9,000 rockets; most of the rest can’t be destroyed by air, either because their location is unknown or because they’re stored in places likes schools and hospitals that can’t be bombed without massive civilian casualties. During that same week, Hamas fired about 1,000 rockets at Israel. Thus it has some 5,000 left, including hundreds capable of hitting Tel Aviv and beyond–more than enough for another war or three. And it can easily manufacture even more, since for the same reasons, Israel has bombed only about half its rocket production facilities. Eliminating its capabilities thus requires a search-and-destroy ground operation: capturing and interrogating terrorists to find out where arsenals and factories are located, searching facilities like hospitals that can’t be bombed, etc.
Clearly, such an operation wouldn’t be cost-free, and in previous years, Israel saw little point in paying the price, because Hamas could easily replenish its arsenal. But that’s no longer true. The Egyptian government, with strong public support, has been systematically destroying Hamas’s cross-border smuggling tunnels into Sinai over the past year, having finally grasped that the two-way terror traffic through these tunnels threatens Egypt’s security at least as much as Israel’s. Thus as long as Israel refrains from a cease-fire deal that grants Hamas egregious concessions–i.e., as long as it resists international pressure to loosen its naval blockade of Gaza, ease its tight security checks on overland cargo to Gaza, and relax restrictions on dual-use imports like cement that Hamas has repeatedly diverted to build its terrorist infrastructure at the expense of civilian needs–Hamas will likely have difficulty rebuilding its capabilities.
In short, Israel now has a golden opportunity to destroy Hamas’s rocket capabilities once and for all. It would be folly to waste it.
Yesterday, I wrote about one important way in which the West helps Hamas. Clearly, there are also many others, including media coverage that encourages Hamas’s use of human shields (as Alan Dershowitz explains here) or even parrots outright Hamas lies (as Noah Pollak explains here). But Monday’s Jerusalem Post editorial highlighted one important form of assistance to Hamas that has received far too little attention despite contributing greatly to Gaza’s current misery: the West’s relentless pressure on Israel to stop restricting imports of “dual-use” items into Gaza.
For years, human-rights groups, diplomats, pundits, and other opinion leaders demanded an end to the “siege” of Gaza, and eventually, they succeeded. President Barack Obama deserves special mention here; it was he who, after Israel’s botched raid on a flotilla to Gaza in 2010, twisted Israel’s arm into drastically easing its import controls. The pressure increased again after Egypt tightened its own blockade of Gaza last year, leading Israel to remove all remaining restrictions on construction materials like cement and iron.
Most of those who pressed Israel on this issue sincerely wanted to improve Palestinian lives: Eliminating import restrictions, they argued, would let Gaza residents build homes and businesses, improve the economy, and generally contribute to Palestinian wellbeing. So they blithely dismissed Israel’s warnings that these materials would actually be used not to help ordinary Palestinians, but to build Hamas’s terror infrastructure.
We now know Israel’s warnings were 100 percent correct. As Jonathan Tobin has already noted, Hamas built a vast warren of underground bunkers to protect its rockets and its own personnel. It also built dozens of cross-border tunnels dedicated solely to launching attacks inside Israel; the IDF has so far located 28–each of which runs for miles, deep underground, requiring hundreds of tons of cement and millions of dollars to build–and doesn’t think it has found them all. Yet Hamas built no hospitals, schools, power plants, or even bomb shelters to serve the general population; where such institutions exist, they were built either by Israel (when it controlled Gaza) or the international community.
Hamas built much of its underground warren with materials smuggled in from Egypt. But Israel’s lifting of restrictions last year undoubtedly helped. And even before that, Israel allowed huge quantities of dual-use products to be imported for projects supervised by the UN, Western governments, or international aid agencies, who were supposed to ensure that Hamas didn’t use them for its terrorist infrastructure. Given the sheer size of the tunnel network, it now seems likely that Hamas siphoned off some of this material, too–just as it has repeatedly stored rockets in UNRWA schools despite that organization’s stated objections.
Had Hamas not been able to build these tunnels, Israeli ground troops wouldn’t be in Gaza trying to destroy them. And had Israeli troops not been in Gaza, the hundreds of Palestinians wounded or killed in the Hamas-Israel crossfire would be unharmed, while the hundreds of homes damaged or destroyed in the fighting, or in the demolition of tunnels that run right under them, would still be standing.
In other words, in its well-meaning effort to improve Palestinian lives by demanding that Israel end its import restrictions, the international community helped Hamas build a massive terrorist infrastructure that has now brought death and destruction down on Gaza. I wonder whether all the Palestinians who have lost their loved ones or their homes think those extra tons of imported cement were worth the price.
I also wonder whether the West will learn the lessons for next time. Hamas is demanding that any cease-fire include a complete removal of all Israeli and Egyptian import restrictions and the end of Israel’s naval blockade. Pressuring Israel to comply with this demand would be a mistake. For not only would it show Hamas that launching rockets at Israel is an effective way of securing political gains, it would also facilitate its efforts to rebuild its war machine for the next round.