The Israelis will say they had no choice: they are wrong

Tony Karon

• Last Updated: December 28. 2008 9:30AM UAE / December 28. 2008 5:30AM GMT

It’s not that Israel wanted to attack Gaza; it would have us believe it had no choice.

Like the Vicario brothers in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterful novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold – who believed they were honour-bound to kill Santiago Nasar for sleeping with their sister, and told anyone who would listen of their intention in the unspoken hope that someone would stop them – Israel, too, had been yelling from the rooftops its intention to strike Gaza.

In fact, it was even urging its intended victims to halt its assault by stopping the rocket fire on to southern Israeli towns, or even, in a spectacular act of chutzpah by a disgraced Israeli prime minister, by demanding that they overthrow the Hamas government they elected three years ago to avoid being bombed.

Just as in the Marquez novel, what propelled the Gaza tragedy forward to its bloody conclusion was that neither the Israelis nor anyone they told of their plan were willing to confront the absurdity of the “rules” that made them believe they were obliged to spill blood. Israel claimed that it had no choice but to launch a military campaign that has begun with air strikes but will probably escalate to some form of ground invasion.

The rocket fire from Gaza became intolerable, say Israeli leaders, and no nation state would live with it. (And certainly not in an election season in which the incumbent leadership is chasing an electorate moving steadily further to the right. The hawkish Likud party had a massive lead over centrist Tzipi Livni in the polls in recent weeks, but it has begun to shed support – not to Livni, but to parties even further to the right.)

The context of the renewed rocket launching, of course, was the breakdown of the ceasefire brokered by Egypt between Israel and Hamas in June, which expired last week. Israel set off the latest upsurge in rocket attacks by launching raids on Nov 5 which it said were necessary to stop Palestinians tunnelling under the boundary fence. But the ceasefire has not really worked for Hamas, because it had expected that in exchange for holding its fire, not only would Israel reciprocate but it would also begin to ease the crippling economic siege, the objective of which was the overthrow of the Hamas government. Israel insists that wasn’t what it agreed, saying it had offered only “calm for calm” – and that the same offer was still on the table.

But it’s hardly surprising that Hamas saw little merit in restraining its rocket fire in exchange for Israel refraining from air strikes while maintaining its stranglehold on Gaza. Why would Hamas accept a “we won’t bomb you, but that doesn’t mean we won’t starve you” formula when it was well aware of the reasons restraining Israel from launching a full-blown campaign – the reluctance to present incoming President Barack Obama with a crisis that forces him to prioritise Israeli-Palestinian relations rather than Israel’s preference that he focus instead on Iran; the fear of losing dozens of Israeli soldiers in house-to-house fighting in Gaza; the inevitability of massive civilian casualties (and the possibility that intensified Palestinian rocket fire in retaliation might inflict civilian casualties in southern Israel); the fact that such an operation is unlikely to defeat Hamas; and, because of that, the fact that Israel has no exit strategy. (President Mahmoud Abbas and even some in the Arab world would dearly love to see Israel take care of Hamas militarily, and then hand Gaza back to Fatah, but the Israelis aren’t so naive as to believe Fatah is capable of ruling the territory.)

So Hamas knows that despite yesterday’s bloody airstrikes, Israel is likely to stop short of a full-blown reoccupation, and the Islamists believe they can prevail politically in a limited confrontation.

Israel has painted itself into a strategic corner – with the enthusiastic support of the Bush administration – by continuing its quest to reverse the choice of the Palestinian electorate in 2006. Even some in the Israeli security establishment recognise that the fundamental flaw in Israel’s policy over Gaza is its refusal to recognise political reality. “The state of Israel must understand that Hamas rule in Gaza is a fact, and it is with that government that we must reach a situation of calm,” Shmuel Zakai, former chief of the Israeli military’s Gaza division, told Israel Army Radio last week. Israel’s error, he said, was in failing to improve the economic situation in Gaza once the truce took hold, and instead maintaining a chokehold that worsened the situation.

Piqued by the audacity of the Palestinian voters, the US and Israel sought to reverse the result. First, they imposed crippling sanctions, and when that failed, they attempted a military putsch that prompted Hamas to drive Fatah-linked security forces out of Gaza in a bloody counter-coup. Instead of using Gaza’s economically dependent situation as leverage to restrain Hamas from launching attacks, the US immediately cut aid and enforced sanctions on Gaza with the warning that these would only be lifted when Hamas adopted positions that it would have deemed ideological surrender. And they have been trying in vain to topple it ever since.

The US-Israeli strategy on Hamas in Gaza has been a spectacular failure because it is fatally flawed. So when, in the coming days, you hear Israeli leaders claiming they “had no choice” but to go to war in Gaza, remember the Vicario brothers of Gabriel Garcia’s novel, who also believed they had no choice. And also remember that Marquez, in his book, blamed the whole town and its anachronistic codes for failing to stop a tragedy that unfolded in slow motion and in plain sight.

Tony Karon is a New York-based editor and analyst who blogs at
www.rootlesscosmopolitan.com