ISRAEL’S GAZA OPTIONS
Dr. Frederick Krantz
December 31, 2009
Hamas is a Sunni Islamic radical terrorist organization whose primary raison d’etre, clearly expressed in its founding covenant, is the destruction of Jewish Israel. Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, was wrong in stating that Hamas’ refusal to extend the recent cease-fire, and its subsequent Qassam, Grad and Katyusha rocket barrages against southern Israeli towns, was irrational, just as an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official was wrong in terming it a miscalculation.
Quite the reverse: Hamas’ action was both rational and calculated, for its legitimacy—with the people of Gaza (who elected it) and with Syria, Lebanese Hezbollah, and, above all, Iran (which back it)—resides precisely in its self-justificatory need tirelessly and unendingly to seek Israel’s destruction.
For seven years, since 2001, and especially since Israel’s mistaken 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, which Hamas exploited by staging a successful coup d’etat against the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas has engaged in steadily increasing, and widely documented, terrorist acts against Israel. Over 10,000 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza into the Jewish state, killing twenty people, wounding hundreds, causing widespread destruction and emotional shock and distress for a large civilian population, including thousands of children.
Currently, with the ever-greater range of its rockets, Hamas airborne terror reaches a perimeter 40 kilometers beyond Gaza, and threatens over 800,000 Israelis. And given the imminent supply of even more powerful rockets from Iran and Syria, Hamas would soon have been able to reach Tel Aviv and even Jerusalem. With the replenished and modernized arsenal already in the hands of its northern ally, Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorists (emboldened by surviving Israel’s 2006 anti-terrorist incursion), all of tiny Israel would soon have been under the direct threat of terrorist bombardment, a situation unprecedented in Israel’s sixty-year history.
Hence, after desperately trying to get Hamas to agree to a renewal of the recent truce, Israel, facing renewed Hamas rocket terrorism, launched its Operation Cast Lead, the evident justification for which even some Arab states seem to understand (even while, for political reasons–including fear of their own “Arab street”–they are unable explicitly to condone it). What is unclear to all rational observers is not the justification for Israel’s response, but what Israel’s end-game will be: will Israel now launch a ground invasion, to consolidate its obviously successful aerial campaign.
The issue here is not whether Israel can defeat Hamas terrorists holed up in Gaza–obviously the Middle East’s premier military can overcome irregular guerrilla fighters, with their backs against the sea and their only non-Israeli border occupied by an Arab state, Egypt, hostile to what is, in fact, a branch of the radical Moslem Brotherhood threatening Hosni Mubarrak’s own regime.
Nor is end-game uncertainty a matter of Israel’s reluctance to absorb casualties—while always a concern for tiny Israel, whose population is a kind of extended family, the Jewish state has absorbed the proportionally heavy casualties of five wars fought against Arab aggression. And presumably it has learned from the 2006 Lebanon war that air-power alone cannot guarantee victory on the ground against well-entrenched terrorists, or prevent them from rearming after a hastily-contrived truce (one helped, not hindered, in Lebanon by a feckless and ineffectual United Nations UNIFIL armed force).
To be successful, which means ensuring the end of terrorism, a ground campaign must not only root out Hamas’ hidden underground weapons bunkers, it must effectively destroy Hamas itself. But a key issue then arises: who will replace it?
A prime candidate is, most obviously, Hamas’ enemy, the Palestinian Authority President, and Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas, who has made no bones about blaming Hamas for stupidly provoking Israel’s retaliation, has long been machinating against Hamas in hopes of returning to Gaza, from which Hamas unceremoniously ejected him in the 2006 coup.
Abbas is strongly backed by Israel’s current government, still formally led by Ehud Olmert, with whom he has been negotiating the on-again, off-again peace process, by the outgoing Bush Administration in the U.S., and by Egypt and anti-Hamas (and anti-Iranian) Saudi Arabia.
While some pundits argue that Abbas remains unpopular in Gaza, the elimination of Hamas would create a new situation, and the ending Israel’s partial embargo and the prospect of rebuilding Gaza’s shattered economy would certainly be appealing. In any event, since Israel will not re-assume its recently-abandoned presence, at the moment tertium non datur—there seems to be no alternative to Abbas.
On the other hand, assuming that Israel does not crush Hamas, and that a sudden Hamas epiphany leading it to accept Israel’s existence is not in the offing, the best that can be hoped for is a restored, effective, and enforceable cease-fire–perhaps “guaranteed” by external powers. But that–given Hamas’ intransigence, its Iranian backing, and the model Hezbollah’s “successful” resistance against Israel in 2006–is probably not in the cards either. Instead, a more probable scenario would be a brief and shaky cessation of fighting, followed by the gradual restoration of the status quo ante, that is, the rebuilding of Hamas’ military resources and its resumption of terrorist acts.
(Of course, an external event, like the defeat of Iran’s Islamist mullahocracy and its terrifying drive for nuclear weapons, would radically alter the situation. Hamas, deprived of its financial and political backer, would be isolated and radically weakened, and this might finally lead to its overthrow by Abbas and/or other forces. But at the moment, barring Israeli action, such a resolution, given UN paralysis and Western pusillanimity, is improbable.)
Logic dictates eliminating terrorism by eliminating its instigator, Hamas, But history and politics do not unfold according to logic: the current Tsipi Livni and Ehud Barak-led Kadima government, marked by internal tensions and facing an impending election, may well replicate the hesitation and mistakes of its 2006 Olmert predecessor. Fearful of ground warfare casualties, and grasping at straws like UN intervention, it drew out the conflict, allowed Hezbollah to regroup and claim victory, and stumbled into another temporary and unstable cease-fire
Much, then, is at stake, for Israel, the Palestinians, and the region, in the current Gaza conflict. And the longer it continues the less manageable it becomes (Iran, fearing defeat as its Gaza client began to go down, could unleash greater violence by ordering its Hezbollah clients in the north, backed by Syria, to intervene, thus sparking a larger conflict).
As a sage observer of international politics said long ago, when asked if there weren’t alternatives to a then-current bloody stand-off, “Why yes, of course there are alternatives”, he replied, “either things will get worse, or there will be a catastrophe”. Radical Hamas, intoxicated by the prospect of martyrdom, may wish for catastrophe, but democratic Jewish Israel, wishing only to live in peace, must act quickly and decisively. Perhaps this time around, Israel will not repeat the debacle of 2006.
(Dr. Frederick Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research
and a professor of history at Liberal Arts College, Concordia University)
