Israel Faces Hard Political Problems After the Gaza Fighting Charles Lipson
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/21/israel_faces_hard_political_probl
It’s hard waging war against terrorists camped out among civilians. It’s even harder when your best ally starts edging away. That was the position Israel faced after an abrupt change-of-face by the Biden White House.
Until Wednesday, the Biden team supplied the press with readouts stressing America’s “strong” and “unwavering support” for Israel, based on the president’s calls to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Those days are over. Biden buckled under growing pressure from anti-Israel factions within the Democratic Party and some allies in Europe and the Middle East.
The administration’s revised goals were Israel’s immediate de-escalation and a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Progressives want to go further. They hope to block a huge, scheduled sale of military equipment to Israel, including Iron Dome defensive missiles. (That progressive goal is a long shot since the Biden administration publicly supports the sale.)
The administration’s pressure on Israel returns the Biden White House to Obama-era policies, much like its resumption of Obama’s policies toward Iran. The people tied to those old policies are back, too. They have learned from their mistakes and can repeat them exactly. The policies themselves have become mainstream among Democrats and represent two decades of steady effort by the party’s left wing, including some progressive Jews, led by J Street.
Netanyahu tried to resist the new White House pressure, insisting Israel would fight until it achieved its objectives. But it was difficult to hold out for long. International pressure was building, not on Hamas terrorists firing rockets at civilians but on the Jewish state defending against them. The result was a cease-fire, brokered by Egypt, that began Friday morning. Like all such arrangements, it doesn’t come with a long-term warranty. Cease-fires are fragile. In any case, it is far short of a peace deal and even farther from resolving the Palestinian conflict.
The deadly exchange of fire has drowned out public discussion of several large — and difficult — questions that confront Israel as the fighting ends. The answers to these questions will determine the political outcome of the 2021 Gaza conflict, which may be different from the military outcome.
For Israel, the military objectives were clear. It wanted to deter Hamas from any future rocket attacks on its civilian population and severely degrade its capacity to conduct them. It wanted to decapitate Hamas’ senior leadership and demolish its subterranean hiding holes, which shelter both leaders and weaponry. And it wanted to do all that without launching a ground invasion.
Israel’s military project proceeded apace, with considerable success, despite near-misses in taking out Hamas’ two senior leaders, Mohammed Deif (head of its military wing) and Yahya Sinwar (one of the wing’s founders). Those two have survived, so far, but a whole swatch of senior leadership has not. Hamas’ massive underground tunnel system was systematically destroyed, a difficult and sensitive task since the terrorists routed it under civilian structures. That route was deliberate. Hamas uses human shields to protect its assets, situating them in hospitals, schools, playgrounds, mosques, businesses, and homes.
Israeli Defense Forces say they still have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Hamas targets left to hit, but political leaders must have figured they had achieved their main goals and would pay a heavy diplomatic price to continue fighting, once Hamas agreed to quit.
Biden’s switch changed the calculus in Jerusalem, which knew international pressure was building amid concern over civilian casualties and fears the conflict could spill over into other countries. One obvious concern was Hezbollah, on Israel’s northern border. Like Hamas, it is an Iranian proxy and is armed with tens of thousands of missiles (far better ones than Hamas has). It held back from the Gaza fight this time, but the longer that fight continued, the greater the risk it would become involved.
When the fighting ceased depended partly on Hamas. It had to decide when to stop firing rockets at Israeli homes, schools, and hospitals. But the cease-fire also depended on what Israel still hoped to accomplish — or, rather, what it still considered essential, and what price it was willing to pay to achieve those ends.
It is crucial to recognize that Israel’s goals — and problems — go beyond its military objectives. Though these are linked to the fighting, they are fundamentally political. The problems are obviously compounded by the country’s now-chronic inability to form a stable government.
The first problem is: Who speaks for the Palestinians now? Answering that in their own favor is why Hamas started lobbing rockets in the first place. They wanted to supplant the corrupt, ineffective gerontocracy that is the Palestinian Authority. Neither Hamas (in Gaza) nor the PA (in the West Bank) has delivered for its people. Although Palestinians in the West Bank are doing far better, Hamas is clearly more militant and aggressive. The sharper the ideological conflict, the better for Hamas.
The PA has not held a presidential election since 2005, is led by a man in his mid-80s, and called off the latest vote when it realized he was likely to lose. The PA, eager to shift the blame onto the Israelis, encouraged mass demonstrations. Those swiftly escalated into violence outside the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque and elsewhere. They were exacerbated by an inept Israeli police response.
Hamas decided to outbid these demonstrations by firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages. The Al-Aqsa protests were on May 7. Hamas began its rocket barrages three days later and launched well over 1,300 before accepting the cease-fire. Its goal was to underscore its “rejectionist” stance and dominate the PA-backed demonstrations.
Hamas’ leaders badly miscalculated the Israeli response. They never expected a relentless aerial bombardment, using well-developed coordinates, based on detailed intelligence. They didn’t expect that intelligence would reveal where their leaders were hiding. That discovery caused panic within Hamas, uncertain how Israel found out this most secret of secrets.
Despite Hamas’ heavy losses, it could still win its strategic battle with the PA if Hamas emerges as the main voice for Palestinians, or at least a co-equal one with the PA. That would be an enormous achievement and an equally enormous defeat for both the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
Preventing that political outcome was one reason Netanyahu resisted a premature cease-fire, which would allow Hamas to claim some kind of victory. Put differently, Netanyahu wanted to destroy Hamas’ leadership and its military capacity both to establish military deterrence and to weaken the terrorist group’s political influence.
The second big problem facing Israel is radicalization and violence among Israeli Arabs, who are citizens of Israel and live within its core territory, not in the West Bank or Gaza. They are governed by Israel, not the PA or Hamas, and share nearly all civil rights with Israelis. Despite the screeds of Islamists and leftist ideologues in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Europe, the country is a democracy and not an apartheid state. No other country in the region comes close, and it has managed to sustain its democracy under almost continuous lethal attack. Still, Israeli Arabs do have significant political grievances, particularly concerning land transfers and permission to build. And, of course, they share a common religion and sense of identity with Palestinians in the territories.
One of the most shocking aspects of the current conflict, at least for Israeli Jews, has been rioting by its Arab citizens, going far beyond peaceful street demonstration, sporadic rock throwing, or small-scale confrontations with police. The deadly riot in Lod, not far from Tel Aviv and well within Israel, was ferocious. Some have likened it to the pogroms against Jews in tsarist Russia or Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.
It is unclear how widespread this radical movement among Israeli Arabs is, how violent it will be, or whether it will link up with Israel’s enemies, who are eager to provide support. In any event, the violence by Israeli Arabs poses two immediate problems for the Netanyahu government and a third for the medium term. The most pressing problems are preventing any further outbreaks and stopping counter-violence by extreme, right-wing Jews. After coping with those immediate problems, the government needs to develop plans to deal with Israeli-Arab grievances and integrate a restive (and perhaps radicalized) younger generation into Israeli society.
Yet another big problem is how to repair the physical damage in Gaza. It won’t be like rebuilding Dresden or Tokyo, where the post-war governments were allied with the victor. The rulers in Gaza are almost certain to be virulently anti-Israeli. How can physical structures be fixed or replaced if building supplies and donor aid can be easily diverted, as previous aid has been, for rockets, tunnels, and salaries for terrorists? To rebuild, you need concrete, steel reinforcement, and heavy equipment, but Israel won’t allow those to enter Gaza if they can be used to build terror assets.
President Biden’s announcement of the cease-fire clearly recognized this problem, as well as the need to weaken Hamas. The U.S., he said, would provide humanitarian aid and reconstruction assistance “in full partnership with the Palestinian Authority — not Hamas — in a manner that does not permit Hamas to simply restock its military arsenal.” The goal is not only to prevent materials from being diverted but to strengthen the PA politically.
Even if reconstruction aid is used for purely civilian purposes, it can generate rewards for the political authorities who funnel the money to recipients. That’s how all authoritarian governments profit from Western aid. They are industrial-scale grifters. The money, building materials, and even medicine meant for the poor end up lining the pockets of dictators, warlords, and their clients. That’s a serious problem for Israel since whoever rules Gaza after the fighting is almost certain to list terrorist-warlord on their LinkedIn profile, along with “enemy of the Zionist entity.” They are not good-government enthusiasts.
Israel faces all these problems regardless of the military outcome in Gaza, and the scale of these problems depends on how extensive the military victory was and who rules Gaza after the fighting. Since Israel is determined to avoid ruling Gaza directly, the most likely outcome is that Hamas or some similar Islamic group will do so. It’s also possible the PA will play a much bigger role, which would be far better than Hamas for Israel and the U.S. but is sure to meet violent resistance from more radical groups.
The Israelis hope (but cannot be certain) that whoever rules in Gaza will be chastened and deterred. They almost certainly will be, militarily. At least for a while. But they may be emboldened politically and more consequential within Israel and in the West Bank. Israel’s foreign enemies will certainly seek to fund them, rearm them, and provide political direction.
These, then, are the political stakes for the Jewish state. It has fought the rejectionists time and again since 1948; it lacks a clear governing majority in the Knesset; it has a skittish U.S. ally; and it faces an existential threat over the horizon: a radical Iranian regime that openly hates Jews, wants to expand its regional power, and is working relentlessly to acquire nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to Tel Aviv. And yet, in the teeth of all these challenges, the Jewish state survives.
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