The Weakness of Israel //
As Gaza is
devastated by a new paroxysm of violence, what has Israel achieved by its
26-day bombardment and ground intervention? The outcome so far is similar to
that of past Israeli wars in Lebanon and Gaza: massive firepower is used to
inflict heavy losses on the other side, the great majority of the casualties
being civilians. But, as the war goes on, Israeli leaders find that Israel’s
military superiority is failing to produce comparable political gains.
Worse, from
the Israeli point of view, it is the Palestinians and, in this case, Hamas, who
are in a stronger position than they were a month ago. By its actions, Israel
has put the Palestinian issue firmly back on the international agenda from
which it had largely disappeared since the Arab uprisings of 2011. Only a few
months ago, a friend sympathetic to the Palestinians lamented to me that, in
his travels in the US, Europe and the Arab world, he had seldom heard the words
“Palestine” or “Palestinians”. Gaza, at horrendous cost to its people, has changed
all that.
Usually, the
sufferings of the four million Palestinians penned into Gaza and the West Bank
are invisible to people in the rest of the world. But over the past month we
have seen, night after night, pictures of Palestinian families, with their
maimed and terrified children, vainly seeking safety amid shattered houses and
hospitals. Israeli spokesmen sound shifty and heartless as they claim that
there is no proof of Israel’s culpability for the shelling of a UN hospital or
a children’s playground, suggesting that a Hamas rocket might have fallen
short. These denials and evasions might work in a short war but, by the time
264 Palestinian children had been killed, as of Friday, they only serve to
convince people that Israelis do not care how many Palestinians they kill.
Of course, we
have been here many times before, the most notorious Israeli intervention being
the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. I was in the Sabra and Shatila camps just
after the massacre of 1,700 Palestinians by Christian militiamen who would not
have been there but for Israeli actions. When I see pictures of the dead in
Gaza, I feel I can still smell the sickly sweet stench of the dead bodies as
they began to rot in the hot September sun. I remember the poverty of the dead,
with their ragged clothes and plastic shoes, as they lay in the doorways of
tiny shops or heaped up in alleyways. Out in the open, a donkey was lying dead
between the shafts of a small cart carrying a barrel of water, and corpses were
half-buried in a bank of sand, as if somebody had wanted to conceal them but
had given up half-way through because there were too many bodies to bury.
Not
everything is the same today in Gaza as it was in Lebanon in 1982 or in Gaza in
2008. A crucial difference is that, at those points, the countries neighbouring
Israel were relatively stable, or at least had governments in firm control.
Nothing could be less true this summer, as Syria and Iraq are convulsed by
civil war, and Jordan and Lebanon look more and more unstable.
OR Book Going
RougeEgypt has a leadership installed by a military coup and confirmed by a
dubious election; the Libyan state has collapsed into anarchy, presided over by
predatory militias. The Gaza war adds to the sense of general crisis.
A reason for
Israel launching these mini-conflicts, for there has not been an all-out war
since the invasion of Lebanon, is to demonstrate its raw military power. But,
each time round, it simultaneously shows the limitations of that power to get
anywhere in ending Israel’s long confrontation with the Palestinians. For all
the devastating firepower of Israel’s air force, tanks and artillery deployed
against a few thousand Hamas gunmen, it is unlikely to permanently eliminate
them and thus win a military victory. And, even if it did, the victory would
not be conclusive since the Palestinian sense of oppression is so great that
some other armed group, possibly in the shape of Isis (the self-tagged Islamic
State), would soon take its place.
When I was a
correspondent in Jerusalem between 1995 and 1999, I came to believe that there
was another reason, to do with the political psychology of Israelis, which
explained why they fought these bloody but futile wars. This was put well by
Uri Avnery, the Israeli writer and peace activist, who wrote that the Israeli
army is filled with “teenagers who are indoctrinated from the age of three in
the spirit of Jewish victimhood and superiority”. The same is true of much of
the rest of Israeli society. Israelis genuinely feel they are the main victims
deserving international sympathy, even when 1,400 Palestinians have been killed
by Israeli shells and bombs compared with just three Israeli civilians and one
Thai worker killed by Hamas’s rockets and mortars.
Every
opponent of Israel, however puny, is treated by Israeli governments and much of
the Israeli media as representing an existential threat. Any retaliatory
violence is therefore justified, whether the targets are Palestinians, Lebanese
or the 10 Turks killed on board the flotilla of boats trying to bring aid to
Gaza in 2010. This sense of permanent persecution, born of pogroms and the
Holocaust, is understandable but makes Israelis peculiarly vulnerable to
demagogues manipulating their sense of threat. Israeli spokesmen have
triumphantly pointed to polls showing that 90 per cent of Israelis currently
support Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, but this lack of contrary opinion
about a venture so unlikely to do Israel much good is, in reality, a sign of
weakness in a nation.
Paradoxically,
deliberate threat inflation by the Israeli government redounds to the advantage
of Hamas. Its military wing fires rockets into Israel to cause fear among the
general population by killing or wounding people; its attacks are largely
ineffectual because Israel has the Iron Dome defensive system that intercepts
the rockets. But Israeli leaders then do Hamas’s work for it by telling their
people that Hamas is a threat to their very existence. Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu speaks of the “tunnels of terror” as if they undermined every home in
Israel. A story spread on the internet claims that thousands of Hamas fighters
dressed in Israeli army uniforms had been planning to surge through the tunnels
into Israel in a sort of underground D-Day landing.
A great
weakness of Israel is that Israelis believe so much of their own propaganda. Dr
Arbuthnot, the 18th-century writer and satirist, said that “all political
parties die at last of swallowing their own lies”. The same is true of nations
when they see the world around them only through a lens distorted by the myths
of their own propagandists. Israelis are diverted from the simple fact, proven
so often since the war of 1967, that they are not going to enjoy permanent
peace so long as they occupy the West Bank and besiege Gaza. The Israeli
historian Tom Segev says: “It is not easy to understand why so many Israelis
still believe that a large Israel without peace is better than a small Israel
with peace.”
AUGUST 04, 2014
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