The Gaza Blockade disaster

For June 11, 2010
From the Old Olivetti
By Josh Stein

The world’s attention is on the catastrophic oil spill off the Gulf Coast and the president’s enfeebled response, a disappointment to his advocates (I include myself), confirmation to his foes. But while the oil continued to spew from the earth beneath the sea, on the high seas, Israel’s navy attempted to commandeer a flotilla bent on breaking its blockade of Gaza. The consummation, deaths aboard the lead ship, was devoutly to be wished by the organizers of the expedition. For them it was a no lose situation. If Israel allowed the boats to land it would be a small triumph. If the materials were seized without deaths, and, as the Israelis promised, checked then sent to Gaza, it would be a lesser victory, but not nearly as good theater as what actually happened. That was a bonanza—or was it a calculation? We’ll never know. Israel will transfer the food, medicine and building materials to Gaza and Hamas will have martyrs, the world will be able to blame Israel for the loss of life. The world will little note, nor long remember concurrent Muslim murders by Muslims. As Tom Friedman reminds in the Times, within the week, Muslim suicide bombers murdered nearly 100 Muslims in mosques in Pakistan and pro-Hamas gunmen destroyed a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn’t force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02friedman.html?hp)

On May 31, when I first heard the news of the deaths aboard ship I had a feeling akin to dispair. “Where,” I asked myself “are the people who planned and executed the raid on Entebbe airport to free hostages 2500 miles away?” Israel was the world’s hero back then on July 4, 1976, almost upstaging all the hoopla of the 200 year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Lightning fast the Israelis freed 100 people. According to the mission’s overall commander, Brigadier General Dan Shomron, the plan succeeded because since “no one expected the Israelis to take such risks … they took them.” One Israeli was killed, the leader of the strike force, Yonatan Netanyahu, elder brother of the current Prime Minister. But that was then. Now we have been snookered by people whose public relations skills are exceeded only by Israel’s ability to fall into an obvious trap.

Ehud Toledano, University Chair for Ottoman Studies, Department of Middle East and African History at Tel Aviv University (and a cousin of mine) writes in an E-mail that the commandos were sent into a mission that was ill-planned and ill-conceived by the high command of the navy.” There was “no, or totally insufficient intelligence, both in terms of info gathering and analysis... And, hence, a bad plan for what was wrongly supposed to be a group of peaceniks, but in fact were terror-trained Islamic radicals, ready to use violence in order to kill our soldiers, not just stop the takeover, which they knew they could not do.” He points out that information is “coming out now …to the effect that they were well organized, armed, and had thousands of dollars in their pockets. Families in Istanbul told the press a few hours ago that their relatives had a strong desire to die as martyrs.” This confirms a statement in last Wednesday’s Times that “The Gaza Freedom March made its motives clear in a statement before Monday’s deadly confrontation: ‘A violent response from Israel will breathe new life into the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing attention to the blockade.’” Ehud continues: Those seeking martyrdom “were on the upper deck, about 40 of them, with the [foreign sympathizers] staying on the lower decks, [who] therefore had no knowledge of what was being planned and executed upstairs. It is due to their high skilled professionalism that the commandos avoided being killed and ended up killing so few of the terrorists.”

Amos Oz, published in the same issue of the Times the Friedman column appears bemoans two simultaneous sieges—Israel of Gaza; Israel by Arabs. He wants Israel to sign a peace with the Fatah government in the West Bank, returning to the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the Palestinians’ capital. Once this is done, Hamas in Gaza will either continue to be isolated or will join with Fatah. More pie in the sky? I think so. Even an isolated Hamas still has the capacity to do irreparable harm, much as that tiny hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Neither is going away; Israel can sign peace treaties with willing Arab partners, but the unwilling will still be there and president Obama will probably be as incapable of dealing with the one as he is with the other. I wish it weren’t so, but my wishes count for little.

Have you read the November 9 New Yorker article on Gaza yet? Kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is the centerpiece, used as a metaphor by each side. For Israelis he represents the inhumane lawlessness of Hamas in Gaza, for Palestinian Arabs, he’s but one man isolated from his family, like all of Gaza is from the whole world. To me his kidnapping is another example of Arab response to nobody taking their case seriously. Yassir Arafat would order the hijacking of a commercial airplane. Now it’s Shalit upon whom all of Israel, and through Israel all the world, is focused. Hamas wants for his return fourteen hundred individuals, four hundred and fifty of whom have been convicted of terrorist killings. One Jew is equivalent to 1,400 Arabs? I’m surprised they admit it. The chief “negotiator” between Hamas and Israel is Osama Mozini, a professor of education at the Islamic University. The New Yorker reporter “asked him why he could not be more flexible in his negotiations for Shalit.”

Mozini began reciting the names of Gazan prisoners. Hassan Salameh, is serving forty-eight consecutive life sentences for recruiting suicide bombers. Walid Anjes helped plan the bombing of at least three devastating attacks. He has twenty-six life sentences. Abdel Hadi Suleiman Ghneim’s name came up. According to Mozini all he was doing was riding in a bus when he grabbed the steering wheel and took it over a cliff. (Mozini laughed at this point, apparently seeing the humor in the situation.) Sixteen people died, many others were wounded—including Ghneim who received a life sentence for every person who died on the bus. “These punishments struck Mozini as ludicrous.”

With such people Israel is supposed to negotiate? With Hamas whose charter maintains that “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad”? The last time Israel bargained with kidnappers, it turned over a mass murderer and received in compensation the corpses of two Israeli soldiers. Israeli families, wanted their sons back for a decent Jewish burial, but from an objective viewpoint it’s lunacy to trade murderers for the bodies of people murdered. It can only encourage more cross-border kidnappings. Relatives of Palestinian prisoners have gone on record that more Israelis should be kidnapped to exchange for those in Israel’s jails. “Just outside Rafah, the smuggling capital of Gaza,” reports the New Yorker, “there is a billboard with a portrait of Shalit, behind bars, juxtaposed with a photograph of a masked Hamas fighter. The Arabic text declares, ‘Your prisoner will not have safety and security until our prisoners have safety and security.’”

In fact, the Arabs who say, as does Ahmed Yousuf, Hamas’s Deputy Foreign Minister “We are all Shalits” are right. They are prisoners, but not of Israel, but of their own rage. Rockets raining down on Israeli towns, suicide bombers blowing up pizzerias are actions met with incarceration. Israel is also prisoner of Arab extremists. It’s like the cancer patient whose disease is being treated as chronic. It’s not too bad today, but what will tomorrow’s test results indicate? When will the next plane explode, the next suicide murderer detonate himself killing innocents who are merely riding a bus or crossing a street. To the bomber there are no innocents. Like Shalit everyone in Israel, whether citizen or tourist is part of the occupiers who must be driven into the sea and if the world will not provide us with warplanes and tanks, we’ll do it our way.

The paranoids who control the Muslim world in their grip with their grudges, imposing their fundamentalist religious beliefs, would rather die than concede that Allah has returned Israel to the Jews. They talk of al-Nakba, the calamity. But the real calamity is war and grudges and kidnappings and rockets and suicide bombings all for nothing, for nothing except more blood, Jewish and Arab. Tom Friedman was right in last week’s Times. Nobody over there wants peace; it’s all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As Yousuf, the Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister says, “we are all Shalits,” to which I add, “caught in a world of madness unimagined even by Kafka.”

Why the Two State Solution Won't work

I have friends (yes, even I). Many, probably most of these friends believe that the best way to resolve the Mid-East conflict is with a two state solution, Israel and Palestine (consisting of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab Jerusalem).

Let us examine this possibility. There are three problems with it—West Bank access to Israel proper; connecting the West Bank to Gaza; and the grandmother-of-the-mother-of-difficulties, Jerusalem.

The two state solution assumes that Israel will have defensible borders even without natural frontiers other than the unnatural security fence separating the West Bank from Israel to prevent dissatisfied jihadists or other fanatics from crossing it and blowing up (insert here the name of a civilian meeting place—a bus, a sidewalk café, a synagogue) after making a touching farewell tape. This is a normally one-way street. Yes we hang our heads in shame when we remember Baruch Goldstein, but his slaughter of the innocents was by a lone murderer. People who cross the Green Line and blow up pizzerias are mentored, trained, equipped and filmed before they go. They become heroes (and occasionally heroines). If there is a Hell I have no doubt that our Goldstein is trying to strangle their Ahmed as the remnants of Ahmed (don’t forget, he’s been blown to smithereens on a cross-walk in Jerusalem) tries to stab the bad doctor. Poor Goldstein, alone in Hell with 500 Ahmeds. Well, it serves him right.

Gaza as part of this proposed Palestinian state, separated by Israel from the West Bank by about 25 miles, means that Palestine would surround Israel with potentially hostile and (I imagine) frequently actual, enemy action by those who believe in a one Arab state solution. That’s the bad news for Israel. From the Arab side, the West Bank presumably would be Palestine central, Gaza the proverbial step-child.

When it achieved its independence, India was divided into Hindu and Muslim areas—but the Muslims were in the Northwest and the Northeast so Pakistan became a country separated by India, its enemy; the area that became Bangladesh was untenable. It declared its independence and is untenable still. Look to Poland which, following the Great War, separated the bulk of Germany in the west from East Prussia to the east. When war came again it was attacked on both fronts, the pincers having been put in place by the diplomats of Versailles in their attempt at fairness. Either way, bifurcated Palestine will not survive and surrounded Israel never rest easy. A solution to the problem (for the Arabs) would be a raised highway across 50 kilometers of Israel. Arab traffic above would flow east to west, Israeli traffic below from north to south. Who would pay for construction, maintenance and police remains to be seen. It’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t. Gaza would be the new Bangladesh. Israel would be the new 1939 Poland. The plan presupposes men of good will on both sides. Who amongst you trusts Hamas or Hezbollah not to try for a one-state Arab solution? Seeing no hands, we’ll proceed. The only historical model I can think of where a country divided by another has survived is us. Canada separates the lower 48 from Alaska, but we’ve been friendly with Canada ever since “Fifty-four forty or fight” morphed into “OK, the 49th parallel is good enough.” I’m not picturing a squadron of blood-thirsty Royal Canadian Mounted Police invading Alaska for its oil, or the United States launching a two pronged invasion to conquer British Columbia. There is good faith and cooperation on both sides.

As to Jerusalem, well, on the one hand it’s just a city which has road and sewer and lighting and school issues to resolve like any other municipality. The problem is that this particular city is JERUSALEM, FOR GOD’S SAKES! When the United Nations partitioned Palestine Jerusalem was designated an international city. When the British withdrew the Jordanians tried to grab it; the Jews fought to keep the road to it open, and the city was divided. The Jordanians got the holy places until Israel conquered it in 1967. In the 2000 near-peace agreement brokered by President Clinton, Ehud Barak offered Palestinians control over East Jerusalem, including most of the Old City and “Religious Sovereignty” over the Temple Mount, and the West Bank and Gaza. The offer was rejected. The Second Intifada irrupted.

A hopeless situation? Well, maybe, but I have a solution that might work. Read about it in my next column.

The crocodile and the scorpion

There’s an old joke. It’s not very funny, but it is hoary with age, and so has become a cliché. A scorpion asks a crocodile to let him ride on his back across the Nile. “But if I carry you, mid-way across you’ll bite me and I’ll die,” responded the worried Crocodylus niloticus. “Not to fear, if I bite you mid-way across, we both die, so I won’t.” This appears to be a convincing argument. But mid-way across the scorpion stings the crock in the back. The dying lizard turns to the venomous betrayer and says, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both die,” to which the scorpion replies just before it drowns, “well, that’s Africa.”

Because of an early deadline I don’t know how the current Israeli offensive against Hamas will turn out. But this I do know—its hatred for Jews is a cancer that can neither be contained nor eliminated, which in fact metastasizes proportionately to the efforts of Israel to excise it (or, to switch my metaphor yet again, it’s hydra-like—whenever Israel cuts off one head, two grow in its place). But what else can Israel do? It pulled out of Gaza and instead of peace it got Hamas.

Some pro-Israeli doves argue that Israel ought to moderate its counter-attack. For example: Diane Balser, executive director of Brit Tzedek intones, “We can already anticipate that this incursion will be yet another failed attempt to resolve this fundamentally political conflict by military means. It is high time to break with this cycle; only through serious and sustained international diplomacy can the problems with Hamas and Gaza be resolved.”

Such organizations are to be commended for their consistency, but none recognize the nature of the beast with which it is trying to reconcile. Hamas does not recognize the despised State of Israel and sees no option other than to continue its struggle to the death by any means possible. If that requires putting its headquarters in the middle of a civilian population of innocent Arabs so be it. The more televised martyrs the better. If it means attacking Israel indiscriminately and waiting for the inevitable retaliation so that it can cry “foul!” and have its world-wide community of sycophants take to the streets, hurling stones and vituperation, urging vendetta, bring it on! The pictures we see on television of civilian suffering are perfect for Hamas. “Look what the Jews do to us, we must get revenge,” is the war-cry taken up around the world. An intifada is to be expected; indeed, it’s been prophesized by Hamas.

Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni also misses the point when in an interview with al-Jazeera she urges Arab governments to stop Hamas’ attacks because they are injurious to the Palestinians of Gaza; she ignores the volatility of the Arab Street.

Negotiation with Hamas is like the crocodile’s discussion with the scorpion. The scorpion knows only one thing and it does it even if it loses its own life. Negotiations with Egypt were possible because Anwar Sadat had achieved a victory of sorts in the Sinai in October 1973. Hamas achieved a victory of sorts when Israel pulled out of Gaza in August 2005. The one came to pray in Jerusalem and made peace, the other fires rockets onto Sderot.

But, I fear, the air assault (followed by a ground incursion?) will fail as well. Like Lebanon two summers ago, Hamas may be lulling Israel into its rope-a-dope strategy. We hit and hit and hit harder, exhausting ourselves; and they claim victory by not surrendering. Their intifada, when it comes, will provoke greater responses in an escalating progression of civilian deaths.

Israel has other choices beyond shock and awe. It might take the French suggestion of a two-day cease fire to see if Hamas will stop its assaults or it should return to targeted assassinations of Hamas leadership (and Hezbollah’s for that matter). We should abandon precision bombing because the bombing is never precise enough and because its collateral damage—both human and structural—is a provocative outrage.

An army uses the weapons it has, so Hamas uses rockets and will be using human bombs in Jerusalem and elsewhere, and it doesn’t care about the blow-back. We have planes, but we do care. We also have courage and intelligence. We have Mossad. (Gabriel Allon, where are you when we need you most?) Just as in that other old story, sometimes slow and steady wins the race. But trust the scorpion? Only if we have a death-wish.

Response to Hamas kidnapping IDF soldier

I write on Friday the 14^th of July. Four thousand miles to the east rockets are exploding, bombs are dropping; the emotional reverberations are felt in my home; yours too, I imagine. What the situation will be when the paper arrives at your door, I do not know, but today, it is bad. Worse, Israel has only itself to blame. It did not learn the lessons of history.

Out of Gaza on June 25 came Hamas gunmen to kill Israeli soldiers on Israeli soil, and then they kidnapped one of them, a young corporal with dual Israeli-French citizenship. For weeks Jews in southern Israel had been hit with rockets, more annoying than lethal, but always an unprovoked menace.

Then on July12 Hezbollah forces crossed into northern Israel and killed and kidnapped other soldiers. Israel responded with an incursion into Lebanon, hitting bridges and the airport in an effort to prevent the kidnappers from taking their prey out of Lebanon into Iran. Already Nahariya and Haifa have been hit by Hezbollah rockets. Each side’s fury mounts with each rocket landing, each soldier or civilian killed or wounded.

What is to be learned? Nothing is learned. That’s the problem. The British and the French gave the Sudatenland to Hitler to buy peace; the French then hid behind the Maginot line while the British felt secure on their side of the Channel. None to any avail. That’s the lesson that ought to have been learned by Israel, but wasn’t. The most fundamental lesson is that Israel must never again unilaterally withdraw from territory. It does not work. Israel pulled out of Sinai when Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin reached agreement on how and when and for what in exchange. In short, the Sinai for peace—real peace, not just the hope of peace. For this the Arab leader won the Noble Peace Prize and later an Arab bullet. But the peace held. (Israel offered Gaza in the same package, but Sadat was too smart to accept it. Gaza had only been occupied by Egyptian forces, it had never been part of Egypt proper; “No, Menachem, you can keep that snake pit,” the Egyptian leader conceded. One can only wonder what Begin’s reaction was. Probably not joy.)

But that’s it, the one example of negotiated handover of land. Later, in 2000, Israel surprised the world by unilaterally withdrawing, overnight, from southern Lebanon, callously abandoning its Christian allies to their fate. Munich redux. Almost immediately Hezbollah moved in and started attacking northern Israel with rockets and mortars claiming that a small area (Shebaa Farms, a 28 sq. km. piece of land) was still occupied territory, despite this time the usually hostile world siding with Israel, saying “no, it’s not.” And then last year, after a year’s buildup, Israel removed its settlers and soldiers from Gaza. Immediately weapons were smuggled from Egypt into Gaza. The Hamas led government either turned a blind eye or actively engaged in the process of illegally arming its militants. Either way, the results were inevitable and soldiers and civilians on both sides died.

So the first uncomfortable conclusion is that Israel must not again retreat without ironclad guarantees that it will not be assaulted by the very people to whom it returned land taken in defensive wars. The tail of the tiger is an uncomfortable thing to hold. Letting go is more than uncomfortable; it’s disastrous.

And the other choice? Can there ever be peace with the Palestinians? Egypt was one thing; Israel occupied another country’s territory and then gave it back following negotiations. But the Palestinian leadership believes that Israel itself is occupied Palestine. So what to do? Expel the Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank? Re-occupy southern Lebanon? One choice is worse than the next. Even if Israel succeeds in its intention of destroying the Hezbollah leadership, the Arabs can wait. If not now, then later their attack will be successful, they think. By this scenario, the only way to avoid the killings is to pull down the flag, blow up the improvements made over the past 60 years and go back to Europe and other places from which the Jews came with their talents. That’s not going to happen either. The Jewish people are in this thing for the long term. Withdrawal is not an option.

What the situation will be when the paper arrives at your door, I do not know, but today, it is bad.