Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (10 page)

Although the UN Panel deemed Israel’s killing of the nine passengers “unacceptable,”
⁸⁰
it strove hard to “balance” this assessment by also casting doubt on the passengers’ character. Here again it confronted a dilemma. The Israeli Turkel Report alleged that the organizers of the flagship
Mavi Marmara
were
jihadis
hell-bent on killing Israelis. It had some difficulty sustaining this charge, however, because the most lethal weapons “smuggled” on board by these would-be
jihadis
, according to the Turkel Report itself, were slingshots and glass marbles, while it was hard to explain why these young, burly fanatics did not manage to kill a single Israeli commando, not even the three who were being held captive by them.
⁸¹

Just as the UN Panel adopted a novel strategy to prove the legality of the blockade, so it also conjured a creative proof that the Israeli Turkel Report’s condemnation of these alleged
jihadis
was on the mark. The UN Panel “seriously questions the true nature and objectives of the flotilla organizers.” Why? Because it discovered that they intended not only to deliver humanitarian relief, but also “to generate publicity about the situation in Gaza.” To clinch its indictment, the UN Panel reproduces with a great flourish this incriminating document “prepared by” the organizers:

Purpose: Purposes of this journey are to create an awareness amongst world public and international organizations on the inhumane and unjust embargo on Palestine and to contribute to end this embargo which clearly violates human rights and delivering humanitarian relief to the Palestinians.
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The UN Panel goes on to adduce yet more evidence of this sinister and nefarious plot: “The number of journalists embarked on the ships gives further power to the conclusion that the flotilla’s primary purpose was to generate publicity.”
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Not even the wretched Israeli Turkel Report dared impugn the passengers’ motive of publicizing the blockade’s dire impact.
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It must be a first, and surely marks a nadir, in the annals of the United Nations that a report bearing its imprimatur vilifies the victims of a murderous assault because they sought to cast light on a crime against humanity.
⁸⁵

ON
14
NOVEMBER
2012, Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense. According to the official story line, the assault began only after it had stoically absorbed hundreds of Hamas projectile attacks. The facts, however, suggest otherwise. From the start of 2012, one Israeli had been killed as a result of Palestinian attacks from Gaza, whereas 78 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli strikes. Hamas had mostly steered clear of armed confrontations. In the methodical madness that is Israeli policy towards Gaza, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the new round of fighting, had served as Israel’s “subcontractor” for enforcing the periodic cease-fires;
¹
in fact, he was in the process of “advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement” when Israel liquidated him.
²
But Hamas also recoiled at the prospect of becoming a clone of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority (PA). It occasionally turned a blind eye, or joined in (if only to prevent an escalation), when Israeli provocations resulted in retaliatory strikes by Hamas’s more militant Islamist rivals.

At the time Israel launched Pillar of Defense, it was widely speculated that Hamas had been itching for a fight. On every front, however, Hamas had been on a roll prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Its ideological soul mate, the Muslim Brotherhood, had risen to power in Egypt. The emir of Qatar had journeyed to Gaza carrying the promise of $400 million in aid, while Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was scheduled to arrive shortly. In the West Bank, many Palestinians envied Gaza’s (imagined) economic prosperity. In the meantime, Gaza’s Islamic University had even managed to pull off an academic conference attended by renowned linguist Noam Chomsky. Hamas’s star was slowly but surely rising, at the expense of the hapless PA. The very last thing it needed at that juncture was an inevitably destructive confrontation with Israel that could jeopardize these hard-won, steadily accreting gains.

On the other side, some cynical Israelis speculated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched Pillar of Defense to boost his chances in the upcoming election. As a general rule, however, Israeli leaders would not undertake major military operations or jeopardize critical state interests for the sake of partisan electoral gain. It was also purported that Israel’s governing coalition had to do something to appease popular indignation at the Hamas projectiles. But in fact, they had barely registered on Israel’s political radar; public opinion was focused on the Islamic Republic of Iran and sundry domestic issues.

Why, then, did Israel attack?

In one sense, Israel was transparent about its motive. It kept repeating that it wanted to restore its “deterrence capacity.” The real puzzle is the nature of the threat it sought to deter. Pillar of Defense unfolded in the broader context of successive Israeli foreign policy failures. Netanyahu had endeavored to rally the international community for an attack on Iran, but ended up looking the fool as he held up in the United Nations a comic-strip depiction of The Iranian Bomb. Hezbollah boasted that a drone launched by it had penetrated Israeli airspace, and reserved the right to enter Israeli airspace at its whim. Now, the Party of God’s “terrorist” twin upstart in Gaza was gaining respectability as regional powers thumbed their collective nose at Israel on its doorstep. The natives were getting restless. It was time to take out the big club and crack a few skulls to remind the locals who was in charge—or, in Israel’s preferred metaphor, it was time to “mow the grass” again in Gaza. “At the heart of Operation Pillar of Defense,” the Crisis Group observed, “lay an effort to demonstrate that Hamas’s newfound confidence was altogether premature and that, the Islamist awakening notwithstanding, changes in the Middle East would not change much at all.”
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Still, Israel needed a credible alibi. In November 2008, it had broken the cease-fire (by killing six Hamas militants) in order to provoke a retaliatory attack by Hamas, which then supplied the pretext for Operation Cast Lead. Four years later, it killed Jaabari to provoke Hamas again and supply the pretext for Pillar of Defense. The actual Israeli assault, however, differed significantly from Cast Lead. It was qualitatively less murderous and destructive. Israel, it was said, used more precise weapons during Pillar of Defense and had “learned the lessons” of Cast Lead on how to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, 99 percent of Israeli air strikes during Cast Lead hit targets accurately, while its manifest goal was—in the words of the Goldstone Report, which was corroborated by scores of other human rights reports—to “punish, humiliate and terrorize” the Gazan civilian population.
⁴

If its new rampage proved less lethal by comparison, it was not because Israel had corrected for past errors, but because of the unprecedented political constraints to which it was subject.
First
, Turkey and Egypt had made abundantly clear that they would not sit idly by if Israel launched a repeat performance of Cast Lead. From early on, both states drew a red line at an Israeli ground assault. Although officially denied now,
⁵
it was reliably reported at the time that President Barack Obama, no doubt prodded by these key regional actors, counseled Israel not to invade.
Second
, the prospect of another Goldstone Report hung over Israel. After Cast Lead, Israeli officials had managed to elude prosecution at the International Criminal Court as well as legal accountability elsewhere (on the basis of universal jurisdiction). But, if it committed another massacre, Israel might not again be so fortunate.
Third
, Gaza was swarming with foreign journalists. Israel had sealed Gaza shut from the outside world before Cast Lead with the collaboration of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. In the initial phase of that onslaught, Israel had enjoyed a near-total monopoly on media coverage. But this time around, journalists could freely enter Gaza and incontrovertibly report Israeli atrocities in real time. On account of this trio of factors, during Pillar of Defense Israel mostly targeted sites that could be deemed “legitimate.” True, some 70 Palestinian civilians were killed, but that could be chalked up to “collateral damage.”

The deaths and injuries of civilians during Pillar of Defense, although far fewer than in previous rounds of the conflict, received in-depth and graphic news coverage. When Israel tested the limits of military legitimacy, trouble loomed. After it flattened civilian governmental structures in Gaza, the headline on the
New York Times
website read, “Israel targets civilian buildings.” A few hours later it metamorphosed into “
government
buildings” (no doubt after a call from the Israeli consulate). Still, the writing was on the wall: Israeli conduct was being closely scrutinized by outsiders, so it had better tread carefully. The egregious exceptions came during the cease-fire negotiations when Israel resorted to its standard precision terror tactics in order to extract the best possible terms in a final agreement, and also targeted journalists in the event that negotiations collapsed and it would have to, after all, launch a murderous ground invasion.

The armed resistance Hamas put up during the eight-day Israeli assault was largely symbolic. Although Israel reveled in the success of its newly deployed Iron Dome antimissile defense system,
⁶
it almost certainly did not save many, and perhaps not any, lives. During Cast Lead some 925 “rockets” (and an additional number of mortar shells) landing in Israel killed three Israeli civilians, while during Pillar of Defense some 850 “rockets” (and an additional number of mortar shells) landing in Israel killed four Israeli civilians. It is unlikely that, in the main and allowing for the aberration, Hamas used more sophisticated weapons during Pillar of Defense. Through its army of informers and its state-of-the-art aerial surveillance, Israel would have been privy to any large quantities of technically sophisticated Hamas weapons, and would have destroyed these stashes before or during the first day of the attack. It is also improbable that Netanyahu would have risked an attack just on the eve of an election if Hamas possessed weapons capable of inflicting significant civilian casualties. A handful of Hamas projectiles did reach deeper inside Israel than previously, but these lacked explosives; an Israeli official derisively dismissed them as “pipes, basically.”
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If Israel ballyhooed Iron Dome, it was because its purported effectiveness was the only achievement to which Israel could point in the final reckoning.
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The last act of Pillar of Defense came when Israel hit up against a tactical dead end. On the one hand, it had struck all preplanned military targets but, on the other, it couldn’t directly target the civilian population. Hamas had successfully adapted Hezbollah’s strategy of continually firing its projectiles, the psychological upshot of which was that Israel couldn’t declare its deterrence capacity had been restored, forcing on it a ground invasion to stop the projectile attacks. Israel could not, however, launch such an invasion without suffering heavy combatant losses, unless it blasted everyone and everything in and out of sight as it cleared a path into Gaza. But, because of the novel circumstances—the regional realignment after the Arab Spring, and Turkey under Erdoğan; the threat of a “mega-Goldstone,” as an Israeli commentator put it;
⁹
the presence of a foreign press corps embedded not in the Israel Defense Forces but among the people of Gaza—Israel couldn’t launch a murderous Cast Lead–style ground invasion. It was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. It couldn’t subdue Hamas without a ground invasion, but it couldn’t launch a ground invasion without incurring either a domestically unacceptable price of combatant casualties or a diplomatically unacceptable price of global opprobrium and ostracism.

One can pinpoint the exact moment when Pillar of Defense collapsed. At a 19 November 2012 press conference, Hamas leader Khalid Mishal effectively told Netanyahu,
Go Ahead, Invade!
“If you wanted to launch it,” he taunted, “you would have done it.”
¹⁰
The Israeli prime minister panicked, his bluff had been called. What happened next was a repeat of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Unable to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks but dreading the prospect of a full-blown ground invasion that meant hand-to-hand combat with the Party of God, Israel had called in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to negotiate a cease-fire. This time, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was summoned by Netanyahu to bail Israel out. Not even the 21 November 2012 bus bombing in Tel Aviv—which, cease-fire or no cease-fire, would normally have elicited massive Israeli retaliation—shook the prime minister from his resolve to end Pillar of Defense immediately, before Hamas resumed its verbal digs.

The formal terms of the final agreement marked a stunning reversal for Israel. It called for a
mutual
cease-fire, not one, as Israel demanded, unilaterally imposed on Hamas. It also incorporated language implying that the siege of Gaza would be lifted. Notably, it did not include the precondition that Hamas must cease its importation or manufacture of weapons. The reason why is not hard to find. Under international law, peoples resisting foreign occupation are not debarred from using armed force.
¹¹
Egypt, which brokered the cease-fire, was not about to barter away Hamas’s legal right.
¹²
Israel undoubtedly anticipated that Washington would use its political leverage to extract better cease-fire terms from Cairo. But the Obama administration, hoping to bring the new Egypt under its wing, prioritized American interests and consequently was not willing to (assuming it could) lord it over Egypt on Israel’s behalf.

If any doubt remained about who won and who lost in the new round, it was quickly dispelled. Israel launched Pillar of Defense to restore Gaza’s fear of it. But after the cease-fire and its terms were announced, Palestinians flooded the streets of Gaza in a celebratory mood as if at a wedding party. In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, Hamas’s Mishal cut the figure and exuded the confidence of a world leader. Meanwhile, at the Israeli press conference announcing the cease-fire, the ruling triumvirate—Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—resembled grade-schoolers called down to the Principal’s Office, counting the seconds until the humiliation was over.

The cease-fire is likely to hold until and unless Israel can figure out how to militarily prevail in the new political environment. The days of Cast Lead are over, whereas a Pillar of Defense–type operation will not bear the fruits of victory. It is unlikely, however, that Israel will fulfill the terms of the final agreement to lift the siege of Gaza. During Israeli cabinet deliberations on whether or not to accept the cease-fire, Barak had already cynically dismissed the fine print, scoffing, “A day after the cease-fire, no one will remember what is written in that draft.”
¹³

Moreover, Egypt will probably not pressure the US to enforce the cease-fire terms on Israel. The respective interests of the new Egypt and Hamas mostly diverge, not converge. Egypt desperately needs American subventions and is currently negotiating a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, where Washington’s vote is decisive. The popularity of President Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government will ultimately hinge on what it delivers to Egyptians, not Gazans. In the meantime, US political elites are lauding Morsi to high heaven, stroking his ego, and speculating on the “special relationship” he has cultivated with Obama. Those familiar with the psychological manipulations of Washington when it comes to Arab leaders—in particular, contemptibly mediocre ones, such as Anwar Sadat—will not be surprised by the current US romancing of Morsi. It is equally unlikely that Turkey will exert itself on Hamas’s behalf. Right now, Ankara is smarting from Obama’s rebuff of designating not itself but Cairo as prime interlocutor in brokering the cease-fire. (Turkey was apparently disqualified because it labeled Israel a “terrorist state” during the assault.
¹⁴
) Still, aspiring to be the US’s preeminent regional partner, and calculating that the road to Washington passes through Tel Aviv, Turkey has resumed negotiations with Israel to break the diplomatic logjam after Israel’s lethal assault on the
Mavi Marmara
in 2010.
¹⁵
On the other side, its recent operation has brought home to Israel that alienating both its historic allies in the region, Egypt and Turkey, is not prudent policy, so a face-saving reconciliation between Ankara and Tel Aviv (the Turkish government is formally demanding an apology, monetary compensation, and an end to the Gaza siege) is probably in the offing. The long and the short of it is that, even in the new era that has opened up, definite limits exist on how much regional support the Palestinians can realistically hope to garner.