The nature of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is changing
Day 10 of the conflict in Israel and Gaza and no let-up is in sight. So far at least 213 Palestinians have been killed and 12 Israelis, and many hundreds wounded.
On Wednesday afternoon four missiles were fired from Lebanon, most likely by Hezbollah forces, into northern Israel. Sirens wailed in Haifa and Aqa. At least two missiles landed in the sea – one went into a field, and no casualties are reported from the Hezbollah salvo. It does open a new dimension, and a new front, however – with the Shiite Lebanese forces of Hezbollah coming to the aid of their allies in Gaza – Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Diplomatic efforts are getting nowhere. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said he is looking for a “decisive defeat” over Hamas and doesn’t foresee a ceasefire soon. Hamas is sticking to its guns, or rockets rather, while all around it Gaza is being reduced to rubble under Israeli air and artillery attacks.
President Biden’s “even-handed” approach is being hammered by critics in his own party – in their estimation, for “even-handed” read “hands off”. Bernie Sanders (who is of Jewish birth and heritage) and Elizabeth Warren emphasise the need to protect the civil and human rights of Palestinians as much as defending the rights of Israelis to defend themselves. Visiting a factory in Dearborn yesterday, the President was roundly heckled by a crowd of a thousand onlookers. Biden’s Middle East insouciance marks a conspicuously sticky patch in the already generally sticky pathway of his foreign policy to date.
So is the Gaza war of “Operation Guardians of the Walls” of 2021 a ghastly groundhog day of what has gone before, the immediate predecessor being “Protective Edge” costing 2,125 Palestinian lives over 51 days in the summer of 2014? Probably not. A repeat of the previous flare-ups over Gaza since 2005 would mean a cycle of Palestinian rockets, massed artillery and aerial bombing attacks, an uneasy ceasefire, huge damage and wrecked infrastructure, stuttering diplomacy, sporadic rocket and sniping attacks, stone-throwing, rearming with rockets, and then another major flare-up with rockets and bombing Gaza flat again.
This cycle is a reminder of how futile the tactics of both sides have become. There is no military solution to Gaza. At the moment there is no diplomatic one, either. This is the first real difference this time round: the sense from rational commentary on all sides that the issue of Gaza-Israel-Palestine is in a cul-de-sac.
The liberal Israeli daily, Haaretz, is already painting the current campaign as a failure to be compared with the mistaken war in southern Lebanon in 2006 – a stalemate from the outset. Not that the paper gives the Israeli Defence Force much credit for the way it fought in Gaza in 2014. “Operation Guardian of the Walls” has turned into Israel’s most failed and pointless border war ever,” wrote Aluf Benn in the paper on 18 May. “Instead of wasting time in a useless effort to create “an image of victory” while causing death and destruction in Gaza and upending lives in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must stop now and agree a ceasefire.” Benn accuses the Israeli command of being ill-prepared and having no clear tactics for handling the rocket onslaught of Hamas out of Gaza, and concentrating too much on the threat from the new Iranian-spawned missiles of Hezbollah.
Alon Pinkas comments in the same paper that the flaw of Israel’s approach in the present crisis is that there is no overall strategy. He refers to a study now 20 years old of former intelligence chief Yehoshafat Harkabi which claimed that Israel was becoming addicted to the “tacticalization of strategy”.
“’Tacticalization of strategy’ means that a country is conflating the military-tactical for the political-strategic” Pinkas writes. Netanyahu is a supreme tactician – and his present tactic is aimed as much at conserving his fading political career as much as anything – not to mention avoiding the worst case scenario that if his present corruption trial goes against him, he could end up in jail.
Two months ago, Jared Kushner, son in law and supreme consigliere on Middle East matters to ex-president Donald Trump, boasted in the Wall Street Journal how he had fixed the Palestinian issue. By signing up a string of Arab countries, starting with UAE and Bahrain, to the Abraham Accords, he had managed to downgrade the Palestinians as an issue and a people. Oman, Sudan and Morocco came on board, for suitable inducements. Sudan is now hoping the US will back it in the increasingly toxic dispute about the headwaters of the Nile and the Renaissance Dam – threatening hostilities between Egypt and Ethiopia as well as Sudan. Kushner also connived to recognise Morocco’s rights over the Western Sahara, another setting for renewed war. He also believed that he had brought Israel close to the Gulf states – Saudi Arabia would soon join – for copious arms supplies. Implicit was that nobody was over-bothered with Palestine rights, whether on the West Bank, Gaza or Jerusalem.
Kushner endorsed the Nation-State Act of 2018 which entrenched Israel’s status as the state of Jewish identity and aspiration – and all Jewish West Bank settlements with it. A unified Jerusalem is affirmed as the capital of a unified Israeli state. On the other hand, the rights of all Israeli citizens are affirmed – though this seems to be a secondary consideration.
The events of the past few weeks in Jerusalem indicate what has really changed in this round of the conflict between Palestinians and Israel. With the upheavals and crude police tactics on the Holy Mount and disposal of Palestinians at the Damascus Gate in the Old City, Hamas has established its credentials as the protectors of the sacred Islamic sites in Jerusalem. This cannot be wished away in a hurry. The raucous demonstrations and flag waving of ultra-Zionist youths there have made matters worse. Even worse has been the sight of Jewish settlers shooting randomly at Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, where they are pressing property claims by judicial sophistry backed by Israeli police force majeure.
The bombs, rockets, fury and propaganda across Gaza and Israel tend to disguise the tipping point that the State of Israel has now reached, 73 years after independence. Can it continue to claim to be a Jewish confessional state yet one with full democratic and civic rights granted to all citizens – meaning the 1.77m Arabs registered as citizens? Since the 2018 Nation-State Act, Arab Israelis have been losing ground in subsidy, entitlement and status. If Israel continues its vigorous settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the trashing of Gaza in the name of fighting Hamas – or whatever the Islamic bogeyman of the day – there can be no two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine contest.
That implies that the Israeli state administration would have to take charge of 2.75m Palestinians on the West Bank, allied to the 2m Palestinians of Gaza, in addition to the 1.77m Israeli (Palestinian) Arabs. Last year it was calculated that there were 6.83m Jews of all backgrounds in Israel. That means there are 309,000 more Jews than Arabs living between the Mediterranean coasts of Israel and Gaza and the Jordan basin and valley.
A single, united Israel may struggle to remain both a Jewish confessional state and a pluriform democracy.