Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (11 page)

Many Palestinians have inferred from the resounding defeat inflicted on Israel that only armed resistance can and will end the Israeli occupation. In fact, however, Hamas’s armed resistance operated for the most part only at the level of perceptions—the projectiles heading towards Tel Aviv did unsettle the city’s residents—while it is improbable that Palestinians can ever muster sufficient military might to compel an end to the occupation. But Gaza’s steadfastness until the final hour of Operation Pillar of Defense did demonstrate the indomitable
will
of the people of Palestine. If this potential force can be harnessed in a campaign of mass civil resistance, and if the supporters of Palestinian rights worldwide do their job of mobilizing public opinion and changing government policy, then Israel can be coerced into ending the occupation, and with fewer Palestinian lives lost than in armed resistance.

UNLIKE ISRAEL’S ATTACKS
on Lebanon in 2006 (Second Lebanon War) and Gaza in 2008–9 (Operation Cast Lead), Operation Protective Edge, beginning 8 July 2014, was not preplanned long in advance.
¹
It resulted from contingent factors, although many of its facets—Israeli provocations and annihilating force—conformed to a decades-old pattern. At the end of April 2014, the two leading Palestinian political factions, Hamas and Fatah, formed a “consensus government.” Surprisingly, the US and European Union (EU) did not suspend engagement but, instead, adopted a wait-and-see approach, effectively legitimizing it. In part, they wanted to penalize Israel for aborting the “peace” initiative of US Secretary of State John Kerry. But Hamas had also made an unprecedented concession. It didn’t oppose President Mahmoud Abbas when, speaking for the new government, he reiterated his support for the three negotiating preconditions set forth by the US and EU: recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence, recognition of past agreements. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu erupted in a rage.
²
He could no longer maintain the alibi that Abbas represented only some Palestinians, and that Hamas was a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction. His fury was all the more unrestrained because the US and EU had already ignored his dire prognostications by entering into talks with Iran, which was supposedly threatening Israel with a “second Holocaust.”

In early June 2014, a gift dropped in Netanyahu’s lap: the abduction and killing by Palestinians of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. It appears that Netanyahu knew almost immediately that the teenagers had been killed rather than abducted for purposes of a prisoner exchange and that Hamas’s leadership was not responsible.
³
But he decided to exploit the opportunity presented by the abduction to destroy the Palestinian unity government. Feigning a rescue mission, Israel launched in mid-June Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, killing at least five Palestinians, ransacking and demolishing homes and businesses, and arresting some 700 Palestinians, mostly Hamas members, including many who had been released in a 2011 prisoner exchange deal.
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The rampage was transparently designed to evoke a violent response from Hamas so as to “prove” it was a terrorist organization, not to be trusted. Netanyahu then could, and in fact later did, scold the US, “never second-guess me again”:
Didn’t I tell you Hamas was a terrorist organization?
⁵
Initially, Hamas resisted the Israeli provocations, although other Gaza factions did fire projectiles, but in the ensuing tit-for-tat, Hamas entered the fray and the violence spun out of control.
⁶

Once hostilities broke out, Israel faced a dilemma familiar to it from the 2006 Lebanon war and Cast Lead. Short-range projectiles of the kind Hamas
⁷
possessed couldn’t be disabled from the air; they had to be taken out at ground level. But a ground invasion would have cost Netanyahu either too much domestically, if many Israeli soldiers were killed fighting street-by-street with Hamas, or too much internationally, if Israeli soldiers immunized themselves from attack by laying waste Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and killing many civilians as they advanced. Netanyahu consequently held back from launching a ground invasion, but then two more gifts dropped in his lap.

First, Tony Blair helped coordinate a cease-fire deal, formally presented by Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on 14 July, in which Hamas would agree to stop firing projectiles in exchange for an easing of the blockade when “the security situation stabilizes.”
⁸
No such security caveat was stipulated in the two prior cease-fire agreements between Israel and Hamas in 2008 and 2012.
⁹
Inasmuch as Israel designates Hamas a terrorist organization, by definition the security situation in Gaza could stabilize only when Hamas was either defeated or disarmed itself, in the absence of which the illegal and inhuman siege would continue. It was surely known in advance that Hamas had to reject these cease-fire terms, which would then hand Israel a credible rationale for a brutal ground invasion. Second, the downing on 17 July of the Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine displaced Gaza as the headline news story. Here was an opportunity Netanyahu couldn’t resist. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which occurred during the first Palestinian uprising (intifada), Netanyahu reportedly declared that Israel had committed a blunder when it didn’t expel “five, 50 or 500” Palestinian “inciters” from the occupied territories while media attention was riveted on China.
¹⁰
The downed airliner was Netanyahu’s “Tiananmen moment.” Realizing that he could inflict massive death and destruction, Netanyahu launched the ground invasion hours later, on the night of that very day.

Already before the ground invasion began, Israel had apparently exhausted its bank of military targets in Gaza and proceeded to outright terror bombing, which, as Israeli troops crossed the border, escalated into precision terror strikes on homes and businesses, schools and mosques, hospitals and ambulances, power stations and sewage plants, civilian shelters and fleeing citizens. Per usual, to justify the rising death toll, Israel accused Hamas of using civilians as “human shields”; per usual, reputable human rights organizations and journalists found no evidence to support Israel’s allegation.
¹¹
The obvious purpose of Israel’s terror strikes was to subvert the will to resist of Gaza’s civilian population, or turn it against Hamas either amid the fighting or after a cease-fire, when the dust had settled and Gazans took in the magnitude of the devastation. “I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before,” Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, observed after touring the ravaged strip, while UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared before the UN General Assembly, “The massive deaths and destruction in Gaza have shocked and shamed the world.”
¹²

Operation Protective Edge did not turn out quite as Netanyahu anticipated. In some respects it fared better, but in other respects worse. He did get
carte blanche
from the White House to pulverize Gaza. It was manifest from early on that Israel was targeting or firing indiscriminately at civilians and civilian infrastructure.
¹³
Even Human Rights Watch (HRW), which routinely provides legal cover for Israel,
¹⁴
had to concede that Israel was probably committing war crimes.
¹⁵
But, despite some behind-the-scenes tensions,
¹⁶
Washington did not publicly exert pressure on Israel to desist; on the contrary, each day President Obama or his spokespersons, intoning Israel’s “right to self-defense” and refusing to condemn Israeli atrocities, gave Netanyahu the green light to continue.
¹⁷
It ought never to be forgotten that Obama was the enabler-in-chief of Israel’s latest massacre. It might be asked,
Why did the Obama administration back Israel’s assault if it supported negotiations with the unity government?
The answer is, once Hamas projectiles started flying over Israel, and Israel’s domestic lobby lined up wall-to-wall Congressional support,
¹⁸
it would have taken spine for Obama to defy it, which he lacks. Still, did he really have to reaffirm Israel’s “right to defend itself” day in and day out, even as human rights organizations documented Israeli war crimes?

Meanwhile, in recent years the balance of forces elsewhere has dramatically shifted in Israel’s favor. Netanyahu benefited hugely from this political realignment during Protective Edge. Regional powers, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, openly longed for Hamas’s removal from power.
¹⁹
The Arab League—in its sole meeting on Gaza—even supported the cynical Egyptian cease-fire ultimatum.
²⁰
Only Iran, Turkey, and Qatar among Middle Eastern powers opposed the Israeli attack. A critical factor limiting the damage Israel wreaked during Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) was the strong backing Egypt and Turkey lent Hamas.
²¹
But after the July 2013 coup Egypt became Hamas’s sworn nemesis, while Turkey was preoccupied with other regional developments, notably in Syria. Convulsed by its own internal conflicts and humanitarian crises, the so-called street across large swaths of the Arab world fell mute during the Israeli assault. As a result, corrupt Arab dictators and their Washington backer paid no price for egging on Israel. The EU also gave Israel a free pass because it dreaded “militant Islam,” now spreading like wildfire under the ISIS banner, to which Hamas was, rightly or wrongly (in this writer’s opinion, wrongly), assimilated. The only notable exceptions outside the Middle East were Latin American states (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela), which, in a rare display of selfless solidarity with beleaguered Gaza, registered diplomatically their disgust at Israeli actions.
²²
Still, amidst the slaughter, Gaza basically stood alone and abandoned.

A less welcome surprise for Israel was the sophisticated, ramified network of tunnels that Hamas had dug inside Gaza. Adopting and adapting Hezbollah’s strategy during the 2006 Lebanon war, the Palestinian resistance used projectiles to lure Israel into a ground invasion, and then emerged from tunnels, which withstood Israeli aerial bombing and artillery shells, to inflict an unprecedented number of combatant casualties.
²³
Only ten Israeli soldiers were killed in Cast Lead, four by friendly fire; many Israeli soldiers testified not having even seen a Hamas fighter.
²⁴
This time around, however, at least 66 Israeli soldiers were killed. Because of so many combatant deaths, advancing Israeli troops marked time, never penetrating more than 2–3 kilometers beyond the border.
²⁵
Israel abruptly recalibrated its mission from destroying Hamas “rockets” to destroying Hamas “terror tunnels” exiting on its side of the border. But, of the 32 tunnels Israel allegedly discovered and detonated, only 12 passed under the border,
²⁶
while Israel could easily have sealed them from its side, just as Egypt after the July coup sealed some one thousand tunnels passing from Gaza into the Sinai. Israel’s actual goal was to destroy the tunnels
inside
Gaza so that, when it next had to “mow the grass,” Hamas fighters wouldn’t again be able to inflict heavy combatant casualties. By proclaiming a “right” to destroy the tunnel system, Israel was effectively saying that Palestinians had no right to defend themselves against Israel’s periodic massacres. Even if Netanyahu did seek to destroy tunnels used by Hamas infiltrators, it’s hard to figure out why this would be legitimate. Do the laws of war prescribe that planes, artillery shells, and tanks get to breach Gaza’s border at Israel’s will and whim, but Palestinian tunnels must not violate Israel’s sacred space?

Israel not only misrepresented the nature of the threat posed by Hamas’s “terror tunnels.” It also misrepresented the threat posed by Hamas’s “rockets.” Although Hamas allegedly fired some 3,900 rockets at Israel, they caused only seven civilian casualties and $15 million in property damage.
²⁷
The vast discrepancy between the scale of the attack and its material consequences is supposedly reconciled by the miracle of the Iron Dome antimissile defense system. This explanation, however, is not plausible. Israel suffered only three civilian casualties and (in an odd coincidence) $15 million in property damage during Cast Lead—that is, before Iron Dome came along.
²⁸
It might still be argued, in support of Iron Dome’s efficacy, that Hamas fired far fewer “rockets” (925) during Cast Lead. But Israel’s early warning sirens and shelters have been markedly improved since Cast Lead; if Hamas fired more rockets this time around and Israel suffered roughly the same losses as in 2008–9, that just as well might be chalked up to the overhaul of its civil defense system.

The bigger point, however, is this: For many years before Cast Lead, the blockade of Gaza was sufficiently porous for relatively sophisticated rockets to be smuggled in from Hamas’s benefactor in Iran. But just before and then after Cast Lead, the blockade of Gaza was gradually tightened. The tunnel system with Egypt somewhat compensated, and weapons no doubt still made their way in. However, (1) Hamas’s stash of rockets was depleted in 2012 during Operation Pillar of Defense, (2) Iran downgraded relations with Hamas in 2013 after it realigned against Syrian strongman (and Iranian ally) Bashar al-Assad, and (3) after the military coup in Egypt, the new regime sealed nearly all the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. In broad strokes, then, and allowing for the occasional exception, the picture prior to Protective Edge was this: Hamas had no rockets in its armory, no allies from whom to acquire them, no way to smuggle them in, and no wherewithal to manufacture them. The notion that Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel (and had thousands more still hidden away), while it was the miracle of Iron Dome that spared Israel from devastation, is almost certainly a fiction. Dismissing Israel’s Iron Dome hoopla, MIT missile defense expert Theodore Postol estimated that fewer than ten percent of Iron Dome’s intercepts were successful, and he ascribed the fewness of Israeli civilian casualties to its sophisticated civil defense system and the smallness of the warheads on Hamas “rockets” (10- to 20-pound range).
²⁹
But this hypothesis would not yet account for the minimal infrastructural damage Israel witnessed: if Iron Dome did not disable 3,500 (of the 3,900) incoming Hamas rockets, wouldn’t total property damage from even small warheads exceed $15 million? The only plausible explanation is that Hamas “rockets” consisted overwhelmingly of enhanced fireworks.