Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (2 page)

After the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel was itching to take on Hezbollah again but was not yet confident it would emerge triumphant from the battle. In mid-2008, Israel sought to conscript the US for an attack on Iran, which it believed would also decapitate Hezbollah (Iran’s junior partner), and thereby humble key rivals to its regional hegemony. To Israel’s chagrin and humiliation, Washington vetoed an attack and Iran went its merry way; the credibility of Israel’s capacity to terrorize slipped another notch. It was time to find another target, and Gaza fit the bill. It was largely defenseless while Hamas had resisted Israeli diktat, crowing first, in 2005, that it had forced Israel to “withdraw” and then, in 2008, that it had forced Israel to accept a cease-fire. If Gaza was
where
Israel would restore its deterrence capacity, one theater of the 2006 Lebanon war had already hinted at
how
it might successfully be done.

During the 2006 Lebanon war, Israel pulverized the southern suburb of Beirut known as the Dahiya, which was home to many poor Shiite supporters of Hezbollah. In the war’s aftermath Israeli military officers began referring to the “Dahiya strategy.” “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction,” IDF Northern Command Chief Gadi Eisenkot anticipated. “This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.” In the event of future hostilities, Israel needed “to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate,” reserve Colonel Gabriel Siboni of the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies declared. “Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.” “The next war . . . will lead to the elimination of the Lebanese military, the destruction of the national infrastructure, and intense suffering among the population,” former chief of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland threatened. “Serious damage to the Republic of Lebanon, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are consequences that can influence Hezbollah’s behavior more than anything else.”
³¹

Under international law, use of disproportionate force and targeting of civilian infrastructure constitute war crimes. Besides Lebanon, Gaza was frequently singled out as a prime target of Israel’s criminal strategy. “Too bad it did not take hold immediately after the [2005] ‘disengagement’ from Gaza and the first rocket barrages,” a respected Israeli pundit lamented. “Had we immediately adopted the Dahiya strategy, we would have likely spared ourselves much trouble.” If and when Palestinians launched another rocket attack, Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit urged in late September 2008, “the IDF should . . . decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”
³²

The operative Israeli plan for Cast Lead could be gleaned from authoritative statements issued after it got underway: “What we have to do is act systematically with the aim of punishing all the organizations that are firing the rockets and mortars, as well as the civilians who are enabling them to fire and hide” (reserve Major-General Amiram Levin); “After this operation there will not be one Hamas building left standing in Gaza” (Deputy IDF Chief of Staff Dan Harel); “Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target” (IDF Spokesperson Major Avital Leibowitz); “It [should be] possible to destroy Gaza, so they will understand not to mess with us. . . . It is a great opportunity to demolish thousands of houses of all the terrorists, so they will think twice before they launch rockets. . . . I hope the operation will come to an end with great achievements and with the complete destruction of terrorism and Hamas. In my opinion, they should be razed to the ground, so thousands of houses, tunnels and industries will be demolished” (Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai). The military correspondent for Israel Channel 10 News commented, “Israel isn’t trying to hide the fact that it reacts disproportionately.”
³³

Israeli media exulted at the “shock and awe” (
Maariv
) of its opening air campaign, which was designed to “engender a sense of dread.”
³⁴
Whereas Israel killed a mere 55 Lebanese during the first two days of the 2006 war, it killed as many as 300 Gazans in four minutes on the first day of Cast Lead. Most targets were located in “densely populated residential areas,” while the bombardments began “at around 11:30 a.m., a busy time, when the streets were full of civilians, including school children leaving classes at the end of the morning shift and those going to school for the second shift.”
³⁵
Several days into the slaughter an Israeli strategic analyst observed, “The IDF, which planned to attack buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, did not warn them in advance to leave, but intended to kill a great many of them, and succeeded.”
³⁶
Benny Morris lauded “Israel’s highly efficient air assault on Hamas,” and an American military analyst marveled at the “masterful precision” of the assault.
³⁷
The Israeli columnist B. Michael was less impressed by the dispatch of helicopter gunships and jet planes “over a giant prison and firing at its people.”
³⁸
For example, on that first day of Cast Lead, Israeli aerial strikes killed or fatally injured at least 16 children while an Israeli drone-launched precision missile killed nine college students (two of them young women) “who were waiting for a UN bus” to take them home.
³⁹

As Cast Lead proceeded apace, prominent Israelis dropped all pretenses that its purpose was to stop Hamas rocket fire. “Remember, [Israeli Defense Minister Ehud] Barak’s real foe is not Hamas,” a former Israeli minister told the Crisis Group. “It is the memory of 2006.”
⁴⁰
Israeli pundits gloated that “Gaza is to Lebanon as the second sitting for an exam is to the first—a second chance to get it right,” and that, this time around, Israel had “hurled [Gaza] back,” not 20 years as it promised to do in Lebanon, but “into the 1940s. Electricity is available only for a few hours a day”; that “Israel regained its deterrence capabilities” because “the war in Gaza has compensated for the shortcomings of the [2006] Second Lebanon War”; and that “there is no doubt that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is upset these days. . . . There will no longer be anyone in the Arab world who can claim that Israel is weak.”
⁴¹

New York Times
foreign affairs expert Thomas Friedman joined in the chorus of hallelujahs. Israel actually won the 2006 war, Friedman reasoned, because it had inflicted “substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon,” and consequently administered an “education” to Hezbollah: fearing the Lebanese people’s wrath, Hezbollah would “think three times next time” before defying Israel. He expressed hope that Israel would also “‘educate’ Hamas by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population.”
⁴²

If Israel targeted the Lebanese civilian population and infrastructure during the 2006 war, it was not because it had no choice, but because terrorizing Lebanese civilians appeared to be a low-cost method of “education.” This pedagogical approach was much preferred to tangling with a determined foe, such as the Party of God, and suffering heavy combatant casualties. Whereas Hezbollah’s unexpectedly fierce resistance prevented Israel from claiming a victory on the battlefield, Israel did successfully educate the civilian Lebanese population, which is why Hezbollah was careful not to antagonize Israel during Cast Lead.
⁴³
Israel’s pedagogy also proved a success among the Gaza population. “It was hard to convince Gazans whose homes were demolished and family and friends killed and injured,” the Crisis Group reported, “that this amounted to ‘victory,’” as Hamas had boasted in the wake of the invasion.
⁴⁴
In the case of Gaza, Israel could also lay claim to a military victory, but only because—in the words of Israeli journalist Gideon Levy—“a large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight.”
⁴⁵

Israel’s evolving modus operandi for restoring its deterrence capacity describes a curve steadily regressing into barbarism. Israel gained its victory in 1967 primarily on the battlefield—albeit in a “turkey shoot”
⁴⁶
—while in subsequent hostilities, mostly in Lebanon, it sought both to achieve a battlefield victory and to bombard the civilian population into submission. But Israel targeted Gaza to restore its deterrence capacity because it eschewed
any
of the risks of a conventional war; it targeted Gaza
because
it was largely defenseless. Israel’s resort to unalloyed terror in turn revealed its relative decline as a military power, while the glorification of its military prowess during and after Cast Lead by the likes of Benny Morris registered the growing detachment of Israeli intellectuals, and a good share of the public as well, from reality.

A supplementary benefit of this deterrence strategy was that it restored Israel’s domestic morale. A 2009 internal UN document concluded that the invasion’s “one significant achievement” was that it dispelled doubts among Israelis about “their ability and the power of the IDF to issue a blow to its enemies. . . . The use of ‘excessive force’ . . . proves Israel is the landlord. . . . The pictures of destruction were intended more for Israeli eyes than those of Israel’s enemies, eyes starved of revenge and national pride.”
⁴⁷

Beyond restoring its deterrence capacity, Israel’s principal goal in the Gaza invasion was to fend off the latest threat posed by Palestinian pragmatism. Except for Israel backed by the United States, the international community has consistently supported a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict that calls for two states based on a full Israeli withdrawal to its prewar 1967 borders, and a “just” resolution of the refugee question based on the right of return and compensation.
⁴⁸
The lop-sided voting record on the annual UN General Assembly resolution “Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine” as well as the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice attest to this broad consensus. It is further evidenced by an Arab League peace initiative of 2002 (later reaffirmed) that commits League members to not just recognizing Israel but also establishing “normal relations” once Israel implements the consensus terms for a comprehensive peace. The Arab Peace Initiative was subsequently adopted by all 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, including Iran.
⁴⁹

It is acknowledged on all sides that the Palestinian Authority has accepted the terms of the global consensus and even expressed willingness to make significant concessions going beyond it.
⁵⁰
But what about Hamas, which currently governs Gaza? A recent study by a US government agency concluded that Hamas “has been carefully and consciously adjusting its political program for years and has sent repeated signals that it is ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”
⁵¹
Khalid Mishal, the head of Hamas’s politburo, stated in a March 2008 interview, for example, that “most Palestinian forces, including Hamas, accept a state on the 1967 borders.”
⁵²
Even right after the devastation wrought by Cast Lead, Mishal reiterated that “the objective remains the constitution of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, the return of the Israelis to the pre-67 borders and the right of return of our refugees.”
⁵³
In a complementary formulation, Mishal told former US president Jimmy Carter in 2006 (and later reaffirmed in a Damascus press conference) that “Hamas agreed to accept any peace agreement negotiated between the leaders of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and Israel provided it is subsequently approved by Palestinians in a referendum or by a democratically elected government.”
⁵⁴

From the mid-1990s onward, Hamas “rarely, if at all” adverted to its notoriously anti-Semitic charter and now “no longer cites or refers” to it.
⁵⁵
Israeli officials knew full well before Cast Lead that, the charter notwithstanding, a diplomatic settlement could have been reached with Hamas. “The Hamas leadership has recognized that its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” former Mossad head Ephraim Levy observed. “They are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967. . . . They know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their cooperation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: They will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.”
⁵⁶

After having rejected Hamas’s cease-fire proposals for months, Israel finally agreed to them in June 2008.
⁵⁷
Hamas was “careful to maintain the cease-fire,” a semi-official Israeli publication reported, despite Israel’s reneging on the crucial quid pro quo that it substantially lift the economic blockade of Gaza. “The lull was sporadically violated by rocket and mortar shell fire, carried out by rogue terrorist organizations,” the Israeli source continued. “At the same time, the [Hamas] movement tried to enforce the terms of the arrangement on the other terrorist organizations and to prevent them from violating it.”
⁵⁸
The Islamic movement had on this occasion stood by its word, making it a credible negotiating partner. And unlike the hapless PA, which was doing Israel’s bidding but getting no returns, Hamas appeared to extract concessions from Israel. As a result, Hamas’s stock among Palestinians increased.