By David K. Shipler
The
most obvious prediction this week, after Hamas fighters rolled easily from Gaza
into the stunned villages and kibbutzim of Israel, would be this: The
sputtering hope for a Palestinian state has been finally extinguished.
Having seen their children, women,
and elderly bathed in blood and taken to Gaza as hostages, Israelis will never
countenance Palestinian statehood anywhere nearby, not in Gaza and least of all
on the West Bank, which is even closer to the heart of the country--literally
just down the street from the capital, Jerusalem, and many other towns.
Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from its military
occupation of Gaza in 2005, and the subsequent election of Hamas to rule the
densely populated territory, the sporadic rockets and infiltrations have undermined
Israel’s peace movement’s central concept. That’s been “land for peace,” a belief that once
Palestinians had their own territory, they would accept Israel as a neighbor. Well,
Gaza residents got their land, but Israel got no peace. That’s been the
simplistic equation.
Of
course it can be argued—and usually is, on the political left around the
world—that Palestinians didn’t really possess their land, that they were
suffocated and radicalized by Israel’s imposition of tight border controls that
restricted imports and hemmed people into what some call an open-air prison.
Wages are low in Gaza, and better-paying jobs in Israel are inaccessible
without a permit to cross the border. Even after Israel increased the number of
permits in recent years, the Gaza unemployment rate stood at nearly 50 percent:
a prescription for smoldering desperation and explosive fury.
But the
partial blockade was itself a reaction--supported by Egypt along its border
with Gaza—aimed at impeding Hamas from building an arsenal whose disastrous
scope was displayed to Israel this week. In turn, that militarization of Gaza was
a reaction to Israel’s “colonial” oppression, as many Palestinians see it. And Israel’s
tough posture was itself a reaction to radical Palestinians’ ideology of
obliteration, which dreams of a final end to the Jewish state.
And so
on, one reaction to another to another ad infinitum. Untangling the causal
relationship depends on how far back in history you’re willing to go before
stopping and deciding that you have found the original sin.
It’s
not so hard to look backward. It’s harder to look forward. In that part of the
world, only prophets and fools are inclined to use the future tense. Prophets
have been scarce for quite a while. Fools have been in plentiful supply.
Unexpected
consequences seem to be the rule. Israel’s lightning victory in the six-day war
of 1967, celebrated tearfully by Jews able at last to pray at Jerusalem’s
Western Wall, saddled the country with the unending dangers of containing hostile
Palestinian populations in the captured West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s near
defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur war gave President Anwar Sadat of Egypt the
stature, he thought, to make peace with Israel. Some have speculated that Hamas’s
monstrous assault will give Palestinians the swagger to make eventual
compromises. I wouldn’t put money on it, but you never know.
You never know, that should be the
motto. And you need to be careful what you wish for. In 1981, it came to my
attention that the Israeli government, confident in its ability to manipulate
Arab politics, was funneling money to the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, a
precursor of today’s Hamas. That startling miscalculation was confirmed by
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, who explained
that he was under instructions from the authorities to build up the Brotherhood
as a counterpoint to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Communists, whose
goal of Palestinian statehood was seen as more threatening than Muslim fundamentalism.
The
Brotherhood was doctrinaire religiously but also deep into social welfare
services for the impoverished Gaza population. I suppose the movement seemed
benign to Israeli officials whose hubris led them to think they understood the
Byzantium of Gaza’s politics. A year later, Israelis made the same mistake in
Lebanon, where they went to war to succeed in expelling the PLO but fail dramatically
at realigning Lebanese politics in a pro-Israel direction.
Significantly,
an architect of both the Gaza and Lebanon schemes was former general Ariel
Sharon, then defense minister. Later, as prime minister, he ordered the army’s
unconditional withdrawal from Gaza, with no agreement or international
structure to keep some modicum of peace. Hamas rockets followed.
Palestinians have a rich history of
miscalculation as well, and this Hamas attack seems destined to mark history with
an indelible turning point. Israelis, it has been said, became complacent in
their material comforts and relative security in recent years. True, masses took
to the streets against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to emasculate
the judiciary, but Jewish-Arab violence precipitated by Palestinians and vigilante
Jewish settlers, was mostly confined to the West Bank, with little terrorism
inside Israel proper. The “situation,” in the anodyne euphemism, did not occupy
everyday worries.
In Gaza, Hamas lobbed occasional
rockets, which were mostly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile
system. As radical as the group’s objectives were—Israel’s annihilation—it seemed
contained, the two sides standing off in a hostile equilibrium. The Arabs’ conventional
order of battle had been practically dismantled by peace treaties with Egypt
and Jordan, internal disarray in Syria, and the aftermath of the US war in
Iraq.
The remaining threats came from non-state
actors—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—but they seemed manageable. Then
came the latest day of infamy.
What shift will this bring? “Hamas
was once a tolerable threat,” wrote
Haviv Rettig Gur in the Times of Israel. “It just made itself an
intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak
to respond with the old restraint. . . . These heirs of a collective memory
forged in the fires of the 20th century cannot handle the experience of
defenselessness Hamas has imposed on them. Hamas seemed to do everything
possible to shift Israeli psychology from a comfortable faith in their own strength
to a sense of dire vulnerability.
“And it will soon learn the scale
of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its
border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources
worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more
vulnerable Israel cannot. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.”
It seems a reasonable prediction.
The page will be turned from heart-rending pictures of Israelis massacred and kidnapped
to heart-rending pictures of Palestinians bombed and mangled in Gaza. Woe to
the fools who see only one page.
