By David K. Shipler
In
October 1953, two days after infiltrators from Jordan threw a grenade into an
Israeli home and killed a
mother and her two small children, Israeli Unit 101, led by Col. Ariel Sharon,
took revenge in a deliberately disproportionate manner.
Crossing into Jordan, the Israeli
commandos destroyed
some 50 houses and killed 69 civilians in Qibya, a town 5 kilometers south of
where the infiltrators’ tracks had led. Sharon claimed that he didn’t know any
people were in the houses he blew up, but property damage was hardly the point.
“The orders were utterly clear,” Sharon wrote in his autobiography. “Qibya was
to be an example for everyone.”
That
was, and remains, Israel’s basic strategy of deterrence: hold the neighbors
responsible for the misuse of their territory by hitting back exponentially.
The
practice has worked, to an extent, as long as the neighbor has been in control.
Jordan eventually patrolled its side of the border closely, and the frontier
was fairly quiet for decades before the two countries signed a peace treaty in
1994. The same with Egypt for several years before its formal peace with Israel
in 1979. And even without a treaty, Syria has kept its heavily fortified border
mostly closed to attacks on Israelis until exchanges of fire recently, during
the Gaza war.
But where
the state has been weak or virtually non-existent, as in southern Lebanon and
the Gaza Strip, only powerless civilians have a stake in preserving calm or
stability. Non-state forces have prevailed—first the Palestine Liberation
Organization, then Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza—and Israel’s strategy of
fierce retaliation has little effect except to radicalize residents and fuel
extremism.
So it is in Gaza today. Israel’s military withdrawal in 2005 opened a vacuum for Hamas to govern, but its armed passion to obliterate the Jewish state provoked a partial Israeli and Egyptian blockade, deepening poverty and leaving the territory well short of autonomous statehood. Hamas used outside aid to construct tunnels and build an arsenal of weaponry, not to foster prosperous independence that it would want to preserve.
