Month: July 2014

Devastating image of dead child on a Gaza beach by @TylerHicksPhoto. http://t.co/mnzl9ob99j pic.twitter.com/F2zi96Zx7I

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) July 16, 2014

Larison makes the case that Israel doesn’t really have such values anymore:

[Douglas] Murray … says that Israel “takes western values seriously and fights for the survival of those values,” but that seems to be almost exactly the opposite of what has been happening in Israeli politics over the last ten or fifteen years. Some of this may depend on what Murray wants to include as “Western values” and what he thinks it means to “fight” for them, but it would be fair to say that Israel under its last two governments has become increasingly illiberal domestically and even more heavy-handed in its dealings with its immediate neighbors. The occupation has become more entrenched than it was at the turn of the century, and support for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians has dwindled significantly. If Murray is right that this is what being a “Western country” involves, then I suspect most people in the West would rather be something else.

And it’s not getting any better anytime soon. Recent research by Anna Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff forecasts that the political upshot of the current conflict will be to move Israel even further to the right:

In research that is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, we use variation in the range of rockets from Gaza to Israel to estimate the effect of terrorism on voting in the Israeli elections from 2003 through 2009. During this period, the rockets’ range has continuously increased, allowing us to examine what happens to voters who come into the range of rockets from Gaza compared to similar voters who live outside that range. We find that the vote-shares of right-wing parties that typically oppose concessions to Palestinians increase by 2-7 percentage points among voters within range of rockets. We further argue that voters “reward” right-wing incumbents electorally even if rocket range increases while they are in office, because right-wing parties are perceived to be more competent in dealing with security threats. …

So what does the current round of violence mean for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the recent round of violence? Our research as well as other studies would suggest a pessimistic outcome. Given the increase in the number of Israelis who are within the range of rockets, and the high number of Palestinian casualties, the recent round of fighting is likely to cause individuals on both sides to harden their attitudes towards each other, making a peaceful resolution of the conflict less likely.

And as Keating points out, Netanyahu is actually to the left of the most vocal members of his cabinet:

One aspect of the situation that’s gotten comparatively little attention is that hardline members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet seem to be pushing the Israeli government toward a more aggressive campaign. Netanyahu is hardly pushing for accommodation, but the most aggressive political pushback he’s gotten during this campaign is from the right, not the left. Yesterday, Netanyahu fired his deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, a member of his own Likud party, for saying that the short-lived cease-fire yesterday had humiliated Israel. Netanyahu had faced heavy criticism in the Cabinet for accepting the Egyptian-proposed cease-fire, particularly from Danon, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett of the right-wing Jewish Home party.

Meanwhile, Yglesias flags a recent poll suggesting that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians really want two states:

Strikingly, this conclusion that 27 percent of Palestinians and 35 percent of Israelis favor a two-state solution is likely an overstatement of the actual level of popular support. …

[T]he international community’s comforting image of a tragic conflict being driven by misguided extremists on both sides is somewhat obsolete. Mainstream opinion on both sides now shows a decided lack of enthusiasm for foreigners’ favored solution. Which by no means makes a Two-State Solution impossible — public opinion is somewhat malleable, a real peace treaty in the hand might seem more appealing than a hypothetical one, and even in democracies unpopular measures are enacted all the time. But it’s wrong to simply assume that if the current wave of violence dies down, the larger conflict will naturally proceed to resolution.

Perhaps that’s why Bernard Avishai hopes for a major American intervention in the peace talks:

What the Obama Administration seems unable to grasp, or finds inconvenient to admit, is that the peace process cannot just be paused; to say that the parties to the conflict must want peace more than Americans is to condemn them to leaders who, in the short run, benefit from conflict, and hand Americans, and everyone else, an insufferable future. Obama reiterated, this week, that the status quo is unsustainable. But what is he prepared to do about it, other than offer Kerry as a mediator? Kerry must persist in demanding a ceasefire, of course—but, if he gets one, he must seize the moment to finally publish an American plan for a larger peace.

Such a plan, endorsed by all world powers, can at least temporarily redeem Abbas’s leadership by giving hope—what Obama has called a “horizon”—to young Palestinians who, watching Gaza but not only Gaza, are thinking apocalyptically. Netanyahu says he will stop the operation when he can be assured of “quiet,” which sounds reasonable enough. But it is morally reckless to think that peace is the same thing as quiet, which can be purchased, if only temporarily, with intimidation.

Good luck. Read my take on the permanence of the Greater Israel project here.

(Update: A tweet that was briefly live on the post contained an image that was from Lebanon in 2006, not current day Gaza: “Israeli girls write messages such as “to (Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan) Nasrallah with love from Israel and Daniele” on shells destined for targets in southern Lebanon. Photo: Afp Ap”)

The great hope of many Israelis on the far right (which these days means the center) is that demography – far from forcing them to come to terms with the occupation – is actually the major impetus behind the de jure annexation of the entire West Bank. A recent piece in Tablet By David Goldman brings that into focus. Money quote:

Israel is the great exception to the decline in fertility from North Africa to Iran, as I argued in a 2011 essay for Tablet magazine. The evidence is now overwhelming that a Jewish majority between the Jordan River and the sea is baked in the cake. The CIA World Factbook estimates total fertility of Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza at just 2.83 in 2014, versus 3.05 in 2011. The total fertility of Israeli Jews, meanwhile, has risen above three children per female … Jewish immigration is consistently positive and accelerating, while Palestinian emigration, at an estimated 10,000 per year since 1967, is reducing the total Arab population west of the Jordan River.

Palestine Authority data exaggerated Arab numbers in Judea and Samaria by about 30 percent, or 648,000 people, as of the 1997 census. As Caroline Glick observes in her 2014 book The Israeli Solution, Jews will constitute a 60 percent majority between the river and the sea, and “some anticipate that due almost entirely to Jewish immigration, Jews could comprise an 80 percent majority within the 1949 armistice lines and Judea and Samaria by 2035.” Israel therefore has little fear demographically from annexation.

I’m not an expert so I cannot judge these demographic predictions. They seem somewhat dubious to me. But in some respects, that’s not the point. The point is that many Israelis, especially those in its current government, believe this scenario and at the same time see the vast upheaval in the Arab and Muslim world as a golden opportunity to achieve the radical Zionist goal from the very beginning: control of all the land between the river and the sea.

You saw this in Netanyahu’s brusque dismissal of the two-state solution as impossible because of the renewed threat of Jihadism unleashed by the Arab Spring and the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars. And that, on top of alleged demographics, is what fuels Israel’s otherwise baffling desire to settle the West Bank and East Jerusalem at the expense of any other objective. (Netanyahu was prepared to release scores of convicted murderers of Jews than remove one brick from Greater Israel’s foundations in Judea and Samaria.)

Far from encouraging the Israelis to make peace as soon as possible, the spiraling chaos in the Arab world has emboldened many to intensify and accelerate the settlements and the colonization, and to press the war against the desperate and isolated Hamas with cold-blooded dominance. Here’s how David Goldman sees it:

The inability of the Palestine Authority to govern, the inability of Hamas to distance itself from its patron in Tehran, and the collapse of the surrounding states eventually will require Israel to assume control over the West Bank. This time the Israelis will stay. Israel can’t rely on the PA to conduct counterterrorism operations against Hamas, its coalition partner. Israel’s border with the Hashemite Kingdom in the Jordan Valley, meanwhile, has become a strategic pivot. ISIS is now operating in strength at the common border of Israel, Syria, Jordan, and occupied Iraqi-Syrian border towns close to the common frontier with Jordan. Jordan’s own security requires a strong IDF presence on its western border.

When Israel absorbs Judea and Samaria—and it is a when, not an if—the chancelleries of the West will wag their fingers, and the Gulf States will breathe a sigh of relief.

The two-state solution is dead. Greater Israel is here to stay. And it’s just a matter of time before an American administration embraces it.

William Saletan argues that life under the Islamist militant group has been “disastrous” for Gaza:

Critics accused Israel of violating the laws of war in practice. But Hamas flouted those laws explicitly. It fired rockets on every city within reach, declaring, “All Israelis have now become legitimate targets.” Weapons launched by Hamas and its allies have hit citizens in Gaza. They’ve hit Palestinian homes and buildings in the West Bank. They’ve hit Gaza’s power lines twice, knocking out 20 percent of the strip’s electricity. All this while managing, with more than 1,200 rockets, to kill only one Israeli.

The vast majority of the damage in Gaza has been inflicted by Israel. Yet Hamas has contrived to make the carnage worse. It has encouraged Gazans to stand in the way of Israeli missiles. When Israel advised 100,000 Gazans to evacuate an area targeted for invasion, Hamas instructed them to ignore the warnings. It added: “To all of our people who have evacuated their homes—return to them immediately and do not leave the house.”

And these nihilist tactics aren’t getting them anywhere either. As Michael Totten remarks, “Hamas is losing and everyone knows it”:

That’s almost certainly the reason Hamas rejected the Egypt-proposed cease-fire agreement. So far it has accomplished practically nothing. A small band of serial killers on the West Bank managed to murder more Israelis a couple of weeks ago than Hamas can manage with its entire missile arsenal now. It’s pathetic, really, and must be extraordinarily humiliating.

The Middle Eastern habit of declaring victory after getting your ass kicked has a long pedigree. Egypt did it after losing the 1973 Yom Kippur War. North Korea built a hysterical propaganda museum in Cairo commemorating that make-believe victory, but at least that particular fantasy is based on something. The Egyptian army did well against Israel for the first couple of days even though it lost in the end. Hezbollah declared victory in the 2006 war despite the fact that entire swaths of its infrastructure were obliterated, but Hezbollah did inflict some serious damage and triggered a refugee crisis. Hamas couldn’t possibly base a victory boast on anything now.

Michael Koplow adds that Hamas’s leadership structure, such as it is, makes it hard for the group to negotiate an end to the crisis:

Hamas is an organization fractured between the Gaza leadership and the international leadership based in Qatar, and so it is unclear what it actually wants and who has the authority to make a deal. Signs point to Khaled Meshal following the military leaders right now than the other way around, and the military guys in Gaza appear to be averse to ending the fighting anytime soon. The atmosphere is very different now than it was in 2012, and while I will for the second time in a week emphasize that internal Palestinian politics are not my expertise, I have the sense that Meshal will be subject to the Gaza leadership’s veto on any deal he is involved in brokering. There is also the complicating factor of Gazans wanting a ceasefire and whether this will create any pressure on Hamas’s Gaza wing to at some point acquiesce.

They’re also likely to run out of rockets pretty soon:

Simply extrapolating the current tempo of operations on both sides would suggest that missile stocks in Gaza will be getting very low within a fortnight. However, that assumes that Israel is not running out of targets, as it did after only a week of Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012. The IDF says that it still has plenty of targets to work on, but the pressure to find more if the missiles keep on coming could yet lead to a limited ground assault. That is something Israel still wants to avoid. But the problems for Hamas and Islamic Jihad are more acute. They need to find a way of quitting while they retain some firepower, particularly as building a new arsenal of rockets will be much harder than before given the close security co-operation between the new al-Sisi government in Egypt and Israel. The military logic on both sides suggests that the end of this bout of fighting is not far off.

Previous Dish on Hamas’s objectives in the current conflict here.

(Photo:  Israeli air missiles hit al-Wafa Hospital, the rehabilitation center, which currently serves patients in Gaza city, Gaza on July 16, 2014. Following the strike, Hospital administrators moved all patients from the top floor. By Mohammed Talatene/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)