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| Palestinian medics arrive to inspect destruction caused by Israeli attacks on Gaza City's Shuja'iya neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip on 20 July 2014 [Associated Press/Lefteris Pitarakis] |
| Abstract On 13 July 2014, five days after the start of the third Israeli war against the Gaza Strip, Haaretz, known for its liberal Zionist orientation, published an editorial calling on the Netanyahu government to announce that Israel had achieved its objectives. This editorial also implicitly called for him to stop the war. The editorial told Netanyahu and his government that the war had failed and that there was no justification for its continuation because that would lead to further failure. In fact, the heavy material damages inflicted by the Gaza rockets and the ability of such rockets to paralyse many aspects of life in Israeli towns and cities, in addition to dozens of international airlines suspending their flights to Tel Aviv airport, had brought Netanyahu’s war to a stalemate. This paper addresses the reasons Netanyahu decided to go to war, why it quickly become evident that this war would fail, and why the failure of Netanyahu’s war has become a double failure for Egypt, which has now clearly indicated that it is closer to the Israeli government than to its Palestinian brothers. |
Introduction
On 13 July, five days after the start of the third Israeli war against the Gaza Strip, Haaretz, known for its liberal Zionist orientation, published an editorial calling on the Netanyahu government to announce that Israel had achieved its objectives. The editorial also implicitly called for him to stop the war. The editorial told Netanyahu and his government that the war had failed, and that there was no justification for its continuation because that would lead to further failure. The war had broken out against the backdrop of the kidnap and murder of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank. However, the fact that this event took place in the West Bank, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Israeli occupation forces, and the rapidness with which the Netanyahu government waged war on Gaza, inevitably raises questions about the war and whether it had actually been on the Israeli government’s agenda for months.
The kidnappings were announced on 13 June 2014 and the settlers’ bodies were later found near the town of Halhul in the Hebron province. By 30 June, the search for the settlers had fuelled hatred among other settlers, leading Jewish extremists to kidnap an Arab boy from Jerusalem and burn him alive. The most dangerous aspect of the Israeli response was Netanyahu’s accusation (without any evidence) that Hamas was responsible for the kidnapping and killing of the three settlers. Within days of the Israeli government’s announcement that the bodies of the three settlers had been found, the Israelis began a series of air raids on the Gaza Strip. On Monday, 7 July, the Israeli government announced the launch of a major military operation on the Gaza Strip. From that point on, Hamas and the other Palestinian factions fired rockets against various Israeli targets in response to the Israeli attacks which have inflicted heavy casualties among Palestinian civilians.
This paper addresses the reasons Netanyahu decided to go to war, why it quickly become evident that this war would fail, and why the failure of Netanyahu’s war has become a double failure for Egypt, which has now clearly indicated that it is closer to the Israeli government than to its Palestinian brothers.
Decision to go to war
Despite his right-wing affiliation and throughout his political career, the Israeli prime minister is known for his desire to avoid major wars. A well-known pragmatist, Netanyahu understands that wars are political acts with no guaranteed results. However, his pragmatism did not serve him well this time, for he assumed that this war on Gaza, even if it did not achieve all his goals, would not cost him much on the political level.
There were five major goals behind the third Gaza war:
• First, the war relates to the nature of the Israeli governing coalition led by Netanyahu, who is keen to show that his commitment to Israel’s security was no less than the commitment of his coalition allies.
• Second, this war relates to the nature of the regional alliance between Israel and a number of Arab countries which have been engaged in a massive campaign against political Islam for several months. Netanyahu wanted a starring role in this regional war and has used it to cement his Arab alliances. For him, this is an attempt to uproot Hamas and other armed forces in the Gaza Strip, or, at the very least, substantially weaken them.
• Third, the war is related to the stalled peace process and Netanyahu’s anger with the decision of Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, to reconcile with Hamas and form a national consensus government. In the weeks immediately prior to the abduction incident, it became clear that Netanyahu, instead of aiding American efforts to reach an agreement, actively lobbied to revive the classification of Hamas as a terrorist organisation and used the Palestinian reconciliation agreement to claim the absence of a Palestinian partner in the peace process.
• Fourth, the Gaza war is part of the Israeli government’s policy which views periodic wars as a strategy to curtail the capacity of the Palestinian armed resistance.
• Fifth, after Netanyahu realised that it would be difficult to achieve his previous goals by force, he attempted to build a global Arab alliance to forge an agreement to end the war and disarm the Gaza Strip.
War surprises
The Israeli Prime Minister began the war but did not know when and how to end it, and the surprising manner in which it developed confused him. After two weeks of war, hundreds of air raids and hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives, the Israeli war machine was unable to halt the Palestinian resistance from firing rockets or to sever the relationship between the resistance forces and the people of Gaza. It gradually became clear that the most powerful army in the Middle East, and its security forces, which had always claimed that they could read the Palestinian peoples’ minds better than their leaders could, did not know exactly which targets the Israeli Air Force should bomb. After destroying the traditional PA sites and the well-known training camps in Gaza, the air force was unable to target the sites from which rockets were being fired, and, on more than one occasion, rockets were launched while Israeli planes were flying over Gaza. Even when the Israelis resorted to a policy of indiscriminate shelling of families and worshippers in mosques, Gaza’s steadfastness was no less than that which had been demonstrated in 2012.
One of the most important causes of the Israeli strategic blindness, which has been clearly evident during the war, was the Hamas government’s success over the past six years in dismantling Israeli spy networks within Gaza. These networks had always been considered a cheap instrument previously enabling Israelis to achieve extensive breakthroughs against the Palestinian community and resistance groups. Another reason was the tactical counter-intelligence and deception methods which the resistance forces developed, and their ability to learn and adapt from one war to another.
On the other hand, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the al-Quds Brigades (the military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad), as well as other resistance forces, launched hundreds of rockets at Israeli towns. With Hamas’ success in developing long-range missiles, the movement was able to target Tel Aviv and Haifa for the first time. The war’s second surprise was Hamas’s development of small unmanned aircraft (drones), which Israeli defence forces discovered only after they had penetrated more than thirty kilometres into Israel’s airspace. In general, the Israeli Iron Dome defence network failed to intercept more than twenty per cent of the rockets launched from Gaza, despite the fact that Palestinian resistance fighters did not resort to saturation attacks in which scores of rockets are launched simultaneously.
Extensive material losses inflicted by the Gaza rockets and their ability to paralyse life in many Israeli cities and towns, in addition to the fact that dozens of international airlines stopped their flights to Tel Aviv airport, drove Netanyahu’s war to a stalemate. By the end of the first week of Israel’s war, its brutality had become clear, particularly after the massive increase in Palestinian civilian casualties, and after Israeli war planes had targeted homes, shelters and hospitals. Netanyahu had to either stop the war or risk either a protracted or a limited ground incursion, whatever the consequences and despite the major political risks that would result from such an action. Another option was an unending air war accompanied by the continued firing of rockets by the Palestinian resistance against Israeli sites.
The option of a continued war was no less risky. It would result in the Israeli government not only suffering increasing material and human losses, but also risking losing Israeli public opinion, and an escalation in international pressure. Palestinian reconciliation had contributed to strengthening Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, which had been intertwined with the stalled peace process due to Israeli inflexibility. However, the war on Gaza again recalled the weakness of the Palestinian president and the authoritarianism of the Palestinian Authority. Continuing the war would lead to further marginalisation of the Authority, the strategic Palestinian partner of the Jewish state and one of its security guarantees, and would reignite the threat of a new Palestinian intifada.
At the regional level, the war on Gaza, instead of causing a serious blow against political Islam, has actually strengthened the Islamic trend and its credibility among Arabs, and has led condemnation of Arab countries allied with Netanyahu and his government. Moreover, the war’s continuation may enhance the credibility of those who say that armed struggle is the solution to the political crisis in the region.
In the face of a number of options, each worse than the other, on the evening of 17 July, the tenth day of the war, Netanyahu began a limited ground invasion of Gaza, declaring that his objective was not to topple Hamas, but to address a network of tunnels which had become a major source of concern for the Israelis. This is particularly critical since the tunnels were used by Palestinian resistance forces in ground attacks against Israeli forces on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza.
Failing to achieve concrete results on the battlefield, Netanyahu tried to reach an agreement to end the war, exactly as his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, did in the 2006 war against Lebanon. Therefore, he began touting to the United States and major European countries that ending the war must be premised on the total disarmament of Gaza in return for a huge redevelopment project in the Gaza Strip with contributions from oil-rich Arab countries. This proposal appears to have support from the Arab countries which encouraged the war.
Bungled Egyptian role
The first week of the war was an opportunity handed to Netanyahu by Arabs and the West. All sides realised that a prolonged war would provoke undesirable popular responses and a political backlash. After the first week of the war, during which Cairo ignored Palestinian and Arab calls for intervention, Egypt surprised Palestinians with a ceasefire initiative.
Cairo, however, is closely aligned with the Netanyahu government. Tony Blair, the Quartet’s envoy to the Middle East and advisor to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, played a role in convincing Cairo to act in consensus with the Israelis to block any other initiative to stop the war. On 14 July 2014, the Egyptians and Israelis reached a formula for what would be an Egyptian initiative. The following day, the media began publicising the initiative, which was not officially offered to Hamas or any of the resistance forces. On 16 July, the Israeli war cabinet met and announced its approval of the initiative. That evening, Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced their rejection of the initiative.
According to Haaretz (16 July), the Egyptian initiative was formulated after consultations between Egyptian officials and Israeli advisors close to Netanyahu, resulting in a proposal that mostly reflected the Israeli position. The Egyptian initiative was based on the idea of returning to “quiet for quiet”, with the Israelis being implicitly allowed to continue targeting non-civilians, and to decide when to end the military attack against Gaza. The initiative included nothing beneficial for people in Gaza except a reference to the possibility of opening the border crossings with the Gaza Strip, on the condition that the security situation was stabilised. The Egyptian stance reflected a marked arrogance in assuming, without consultation with Palestinian resistance forces, that they would accept the initiative in any form.
The rejection of the Egyptian initiative by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other resistance organisations caused great embarrassment to Sisi’s regime and revealed its inability to influence the course of events. There is no doubt that the brutal Israeli escalation on the days following the rejection of the initiative received Cairo’s support. The Egyptian foreign minister explicitly linked responsibility for the increasing number of Gazan casualties to Hamas’s rejection of his government’s initiative.
The failure to stop the war was the main reason Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani visited Turkey on 17 July and Saudi Arabia on 22 July, in order to coordinate a Qatari-Turkish-Arab effort to reach a solution to end the war in a manner that would be acceptable to both sides. Despite Israeli support for the Egyptian initiative, and despite tense relations between Israel and both Qatar and Turkey, Doha and Ankara bet on American support and on Netanyahu’s failure to achieve his war objectives.
Intensive communication ensued between the foreign ministers of Turkey, Qatar and the United States in the second week of the war, despite the fact that the US had initially supported the Egyptian initiative. However, in a clear shift, US President Barack Obama announced that the US secretary of state, John Kerry, would visit the region to broker an agreement based on the 2012 deal sponsored by toppled Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. The French, the only Europeans to take an active role, expressed support for the Egyptian initiative during Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius’ visit to Amman and Cairo, just hours after Cairo signed a huge contract for the purchase of French warships said to be financed by Arabs allied with Sisi’s regime.
Meanwhile, Hamas, on behalf of all resistance factions in Gaza, presented all concerned parties with a list of the conditions it deemed necessary to end hostilities. These included ending the blockade on the Gaza Strip; cessation of all hostilities, including targeting resistance fighters; release of all detainees arrested after the kidnapping of the West Bank settlers; and ending administrative detention of Palestinians.
Amid the diplomatic moves, the biggest question was the stance of the Palestinian Authority (PA) president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the authority itself. It was no secret that the Authority, as the official representative of Palestinians in the West Bank and enhanced after reconciliation with Hamas, would be a critical factor in the negotiations, whether by supporting the demands of the Gazan resistance forces and presenting them as collective national Palestinian demands, or by bargaining on these demands with the hope of obtaining factional gains for Fatah and the PA.
Despite the secrecy surrounding the meeting of Hamas leader Khaled Mesh’al and Abbas in Doha on 21 July, there has been no clear statement from the PA leadership regarding the demands of the Gaza Strip and Netanyahu’s attempts to link Gaza reconstruction with disarming the resistance. However, on his return to the West Bank on 22 July, Abbas expressed the view that Gazans had the right to defend themselves.
Diplomatic shifts
After two weeks of devastation, the war did not stop, and it is likely that it will continue for a while yet. But Arab and international diplomatic attempts to reach an agreement were accelerated after Israeli army losses had increased, and following the enormous increase in civilian losses in Gaza. With Hamas’s announcement that it had captured an Israeli soldier and with Israeli reference to that incident, it became evident that an agreement to end the war would favour the resistance and the people of Gaza and their freedom. Obama’s decision to send Kerry to the region on 21 July and to call for a return to the 2012 agreement was perhaps the most prominent indicator that a serious diplomatic move to stop the war had begun. There is no doubt that Obama’s decision implicitly insulted Sisi’s government. Not only did Obama not refer to the Egyptian initiative, but the 2012 agreement was an achievement of Egypt’s ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. It is unclear how the Israeli demand to disarm Gaza will be passed over or ignored, considering that the Netanyahu government is trying to mobilise European-American support for it.
There are several indications of a search for a new initiative that would combine a ceasefire with lifting the siege on Gaza. These include Kerry’s efforts, the involvement of other countries which did not approve the Egyptian initiative, and the assertion by Mesh’al that he would not negotiate a peace that did not include the lifting of the blockade, as well as the recent coordination between Qatar and Egypt’s sponsor, Saudi Arabia.
When the war ends, it will be apparent that many elements have changed at both the Palestinian and Arab levels. The Palestinian resistance might not achieve all the demands of the Gazan people, firstly because of the magnitude of Arab divisions with regard to this war, and secondly because it is difficult for Israeli leadership to suddenly become faithful to any agreement it signs. Certainly, a significant number of the resistance’s demands will be achieved because Israeli military action in Gaza has failed for the third time. Consequently, the Palestinian arena will witness a rebuilding of the balance of power between Hamas and Abbas’s PA, particularly since Ramallah believed that Palestinian reconciliation came as a result of an overall decline of the Islamic movement in Egypt and of the Islamist sphere more generally. It will be important for Hamas to insist on holding legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a timely manner as set out in the reconciliation agreement.
In the Arab arena, the steadfastness seen in Gaza in this war is regarded as the first tangible indicator of a decline in the anti-Arab revolution camp, particularly after the coup in Egypt and the attempts to disrupt the process of democratic transition in Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. Egypt, whose regional influence has reached its lowest level, has paid a heavy political price because of this war in which it chose to position itself closer to Israel. During this war, Egyptians have seen how Sisi not only failed to commit himself to a position similar to that of Morsi’s in 2012, but also how he caused Egypt to lose any political influence it might have retained in the Palestinian arena.
In conclusion, it is inevitable that Gaza’s steadfastness in confronting three Israeli wars, despite its small geographical size and its besieged state, should induce a widespread re-evaluation of the overall Palestinian struggle and of the two-state solution on which many Arab, Palestinian and international parties had pinned their hopes for a resolution to the struggle.