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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Israel's post-traumatic war is not just about stopping Hamas rockets, but about repairing reputations -- and erasing the stain of failure.
By Aluf Benn
Read more: Iran, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Opinion, Hamas, Hezbollah, Aluf Benn
Reuters/Baz Ratner
An Israeli soldier advances at the border with the northern Gaza Strip January 4, 2009. Israeli tanks and infantry battled Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip on Sunday in a ground offensive launched after eight days of deadly air strikes failed to halt the Islamist group's rocket attacks on Israel.
Jan. 5, 2009 | TEL AVIV -- If there is one issue separating Israel from its role models in the West, it is the perceived legitimacy of using force. In Europe, and in many parts of American public opinion, military power is seen as an option of last resort; a primitive, old-fashioned and often counterproductive tool of policy. To us, hitting our enemies once in a while feels like a necessary behavior in a tough neighborhood. It may backfire, as it often does, but still, most Israelis believe it's impossible to survive in the Middle East without resorting to occasional aggression.
That is why in Washington, London or Paris, governments must sweat to build political consensus for going to war, while in Jerusalem, war resolutions enjoy wide parliamentary support. Israeli governments find it hard to pass peace treaties through the Knesset. That's where political difficulty lies.
Israel's military operation against Hamas in Gaza, now in its 10th day, is an excellent example of this rule. The war enjoys strong public support among Israel's Jewish majority. Only Israel's Arabs, identifying with their Palestinian brothers, and the far political left, which is all but pacifist, have protested against it. All the rest have united behind the government, including the more established left. The novelist Amos Oz, a moral compass for Israel's peace camp (and an eventual critic of the 2006 war in Lebanon), gave his blessing to the war.
Israelis believe that operation "Cast Lead" in Gaza is a justified war of no choice against an extremist, uncompromising enemy. Hamas and its smaller proxies have targeted Israel's towns and villages near Gaza for several years with thousands of rockets and mortar bombs. They kept rocketing even after Ariel Sharon evacuated Israel's settlements and forces from the Gaza strip in 2005. Lacking a credible response, or an anti-rocket technology, Israel appeared helpless against a primitive weapon, which killed relatively few people, but disrupted life for hundreds of thousands.
The common narrative here involves self-justification with insult. "No other country would have absorbed thousands of rockets on its territory without retaliation" is the way most Israelis analyze the situation. "We pulled out of Gaza, and they thanked us with shells and rockets" is another widely used explanation. Bombing and invading Gaza to "teach them a lesson" follows this logic naturally.
To its credit, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government has built its case for attacking Gaza, both domestically and internationally, by showing restraint for a long time and agreeing to a truce that lasted several months. Hamas, with its Islamist ideology and Iranian alliance, has very few friends. This explains the global support of Israel's actions. There may be protests in the streets in Arab nations and European capitals, but note the lazy pace of diplomatic efforts to call a cease-fire. Egypt, which previously mediated between Israel and Hamas, and brokered the ill-fated truce, all but gave Israel a green light to crush Hamas. Only after the beginning of the ground offensive did Cairo express uneasiness.
Nevertheless, beyond its immediate political-military context, the current war serves a deeper need for Israelis: recovering from the trauma of our debacle in Lebanon in 2006. We grew to believe that our military is invincible, and whenever it fails to fulfill our expectations, we feel defenseless and doomed. The only way out of it is to go for another round and hope for better results. It is not a new idea, nor does it necessarily work: In 1982, leading the invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin boasted that it "cured the trauma of the Yom Kippur War" nine years before. As it happened, Begin's operation soured, creating a new and lasting national trauma. But Israeli governments keep trying.
Gaza is Olmert's second chance. The similarities are striking. As in 2006, Israel is fighting an Islamic group that grew from a small terrorist organization to a quasi-state, expelling Israeli forces from its territory in the process. In both cases, the enemy hit Israel's population with rockets, and the Israel Defense Forces proved incapable of stopping it.
But here the analogy ends. In 2006, Israel went to war unprepared, didn't know when to stop, and failed to defeat several hundred fighters of Hezbollah. Overall, it was an embarrassing show of military incompetence. This time, the military planned and practiced in advance. Its political masters have learned their lesson, and went by the checklist of the post-Lebanon commission of inquiry. This resulted in more modest goals, and in media shyness. And most important, the enemy is weaker this time, as evidenced by its smaller firepower. Unlike Hezbollah, which enjoyed the hilly terrain of Lebanon and open lines of supply via Syria, Hamas is encircled in the small enclave of Gaza, where Israel controls the gates. Egypt has kept the Rafah crossing, which connects it with Gaza, closed in order to prevent a spillover of Gaza's troubles onto Egyptian territory.
Next page: Israelis saw the IDF as they want to remember it, smart, daring and vengeful
The Obama show lands in Israel
The real two-state solution
Spinning the disaster in Gaza
