No matter who is to blame for the recent escalation of violence in Gaza - no
matter which side is morally righteous - it should be obvious that Hamas is now
even less likely to abandon violent resistance any time soon.
Even if Israel's Operation Cast Lead will make Hamas think twice about
attacking Israel in the future (doubtful), Hamas will still do whatever it
takes to prepare for the day when it is ready. And the 18-month blockade of
Gaza - put in place by Egypt and Israel after Hamas' localized coup - has only
made Hamas more protective of its arsenal.
As a result, Jerusalem believes that the only way to protect
Israelis is to secure the Philadelphi Corridor, the 14-kilometer border between
Gaza and Egypt, beneath which lie an estimated 300 makeshift tunnels used by
Hamas and entrepreneurial Palestinians to smuggle (among other things)
foodstuffs, cigarettes, livestock, gasoline and (in the case of Hamas) enormous
amounts of explosives, firearms, ammunition and well-trained teachers and
students of militant resistance.
Without these tunnels, Israel insists, Hamas would not be able to stockpile and
fire rockets and mortars against Israel with impunity. And with talk of a
ceasefire in the air, Jerusalem has made the permanent monitoring and
destruction of these tunnels a key sticking point to ending its assault.
But what would that effort require, and would it actually make Israelis safer?
The ideas are neither new nor particularly promising, as the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) explored and discarded most of them throughout the years it
occupied Gaza. One suggestion was to build a moat filled with seawater that
would drown any smuggler who breached it, but the proposal was abandoned due to
the threat of contaminating the aquifer beneath Gaza.
An underground wall was also considered, but unless it is made of titanium,
Hamas would need only a chisel and a little patience. Another idea was to
destroy all the buildings within a kilometer of the border (houses frequently
conceal entrances and exits to the tunnels), but this could smell an awful lot
like ethnic cleansing, and without a heavy occupation, the houses could always
be rebuilt.
Last year, the US Department of Defense allocated $23 million to train and
equip Egyptian border guards to find and destroy the tunnels, but the effort
has been widely described as a failure, despite the recent deployment of "a
form of ground-penetrating radar", rumored to be on loan from the US Army Corps
of Engineers.
Even with the help of technology, however, the provisions of the 1979 Camp
David Treaty between Israel and Egypt places a tight cap on the number of
Egyptian soldiers allowed near that border with Israel, and even if that were
somehow bypassed, it is unclear how much Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could
help.
After all, Cairo has been struggling with its own militant Islamist problem for
decades; as the ideological birthplace of al-Qaeda and home to the spiritual
forbears of Hamas, Egypt has spent years turning a blind eye to Palestinian
weapons smuggling to ensure that Hamas continues to see Israel as their primary
enemy, rather than Cairo.
On the other hand, Mubarak has had to balance this interest with a primal fear
that Gaza's jihadi hotbed might spill over into Egypt. For this reason it has
been particularly surprising these past few weeks to see Mubarak and his
Foreign Ministry blame Hamas for the violence and subsequently refuse to allow
healthy Gazans fleeing Israel's air strikes to seek refuge in Egypt - a
decision for which he has been excoriated in the Arab world. Amid the fallout,
it is still unclear if Mubarak will resume his balancing act or if he will risk
dismembering the vast networks of smugglers and corrupt officials in the Sinai
Peninsula.
Given Cairo's previous failings to curb smuggling, Israel has been insistent
that whatever force patrols the border should be "international" and have a
clear mandate to find and destroy these tunnels, and to capture any operatives
caught in the act of smuggling. But Egypt is weary of violations to its
sovereignty, and deploying the force on the Gaza side of the border is a
deal-breaker for Hamas.
Besides, as impractical as a moat or an underground wall may be, an
international contingent of soldier-archeologists might be even worse, as any
force tasked with destroying - not just "monitoring" - these tunnels would
likely find themselves in Hamas' crosshairs. And what competent military would
volunteer their services for such a task?
Well, it seems the IDF would. With as much at stake as Israel claims to have,
there is good reason to think Jerusalem already has something in mind for this
border, though the Israelis have been coy on the matter so far. More
specifically, Israel's primary ceasefire negotiator, Amos Gilad, rejected the
prospect of an international force because it would be "devoid of intelligence,
devoid of an ability to penetrate those doing all of this smuggling, devoid of
an operational capability". In nearly the same breath over the weekend, Gilad
also rejected the prospect of an Egyptian force because "the Egyptians are
great at making efforts, but not at achieving results".
Granted, this could be a negotiating tactic to secure as good an outcome as
possible for Jerusalem, especially given that both of these statements are
accurate. But precisely because they are accurate, Israel is unlikely to
entrust border control to international or Egyptian forces. To that end, one
idea making the rounds in hawkish Israeli circles is to make all Gazan
territory within three kilometers of the corridor a "closed military zone" and
to ask Cairo to do the same on its side of the border - forcing any future
tunnel to be at least six times longer than today's average length of one
kilometer.
This would require not only destroying all the buildings in a given area, but
also a massive population transfer in one of the most densely populated places
on Earth. The southern city of Rafah alone, with a population exceeding
150,000, would fall in a zone that extended only one kilometer into the Strip.
Though extreme, from the IDF's perspective, without widening the corridor in
this way, reoccupying only the Gaza-Egypt border - and not the entire Strip -
would make the IDF contingent along the border more vulnerable to attack from
Hamas and other militants. Already obsessed with Israel's lack of "strategic
depth", Jerusalem would need to ensure that its new formation, protruding like
a twig out of southern Israel, could be reinforced quickly and thus able to
withstand a sustained rocket/mortar assault from both directions.
But whoever or whatever patrols the border, indulging Israel's tunnel vision
will not keep weapons out of Gaza, no matter the success of any anti-tunneling
campaign. Because an end to the blockade will be integral to any ceasefire,
Hamas will merely return to the days when it smuggled weapons from Egypt and
even Israel itself through legitimate border crossings into Gaza. Both then and
now, nearly all of Hamas' rocket propellants and explosives are homemade from
vast quantities of sugar and potassium nitrate, which can be disguised as just
about anything.
Likewise, with the right instruction, even the military-grade rockets (donated
by Iran) that Hamas smuggles into Gaza can be broken down into smaller pieces,
packaged as "humanitarian equipment", and then reassembled on the other side.
In the end, if Hamas wants to acquire weapons, it will acquire them. And if
Israel wants to stop the attacks on its country, it has to concede that in the
long term, only a re-occupation of all of Gaza or a negotiated final settlement
could ever make it stop. Everything else is politics.
David H Young is a Washington-based analyst and blogs at
www.justwars.org.
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