Iranian hand seen in Gaza
escalation By Victor Kotsev
The Gaza Strip is a world full of violent
paradoxes. The latest is the situation in which
the Palestinian militant movement Hamas, which
nominally controls the strip, found itself over
the weekend sitting in the corner with its eyes
down and praying for the lives of Israelis; all
this when its former Iranian sugar daddy turned
into a whip-cracking Dom whose surrogate, Islamic
Jihad, battled it out with Israel.
Granted, there is creative emphasis added
in the above interpretation, but the gist is on
target. In fact, Islamic Jihad hasn't been very
successful so far in the confrontation; over the
last couple of days, as mediation efforts
progressed, it scrambled to avoid leaving the
impression of utter defeat (which is tantamount to
utter defeat these days). It fired so many Grad
missiles at
Israel that had it not
been for the Iron Dome missile defense, which shot
down about 85% of the ones it targeted, Israeli
tanks would probably be in the outskirts of Gaza
City now.
As it is, on Monday evening the
Egyptian go-betweens announced a ceasefire to take
effect at 1am Tuesday. There is no certainty how
long it will last, but most analysts expect a calm
to set in by Wednesday or so. There are reportedly
two main scenarios that could derail this and
trigger off a wider Israeli operation: if Islamic
Jihad or one of the other groups, in an act of
desperation, fires a missile that can hit Tel
Aviv, or if the Iron Domes fails to stop a barrage
that kills Israeli civilians.
Barring
these kinds of developments, US President Barack
Obama can congratulate himself on an investment
that proved its money's worth (his administration
gave Israel over US$200 million to procure the
short-range missile defense system), and the
Israeli military can congratulate itself on one of
the most successful "surgical" operations it has
ever conducted, with one of the lowest ratios of
civilians to enemy combatants killed.
Based on what is known, 21 of the 25
Palestinians killed in the violence were
combatants, some ranking members of Islamic Jihad
and the Popular Resistance Committees, the two
Palestinian militant organizations most heavily
involved. Four civilians also died, including a
65-year old man, a 30-year old woman, and two
teenage boys aged 12 and 15.
Over 80
Palestinians were reportedly wounded in the
strikes, including dozens of civilians; the
Israeli army claims that the militants' use of
human shields is to blame for non-combatant
casualties. [1]
The low casualty rate
among Israelis - no deaths so far - is even more
striking, given that over 200 rockets were fired
at Israeli population centers in four days, a
quarter of them Grad Katyshas with extended ranges
of about 40 kilometers. At least 56 rockets were
intercepted by the Iron Dome system, whose radar
can map where a rocket will fall and whose
operators can selectively shoot down only those
headed for densely populated areas. (The accuracy
rate of the rockets is far from perfect.)
Three or four Israeli civilians were
wounded (accounts vary), including one who is in a
serious condition. A number of others suffered
from shock and minor related injuries.
In
a sense, the Iron Dome is proving to be a game
changer. Here is how the Jerusalem Post's defense
analyst Yaakov Katz put it:
"Diplomatic maneuverability" are the
two words that could be heard over and over
again on Sunday within the IDF [Israel Defence
Forces] in reference to the performance of the
Iron Dome rocket defense system.
It is
easy to understand why. Imagine if the 43
rockets that the Iron Dome intercepted on their
way to Beersheba, Ashdod and Ashkelon had
succeeded in hitting their targets. … Had
this happened, the government would be facing
unbelievable pressure from the public to order
the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] to launch a
ground offensive into Gaza to stop the rocket
fire, as it was on the eve of Operation Cast
Lead in late 2008. The Iron Dome is helping to
prevent that from happening.
That did
not happen - at least not so far in a bout of
violence that looks like it is nearing its end -
much to the relief of almost everybody involved,
reportedly ranging from Israel to Hamas to the
Egyptians and Americans. Hamas did not take any
significant part in this violence, and even as it
condemned "Israeli aggression" it did its best to
calm things down. [3]
It is true that
Israel started the violence with a targeted
assassination, but it is hard to ignore several
important circumstances: firstly, the top militant
who was assassinated on Friday, Zuhir al-Qaisi,
was so deeply involved in terrorism that the
Egyptian intelligence had recently warned him to
keep it down or else Israel would kill him. [4]
Whether or not he was the mastermind of
the specific terror attack that Israel accuses him
of planning - a cross-border raid from Egypt in
August of last year which killed eight Israelis -
it seems quite plausible that he was intimately
involved in the destabilization of Sinai in the
last year. (See Sinai
clashes send loud message, Asia Times Online,
Aug 24, 2011)
Given that the
Egyptian-controlled peninsula became the last
stretch of a long arms-smuggling route that
started in Libya and ended in Gaza, numerous
Israeli officials have warned over the past month
that more violence was to be expected in and near
the strip.
Secondly, al-Qaisi was not a
member of Islamic Jihad, the organization that
launched the majority of the rockets at Israel and
that suffered most of the losses (the majority of
those rocket crews on combat missions). He was the
leader of the Popular Resistance Committees,
another militant organization.
There is
every indication that Hamas was the one being
punished, as much as Israel was being provoked
with the missile salvos. In the last couple of
weeks, though really ever since the Syrian
uprising against the regime of President Bashar
al-Assad took off, Hamas's relationship with its
former patrons Iran and Syria have gone from bad
to worse.
In late February, the
organization moved its headquarters out of the
Syrian capital Damascus, motivated by the fact
that as an ideological offshoot of the Muslim
Brotherhood movement, its primary allegiance
rested with the Syrian opposition. Then over the
last week, Hamas became embroiled in a controversy
over whether it would strike back at Israel in the
event of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear
program. [5]
The punishment, it seems,
came swiftly: at a period when Hamas is in flux,
changing bases and supply lines and still
responsible for the wellbeing of Gaza's 1.5
million inhabitants, Iran and Syria apparently
unleashed the other proxies they had cultivated in
the strip. In so doing, they capitalized on
Hamas's lack of interest and readiness to fight,
and sought to either draw the movement into a war
that was bound to damage it badly or to weaken it
domestically by portraying it as a collaborator
with the Israelis.
It must be noted that
in parallel with the turmoil in Egypt and Libya in
the last year, Islamic Jihad has grown to be quite
a formidable organization. The Arab-Israeli
journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reported on this in
an article published by the Jerusalem Post last
October:
With the help of Iran and Syria,
Islamic Jihad has become a major player in the
Palestinian arena. The organization's leaders
now visit Cairo and other Arab capitals, where
they are received as VIPs. …
The
organization is beginning to emerge as a major
challenge to the Hamas regime, especially given
the fact that dozens of disgruntled Hamas
members are reported to have defected to Islamic
Jihad. Former Fatah security officers, some of
whom were trained by the US and EU, are also
believed to have joined Islamic Jihad in the
past few years. [6]
Israel itself
seems quite weary of an escalation, to the point
where the measured response to the "unprecedented"
rocket salvos has raised a lot of eyebrows among
the right-wing allies of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. So far, however, the lack of
Israeli casualties and the surprising success rate
of the surgical strikes have deprived the hawks of
important ammunition.
As of early Tuesday
morning, reports by the Israeli press suggest that
the ceasefire was breached by new rocket strikes,
but no casualties are being reported. Given
Islamic Jihad's humiliation, a few isolated
rockets, perhaps aimed loosely or at military
facilities, are to be expected in the hours after
the ceasefire comes into effect; a symbolic
Israeli strike, perhaps of an empty militant base,
can be expected in return.
What we need to
look out for is anything that is more serious than
that. We can only hope that the luck which has
prevented greater civilian casualties on either
side does not run out, and that Israel and Hamas
do not end up drawn into a bloody war that neither
seems to want. In an ironic twist, the two finally
seem to find themselves sharing a similar agenda.
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