Iran
focus blunts Israel's response on
Gaza By Victor Kotsev
As missiles continue to rain on southern
Israel from Gaza more than 48 hours after an
Egyptian-mediated truce went into effect, the
political debate in the country is heating up. The
peace movement and the Israeli left are losing
ground, and it seems that the main thing holding
the hawks back is the belief that the Iranian
threat is even more urgent than the Gaza terror.
By understating the Israeli military
response to the rockets, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu is both creating a sense of a
silence before a storm - similar to the silence
that existed in the days right before the raid
that launched Operation Cast Lead on 27 December
2008 - and playing brinksmanship with his own
supporters. The latter, among other things,
demonstrates his seriousness against Iran
internationally, and ups the ante in that
conflict.
Meanwhile, the Western campaign
against Iran has reached new
heights, even though
Israeli attempts to claim all the credit seem a
bit amusing [1]. Still, the closely timed
announcements that SWIFT, the main financial
messaging service for international money
transfers, will stop working with Iranian banks
and that the United States and Britain are
expected to tap into their strategic oil reserves
within the next couple of months are clearly
fraying the nerves of the Iranian leaders. One
sign of the anger of the ayatollahs is the
continued rocket fire from Gaza.
An
article in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz mentioned
above explains that the decision taken by SWIFT
"is an unprecedented move, and it means that
Iran's government will have to physically relay
cash or gold bars to pay for its transactions
overseas." Reuters, on the other hand, claims that
the alleged US-British initiative is "a bid to
prevent fuel prices choking economic growth in a
US election year". [2]
Still, the
timeframe of the expected release of reserves is
highly suspect. It jibes, among other things, with
information published by the Russian newspaper
Kommersant, according to which the US gave Iran a
"last chance" to resolve the nuclear dispute by
April, and asked the Russians to relay the
message. (The United States subsequently denied
this.)
Adding to the suspicions, this
week's meeting between US President Barack Obama
and British Prime Minister David Cameron was
preceded by a Washington Post op-ed co-authored by
the two in which they all but explicitly compared
the situation now to that during World War II. [3]
Preparations for war have been taking place near
the Persian Gulf for some months; the US just
announced on Thursday that it would double the
number of its minesweepers in the area.
This would explain, in part, why Netanyahu
is holding back so uncharacteristically from
ordering the army to respond more forcefully to
the missiles coming from Gaza. Since the ceasefire
took effect at 1 am local time on Tuesday morning,
a couple of dozen rockets and mortar shells have
reportedly landed in Israeli territory, and a few
were shot down by the Iron Dome anti-missile
system before they could hit cities such as
Beersheba and Ashdod.
Before the truce
came into effect, at least 56 missiles were shot
down (Iron Dome allows its operators to target
selectively only rockets that are likely to cause
casualties). In total, more than 200 missiles were
fired at Israel in four days or so.
Despite the miraculous lack of fatalities
from this barrage - at least one serious injury
notwithstanding - this is a major red line for
most Israelis. In a country where a million
citizens live within range and practically
everybody is everybody else's friend of a friend
of a friend, the experience of waiting for the
random death from above is intimately familiar to
all. The Iron Dome helps the statistics, but the
feeling of collective danger remains. Suffice it
to add that most Israeli extended families have
members living in the areas targeted by rockets.
Even the Israeli left was shaken by the
onslaught. The Ha'aretz columnist Carlo Strenger
captures this in an article framed as an "Open
Letter to Hamas":
The other casualty of this further
violence is the hope for peace. Israelis, for
very understandable reasons no longer care who
is responsible for the violence. All they know
is that, in the end, there will always be a
Palestinian group that will initiate violence.
As a result they say "why should we take the
risk of retreating to the 1967 borders? Why
should we rely on Palestinians to keep the
peace? All we'll get is rockets on Tel Aviv,
Raanana and Kfar Saba. So the world won't like
us for the occupation; we can live with that,
but not with rockets on our population centers".
[4]
Another prominent Israeli
left-wing journalist, Bradley Burston, lashed out
against "the hard left media" for the selective
omissions and manipulations of its reporting:
When a leftist places quotation
marks around the word rockets, when a leftist
terms attacks on civilian populations a matter
of human nature, when a leftist dismisses
rockets as crude, homemade, and unguided, or
blames Israelis for their use, when a leftist
notes that rockets have killed "only 28"
Israelis, or sniffs or jeers at the fact that
one out of seven Israelis, one million in all,
are currently in rocket range - it may be time
to ask, what it is, exactly, that's supposed to
make a person a leftist? [5]
On the
right, there are only muted grumblings against the
government's policy of restraint (bombing empty
buildings in Gaza, at night, in response to the
continued rocket attacks). This is mostly due to
the developments on the Iranian front - even the
hawks are sensitive to international pressure and
know that an extended operation in Gaza would make
a raid against Iran more difficult. It would,
moreover, strain the credibility of the Israeli
threats, which is seen as an important component
of the diplomatic campaign against the Islamic
Republic.
Netanyahu, back from his own
visit to the US earlier this month, seems to be
stirring some of the Iran hysteria himself.
According to Ha'aretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn,
"Since his return from Washington, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has mainly been preoccupied
with one thing: Preparing public opinion for war
against Iran." [6]
Still, it is also
possible that the current Israeli restraint in
Gaza is an attempt to capture the so-called moral
high ground before a wider campaign. The Israeli
prime minister is keeping all the cards close to
his chest, as is his habit, and is letting various
high-ranking army officials tell the media how
prepared they are for a ground invasion of Gaza.
Meanwhile, a debate seems to be raging at
the highest echelons of government: ever since it
became apparent last year that the Muslim
Brotherhood would win the elections in Egypt, some
have argued that the window of opportunity for
major military action in the strip would close
soon.
The vote by the Egyptian parliament
on Monday to expel the Israeli ambassador brought
home this point. While the military is still in
control in Egypt, such votes carry only a symbolic
significance, but if a transition of power takes
place as expected this year, Israel will face
stiff opposition to any use of force against the
Palestinians.
If the fire from the strip
continues but a war with Iran does not appear to
be imminent, the pressure on Netanyahu will grow
to order a wider operation in Gaza.
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