Crisis shows failure of Israeli policy towards Palestinians

LONDON: Israel is facing an unprecedented crisis. The state that was founded to protect Jews from persecution failed miserably in protecting its citizens living near the Gaza Strip. It was completely surprised by a militarily inferior adversary.

The small Israel Defence Forces (IDF) contingent deployed along Israel’s border with Gaza crumbled and could not prevent the butchering of almost a thousand people, most of them civilians, and the taking as hostages of scores of other citizens by Palestinian terrorists from Hamas.

Nobody knows how the situation will develop. The fighting has only just started. The IDF is reorganising its forces along the border and mopping up Hamas forces that crossed from Gaza into Israeli territory.

At the same time, it is bombing targets in Gaza linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant group. The aim is to destroy their military capabilities and to make them pay a high cost for the recent atrocities without recourse to ground operations. Israel’s civilian population, meanwhile, fears further rocket attacks from the Palestinian organisations after a barrage at the weekend and more strikes on Monday.

This is the usual pattern of Israeli reaction to attacks from the Gaza Strip, but this time it will not be enough. Public frustration and anger are at unprecedented levels. Many accuse the government and the armed forces of negligence and betrayal of their duties, and are demanding drastic military action that will “once and for all” end the threat from the Palestinians in Gaza.

The government is unlikely to be able to absorb this pressure without launching major operations in the Gaza Strip that include an extensive ground offensive. These might even lead to reoccupation of the territory, with all the costs in human life that implies. That, in turn, could drag Israel into a wider conflict with the so-called “axis of resistance” that includes not only the Gaza-based groups but also Hizbullah, a Lebanon-based militia, Iran and Syria.

The political implications are broad, too. Israel’s government is in a fragile situation. There are demands for resignations of senior officials. Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and his government might be “saved” by elements in the opposition that wish to form a unity government with him for the purpose of dealing with this crisis. Regardless of the level of opposition support in the short term, however, the crisis may deal a fatal blow to Netanyahu’s political career as public calls for accountability grow.

Israel was led to this grim situation by the failure of its policies towards the Palestinians. When Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, two years after the IDF had pulled its forces out, the Israeli government faced a choice between two viable political and military strategies. The first involved adapting to a reality in which Hamas was one of the two major political factions in the Palestinian territories — the other being Fatah, based in the West Bank. Any Israeli government that genuinely wished to end the conflict with the Palestinians would then have striven to include Hamas in the bilateral political process alongside its Fatah rivals. That would have required Israel to enter into direct talks with Hamas while supporting reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.

The other option was to adopt a strategy of consistently weakening Hamas and strengthening the Palestinian Authority run by Fatah. That would have had to include a credible political process aimed at a permanent status agreement, possibly achieved through a series of smaller agreements and unilateral steps.

These two options had their weaknesses and potential costs, but since the end of the government led by Ehud Olmert in 2009, successive Israeli administrations have chosen neither of them. Olmert had tried the second strategy for some time but was forced to resign before achieving any of his goals. Netanyahu subsequently adopted a third strategy that was bound to fail.

In 2009 Netanyahu gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University in which he declared his acceptance of a Palestinian state with several conditions. Despite this, he abandoned the political process with the Palestinians, eventually making it clear that he opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state. He replaced the political process with a strategy of “divide-and-conquer”, which was aimed at weakening the Palestinian government in Ramallah on the West Bank and strengthening Hamas’s hold on power in the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu believed this to be the best way to ensure that no viable political process would be possible.

The prime minister took this policy to a new level in building his current government: a coalition with extreme religious, ultra-nationalistic parties, which stated quite openly that Israel would never enable the establishment of a Palestinian state, give equal rights to the Palestinians under a one-state solution or stop the plundering of their lands through settlement-building. This policy led to most of the Israeli army being deployed to protect Jewish settlers in the West Bank, at the expense of protecting the border around the Gaza Strip.

The current crisis demonstrates the utter failure of this strategy. It is absurd to hope that Israel can indefinitely contain with its military might and security services millions of Palestinians who claim the right to self-determination and a free, normal life. Eventually, the oppressed will rise against their oppressor. Suffering under oppression and a strong desire for freedom breed resourcefulness. The Hamas fighters who planned last weekend’s attack were indeed very resourceful in exploiting Israel’s unpreparedness. Eventually, Israel will have to make a choice between the two-state solution and a single state with equal rights for all of its inhabitants — and strive to make whichever it chooses work. Hopefully, the Israeli public, having endured the collapse of the current approach, will support it. Shlomo Brom is a retired brigadier-general who served in various intelligence posts in the IDF and as a deputy to Israel’s national security adviser.