Beware of Small States

Israel had been planning it for nearly two years, in accordance with a ‘chosen war’ strategy that bore a striking resemblance to the one which, in 1982, General Sharon used to invade Lebanon in his bid to destroy the Islamists’ predecessor, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. The plan became operational during the flimsy, six-month truce which Egypt had negotiated between the two sides. From the moment this so-called tahdi’a, or ‘lull’, had gone into effect Israel ignored the most important item on its side of the bargain. Far from lifting the suffocating blockade it had been imposing on Gaza, itself akin to an act of war, it systematically maintained and - towards the end - intensified it, rendering yet more extreme what, months before, a UN official had already called the ‘subhuman’ conditions in which Gaza’s inhabitants were living.² Then, on 4 November, it launched an unprovoked raid into the Strip, killing six members of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades. This very deliberate violation of the truce was the critical ruse that goaded Hamas into stepping up its retaliatory missile fire, and thereby furnishing an internationally serviceable pretext for the long-planned assault.

In the event, then, it was not Lebanon to which the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ was to be first applied. It was to be Gaza, and the 1,500,000 inhabitants of this most densely populated piece of territory on earth. And it soon emerged that the Dahiya Doctrine dovetailed very nicely with another, hardly less lethal sub-doctrine — and lesson from Lebanon too - which had been developed for Operation Cast Lead. ‘We are very violent, we are not shying away from any method of preventing casualties among our troops‘, said one of several senior commanders who, perhaps inadvertently, revealed it. They called it ‘urban warfare without gloves ... You do not come close to a suspicious house without firing on it first, with a missile, with a tank, then tear off one of its walls with an armored D9 [a huge tractor], and only then look to see who is inside, if anyone is still alive.‘³ Or, as Uri Avnery, the well-known peace activist, put it, it was ‘the total destruction of everything in [the soldiers‘] path’, a ‘readiness to kill eighty Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier’.⁴ And particularly prominent in this campaign were the military rabbis of a once overwhelmingly secular army in which religious, kippah-wearing Jews now accounted for a good 40 per cent of newly graduated officers and 30 per cent of the men. More like medieval Christian warrior-priests than traditional Jewish sages, steeped in the extremist ethos of the religious settlers from whose ranks they were substantially drawn, they were bent on improving the army’s ‘combat values’ in the wake of its failure at the hands of Hizbullah. With the educational brochures of the Army Rabbinate as their guide, they taught that present-day Palestinians were no different from the Philistines slain by the Israelites of yore, that it was mere immorality to be anything but cruel to the ‘cruel’ enemy, and mortal sin to relinquish to ‘the gentiles’ a ‘single millimetre, finger or fingernail of the Land of Israel’.⁵

Thus, the Israelis’ war aim, in its broadest terms, was to create in the south a whole ‘new order’, or ‘security situation’, like they had tried to do two and a half years before in the north. At its minimum, this meant neutralizing the missiles, either by imposing a new and truly effective ceasefire or by destroying them physically. And, just as in 2006 it had meant preventing Hizbullah’s rearmament by blocking the flow of weapons overland from Syria, so now it meant achieving the same in the south, first by smashing the hundreds of tunnels beneath the Egyptian — Gazan border that were the last stage of the missiles’ journey into the hands of the Hamas fighters, and secondly by securing the establishment of a cordon sanitaire around the Strip’s borders. The maximum goal — and this looked more and more like the real one as the campaign unfolded - meant ‘toppling’ Hamas and restoring the rule of President Mahmoud Abbas’s ‘legitimate’, internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which, in response to an American-backed coup against its democratically elected regime, Hamas had driven out of Gaza the year before.⁶ This was to be achieved, first, by attacking the ‘infrastructure of terror’, destroying it or at least so debilitating it that Hamas could no longer keep physical control of its militant fiefdom; and, secondly, by attacking the ‘infrastructure of the [would-be] Palestine state‘, not merely its governmental and administrative institutions, but pretty much anything, industry, agriculture, commerce, that would contribute to the basic livelihood of its citizens.⁷ Any such war on so densely packed a territory was bound to imperil virtually anyone who lived there. But that did not matter, because ‘to harm civilians until we achieve political goals’ was what the Dahiya Doctrine was basically about in any case.⁸ Commanders were assigned a very generous range of ‘pre-planned targets’, 600 of them reportedly, compared with the mere 150 in Lebanon 2006.⁹ ‘There are many aspects of Hamas’, a senior officer explained, ‘and we’re trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel.’¹⁰ These targets, advised another, should include ‘decision-makers and the power elite, economic interests and the centres of civilian power that support the [enemy] organization’; the ‘damage inflicted’ on them, and the ‘punishment meted out‘, should be such as to ‘demand long and expensive reconstruction processes’.¹¹ The ultimate goal was to inflict such pain on the Gazans that they would turn against the regime which had brought this mayhem down on their heads, driving it from power.¹²

All these particular objectives underlay a larger, if less tangible one, directed at all the states and non-state forces in the region. This was to restore Israel’s badly battered ‘deterrent power’, the threat and periodic use of which it deemed to be its only sure guarantee of survival. ‘People didn’t mess with Israel’, said a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, ‘because they were afraid of the consequences. Now the region is filled with provocative rhetoric about Israel the paper tiger. This operation is an attempt to re-establish the perception that if you provoke or attack you are going to pay a disproportionate price.’¹³ Apart from the creation of the UNIFIL buffer zone between themselves and Hizbullah, the Israelis had achieved virtually none of their loudly proclaimed aims in the north. So now they were going to war against a much weaker, if fanatically determined, Hamas in the knowledge that they simply had to achieve them in the south - or the Arabs would come to believe, as a Beirut columnist said, that this really did mark ‘the beginning of the end for Israel’.¹⁴

After ‘shock and awe’ the Israel Defence Forces set about the task, ‘sending Gaza decades into the past‘,¹⁵ which General Yoav Galant, head of the Southern Command, assigned them, and giving Gaza a taste of the ‘shoah’ — Hebrew for holocaust - which the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, had earlier threatened it with.¹⁶ In a campaign seemingly replete with war crimes and atrocities, the F-16s and Apache helicopters, the tanks, artillery and gunboats offshore bombarded schools and universities, mosques and clinics, premises of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the parliament and most government buildings, roads, bridges, generating stations, sewage lines, 21,000 residential apartment buildings, 1,500 factories and shops, and 80 per cent of the Strip’s agricultural infrastructure;¹⁷ ground forces shot at ambulance men and aid workers; and in one episode which prompted even that most taciturn of organizations, the International Red Cross, to issue a public condemnation, soldiers herded a hundred terrified civilians into a building, apparently for their own safety, later killed thirty of them by shelling the building, and then, over four days, prevented rescue workers from trying to reach the survivors, who included four emaciated children, too weak to stand, crouched at their dead mother’s side.¹⁸ In the 22-day war, some 1,330 Gazans died, at least half of them civilians, including 410 children, compared with 13 Israelis, 3 of them civilians hit by Hamas rockets, and 10 soldiers. In a letter to the London Guardian, twelve persons ‘of Jewish origin’ said that what the Israelis had done reminded them of the Warsaw Ghetto in Nazioccupied Poland, and the ‘death by hunger’ promised them by the city’s governor-general, Hans Frank.¹⁹

But he also had powerful reasons not to step in. He who had publicly admitted never even to have dreamt that the soldiers’ abduction would have provoked an Israeli response of the magnitude that it did, was not going to provoke yet another one, knowing, as this diligent student of Israeli affairs surely did, that it would very likely have been carried out in accordance with the prescriptions of General Giora Eiland. In ‘the Third Lebanon War’, this strategist had written, Israel should ‘eliminate’ the country’s military, ‘destroy’ its national infrastructure, including homes, and inflict ‘intense suffering among the population’. Since ‘the only good thing that [had] happened in the last war [had been] the relative damage caused to Lebanon’s population’, next time ‘Lebanon [might] be razed to the ground’.²¹ Nasrallah’s own Shiite constituency would have had little or no stomach for that. And the outrage of the rest of the population would have very likely been so great as to ignite the kind of full-scale civil war that had only narrowly been averted, the previous May, by the ‘14 March’ coalition’s capitulation to Hizbullah’s political diktat-by-arms.

So, instead of shooting war, Nasrallah went over to the offensive in that other war, the political one, which had so often accompanied it in the past. This was the struggle to change in Hizbullah’s favour the whole political and strategic environment in which it had to operate. It could never defeat Israel on its own; that was axiomatic; only when others, states or non-state actors like itself, joined the ‘Islamic resistance’ which it had pioneered would the ultimate jihadist goal, the ‘liberation of Jerusalem‘, come into the realm of the possible.²² Meanwhile, there were forces in the region which, along with their external backers, would always stand in the ‘resistance‘s’ path; indeed, it seemed that the more headway the ‘resistance’ made and the more support and admiration it garnered among the Arab and Muslim masses, the more they would press their counter-offensive against it. For Islamists or secular nationalists, and others too, these forces were chiefly embodied, at state level, in the ‘moderate’, pro-American regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and their protégé, Hamas’s rival, the West Bank regime of President Mahmoud Abbas. Given the unique centrality and emotional import of the ‘Palestine problem’, this was another ‘little war’ in which, being fought on Palestine soil itself, the regional and international stakes were even higher than they had been in Lebanon 2006. It would, said Nasrallah, ‘have repercussions not only for Gaza alone, or Palestine, but for the whole Umma’.

Just as in 2006, the ‘moderates’ had blamed Hizbullah for starting the war, so now did they blame Hamas. It was a standpoint all the more suggestive of their genuine alarm because Hamas was as true-blue, orthodox Sunni as themselves, whereas with Hizbullah sectarian fear of rising, militant Shiism had largely motivated them. The ‘Arab system’ immediately fell into new depths of impotence and disarray; for the first time since the foundation, sixty-eight years before, of its key institution, the Arab League, the two sides of the great divide held what, in effect, were two rival Arab summit conferences, with Hamas - and non-Arab Iran — attending the pre-eminently Islamo-nationalists’ one, and Mahmoud Abbas representing the Palestinian Authority at that of the ‘moderates’. The general Arab perception was that, this time, the latter were aligning themselves more overtly than ever before with the historic Arab foe in wishing defeat on fellow Arabs doing valiant, but unequal, battle against it, and that what, in 2006, might have been no more than suspect ‘silence’ or ‘concealed collaboration’ had become open ‘co-operation’ and ‘partnership’ now.²³ On them Nasrallah turned his wrath. Hizbullah, he said, had not made enemies of those who had betrayed it in 2006; but now it would of those ‘who collaborate against Gaza and its people’. And he singled out President Mubarak’s Egypt as the chief and most dishonourable of them.

It was no secret that, as the purveyor of a militant, Iranian-backed fundamentalism arising on his very doorstep, Mubarak intensely disliked Hamas and its ideological and organizational links with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the movement which constituted perhaps the greatest challenge to the legitimacy, or even survival, of his ossified regime. Nor was it much of a secret either that he wanted it cut down to size, and expected Israel to do the job for him; what more shockingly flaunted intimation of that than his very public handshake with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who, on the eve of the onslaught, had gone to Cairo to apprise him of what was afoot?²⁴ It was the Rafah crossing point, the Gazans’ only access to the Arab world, on which Nasrallah concentrated his incendiary accusations. Here, in Gaza’s hour of supreme adversity, was the ruler of the greatest Arab state, with the greatest power to help or hinder Hamas in its struggle, keeping its borders as hermetically sealed, bar a few ambulances and a trickle of aid, as the Israelis did theirs. For many in the Arab world, it was Egypt’s ultimate shame, the betrayal of everything that it had once stood for under Nasser and pan-Arabism. It was also, in the eyes of Hizbullah and its allies, the key to the outcome of the conflict, the means by which ‘the epic victory of Lebanon [would] be repeated’ on Palestinian soil itself. ‘Egyptian officials’, Nasrallah thundered, ‘if you don’t open this crossing, then you are partners to the crime, to the murders and the siege.’ And he urged the Egyptian people ‘to take to the streets’ in their ‘millions’ and ‘open the crossing’ with their ‘bare chests’. He appealed to the Egyptian army to move as well. And assert as he might that ‘I am not calling for a coup’, a coup, or rather a revolution, was surely what he really would have liked. It had, after all, been Palestine, and the Egyptian army’s humiliation in the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which did so much to trigger the mother of all Arab revolutions, the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952.

Countless Egyptians, Muslim Brothers to the fore, clearly shared Nasrallah’s outrage at the weakness and ‘treachery’ of the mildewed travesty of itself into which, nearly sixty years on, that bright new order had degenerated. It was not unreasonable for them to hope that, coming on top of all their other, more mundane woes, Palestine could once again rouse a long-suffering people to long-overdue revolt - and thereby wreak the kind of fundamental change in the whole geopolitical landscape of the Middle East of which organizations like Hizbullah and Hamas must dream.

The Israelis did not even secure their minimum aims. They didn’t destroy all of Hamas’s rockets. Between their unilateral ceasefire and its own, Hamas launched a final, symbolic barrage, not the largest of its whole campaign as Hizbullah had so infuriatingly contrived to do, but what, in the circumstances, was a quite respectable tally of them. According to Israeli defence officials, it still had a good thousand out of an original 3,000 missiles left.²⁵ And in the absence of an agreed truce of the kind that had preceded the war, the Israelis had won no reasonable guarantee that Hamas would stop firing them in the future. In fact, the first lone, taunting projectile came in within a week. But had Hamas been deprived of the means to replenish its depleted arsenal? Therein lay the really important question. Achieving that in tiny, encircled Gaza should in principle have been a good deal easier than in Lebanon where, in 2006, failure had been immediate and complete. The US and several European states consulted one another about the dispatch of warships to police the Mediterranean approaches to Egypt and Gaza as well as the shipping lanes from Iran around the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea. The US signed a security agreement with Israel for the joint monitoring, with state-of-the-art equipment, of Egypt’s border with Gaza. Egypt itself, while rejecting US or any other foreign forces on its soil, doubled its own contingent there. Yet hardly had the fighting stopped than the Palestinian smugglers were back in business, re-activating those tunnels that the Israelis had failed to damage or destroy, and repairing those that they had. ‘We will continue to get weapons into Gaza — and the West Bank,’ said a Hamas leader, ‘those who think sea, air or satellite monitoring can detect weapons flow through tunnels are deluded.’ And a tunnel owner agreed. ‘The money is too good,’ he said. Too good - that is to say - not just for him, but for all the owners’ Egyptian confederates, be they the Bedouin tribes of northern Sinai, time-honoured smugglers beyond government control, or the lowly-paid officers and soldiers they had no difficulty bribing to look the other way.²⁶

As for its maximum aims, if anything the Israelis only achieved the reverse of those. Perhaps, as they said, they had given Hamas quite a beating. It could hardly have been otherwise, so immense was the gulf between the sides: a few thousand guerillas, lightly armed and with very little of the physical room for manoeuvre on which guerilla warfare classically relies, pitted against the overwhelming might and firepower of the Israeli army and the savage, indiscriminate manner in which it was prepared to use them. Nor had the Israelis been taken unawares as they had been against Hizbullah; this time it was they who had the advantage of complete surprise, they who had all the time in the world to plan their assault down to its smallest detail and, with their long and deep penetration of Gazan society, all the means to compile intelligence of a sophistication they could never have managed against the famously secretive and impenetrable Hizbullah. All in all, as some Israelis put it, it was a ‘war de luxe’ from the outset, ‘child’s play’ compared with previous ones. Pilots bombed unimpeded ‘as if on practice runs’ and ground forces bore down on an enemy who, whenever serious clashes occurred, simply retreated deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of concrete that was Gaza City. Though urban terrain generally favours the defender, the low-risk ‘methodical crawl‘, blitzing all before them, at which the invaders advanced helped ensure a remarkable disparity in casualties - a mere ten Israeli soldiers killed, as against an unknown number of Hamas fighters, but very possibly up in the hundreds that the Israelis claimed.²⁷ As the army tightened the siege, and drew closer to the central strongholds and symbols of Hamas power, Prime Minister Olmert rejoiced at what he called the ‘unprecedented blow’ the organization had been dealt; military intelligence said that its leadership was in dire straits and its forces on the verge of collapse; one last push would finish it off.

For whatever reason — the great increase in casualties that an all-out, final offensive would almost certainly have caused, the advent of the Obama Administration, international outrage, the wild, anarchic Gazan ‘Somalia’ to which a complete Hamas defeat might have given birth-the Israelis never made that push. But it is questionable whether they would have succeeded even if they had. In any case, whatever beating Hamas might have taken, it had clearly survived - with much of its apparatus still intact. And for non-state militias like it and Hizbullah, survival - not to be defeated, not to lose possession and control of the territory on which they had fought - was ‘victory’, and if, in addition, they managed to keep the arms flowing too, the promise of more ‘victories’ to come.

Hamas might - for the time being - have been militarily weakened, but it had been politically strengthened. That was what happened with Hizbullah after its ‘victory’, and what Hamas, bathed in its aura of heroism and martyrdom, would now seek to emulate in its turn. State within the Lebanese state though Hizbullah had remained, it had also, by both constitutional and not-so-constitutional means, procured itself a powerful place as part of that state itself. Hamas, and particularly its ‘external’, Damascus-based leaders, seemed to harbour greater ambitions than that, nothing less, in fact, than the official leadership of the Palestinian people, or at least the dominant place within it. They felt they had surely earned it, that, in addition to the legitimacy of the ballot box, through their performance on the battlefield they had now acquired a new ‘revolutionary’ legitimacy as well.²⁸

The Palestine Liberation Organization, whose creation in 1964 had marked the beginning of the Palestinian national struggle, was still, in principle, the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’ and its most important institution, the Palestine National Council, still their supreme legislature. But with the Oslo accord of 1993, the PLO had renounced violence, Yasser Arafat had moved into the occupied territories, and the Palestinian Authority which he established there, though de jure subordinate to it, became the real, de facto centre of Palestinian power; and although the PLO continued to perform routine administrative functions, it had otherwise fallen into institutional, moral and political irrelevance and decay.

It was by revitalizing this inert body, or perhaps even creating a new one, that Hamas now seemed bent on staking its leadership claim. Its PLO would formally reinstate ‘armed struggle’ as its chief mode of action, in place of the diplomacy and negotiation on which the PA had long since exclusively relied. For diplomacy had not merely failed to yield what it was supposed to, a ‘Palestine state’, co-existent with Israel, on the little that remained of original Palestine. What with Israel’s continued Judaization of Jerusalem, its ever-expanding settlements, its monstrous ‘security wall’ and its whole, apartheid-like structure of separation and control which even South Africans deemed worse than their own had ever been²⁹ — what with all of that, the seemingly futile and interminable ‘peace process’ was well on the way to placing such a state forever beyond reach. In all probability, Hamas’s PLO could only come into being at the price of intensified internecine strife, not merely among Palestinians, but across the region at large, with the Islamo-nationalist camp, led by an increasingly interventionist Iran, working for the emasculation or overthrow of the Fatah-based Palestinian regime, and the ‘moderates’ fighting to preserve it. But it didn’t look to be an impossible goal.

To be sure, it was hard, after Gaza, to gauge Hamas’s true standing among ordinary Palestinians. Like Hizbullah among the Lebanese, admiration for its military prowess was offset, for many, by anger and resentment at the calamity which, by falling into Israel’s trap, it had brought down upon them; indeed, like Nasrallah himself, Khalid al-Mesha’ al, its exile leader, reportedly admitted to underestimating the scale and fury of what Israel had been planning to unleash.³⁰ And, like Hizbullah again, the polls suggested that the honour it had won away from home - among Palestinians and Arabs outside its own, Gazan domain - was greater than its gains inside it.³¹ One thing, however, was clear: Hamas had now supplanted Fatah and the PA in public esteem. Their standing, already low before Gaza, fell to a new nadir after it. Not merely, in their extreme distaste for their upstart rival, had they hoped for the defeat of fellow Palestinians at enemy hands, they had been even more indiscreet about it than the ‘moderate’ Arab camp to which they belonged. One official went so far as to say that Hamas leaders should be tried as ‘war criminals’ for causing the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians, another that the Israelis had made a ‘big mistake’ in not finishing them altogether.³² Worse still, the conviction grew that what an Israeli newspaper had reported months before³³ was actually true. This was that, in September, eight PA security chiefs, all Fatah veterans, had met with their Israeli counterparts, and told them that they were preparing to fight an ‘all-out’ battle ‘to the end’ with the ‘common enemy’ Hamas; this would be ‘the last chance for [their] generation to retain their grip on power before Hamas took over and devoured everything’. They had asked Israel to help with planning, training and the supply of weapons. The operation had been scheduled to take place before President Abbas’s term of office expired on 9 January 2009 — a remarkable coincidence, falling as that day did two weeks into Israel’s own, long-planned war on Hamas. Coming on top of the PA’s other well-known vices - notably its corruption — such outright collaboration, not to say treason, sent a wave of anger through a West Bank population mostly in passionate sympathy with their Gazan compatriots. It badly rattled the PA, whose new, US-subsidized, Jordanian-trained police forces, armed with clubs and tear gas, had to break up a series of demonstrations, arresting Hamas supporters, confiscating Hamas flags and ripping up pro-Hamas placards.³⁴

‘After the Fatah putschists failed to return to Gaza aboard Zionist tanks, they tried to do so on concrete mixers and tons of cast iron.’³⁵ Thus did an Egyptian Islamist website mock the PA’s post-war strategy to regain at least a token authority over its lost, rebellious province. For, as in Lebanon in 2006, after destruction came reconstruction — and an Arab and international community, European-led, ready, once more, to step in with funds, materials and technical expertise to meet this urgent need. The trouble was, however, that though willing to accept such help, Hamas, like Hizbullah, was resolved to take charge of it. It - not the PA - was the electorally legitimate authority in Gaza; it was clean, the PA was not. But, however popular, however representative of its own people Hamas might have been, for Europe, let alone the US, it was still a ‘terrorist’ organization that did not ‘recognize’ Israel’s ‘right to exist’; so Europe could not even ‘talk’ to it until it did. The most it would consider doing was to deal with a ‘national unity’ government — Hamas and Fatah combined — under the pro forma aegis of the PA. As for Israel, it wouldn’t allow in a single bag of cement — or glass or steel — until it was satisfied that Hamas could not use them to rebuild its defences or manufacture new missiles.

In March 2009, ‘national unity’ talks began under Egyptian auspices. But, after so much vicious contention, and bloodshed too, could such rivals be reconciled ever again? And supposing Hamas, wearying of all these boycotts and blockades, decided to seize the main chance, and don the mantle of Palestinian leadership for itself? It was, after all, in the wake of its first and most famous military exploit, the ‘battle of Karameh‘,³⁶ that, forty-one years before - and on a great wave of popular support - Fatah had wrested control of the PLO from the pliant, old-school politicians, creatures of the Arab regimes, who then ran it. Supposing what Fatah had thus done to others in its prime, Hamas now did to Fatah in its degeneracy? How would Israel and the world react to that?

True, in strictly military terms, Israel had learned some lessons from 2006, introduced new tactics in the light of them, and, generally speaking, fought ‘with far greater efficiency’ than it had against Hizbullah.³⁷ But, more important - and another such lesson - was the far greater brutality with which it also fought. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, with Gaza 2009, the hitting of civilian targets finally graduated as the very essence, and principal measure, of this sacrosanct ‘deterrence’ — this invincibility against all comers - now supposedly restored.

The fact was, as Hamas leaders pointed out, that ever since, in 1973, Israel ceased fighting wars against regular Arab armies, and found itself confronted with non-state militias instead - Fatah and company first, Hizbullah and Hamas thereafter — it never truly won any of them, and its ‘deterrent power’ had been declining accordingly. For sure Israel’s priority might originally have been to find and hit enemy combatants rather than the civilians among whom they moved, as well as the missiles that were their weapon of choice. But it grew less and less successful in this even as its enemy grew in proficiency. As a result, along with new military tactics, it came up with new ethical codes to match. Their basic thrust was that the whole body of international law which governs the conduct of conventional warfare was no longer applicable to these new forms of unconventional, ‘asymmetrical’ or Islamist warfare; as far as Israel was concerned, to continue to abide by the old moralities was effectively to deny one side, the legitimate state, the right and ability to defeat the other, the ‘terrorists’ who would destroy it.³⁸ In response to international criticism, Defence Minister Ehud Barak, like most of ‘official’ Israel, took indignant refuge in those time-honoured, ritual protestations about an Israeli army still ‘unsurpassed in its moral traditions’. The truth was, however, that never before had that army travelled so very far from the ‘purity of arms’ which, since pre-state days, it had always claimed to observe. Perhaps at least as telling, in this respect, as the army’s actual deeds were the words that came with them - in the dissertations and debates of the planners and the strategists before the war, and the indiscretions of commanders during it. And hardly less so was the wholesale resurfacing of a venerable strain of politico-military thinking known in Israel as ‘going crazy’.

The threatening of wild, irrational violence in response to political or military adversity had been a recurrent impulse ever since the formation of the state. It was first authoritatively documented, in the 1950s, by the doveish Prime Minister Moshe Sharett (earlier encountered in these pages as the strong opponent of Ben-Gurion’s dreams of violent geopolitical engineering in Lebanon)³⁹ who wrote of his defence minister, Pinhas Lavon, that he ‘constantly preached for acts of madness’ if ever Israel were crossed.⁴⁰ Never - half a century on — had generals, politicians and commentators been so forceful and concordant, whether approving or condemning, in the perception of their military deliberately ‘going crazy‘, or, as Uri Avnery put it, ‘behaving like madmen, going on the rampage, killing or destroying mercilessly’ in their belief that ‘the [success] of the war planners [depends on] the very barbarity of their plan’ and that ‘the atrocities will have ... a deterrent effect that holds for a very long time’.⁴¹

Actually, it held for about a week. And that first post-war missile was followed by a steady, if sporadic, succession of Qassams, Grads and mortars in the weeks to come. Not much deterrence there. But perhaps this reversion to the practice that which had driven the Israelis to war in the first place was essentially short-term and tactical, a judicious admixture of violence to the post-war diplomatic quest for the new and more durable truce which both sides seemed to want, or could live with, if the conditions were right. Hizbullah, after all, had immediately ceased all fire the moment Security Council Resolution 1701 had gone into effect, and has continued to do so ever since; and, for all their dismal performance in that war, the Israelis claimed that this did indeed amount to ‘deterrence’ restored, and working. Very likely Hamas will eventually emulate its Lebanese mentor. But what about ‘deterrence’ in its largest, long-term, strategic sense? What about Israel’s security, indeed its very survival, in that hostile environment in which it seems forever condemned to have its being? For ultimately, that was what, in the Israeli mind, ‘deterrence’ — or permanent military supremacy, the Iron Wall, 200 nuclear warheads - was all about.

In this sense, the Gaza war was yet another self-inflicted injury. For it made that environment more fundamentally, more viscerally hostile than ever. Movements like Hizbullah and Hamas might indeed have embodied much that a great many Arabs and Muslims, observant as well as non-observant, feared, disliked and opposed - the illiberal, retrogressive, totalitarian tendencies of the militant, ‘political’ Islam they espoused, their proxy role in the hegemonic ambitions of non-Arab Iran, their disruptive impact on the whole existing social and political order, and threat of more of it, and worse, to come. Indeed, these were things that made no small contribution to the great Arab schism, over Palestine, which the Gaza war only served to deepen. But there was one thing they embodied to which more and more Arabs did subscribe - and did so, moreover, whichever of the rival camps their particular regime happened to belong to, or whatever their religious or political persuasions might be: Muslim or Christian, Islamist or secular, right or left, conservative or liberal. And that was ‘rejectionism’, the conviction that peace-through-negotiation with such an enemy was impossible, and - as it habitually said of them - that force was the only language it might understand. All the post-war opinion polls showed it. And nothing implanted and intensified this negativity like the ‘barbarism’ — the ‘killing of us like insects’⁴² — which restoring Israel’s ‘deterrent power’ so manifestly appeared to require.

Naturally, not just Hamas, but the whole Islamo-nationalist camp, profited from this at the expense of the ‘moderate’, pro-American one. Indeed, so central, so heated, did the ‘Palestine question’ become that, for one analyst, a whole new pan-Arab ‘narrative’ — simple, dominant, compelling - was in the making, the narrative of the ‘Martyrs’, who were led by the Islamists, and the ‘Traitors’, who included most if not all the Arab regimes, but especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon‘s, and the Palestinian Authority.⁴³ In this scheme of things, the pressures on would-be ‘Traitors’ to look more like ‘Martyrs’ was very apparent in the cri de coeur from one of the Arab world’s most prominent and respected champions of ‘moderation’, of inter-faith ‘dialogue’, and of a just and reasonable peace with Israel. Denouncing the Bush Administration’s Middle Eastern legacy as a ‘sickening’ one, and its attitude to Gaza as a ‘contribution to the slaughter of innocents’, Prince Turki bin Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to Washington and London, said that his country, as ‘the leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds’, had so far resisted calls to lead a global jihad against Israel, but that such restraint was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain:

Today every Saudi is a Gazan, and we remember well the words of our late King Faisal: ‘I hope you will forgive my outpouring of emotions, but when I think that our holy Mosque in Jerusalem is being invaded and desecrated, I ask God that if I am unable to undertake holy jihad, then I should not live a moment more.’⁴⁴

And, in years to come, there can be nothing like this ‘barbarism’ to undermine Israel’s ‘deterrent power’ from another, less familiar, but ultimately, perhaps, far more important quarter. Unlike Lebanon, Gaza had no ‘Qana’, no single, outstanding massacre, and, in consequence, no clear-cut turning point at which, instead of urging its protégé on, the US, in its embarrassment, began quite suddenly pressuring it to end the war before it could achieve its goals. But, actually, at a deeper level, there was very much worse than Qana; there was day upon day of that nonchalant, remorseless, high-tech ‘slaughter of innocents’, especially children, and its raw, real-time projection on to all the television screens of the world. It did Israel’s reputation - already lower than that of any other country but its arch-enemy Iran⁴⁵ — greater damage than anything, even the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, with which it had ever been associated before.

Nor was it just the war itself. It was a whole gamut of other things about the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ on which the war threw a sudden, glaring and unflattering light; things that, by any other reckoning than its own, surely disqualified it for that membership of the ‘civilized world’ by which it — and the ‘friends of Israel’ in the West - had always set enormous store. There was the disdain for such bedrock democratic notions as a ‘free press’ and ‘freedom of information’. It barely even tried to hide it. For it was not merely on the usual, convenient, catch-all ‘security’ grounds that it denied the foreign media entry into the Gaza war zone; it did so, its officials asserted, because they were ‘biased, unethical and unprofessional’ in their reporting.⁴⁶ There was the Knesset vote, supported by all the major Jewish parties from right to left, to ban Israel’s only three Arab parties from participating in forthcoming general elections because of the ‘incitement’ and ‘support for terrorism’ supposedly implicit in their strong opposition to the war.⁴⁷ Then there were the elections themselves and ‘the true face of Israel’ — as so many a dissident Israeli, not just Arabs, put it — ‘which they exposed’. That is to say, the ‘face’ of a whole society lunging towards the extreme right, turning ‘racism and nationalism into accepted values’, and embracing ‘ideas that no one would have dared let cross their lips ten or twenty years ago, lest they be thought utter fascists’;⁴⁸ of the triumph of the Yisrael Beitenu party, whose fifteen seats made it the third largest in the country, and whose leader, Avigdor Lieberman, a former Moldavian nightclub bouncer, once told the Knesset, among other such lurid pronouncements, that any of its Arab members who talked to Hamas should be executed for the same reason that Nazi leaders, ‘along with their collaborators’, had been executed after the Second World War.⁴⁹

There was still, of course, a civic culture, associated with the left and the so-called ‘peace camp’, that stood against this general trend. This had no place in the traditional, establishment left, certainly not in mainstream Labour, which, rhetoric aside, had long been barely distinguishable from the mainstream nationalist right when it came to issues of war and peace, and dealing with Arabs and Palestinians,⁵⁰ and it is questionable whether it had one even in smaller, further-left groups, such as Meretz, which had also made it into the Knesset. But outside parliament, Peace Now, the original activist movement of the kind, had long made it its business to challenge the militarism and intransigence of Israeli governments, to combat the settler movement and bring the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to an end in a final, ‘land-for-peace’ settlement. A more militant organization, Uri Avnery’s Gush Shalom, or Peace Bloc, split off from Peace Now in 1993, and can be said to have set the moral and political agenda for the whole ‘peace camp’ ever since. A host of other organizations devoted themselves to combating specific aspects of the occupation - human rights abuses or the demolition of houses. A small band of journalists - often cited in this book - performed a similar role in the press. But, in the end, more remarkable than the existence of the ‘peace camp’, however dedicated and determined it might be, has been its marginality, and the meagreness of its influence on the general public - an influence which, if anything, has in recent times only seemed to decline.

And for all its activism on certain issues, Peace Now has often shown a tendency to fall in with mainstream opinion at critical junctures. Thus, like Meretz, it initially supported the Gaza war - as it had the Lebanese one - only backtracking when it began to look as if the army risked getting stuck in the ‘Gazan mud’. Among the leading personalities associated with the organization, novelist Amos Oz — likewise replaying his stand on Lebanon - headed a long list of authors and intellectuals who, just before the war, had called on Israel to end its ‘restraint’ over Gaza.⁵¹ Yet compromises of this kind appeared to win Peace Now little respect from society at large, which generally considered it to be ‘unrealistic’, too trusting of the Palestinians’ intentions and too little concerned about Israel’s own vital security interests. Only Gush Shalom held firm, denouncing Gaza from the outset, and, with a few others, staging demonstrations against it. But that only served to confirm the mainstream in its view of it as an unpatriotic ‘lunatic fringe‘, or - with its loneliness in the field - to dramatize what a leading left-wing journalist called the ‘frightening indifference, awful state of apathy and inaction’ in Israel today, ‘the emptiness of the town square ... devoid of demonstrations and protests either for or against - completely empty’. ‘Where’, he asked,‘are the days when a massacre that we did not directly commit [Sabra and Shatila] was enough to bring hundreds of thousands on to the streets?’⁵²

Despairing of their ability ever to change things from within, many in the ‘peace camp’ have long been arguing that only through some powerful external agency can Israel be saved from itself.⁵³ The Gaza war, and the world’s reaction to it, intensified this feeling. But that, in turn, merely exacerbated the hostility towards them of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, as well as that of the electorate that put it there. All these ‘peace-makers’ wanted, said one of their bitterest critics, was to ‘bring Israel to its knees and force a Pax Americana on it’, or, as another put it, ‘to fan the flames of anti-Semitism in the world and create a new blood libel against the Israeli Defence Forces and the State of Israel’. Was it not time, this latter asked, for the government to take legal action against them?⁵⁴ In fact the government was already planning to do just that, with a new campaign, reportedly the brainchild of Foreign Minister Lieberman, to rein in all non-government organizations, local or foreign, who were trying ‘to de-legitimize Israel’.⁵⁵

The further Israel went down this path - wrote Israeli ‘new historian’ Avi Shlaim in the London Guardian — the more it would look like the ‘gangster state’ headed by ‘an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders’ which, at its birth, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, had long since said that it already was; or, in contemporary parlance, like the ‘rogue states’ which successive US administrations have habitually descried in the likes of the ayatollahs’ Iran, Saddam’s Iraq or Colonel Gadafi’s Libya.⁵⁶ With such adverse perceptions of Israel gaining ground in respectable, mainstream Western discourse, could any American president, and least of all, perhaps, a Barack Obama, lend it much indulgence in ‘deterrent’ wars to come? Apparently even the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyah, had serious doubts about that. It was not, he admitted, just the bravery of its fighters to which Hamas owed its ‘victory’, it was to the ‘free peoples of the world, to the mammoth demonstrations in Europe and the Americas which forced Israel to retreat without realizing any of its objectives - besides the killing of children, women and the elderly’.⁵⁷

SHOCK AND AWE, ISRAELI-STYLE

FOR HIZBULLAH — ONLY A POLITICAL, NOT A SHOOTING, WAR

WHO WON THIS TIME?

‘GOING CRAZY’