American Jews Have Abandoned Gaza — And The Truth

PETER BEINART, THE FORWARD

FAILURE IN GAZA

Benjamin Netanyahu; drawing by John Springs

N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS      

Assaf Sharon   Assaf Sharon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is the Academic Director of Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy.


The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long ago become a shouting match over moral superiority. With seventy Israelis and more than two thousand Palestinians, most of them civilians, dead, the latest round of violence in Gaza, too, is being analyzed and discussed mostly on ethical grounds. But as fighting goes on, moral condemnation will likely do little to prevent the next round. Understanding how we got to this point—and, more importantly, how we can move beyond it—calls for an examination of the political events that led up to the operation and the political context in which it took place.

Before the current operation began, Hamas was at one of the lowest points in its history. Its alliance with Syria and Iran, its two main sources of support, had grown weak. Hamas’s ideological and political affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood turned from an asset into a burden, with the downfall of the Brotherhood in Egypt and the rise of its fierce opponent, General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. Egypt’s closure of the Rafah crossing and the tunnels on its border with Gaza undermined Hamas’s economic infrastructure. In these circumstances, Hamas agreed last April to reconciliation with its political rival Fatah, based on Fatah’s terms. For example, the agreement called for a government of technocrats largely under the control of the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas.
But Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the reconciliation as a threat rather than an opportunity. While the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may not serve Israel’s interest (namely, effective government in the Palestinian Territories), it benefits Netanyahu’s policy of rejecting solutions that would lead to a separate Palestinian state. The reconciliation agreement robbed him of the claim that in the absence of effective rule over Gaza, there is no point in striking a deal with Abbas.

Mahmoud Abbas

 Ironically, it was Netanyahu’s own choices that drove Abbas to reconciliation with Hamas. The impending failure of the Mideast peace negotiations led by US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013 and early 2014 left Abbas with few political options. Talks faltered as Netanyahu allowed increased settlement activity on the West Bank and they finally collapsed when he reneged on his commitment to release Palestinian prisoners. Realizing that talks were doomed, Abbas signed fifteen international agreements as a head of a Palestinian state and struck his reconciliation deal with Hamas, as he said he would.

Netanyahu, who never had any intention of making the necessary concessions, as his own statements would later reveal,¹ was mainly playing the blame game. He saw the reconciliation with Hamas as an opportunity to criticize the Palestinian president and, according to one of the American diplomats involved in the peace talks, his aides said that “Abbas’s strategy showed that there was no difference between him and the terrorists.” As soon as the reconciliation was announced, Netanyahu launched a public offensive against Palestinian unity and demanded that the international community oppose it. His efforts did not succeed. Israel’s friends in Europe applauded the agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Even the United States announced its intention to cooperate with the unity government, much to Netanyahu’s chagrin.

Netanyahu could have chosen a different path.² He could have used the reconciliation to reinforce Abbas’s position and further destabilize Hamas. He could, in recognition of the agreement, have encouraged Egypt to open its border with Gaza in order to demonstrate to Gazans that the Palestinian Authority offered a better life than Hamas. Instead, Israel prevented the transfer of salaries to 43,000 Hamas officials in Gaza, sending a clear message that Israel would not treat Gaza any differently under the rule of moderate technocrats from the Palestinian Authority.

The abduction of three Israeli youths in the West Bank on June 12 gave Netanyahu another opportunity to undermine the reconciliation. Or so he thought. Despite the statement by Khaled Mashal, the Hamas political bureau chief, that the Hamas political leadership did not know of the plans to carry out the abduction, Netanyahu was quick to lay the blame on Hamas, declaring that Israel had “unequivocal proof” that the organization was involved in the abduction. As yet, Israeli authorities have produced no such proof and the involvement of the Hamas leadership in the kidnapping remains unclear. While the individuals suspected of having carried out the kidnapping are associated with Hamas, some of the evidence suggests that they may have been acting on their own initiative and not under the direction of Hamas’s central leadership. Regardless of this, Netanyahu’s response, apparently driven by the ill-advised aim of undermining Palestinian reconciliation, was reckless.³

Determined to achieve by force what he failed to accomplish through diplomacy, Netanyahu not only blamed Hamas, but linked the abduction to Palestinian reconciliation, as if the two events were somehow causally related. “Sadly, this incident illustrates what we have been saying for months,” he stated, “that the alliance with Hamas has extremely grave consequences.” Israeli security forces were in possession of evidence strongly indicating the teens were dead, but withheld this information from the public until July 1, possibly in order to allow time to pursue the campaign against Hamas.

On the prime minister’s orders, IDF forces raided Hamas’s civil and welfare offices throughout the West Bank and arrested hundreds of Hamas leaders and operatives. These arrests did not help to locate the abductors or their captives. Among the arrested were fifty-eight Palestinians previously released as part of the deal to return the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been a captive of Hamas since 2006.
As part of this ill-conceived operation against Hamas, Israel also mounted air strikes on Hamas facilities in Gaza. Apparently, Hamas did not take an active part in firing rockets for more than two weeks, although it did not prevent other factions in Gaza from firing.⁴ Only on June 29 or 30 did Hamas restart the rocket bombardment of Israeli territory, which it had not engaged in since November 2012.⁵ Israel retaliated against Hamas in Gaza and a vicious cycle began.

In the first week of July, rockets and mortar shells continued to be fired from Gaza into Israel. Hamas still denied any involvement in the abduction of the three Israeli youths and declared its commitment to the understandings reached in November 2012, following an eight-day Israeli operation in Gaza, according to which Hamas agreed to stop rocket fire into Israel in exchange for Israel reopening border crossings and allowing goods to be imported to Gaza.
This time, after the initial operation against Hamas, Israel was clearly seeking a cease-fire, but refused the terms set by Hamas: releasing the rearrested Palestinians from the Shalit deal and easing the restrictions imposed on Gaza since 2007. Instead, Israel believed it could force Hamas to accept the Egyptian-brokered agreement for an immediate cease-fire on July 4. However, that assumption was based on an inaccurate evaluation of Hamas’s position, interests, and capacities, and the mutual fire continued.
On July 8, Israel officially launched “Operation Protective Edge” with air strikes on Gaza. According to Israeli media, one participant in the security cabinet meeting at which the decision was made warned that “Hamas is trying to drag Israel into broader military action. It serves them. Hamas scores ‘points’ when it is hit.” This observation makes the question of the operation’s goals all the more pertinent: What is the purpose of striking an organization that benefits from being attacked?

On July 15 the Cabinet agreed to the cease-fire proposal formulated by Egypt, which was similar to what had been agreed to in the 2012 cease-fire. Hamas rejected the proposal, on the grounds that it did not meet its terms: mainly, “lifting the siege and opening the crossings.” Two days later, thirteen Hamas militants infiltrated Israel through a tunnel near Kibbutz Sufa. In a sudden about-face, the stated goal of the operation became the destruction of tunnels from Gaza into Israel. Since Israel’s statements about its goals were both vague and shifting, it is not surprising that three weeks into the operation, Israeli media reported that “officers on the ground feel that Netanyahu and Ya’alon don’t really know what their objective is.”

Lacking clearly defined aims, Israel was repeatedly dragged into situations created by the other side. Having misread the situation, Israel failed to adequately prepare for Hamas’s response to the arrests and assaults on the organization’s institutions. Instead, the government dallied until it felt it was forced to respond with a broad aerial assault. Even then, it was clear that the government did not desire a ground invasion. That is why it agreed to a cease-fire without resolving the tunnel issue. It was only after Hamas rejected the proposal that Israel launched a ground invasion into the eastern parts of Gaza. Yet again, Netanyahu’s expectations would be frustrated. What was supposed to be a short, focused attack failed to achieve its goals: on July 20, Defense Minister Ya’alon said that it would take “two or three days” to destroy the tunnels. The job was said to be completed only two weeks later.

False assumptions, miscalculations, and obsolete conceptions robbed Israel of initiative. Lacking clear aims, Israel was dragged, by its own actions, into a confrontation it did not seek and did not control. Israel was merely stumbling along, with no strategy, chasing events instead of dictating them. What emerged as the operative aim was simply “to hit Hamas,” which for the troops translates as a license for extensive and unchecked use of force.
Such aimless display of military power resulted in much unnecessary violence, though it was also true that Hamas rockets were often fired from civilian centers. Under pressure from politicians, the military was encouraged to carry out actions whose primary purpose was to satisfy a need for vengeance—a vengeance the very same Israeli politicians tried to arouse in the Israeli public. One example is the bombing of the residences of Hamas’s high-ranking officials—acts that security experts describe as completely ineffectual. Another example is the careless and possibly criminal bombing of UN schools on three separate occasions—schools in which there was apparently no evidence found of Hamas weapons.

On August 26 an Egyptian proposal for a “cease-fire…unlimited in time” was accepted by both sides. The deal ultimately reached will probably not be very different from the one that could have been achieved from the start. What the government presents as its main accomplishment is the destruction of the offensive tunnels into Israel. These pose a genuine security threat, and eliminating them would certainly be a notable achievement. Yet it is clear that this was not the objective at the beginning of the operation, and the degree to which this goal has been achieved is doubtful.

As the operation’s objective shifted to the tunnels following the infiltration of Palestinians through one of them on July 17, it seemed as if the threat of tunnels caught everyone by surprise. Only two days earlier, Israel had been willing to accept a cease-fire deal despite having done nothing about the tunnels. In fact, the security establishment was well aware of the tunnels and the threat they pose. Prior to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, soldiers were killed in a number of attacks using tunnels in Gaza. In June 2006, Gilad Shalit was abducted by militants who entered Israel through just such a tunnel. In October 2013, a tunnel was found near Kibbut Ein Hashlosha, and in March of this year, another tunnel was discovered in Israeli territory, close to the border with Gaza. Defense officials cautioned many times in recent years that the danger of infiltration by tunnels was real, and one high-ranking officer explicitly stated that “the IDF knew of the existence of forty tunnels before the [current] operation began.”

Yet the existence of tunnels was not seen as a reason for major operations.  When ground forces entered Gaza, what they found was a Palestinian version of the tunnels used in Vietnam by the Viet Cong. Since Hamas was out-numbered and outgunned, its strategy, like that of other guerrilla forces before it, was to lure its enemy into subterranean warfare where its relative weakness was somewhat mitigated. This is why some military experts argue that the tunnels should have been addressed not by a large-scale ground invasion, which exposes troops to attack, but by surgical commando operations.

Others argue that the tunnels could have been destroyed on the Israeli end, without needing to enter Gaza at all. A few even say that it was all an excuse—under pressure from the right, Netanyahu and Ya’alon seized on the tunnels as a justification for a limited ground operation that would allow them to save political face without too many complications.
The battle over the tunnels was complicated, costly, and its results remain dubious. Though many tunnels have been destroyed, it now appears that some tunnels remain, and it is close to certain that new ones will soon be dug.⁶ A former commander of an elite IDF combat engineering company made this clear: “Hamas will resume tunneling as soon as we leave,” “they’ll go back to digging, no matter what.”

Israel’s failure to stop the rockets and to prevent the construction of tunnels underlines the futility of the strict closure of all exits imposed on Gaza since June 2007. The closure had a devastating effect on Gaza’s civilian population, with unemployment now at 40 percent and 80 percent of the population dependent on international aid. Now it has become clear that the security benefits of the closure are strategically negligible. Although it is possible that Hamas would have amassed still more military power had the closure not been in place, its capacities would still be nowhere near those of the IDF. And yet the arms it managed to accumulate, the rockets it fired, and the tunnels it built under the tight restrictions of the closure were sufficient to create a crisis.
Thus, while it is important to prevent the arming of Hamas, the closure is of limited strategic value. Empowering the Palestinian Authority to gradually take control over Gaza and involving international forces in that project is clearly a better strategy. Rebuilding Gaza’s economy could not only ease the humanitarian crisis there, but also benefit Israeli security—as defense officials have stated. Both have become more difficult following the violence of the last few weeks.

Operation Protective Edge has been a strategic failure. It gave Hamas a way out of isolation, providing the organization with an opportunity to show that it could inflict harm on Israeli cities, kill IDF soldiers, and briefly shut down Ben Gurion Airport. Reinstating Abbas in Gaza, as was possible and desirable last April, may now have become more difficult as a consequence of the operation.

Israel’s conduct throughout the crisis has been based directly on Netanyahu’s philosophy of “conflict management,” whose underlying premise is that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be solved, but can be effectively “managed” for a very long period of time. This feeble, not to mention defeatist, assumption is not only wrong but also dangerous, trapping Israel in an illusion that is shattered time and again. Yet “control” and “stability” only exist between each inevitable round of violence. In fact, recurring rounds of violence are inherent to this approach.
“Conflict management” means continued Israeli control over the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, with the inevitable reality of organizations and factions struggling to overthrow that control. Under the illusion that the conflict is being managed, opportunities for change provided by calm periods are squandered. Thus, Israel under Netanyahu did not use the five years of relative calm following Operation Cast Lead—the Gaza war in December 2008 and January 2009—to take any useful action to improve its position with respect to Gaza. The government failed to take advantage of Hamas’s weakness in light of political developments in the region and willingness to make a deal with Abbas. In these circumstances, especially given the desperate conditions in Gaza, the inevitable consequence is periodic violence.

Two alternative approaches exist. One, promoted by the Israeli extreme right, assumes that the conflict can be concluded by defeating the other side. Palestinian national aspirations can be controlled by force on one hand and benefits on the other. Proponents of this approach, spearheaded by ministers Bennett and Lieberman, have been calling for the occupation of Gaza.
Undoubtedly, the IDF, if it undertakes a large-scale mobilization, has the military capacity to conquer Gaza and bring down Hamas rule there. However, this strategy will fail even if it seems to succeed temporarily. Conquering Hamas will not change the reality of Gaza and displays of military might will not crush legitimate Palestinian aspirations. Given the desperate conditions in Gaza, another Palestinian power would undoubtedly rise to take Hamas’s place—one that may very well be more extreme and dangerous than its predecessor.
Moreover, effective control over the entire Gaza Strip, as Israel maintained until 1994, requires a heavy IDF presence deep within Gaza, regularly exposing Israeli soldiers to harm. Israeli control over Gaza will likely be similar to the conditions that prevailed in southern Lebanon before the IDF withdrawal: daily attacks and a steady stream of casualties. This is not a strategy for alleviating violence, but rather for exacerbating it. Ironically, right-wing demands for war ultimately mean making it easier for Hamas to harm Israeli soldiers. History has proven the futility of this strategy, whether in Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, or Iraq. That is why so few Israelis want the IDF to return to Lebanon or to Gaza. When the military presented the costs of a strategy of conquest, even Netanyahu’s hawkish government rejected it completely.

The idea of “managing” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is illusory, and concluding it by force is a dangerous fantasy. The only reasonable strategy is resolution of the conflict.

So long as Hamas is willing to use terror against innocent Israeli civilians and so long as it refuses to recognize the State of Israel, it will not be a “partner” for peace. But it could be partner to interest-based agreements requiring it to modify its behavior, as many academic and security experts claim. In fact, despite Netanyahu’s being the most vocal opponent of dialogue with Gazan terror organizations, it was he who reached two agreements with Hamas: the 2011 Shalit deal and the 2012 agreement that ended Operation Pillar of Defense. The only question is whether the latest agreement between the two sides, reached on August 26, will be limited, fragile, and short-lived, or a stable arrangement that will improve Israel’s strategic standing for a considerable period of time.

A long-term resolution with respect to Gaza requires changing its political predicament. The only sensible way of doing this is to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, a state whose existence would be negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Abbas’s leadership. As part of a comprehensive political agreement, Hamas is very likely to agree to a long-term truce, as its representatives have repeatedly said. In 1997, its founder and spiritual leader Ahmad Yassin suggested a thirty-year hudna (truce) with Israel. In 2006, one of its leaders, Mahmoud al-Zahar, proposed a “long-term hudna.” Earlier this year, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas functionary in the West Bank, reiterated the organization’s willingness for a hudna and said the organization was willing to accept a peace agreement with Israel if a majority of Palestinians supported it.

All these proposals were contingent on ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. They received no response from Israel. Although a Palestinian state contradicts Netanyahu’s ideological commitments and conflicts with his own political interests, a state is clearly in Israel’s interest. In fact, conditioning the establishment of a Palestinian state on attaining comprehensive peace may have been the greatest mistake by advocates of peace.

The historic conflict with the Palestinians will not be settled by a single agreement. Reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians—overcoming decades of bloodshed and hatred—will require a long process of acceptance and forgiveness spanning years and probably decades. The armed conflict, however, can certainly be ended. Israel has already ended armed conflicts with several neighboring countries: with some, like Egypt and Jordan, it achieved comprehensive peace agreements; with others, it agreed to other kinds of accords.
An agreement can be reached with the Palestinians, too: the terms are known and the price is fixed. Whether it is reached or not is a matter of political will on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Unfortunately, Israel’s current leadership will do anything to avoid this choice, to the detriment of both peoples.

The war in Gaza is, fundamentally, not about tunnels and not against rockets. It is a war over the status quo. Netanyahu’s “conflict management” is a euphemism for maintaining a status quo of settlement and occupation, allowing no progress. The Israeli opposition must distance itself from this hopeless conception and other countries need to reject it. Both must be done forcefully and before violence erupts once more, and force becomes the only option—yet again.
—August 28, 2014

-=---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. See “Netanyahu: Gaza Conflict Proves Israel Can’t Relinquish Control of West Bank,” The Times of Israel, July 11, 2014. His press adviser told Yediot Ahronot that Netanyahu intentionally “led the talks nowhere.” ↩
2. Lately, even some of Netanyahu’s closest associates have begun to realize that condemning the Palestinian unity government was a mistake. For example, on July 24, Minister of Communications Gilad Erdan said: “We thought the unity government was a very bad thing. Maybe today we should see it as the lesser of two evils—it is preferable that Abbas oversee the Rafah crossing under Egyptian protection.” ↩
3. BBC journalist Jon Donnison quoted an Israeli police spokesperson as saying that the abduction was the act of a lone cell, operating independently of Hamas’s central directions. He added that “Israeli police spokes[person] Mickey Rosenfeld also said if kidnapping had been ordered by Hamas leadership, they’d have known about it in advance.” A similar report on Buzzfeed quoted an anonymous Israeli intelligence official as confirming that Hamas did not carry out the abduction, adding that “he felt the kidnapping had been used by politicians trying to promote their own agenda.” Rosenfeld later denied the statements attributed to him, but BBC ’s Donnison held firm to his version. The former head of Israel’s internal security service (Shabak or Shin Bet), Yuval Diskin, added his own estimation that Hamas was not behind the abduction: see Julia Amalia Heyer, “Ex-Israeli Security Chief Diskin: ‘All the Conditions Are There for an Explosion,’” Der Spiegel International, July 24, 2014.
   
   Israeli journalist and Hamas expert Shlomi Eldar had earlier surmised that the abduction was the work of the Hebron-based Qawasmeh family, which is affiliated with Hamas but operates independently: see “Accused Kidnappers Are Rogue Hamas Branch,” Al-Monitor, June 29, 2014. Recently even Israel Hayom (the daily newspaper closely associated with Netanyahu) reported that Hamas did not know about the abduction: see Yoav Limor, “Interim Report,” August 1, 2014.
   
   On August 20 a video was released allegedly showing a Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, attributing the kidnapping to the organization’s military wing. Whether it was ordered by Hamas leadership or not remains unclear. ↩
4. According to some sources, until June 24, Hamas arrested terrorists from other factions responsible for rocket fire on Israel: see Avi Issacharoff, “Hamas Arrests Terror Cell Responsible for Rocket Fire on Israel,” The Times of Israel, June 25, 2014. ↩
5. On June 29, the IAF attacked a rocket-launching cell associated, according to some sources, with Hamas: see Jeffrey Heller, “Netanyahu Accuses Hamas of Involvement in Gaza Rocket Fire,” Reuters, June 30, 2014. According to other sources, Hamas began shooting only on June 30, after one of its men was killed the day before: see Avi Issacharoff, “Hamas Fires Rockets for First Time Since 2012, Israel Officials Say,” The Times of Israel, June 30, 2014. ↩
6. According to expert estimates, tunnels can be dug at six to twelve meters a day, an average tunnel taking three months to complete. A former commander of an elite IDF combat engineering company estimated that a five-hundred-meter-long tunnel would take a month and a half to dig, and a longer tunnel would take several months at most. ↩

Capitalizing on U.S. Bombing, Kurds Retake Iraqi Towns, Maliki Refusing to Resign

Men who volunteered to fight with Kurdish forces took up position in Mosul, Iraq, on Sunday. Credit Mohammed Jalil/European Pressphoto Agency       

With American strikes beginning to show clear effects on the battlefield, Kurdish forces counterattacked Sunni militants in northern Iraq on Sunday, regaining control of two strategic towns with aid from the air.

The developments came as political tensions mounted in Baghdad. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki went on state television early Monday and redoubled his demands for a new term.

The American airstrikes, carried out by drones and fighter jets, were intended to support the Kurdish forces fighting to defend Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, according to a statement by the United States Central Command. They destroyed three military vehicles being used by the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and damaged others, the statement said, adding that the warplanes also destroyed a mortar position.

 

 

 

President Obama and other American officials have said that more ambitious American support would be predicated on the Iraqi political leadership breaking a long deadlock and appointing a new prime minister, one who would head a more inclusive government than the Shiite-dominated administration of Mr. Maliki, and who could reach a political settlement with Iraq’s disaffected Sunni population.

 

 

But the political crisis deepened at midnight Sunday as a deadline expired for President Fouad Massoum to choose a nominee for prime minister. Mr. Maliki angrily accused Mr. Massoum of violating the Constitution by not choosing him. “I will complain to the federal court,” Mr. Maliki said.

 

One senior Iraqi official said that overnight Mr. Maliki had also positioned more tanks and extra units of special forces soldiers loyal to him in the fortified Green Zone of government buildings in Baghdad. The official said Mr. Maliki had “gone out of his mind, and lives on a different planet — he doesn’t appreciate the mess he has created.” A Kurdish news agency reported that presidential guards were “on high alert to protect the presidential palace,” and the capital swirled with rumors about what might happen next.

In Washington late Sunday, a senior administration official said that the United States had not confirmed reports of abrupt military movements in Baghdad, including rumors that tanks had surrounded the presidential palace, but that it would monitor the situation closely.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

Palestinian women grieved for Mohammed al-Anati, a boy who was killed in clashes with Israeli troops, at the Al-Fawwar refugee camp near the West Bank town of Hebron on Sunday. Credit Nasser Shiyoukhi/Associated Press        

 

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on Sunday accepted Egypt’s proposal for a new 72-hour cease-fire in the Gaza fighting, which began one minute after midnight on Monday, and agreed to resume Egyptian-mediated negotiations toward a more durable solution.

But several previous cease-fires have collapsed or expired, followed by renewed fighting, and it was not immediately clear whether the sides had moved nearer to an agreement on the contested issues.

   

OBAMA: NO COMBAT TROOPS BUT AIRSTRIKES & AID COULD CONT FOR MOS.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

President Barack Obama listed some of the U.S.’s successes in Iraq so far, in particular that airstrikes on Friday destroyed arms and equipment that ISIS could have used in Iraq and cargo airdrops have supplied food and water to the Yazidi refugees atop Sinjar Mountain. He re-emphasized that “we will not have U.S. combat troops in Iraq. … We learned a lesson from our long and costly incursion” and warned that “ultimately, Iraqis will ensure the safety of Iraq. The United States can’t do it for them.” He also cautioned against hoping for a speedy resolution: “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks, if that’s what you mean,” he told one journalist.  Obama said the airstrikes and humanitarian assistance drops could go on for months, preparing Americans for an extended military presence in the skies there as Iraq’s leaders try to build a new government.

“This is going to be a long-term project.” Two days after emphasizing the limited scope of the mission in a White House address, he pledged that the United States would stand with Iraq if it could form a unified and inclusive government to counter the Sunni militants who threaten its future. “Changing that environment so that the millions of Sunnis who live in these areas feel connected to and well served by a national government, that’s a long-term process,”



Conceding that the advance of the Islamic State (formerly Isis) forces had been swifter than anticipated – details emerged on Saturday of the jihadists opening another front as they crossed into Lebanon from Syria – the president accepted there was no quick fix.  At least four US air strikes appear to have slowed the momentum of the jihadists, Kurdish peshmerga forces said on Saturday. Officials in Irbil, including Iraq's former foreign minister Hoshyer Zebari, a Kurd who quit his national post in June, urged Obama to continue the strikes. He described the attacks as "a critical decision for Kurdistan, Iraq, and the entire region ... intended to degrade the terrorists' capabilities and achieve strategic gains. He ruled out ground troops and reiterated administration calls for Iraq to form a "legitimate" government in order to face the threat from Islamic militants.

Aides said that Mr. Obama had not committed to years of continuous airstrikes while Iraqis develop a new government, but that his comments reflected the uncertainty of a military effort that will be re-evaluated in the months ahead.When he announced the airstrikes on Thursday night, Mr. Obama emphasized the immediate goals of protecting Americans in Baghdad and in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, and helping to rescue the Iraqis trapped by ISIS fighters on the mountain. In his remarks Saturday morning, he focused more on the need to help Iraqis over the long term, giving them what he called space to develop a government that can fight back against militants.

"Under the previous administration, we had turned the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government," he said.
   "We had offered to leave additional troops," Obama said. "And the Iraqi government, based on its political considerations, in part because Iraqis were tired of a U.S. occupation, declined to provide us those assurances. And on that basis, we left."
   "So that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong. But it is frequently peddled around here by folks who oftentimes are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made," he said. It "presupposes that I would have overridden this sovereign Iraqi government that we had turned the keys back over to."

-------------------------------------------------------------

Adam Ferguson, N.Y. Times

They ran from the sound of the Sunni militants’ guns in the night last weekend. Carrying almost nothing with them, thousands of Yazidis fled miles on foot to their holy sites on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, then collapsed amid the rocks and low scrub.

Now they face a different danger.

“There is no water, nothing to eat, there is nowhere to sit, there is not even a shadow,” said one refugee, Jalal Shoraf Din.

Suleiman Ilyas Aslan, who fled with his wife and their three children, said makeshift funeral processions into the scrub wasteland on the mountainside have become ever more common. “We couldn’t count them, there were so many,” said Mr. Aslan, who said he looked away when the grieving families walked by.

The Yazidis are a tiny religious minority, following a faith that is neither Muslim nor Christian. That makes them apostates in the eyes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which is sweeping through their villages in northern Iraq.

Some of those who ran to the mountain did not make it, and no one yet has calculated how many were executed by ISIS fighters over the past week. But interviews with a half-dozen Yazidi families who had made their way down from Mount Sinjar found that almost everyone had lost someone in their extended family. Some were killed; others were abducted and faced an unknown fate. Hundreds of women and young girls were taken away as brides for jihadis and given the choice of conversion or death, according to the refugees, several of whom said they had received phone calls from their daughters or sisters, before their cellphone batteries and credit ran out.

 

Airdrops by the Iraqi government and by the Americans have reached a number of the refugees, but the scale of the mountain, with its many folds and crevasses, means that the refugees are scattered across miles of scrabble wastes.

The atmosphere now on the mountain is one of desperation and exhaustion, said those who were coming off it, dehydrated and confused. Many of those who have made it down have bloodied and blistered feet and can barely speak, not least because of all they have lost.

 

The Yazidis are caught up in a larger disaster occurring across Iraq, but one that is hitting Kurdistan, once the most stable part of the country, especially hard.

There, a mass migration is underway, precipitated by increasingly widespread fears that the Sunni militants are about to take one village after another across northern Iraq. Some 580,000 refugees have poured into the Kurdistan region, about 200,000 since Monday.

 

According to a Kurdish army spokesman who spoke with Al Jazeera, their forces have opened a road to Sinjar Mountain and rescued more than 5,000 of the Yazidis who are trapped there after fleeing from ISIS fighters. “I can confirm that we succeeded in reaching the mountains and opening a road for the refugees,” said the spokesman, Halgord Hikmet, who explained that the U.S.’s recent airstrikes on ISIS allowed peshmergas to open a route to the mountain. In a statement on Saturday, Obama said that the U.S. was proud to be working alongside allies in Iraq during the airstrikes.

The refugees are fleeing into Syria with the hope of making their way back into Iraq. Others made their way down on their own, relying on their sense of the mountain from years of worshiping on its slopes or in some cases herding sheep and goats there. In some cases, groups of women have come with their children, while their men stayed on the mountain.

 --------------------------------------------------------------

Cross-border strikes between Israel and militants from Gaza resumed after a three-day cease-fire expired.

Video Credit By Christian Roman on Publish Date August 8, 2014. Image CreditHatem Moussa/Associated Press                           

As the conflict between Israel and Gaza entered its second month on Saturday, Israel launched more than 30 airstrikes on Gaza, killing five Palestinians, while Gaza militants fired rockets at Israel. An Israeli official tells Reuters that “as long as the shooting goes on,” the country has no plans to send diplomats back to Cairo to negotiate another truce. Since the end of the latest 72-hour ceasefire on Friday, militants have fired more than 65 rockets into Israel. Israel launched airstrikes into Gaza as well on Friday, killing five, including a 10-year-old boy near a mosque in Gaza City.

Israel Must Defeat Hamas, But Also Must Do More to Limit Civilian Deaths

MICHAEL WALZER, NEW REPUBLIC

When it comes to the conflict in Gaza, the critical question, "Cui bono?"—"To whose benefit?"—suggests that this is Hamas's war. It is a reckless gamble by an organization that was in deep trouble, and the gamble (so far) is paying off, at terrible cost to the people of Gaza—though the terrible cost is crucial to the payoff.
Looked at from afar, and I suspect from close up—I have never visited Gaza—Hamas is an awful organization and deserves all its trouble. It is religiously committed to the destruction of Israel, and it has no commitment, religious or secular, to the welfare of the people it rules in Gaza. It has worked hard and surprisingly effectively to build its arsenal and to dig its attack tunnels and its underground fortresses, but it has built no bomb shelters for the ordinary Gazans from whose midst it fires its rockets and in whose homes, schools, and mosques it hides them. Israel claims that Hamas uses the people of Gaza as "human shields"; in truth, Hamas isn't so much hiding behind them as deliberately exposing them to harm, which is one way of "winning" in asymmetric warfare.

But Hamas isn't the only Palestinian organization. For some years now, Israel has had the option of working with Fatah and with the Palestine Authority that Fatah controls. Indeed, Israel has benefited greatly from the diligence of the PA's security forces on the West Bank—and would now like (as would Egypt) to see those same forces at work in Gaza. And yet it has done nothing to strengthen the PA and to move it toward its own goal: Statehood and sovereignty. Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has done pretty much everything it could to undermine the PA—by expanding West Bank settlements, seizing land and water, and failing to deal with the settler movement's zealots and thugs and their "price tag" attacks. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict would look very different today if the PA was on its way to statehood. For one thing, it would be difficult for Hamas to claim to lead the "resistance" to Israeli occupation if the occupation was approaching its end.

Like the present Israeli government (or, better, its leading members), Hamas doesn't believe in a Palestinian state alongside Israel. These two bitter enemies are actually helping one another. Every rocket that Hamas fires weakens the Israeli left and makes it more difficult for ordinary Israelis to contemplate a withdrawal from the West Bank—since rockets from there could make all of Israel uninhabitable. And every new settlement, every "price tag" attack on the West Bank, weakens Fatah and the PA and lends credence to Hamas's claim that violence is the only way.

Hamas wants Greater Palestine; the Netanyahu government, though it doesn't admit it, is moving steadily toward Greater Israel. Hamas opposes Little Israel, and Netanyahu opposes Little Palestine. One might well want to say, a plague on both their houses! But now they are at war, and choices have to be made.

We should choose Israel—because Israel is a democracy where it is possible to imagine the political defeat of the rightwing nationalists who are now in charge; it is possible to imagine a government that would work toward Palestinian statehood—Israel has had governments of that sort in the past, under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert. Inside Israel today, it is possible to criticize the government's bombing policy—as I will do below, a little uneasily, from the outside. Public criticism of Hamas in Gaza, even in "peacetime," is a risky business, and a victory for Hamas in this war—indeed, any strengthening of its hand vis-a-vis Fatah—would set the stage for future and more terrible wars, for Hamas has never deviated from its absolute opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

ADVERTISEMENT

But this choice, Israel over Hamas, is difficult for many people to make because of the rising tide of Palestinian casualties, dead and wounded, in the Gaza war. Israel, people say, is the strongest military power in the Middle East, so what can it possibly fear from Hamas? Why is it killing so many people, not militants only, but also civilians? Indeed, Israel is the Middle East Goliath. But readers of the Bible will know that it wasn't Goliath who won the battle with little David. In a conventional war with Hamas, Israel would win—not in six days as in the 1967 war, but in six hours.

Asymmetric warfare, however, is a very different story. Despite its high-tech army, the best in the world, the United States lost an asymmetric war in Vietnam and may soon turn out to have lost another such war in Afghanistan. In the last decade, Israel, with what may be an even higher-tech army, was unable to win asymmetric wars in Lebanon and Gaza.
The reason has a lot to do with civilian casualties. In asymmetric warfare, low-tech forces—call them terrorists, militants, or the more neutral "insurgents," which I will use—aim at the most vulnerable targets, civilians, and they launch their attacks from the midst of the civilian population. The high-tech forces respond, in defense of their own or of allied civilians, and end up killing large numbers of enemy civilians. The more civilians they kill—this is the sad, but not morally puzzling truth—the better it is for the insurgents. If you kill civilians in places like Vietnam or Afghanistan, you lose the battle for "hearts and minds." If you kill civilians in a place like Gaza, you lose the battle for global support. The two losses are different: America was defeated in Vietnam, while Israel in Gaza (in 2006) was merely forced to accept a cease-fire, and so prevented from winning. Indeed, the cost of winning would probably have been unbearable.

But it can't be the case that the insurgents, by hiding among civilians, make it impossible for the other side to fight against them. There has to be a just, or justifiable, way of responding to indiscriminate rocket attacks. Hence the doctrine of double effect and the rule of proportionality: If you are aiming at military targets (rocket launchers, for example) and know that your attack will also cause civilian casualties (collateral damage), you must make sure that the number of dead or injured civilians is "not disproportionate" to the value of the military target. Needless to say, this is a highly subjective calculation and has rarely been much of a limit on military attacks: This target is very valuable, the generals say; almost any number of civilians deaths is justifiable. Nor has proportionality provided much of a guideline for moral judgments: Even a very low number of civilians deaths, the moralists say, is disproportionate and a war crime.

Along with many others, I have argued for another rule: that the attacking forces must make positive efforts, including asking their own soldiers to take risks, in order to minimize the risks they impose on enemy civilians. How much risk has to be accepted? There is no precise answer to that question. But some risk is necessary, and if it is taken, then I think that the major responsibility for civilian deaths falls on the insurgents who are fighting from homes and schools and crowded streets. And if responsibility is understood and assigned in that way by the global public, it will be possible to fight and win an asymmetric war.

Is Israel fighting that kind of war? Warning civilians to leave a house or a neighborhood, as the IDF has been doing, probably reduces civilian deaths; and it may involve increased risks for the attackers, if the attack is coming on the ground rather than from the air, since defending forces will also be warned. But warnings, as the U.S. learned in Vietnam, aren't enough. People don't leave, or not all of them leave: they are caring for elderly or sick parents; they can't bear to abandon a home of 30 years, with all its accumulated belongings; they don't know where to go; or there isn't any safe place to go. Except when they are being used for some military purpose, houses where people live are not legitimate targets—even if the people who live there include Hamas officials. These attacks are wrong because the officials live with their families, who can't be called human shields.

It is always necessary to figure out who is there, in the house, in the school, in the yard, before an attack begins—and that will often require the attacking soldiers to take risks. I suspect that some Israeli soldiers are doing that, and some are not. That's the way it is in every war; a lot depends on the intelligence and moral competence of the junior officers who make the most critical decisions on the ground. Judging these issues from a distance is especially difficult. But I would strongly advise anyone contemplating the loss of life in Gaza to think carefully about who is responsible, or primarily responsible, for putting civilians at risk. The high-tech army, for all its claims to precision, is often callous and clumsy. But it is the insurgents who decide that the death of civilians will advance their cause. We should do what we can to ensure that it doesn't.  

HOW DOES ONE SQUARE A CIRCLE? THE GAZA - ISRAELI HORROR

Illustrative photo of a nun walking by price tag graffiti at a church near Beit Shemesh in August. (photo credit: Flash90)

Read more: 'Price tag’ attacks draw calls for stronger response | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/price-tag-attacks-draw-calls-for-stronger-response/#ixzz3Ap0zcZMp

NEW REPUBLIC, Yishai Schwartz

Children are dying in Gaza. In the coming days, more will die. And though many die as shields cruelly used by cynical Hamas terrorists, they are being killed by bombs from Israeli planes and shells from Israeli tanks. And so even as we acknowledge that Hamas’ hands are stained with the blood of its own people, for Israel, too, there must be a moral accounting.

I do not mean simply a refrain we have heard frequently in recent weeks: “No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens.” This sentence is probably true. But it is also irrelevant. The question is not what some other country would do, but what Israel ought to do. And that question is not as easily answered. In fact, it presents us with one of the great moral paradoxes and tragedies of our time: A war which must be fought—and which seems impossible to fight morally.

Traditionally, moral thinking about war is divided into two broad questions. First, we ask whether the decision to go to war was a moral one. In doing so, we ask: Are the reasons for the war morally compelling? Were less-destructive alternatives considered and pursued?
For Israel, the first question seems easier to answer. Few would deny that, in principle, Israel’s war with Hamas is both just and necessary. Israel acts on the most clear justification possible: self-defense after days of restraint, warnings, and pleas—as rockets continued to land on its cities and later, as militants sprang from tunnels to kill its citizens. Ceasefires have been offered, but Hamas has rejected them. And whatever criticisms one may have of Israel’s failures to midwife an effective and peaceful alternative to Hamas (and I have many), these do not undermine the fundamental justice of this self-defense.

But there is also a second, larger question: How should wars be fought? And here, Israel runs into a problem. Because in the conduct of war, we insist not only that combatants be the sole targets of military action or that steps be taken to reduce civilian deaths. But we also insist on proportionality; that the military value of a target must outweigh the anticipated harm to civilians.

And on this key issue, Israel may seem to fail the test. True, Israel only targets combatants and takes unprecedented efforts at avoiding civilians (making personalized phone calls to civilians before striking areas near them), but can we confidently say that the anticipated harm to innocents is justified by Israel’s expected military gains? The degrading of Hamas’ rocket capabilities, and most of all the destruction of its terrifying network of offensive tunnels (fortified by the limited cement that Israel permitted into Gaza for humanitarian purposes) are valuable military goals. But as the Palestinian death count rises above 500—many of these civilian—I find myself bewildered: Are these tunnels really worth the lives of all those children?
And the truly horrifying thing is that it is pretty clear that Israel couldn’t do much better. With Hamas headquarters, weapons caches, and infiltration tunnels buried below hospitals, mosques and homes, there may simply be no way for Israel to actually pass the test of proportionality. The killing of any individual Hamas operative, the destruction of any particular piece of terrorist infrastructure, can seem pale and insignificant beside the quantity of innocent death.

ADVERTISEMENT

We are thus left with a paradox: Morality demands that Israel fight this war, but allows no way to fight it morally. In this conflict, reason itself seems to fail.

There is, however, a way out of this paradox. And we find it at the moment we realize that Hamas’ actions have made this war about more than Israel or Palestine; it's a war about future of morality in armed conflicts. For if Israel declines to fight, we live in a world where terror groups use their own civilians, and twist morality itself, to bind the hands of those who try to fight morally. In this world, cruelty is an advantage, and the moral are powerless in the face of aggression and indiscriminate attack. And make no mistake: The eyes of the world are on Hamas, and terrorist groups worldwide will—as they have for generations—learn from the tactics of Gazan terrorists and the world’s reaction. So if Israel allows Hamas’ human shields to defeat it now, we will all reap the results in the years to come.

But there is an alternative. We can say that there is a principle worth fighting and dying for: Civilians cannot be used to make just wars impossible and morality will not be used as a tool to disarm. And once we have that principle, the proportionality calculation changes. The deaths of innocents are not simply outweighed by Israelis’ right to live without daily rockets and terrorists tunneling into a kibbutz playground; but by the defense of a world in which terrorists cannot use morality to achieve victory over those who try to fight morally. It is the protection of that world, one in which moral soldiers still have a fighting chance, that justifies Israel’s operations against Hamas today. And it is that greater cause that decisively outweighs the terrible toll in innocent life.

The War in Gaza: An Obscenity Offending All of Us

ROGER COHEN, N.Y. TIMES

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a ritualistic obscenity. It offends the conscience of humankind. The Oslo accords are dead. The “peace process” initiated through them is a farce. It is time to rethink everything.

In Gaza, an open-air prison for 1.8 million people, more than 300 children are dead, killed in the almost month-long Israeli bombardment. Each of those children has a name, a family. Several were killed in the recent shelling of a United Nations school, an act that the United States called “disgraceful.” The many civilian casualties in Gaza cannot be waved away as the “human shields” of Hamas. They were not human shields; they were human beings. When the guns die down, Israel will begin a difficult accounting.

 

But, yes, Hamas used these human beings, used them in the sense that the organization has no objective in the real world. Israel, which it says it is bent on annihilating, is not going away. Hamas manipulates and subjugates the Palestinians it governs in the name of a lost cause. To send rockets into Israel is to invite a certain response whose result, over time, is to reinforce a culture of paralyzing Palestinian victimhood. Hamas is criminal. It is criminal in its sacrifice of the Palestinian national cause to a fantasy, in its refusal to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel’s right “to exist in peace and security,” in its determination to kill Jews, and in its willingness to see the blood of its people shed for nothing.

A Jewish homeland was voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947 calling for the creation of two states in the Holy Land, one Jewish and one Arab. That homeland was defended through Arab-initiated wars aimed at reversing the world’s post-Holocaust mandate. Israel’s existence is irreversible. It is grounded in that U.N. decision, won on the battlefield, expressed in the forging of a vibrant society; and it represents the rightful resolution of the long Jewish saga of exclusion and persecution.

Except that the resolution is incomplete. Israel’s denial of a Palestinian state, its 47-year occupation of the West Bank, its highly “capricious control regime” (in the words of the former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad) over the lives of Palestinians, its expansion of settlements — all this creates an unacceptable “status quo” in which every lull is pregnant with violence. The occupation must end one day. Without two states Israel will lurch from one self-inflicted wound to the next, growing ever angrier with its neighbors and a restive world from which it feels alienated.

With nearly 2,000 dead, including 64 Israeli soldiers, the victors of this latest Gaza mini-war are apparently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. Support for Netanyahu is overwhelming. A vast majority of Israelis back his actions; many believe he has not gone far enough. Hamas, meanwhile, has hurt Israel; it has endured; it has exercised command-and-control under prolonged attack; it has embodied Palestinian resistance

 

 

But these are Pyrrhic victories. Deeper currents are at work. Surely even Netanyahu must take from this horrific episode the conviction that something must change. He has long pooh-poohed peace. He compared Yitzhak Rabin to Neville Chamberlain, and Israelis somehow forgave him. He came very late and very lamely to the idea of two states for two peoples, only to set impossible conditions for that goal, undermine moderate Palestinians, and waste U.S. mediators’ time.

 

He seized a few months ago on the formation of a Hamas-Fatah unity government to say “the pact with Hamas kills peace.” Now Netanyahu would like nothing more than for the Palestinian Authority, representing the Fatah faction, to take control of Gaza. In effect he would like the Palestinian unity he lambasted to work. He knows demilitarization of Gaza, the stated Israeli objective, can only be attained by remilitarizing it with an Israeli tank on every corner. Nobody wants that. Israel is already running the lives of enough Palestinians — or trying to.

As for Hamas, its victory is also illusory, adrenalin before the fall. It can offer its people nothing. The place to start now is with ending the divisions in the Palestinian movement that the unity government papered over — Gaza first, instead of West Bank first. A Palestinian national consensus is the prerequisite for anything, including the rebuilding and opening-up of Gaza.

Real reconciliation can only come on the basis of an ironclad commitment to nonviolence and to holding of free and fair elections, the first since 2006. Good Palestinian governance, unity and nonviolence constitute the path to making a free state of Palestine irrefutable. The longer Hamas fights this, the greater its betrayal of its people.

Netanyahu has fought Palestinian statehood all his life. But it is the only way out of his labyrinth. In the end his sound bites yield to reality. That reality is bitter indeed.

CEASE FIRE IN GAZA, CIA HACKS SENATE COMPUTERS IN DC, POSSIBLE CUOMO INVESTIGATION IN NY

Baz Ratner/Reuters

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a 72-hour ceasefire, according to an announcement from Secretary of State John Kerry. “The United Nations representative in Jerusalem, Special Coordinator Robert Serry, has received assurances that all parties have agreed to an unconditional humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza,” Kerry said in a joint statement with United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-Moon.

The ceasefire will begin at 8 a.m. Friday and allow humanitarian aid to reach those in need in Gaza. Ground forces will remain in place for the duration of the ceasefire and Israeli and Palestinian delegations will depart to Cairo for negotiations aimed at reaching a “durable cease-fire,” according to the statement. “This cease-fire is critical to giving innocent civilians a much-needed reprieve from violence,” the statement said. “During this period, civilians in Gaza will receive urgently needed humanitarian relief, and the opportunity to carry out vital functions, including burying the dead, taking care of the injured, and restocking food supplies. Overdue repairs on essential water and energy infrastructure could also continue during this period.” -

Read it at The New York Times

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

After repeated denials from the head of the CIA that his agents hacked into Senate computers, the spy agency’s Inspector General’s Office found that they did in fact do it. The report says CIA personnel improperly accessed Senate Intelligence Committee computers when they were being used to put together a report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

“As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth,” John Brennan said in March. “I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s—that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.” On Thursday, Brennan briefed and apologized to Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss. The Senate report, which is expected to be released soon, was investigating the CIA’s use of interrogation methods that some deemed torture in secret overseas prisons during the Bush administration. When asked in the spring if he would resign if CIA hacking turned out to be true, Brennan said he would leave that to President Obama. “If I did something wrong, I will go to the president, and I will explain to him exactly what I did, and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.” The White House said today that Obama has “great confidence” in Brennan. Senator Mark Udall, who sits on the Intelligence Committee, says the revelation "shatters" his confidence in Brennan.

Read it at McClatchy

Reuters

Things are heating up in New York as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, has threatened Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo with an investigation for possible obstruction of justice or witness tampering over the governor's cancellation of his own anticorruption commission. The written warning from Bharara's office came in response to public statements by former members of the commission that were in support of Cuomo—but were made as a result of calls from the governor or his emissaries. "We have reason to believe a number of commissioners recently have been contacted about the commission’s work, and some commissioners have been asked to issue public statements characterizing events and facts regarding the commission’s operation," the letter said.

Read it at the New York Times

Fighting Political Islam, Arab States Find Themselves Allied With Israel

A cease-fire proposal by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt met most of Israel’s demands; Hamas immediately rejected it. Credit Fady Fars/Middle East News Agency, via Associated Press        

N.Y. TIMES

After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.

 

“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents.

 

“I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas,” he said. “The silence is deafening.”

 

Although Egypt is traditionally the key go-between in any talks with Hamas — deemed a terrorist group by the United States and Israel — the government in Cairo this time surprised Hamas by publicly proposing a cease-fire agreement that met most of Israel’s demands and none from the Palestinian group. Hamas was tarred as intransigent when it immediately rejected it, and Cairo has continued to insist that its proposal remains the starting point for any further discussions.

But as commentators sympathetic to the Palestinians slammed the proposal as a ruse to embarrass Hamas, Egypt’s Arab allies praised it. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt the next day to commend it, Mr. Sisi’s office said, in a statement that cast no blame on Israel but referred only to “the bloodshed of innocent civilians who are paying the price for a military confrontation for which they are not responsible.”

Israel’s government has emerged for the moment as an unexpected beneficiary of the ensuing tumult, now tacitly supported by the leaders of the resurgent conservative order as an ally in their common fight against political Islam.

 

Egyptian officials have directly or implicitly blamed Hamas instead of Israel for Palestinian deaths in the fighting. At the same time, Egypt has infuriated Gazans by continuing its policy of shutting down tunnels used for cross-border smuggling into the Gaza Strip and keeping border crossings closed, exacerbating a scarcity of food, water and medical supplies after three weeks of fighting. Egypt and other Arab states, especially the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are finding themselves allied with Israel in a common opposition to Iran, a rival regional power that has a history of funding and arming Hamas.

 

Egyptian officials disputed that characterization, arguing that the new government was maintaining its support for the Palestinian people despite its deteriorating relations with Hamas, and that it had grown no closer to Israel than it was under Mr. Morsi or Mr. Mubarak.

 

“The pendulum of the Arab Spring has swung in Israel’s favor, just like it had earlier swung in the opposite direction,” said Mr.Khaled Elgindy, a former Palestinian adviser.

“But I am not sure the story is finished at this point.”