Another War, Another
Defeat
The Gaza offensive has succeeded in punishing the
Palestinians but not in making Israel more secure.
By John J. Mearsheimer
Israelis and their
American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from
the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy
for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire
comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has
foolishly started another war it cannot win.
The campaign in Gaza is said to have two
objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that
Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it
withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s
deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco,
by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt
Iran’s nuclear program.
But these are not the
real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected
to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with
millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader
strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically,
Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to
be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West
Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of
disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is
Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement
between them, the air above and the water below
them.
The key to achieving this is to inflict
massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the
fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be
largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy,
which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and
has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly
referred to as the “Iron Wall.”
What has been happening in Gaza is fully
consistent with this strategy.
Let’s begin with Israel’s decision to
withdraw from Gaza in 2005. The conventional wisdom is that Israel
was serious about making peace with the Palestinians and that its
leaders hoped the exit from Gaza would be a major step toward
creating a viable Palestinian state. According to the New York
Times’ Thomas L. Friedman, Israel was giving the Palestinians
an opportunity to “build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the
Mediterranean,” and if they did so, it would “fundamentally reshape
the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed
most of the West Bank.”
This is pure fiction. Even before Hamas
came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison
for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until
they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s
closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement
from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging
it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s
necessary so that there will not be a political process with the
Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places
the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a
corner where they hate to be.”
Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli
demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that
pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a
closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people
will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid
of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will
be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain
alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every
day.”
In January 2006, five months after the
Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive
victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This
meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was
democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and
unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by
ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not
work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in
March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national
unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing,
and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.
To make matters worse, the national
unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The
Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the
Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and
end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into
Gaza.
Israel rejected that offer and with
American backing set out to foment a civil war between Fatah and
Hamas that would wreck the national unity government and put Fatah
in charge. The plan backfired when Hamas drove Fatah out of Gaza,
leaving Hamas in charge there and the more pliant Fatah in control
of the West Bank. Israel then tightened the screws on the blockade
around Gaza, causing even greater hardship and suffering among the
Palestinians living there.
Hamas responded by continuing to fire
rockets and mortars into Israel, while emphasizing that they still
sought a long-term ceasefire, perhaps lasting ten years or more.
This was not a noble gesture on Hamas’s part: they sought a
ceasefire because the balance of power heavily favored Israel. The
Israelis had no interest in a ceasefire and merely intensified the
economic pressure on Gaza. But in the late spring of 2008, pressure
from Israelis living under the rocket attacks led the government to
agree to a six-month ceasefire starting on June 19. That agreement,
which formally ended on Dec. 19, immediately preceded the present
war, which began on Dec. 27.
The official Israeli position blames
Hamas for undermining the ceasefire. This view is widely accepted
in the United States, but it is not true. Israeli leaders disliked
the ceasefire from the start, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak
instructed the IDF to begin preparing for the present war while the
ceasefire was being negotiated in June 2008. Furthermore, Dan
Gillerman, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, reports that
Jerusalem began to prepare the propaganda campaign to sell the
present war months before the conflict began. For its part, Hamas
drastically reduced the number of missile attacks during the first
five months of the ceasefire. A total of two rockets were fired
into Israel during September and October, none by Hamas.
How did Israel behave during this same
period? It continued arresting and assassinating Palestinians on
the West Bank, and it continued the deadly blockade that was slowly
strangling Gaza. Then on Nov. 4, as Americans voted for a new
president, Israel attacked a tunnel inside Gaza and killed six
Palestinians. It was the first major violation of the ceasefire,
and the Palestinians—who had been “careful to maintain the
ceasefire,” according to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism
Information Center—responded by resuming rocket attacks. The calm
that had prevailed since June vanished as Israel ratcheted up the
blockade and its attacks into Gaza and the Palestinians hurled more
rockets at Israel. It is worth noting that not a single Israeli was
killed by Palestinian missiles between Nov. 4 and the launching of
the war on Dec. 27.
As the violence increased, Hamas made
clear that it had no interest in extending the ceasefire beyond
Dec. 19, which is hardly surprising, since it had not worked as
intended. In mid-December, however, Hamas informed Israel that it
was still willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire if it included
an end to the arrests and assassinations as well as the lifting of
the blockade. But the Israelis, having used the ceasefire to
prepare for war against Hamas, rejected this overture. The bombing
of Gaza commenced eight days after the failed ceasefire formally
ended.
If Israel wanted to stop missile attacks
from Gaza, it could have done so by arranging a long-term ceasefire
with Hamas. And if Israel were genuinely interested in creating a
viable Palestinian state, it could have worked with the national
unity government to implement a meaningful ceasefire and change
Hamas’s thinking about a two-state solution. But Israel has a
different agenda: it is determined to employ the Iron Wall strategy
to get the Palestinians in Gaza to accept their fate as hapless
subjects of a Greater Israel.
This brutal policy is clearly reflected
in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War. Israel and its supporters
claim that the IDF is going to great lengths to avoid civilian
casualties, in some cases taking risks that put Israeli soldiers in
jeopardy. Hardly. One reason to doubt these claims is that Israel
refuses to allow reporters into the war zone: it does not want the
world to see what its soldiers and bombs are doing inside Gaza. At
the same time, Israel has launched a massive propaganda campaign to
put a positive spin on the horror stories that do
emerge.
The best evidence, however, that Israel
is deliberately seeking to punish the broader population in Gaza is
the death and destruction the IDF has wrought on that small piece
of real estate. Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians and
wounded more than 4,000. Over half of the casualties are civilians,
and many are children. The IDF’s opening salvo on Dec. 27 took
place as children were leaving school, and one of its primary
targets that day was a large group of graduating police cadets, who
hardly qualified as terrorists. In what Ehud Barak called “an
all-out war against Hamas,” Israel has targeted a university,
schools, mosques, homes, apartment buildings, government offices,
and even ambulances. A senior Israeli military official, speaking
on the condition of anonymity, explained the logic behind Israel’s
expansive target set: “There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are
trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected
and everything supports terrorism against Israel.” In other words,
everyone is a terrorist and everything is a legitimate
target.
Israelis tend to be blunt, and they
occasionally say what they are really doing. After the IDF killed
40 Palestinian civilians in a UN school on Jan. 6,
Ha’aretz reported that “senior officers admit that the IDF
has been using enormous firepower.” One officer explained, “For us,
being cautious means being aggressive. From the minute we entered,
we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the
ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in
which we are operating will describe the shock.”
One might accept that Israel is waging
“a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians,”
as Ha’aretz put it in an editorial, but argue that it will
eventually achieve its war aims and the rest of the world will
quickly forget the horrors inflicted on the people of
Gaza.
This is wishful thinking. For starters,
Israel is unlikely to stop the rocket fire for any appreciable
period of time unless it agrees to open Gaza’s borders and stop
arresting and killing Palestinians. Israelis talk about cutting off
the supply of rockets and mortars into Gaza, but weapons will
continue to come in via secret tunnels and ships that sneak through
Israel’s naval blockade. It will also be impossible to police all
of the goods sent into Gaza through legitimate channels.
Israel could try to conquer all of Gaza
and lock the place down. That would probably stop the rocket
attacks if Israel deployed a large enough force. But then the IDF
would be bogged down in a costly occupation against a deeply
hostile population. They would eventually have to leave, and the
rocket fire would resume. And if Israel fails to stop the rocket
fire and keep it stopped, as seems likely, its deterrent will be
diminished, not strengthened.
More importantly, there is little reason
to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get
the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside
Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing
Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not
come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s
brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what
does not kill you makes you stronger.
But even if the unexpected happens and
the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will
become an apartheid state. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently
said, Israel will “face a South African-style struggle” if the
Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own. “As soon as
that happens,” he argued, “the state of Israel is finished.” Yet
Olmert has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and create a
viable Palestinian state, relying instead on the Iron Wall strategy
to deal with the Palestinians.
There is also little chance that people
around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will
soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in
Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many
people—especially in the Arab and Islamic world—care about the
Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding
conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years,
and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see
that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the
victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing
picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on
Israel’s reputation.
The bottom line is that no matter what
happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In
fact, it is pursuing a strategy—with lots of help from its
so-called friends in the Diaspora—that is placing its long-term
future at risk. 
__________________________________________
John J.
Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University
of Chicago and coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy.
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/
