Gaza’s Hamas movement wanted a showdown with Israel because its leaders are high on something called the Arab Spring and competing to become martyrs to the Palestinian cause.
Or, from another perspective, cynical Israeli politicians think a Gaza offensive will be a walkover that will assure re-election in January and at the same time provide a death-blow to Palestinian statehood moves at the UN.
Those are two ends of a spectrum of theories among Israelis and Palestinians about what has propelled the two sides towards their second war in four years, escalating a low-level, slap-for-slap conflict to the brink of an Israeli invasion of Gaza.
Without going back 2,000 years to the origins of the dispute, the roots of the latest high-explosive crisis can be traced in a series of “red lines” that have been crossed.
Specifically: firing a Russian Kornet anti-tank missile on Nov. 10 against Israeli soldiers; Israel’s assassination of top Hamas commander Ahmed al-Jaabari on Wednesday last week after both sides appeared to have agreed to a tacit ceasefire deal; and Hamas firing long-range rockets at Tel Aviv the following day.
These were big steps that wrecked a fragile “status quo.”
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip seven years ago and has regularly used its airpower to deter Hamas and other Islamist groups from firing their rockets into the Jewish state. The militants do not recognize Israel’s right to exist.
In a bruising three-week campaign in 2008 and 2009, Israel first bombarded then briefly invaded Gaza, hoping to put a halt to the rockets once and for all. Operation Cast Lead left 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.
For a while, there was quiet, then the round of retaliations resumed. Missiles were fired, Israel struck back, sometimes targeting empty smuggling tunnels, sometimes targeting rocket crews. Palestinian civilians were also getting killed.
Both sides speak of “the rules of the game” and now both accuse the other of “stepping over the red line.”
Palestinian analysts agree Hamas has the wind in its sails since the Arab Spring swept away pro-Western autocracies and replaced them with Islamists, especially in neighboring Egypt where the ruling Muslim Brotherhood is their spiritual mentor.
“Of course, Hamas feels empowered by the change in the Arab countries around them and many believe Israel cannot isolate it any more,” said a source close to Hamas, who did not wish to be identified.
LEGITIMACY
However, while Hamas craves the legitimacy it needs to assume the moral leadership of the Palestinian national movement from those it considers Western poodles chasing peace with Israel, it shares Gaza with armed Salafists groups intent on violence.
“Hamas has been under continuous blackmail from other factions since it has been more interested in calm in order to preserve its authority in Gaza,” Gaza-based political analyst Hani Habib told reporters.
Trying to face both ways, Hamas abandoned efforts to stop these groups firing rockets at Israel and last month joined in, to show it was not getting soft in the chair of office.
In doing so, it tried to change “the rules of the game,” but overplayed its hand, triggering a massive Israeli operation for which the military planning was sitting ready in a drawer. It came far faster and much heavier than Hamas expected.
“While they thought revolutions in Arab countries served their aims and would make them stronger, they were not looking for war with Israel, not now, despite the fact they have been preparing themselves for one since the 2009 round ended,” the source close to Hamas said.
For Israel, a security situation that had been contained and politically tolerable — zero or very infrequent rocket attacks on the south by groups other than Hamas — tilted with Hamas’ decision to start shooting again with new weapons.
Israel says the aim of Operation Pillar of Defense is not to re-occupy Gaza or root out Islamists. It is to destroy long-range rockets, such as the Fajr 5 from Iran, that Hamas has acquired since 2009 and to disable Gaza’s rocket capacity “for a very long time,” Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Yigal Palmor said.
Could there be ancillary motives?
Alastair Newton at Nomura Global Markets wrote in a note to clients that “militants in Gaza have been building up stocks of missiles … and there does appear to have been an uptick in missile attacks.”
“However, an Israeli general election is now just two months away ... [Israeli] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party has historically benefited from pre-election security concerns, which this latest conflict is likely to exacerbate,” he added.
Although a vast majority of Israelis supports the operation, a high body count could reduce popular backing.
Another vote is also looming — one that the secular government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank wants to bring to the UN General Assembly by the end of this month to give the Palestinians a diplomatic upgrade.
DIPLOMATIC TERRORISM
Israel says this drive for UN recognition of a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is “diplomatic terrorism.” It has threatened to topple Abbas, who is regularly derided by Hamas for not supporting their armed resistance.
Abbas himself is convinced the Gaza campaign is designed to sink his initiative, but has vowed to plough on.
“Everything that is happening is in order to block our endeavors to reach the United Nations,” he said on Friday.
Israeli columnist Uri Dromi says Israel should remember that its Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank “are still committed to a two-state solution, namely, sharing the neighborhood.”
“If we lose them, then we are left with the others only,” Dromi said.
Hamas has courted Egyptian support assiduously since the election of Islamist Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in June. However, Morsi has so far made clear that while denouncing Israeli “aggression” he will not go beyond diplomatic pressure.
The nuances of Gaza’s militant politics are fine but provide some clues as to how the showdown has escalated.
“Hamas did not claim the Kornet hitting the [Israeli army] jeep. The Popular Resistance Committees did,” the source close to Hamas said. “It is true Hamas did not condemn it.”
He did not deny that Hamas wanted to change the rules of a game in which Israel decides when a round of violence ends.
“But assassinating Jaabari was like giving the go-ahead to all Hamas cells to use the equipment, weapons and training they had prepared for a possible war,” he said.
Hamas official and columnist Mustafa Assawaf said the group was “not interested in silence forever, or a big escalation.”
A shaky new truce was in place, thanks to Egyptian mediation, until Jaabari ventured out fatally onto Gaza’s streets
“Israel did not respect deals and understandings, and after killing Jaabari tough reactions were inevitable even if it would lead to broader confrontation,” he said.
Hamas used greater force to “establish a new formula that Israel is not the only party that owns power and that the resistance has its own tools that can be painful to Israel.”
Assawaf rejected the suggestion that an internal leadership struggle within the movement motivated the rocket gamble.
“Hamas leaders are competing, but not for seats. They are competing for who dies as a martyr and gets into a coffin,” he said.
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