Israel and Gaza 2012

 

 

     By G. Jefferson Price III

     Before this year, the world would be looking at the intensifying armed confrontation between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with a sense of deja vu all over again.

   But this is 2012 and the political map of the Middle East has changed dramatically in ways that make the Israel-Gaza confrontation far more dangerous for every country in the region, especially those that border Israel and Palestine.  Great danger also exists for the United States and Europe in the latest confrontation.

      But mostly, life’s more dangerous for Israel, not because of the existential threat from Palestinian rockets, but because Israeli leaders have consistently obstructed and resisted arrangements that would have brought a dignified peace to the region.  And while the leadership and much of Israel’s population accepted and advanced these conditions that make life so intolerable for Palestinians, Israelis have been basking in a pool of complacency that’s quite astonishing given the differences that exist today compared to just two years ago.

     Hosni Mubarak with whom Israel and the United States were so comfortable today no longer runs Egypt. The new Egyptian ruler following Mubarak’s downfall is Mohamed Morsi at the head of a regime directly tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas in Gaza is a Palestinian branch. For more than 30 years since Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, Israel has been able to act with impunity against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and the Lebanese to the north. That no longer holds true. The Egyptians are trying to help negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but the heart of the new Egyptian regime is with Hamas.

     Lebanon is still under the thumb of Hezbollah, the Shi’ite Islamic fundamentalists who share Hamas’s stated ambition to eliminate the Jewish State and which has its own arsenal of rockets pointed at Israel.

     Next to Lebanon along Israel’s northern border, there is Syria itself, where Bashar Assad, like his equally tyrannical father, Hafez scrupulously maintained a ceasefire with Israel since the end of the 1973 war. But the Assad regime will not survive the bloody chaos that’s already left more than 35,000 dead in Syria. And no one can say for certain who and what will be running Syria after Assad’s inevitable downfall.  It might well be a Sunni-dominated regime with strong ties to such states as Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf countries and other big bankrollers of jihadist movements?

    Then there is Jordan, the Hashemite kingdom that borders Israel and the Palestinian territories, the only other Arab country that has a peace treaty with Israel. King Abdullah II is not a popular monarch.  Demonstrations against the government have been underway for weeks in that country that’s produced a couple of Al Qaeda’s most vicious leaders and where the Muslim Brotherhood has a large following.

     In past confrontations between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Israel and the Lebanese, none of these scenarios existed. But Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government seems to be acting as if nothing has changed.

     No one would challenge Mr. Netanyahu’s declaration that Israel has a right and a duty to protect itself and its citizens from the rocket attacks launched from Gaza that have already killed three Israelis and wounded many more.

     However, there is good reason to question why the Israeli security branch decided that last Wednesday was a good time to assassinate Ahmed al Jabari, the Hamas military leader in Gaza.  The latest escalation in Gaza launches came in retaliation for the assassination. But a prominent Israeli actively involved in back channel negotiations with the Hamas leadership through Egyptian intermediaries has reported that the very day Jabari he was assassinated he was looking over an innovative draft proposal for an enduring ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

      “This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister . . . when we met last week in Egypt,” the “unofficial” Israeli negotiator Gershon Baskin wrote in an article in the New York Times last week. “Mr. Jabari was . . . prepared to agree to a long-term cease-fire.”

   Israel had plenty of reason to assassinate Jabari, who was the commander in charge of bringing weapons into Gaza and when to use them. But the timing of his assassination seems to have been counterproductive, to say the least.

     A cynical explanation for the timing would be that Israel has an election coming in January and Mr. Netanyahu needs to burnish his credentials as the no-nonsense, hardliner who is willing to bomb Gaza, targeting the Hamas leadership, no matter how many innocent lives are lost in the process.

    Election would be a good time for a discussion in Israel on the impact of Israel’s long-standing policies in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon in the emergence of an increasingly radical and Islamic fundamentalist enemy. It’s unlikely, though. Discussions like that don’t happen while bombs and rockets are falling.

      But has it occurred to Mr. Netanyahu that this is exactly what Hamas wants? One could assert that Hamas’s latest round of rocket attacks against Israel were “suicidal.” To which the most aggressive in Hamas might reply, “Correct. Suicide is what we do.” And this time Egypt and other regional states, including U.S. NATO ally Turkey are out there supporting Hamas in ways that would have been inconceivable less than two years ago.

     After Gaza is leveled this time, possibly re-occupied, the Palestinian population – more than 1.7 million people, trapped in one of the world’s most densely populated pieces of real estate – will still be there, more embittered, more enraged, more radicalized, and more universally supported. It will be difficult for Hamas’s rival in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, to keep resisting demands for a return to “armed struggle,” aroused by the day-to-day humiliation and indignity heaped upon Palestinians by Israeli policies.

      Not for their sake, but for its own sake, Israel, with the help of it’s allies in Washington and the capitals of Europe, has to develop an alternative way to peaceful survival.

     The moderate Jewish-American group J Street said as much in a statement last week: “military force alone is inadequate as a response to the broader strategic challenge Israel faces. Only a political resolution to the century-old conflict with the Palestinians resulting in two states living side by side can end the conflict.

     Or, as Gideon Levy, a prominent Israeli journalist put it in an article in the Israeli mass circulation daily Ha’aretz:  “Israel arrived at the current round of this endless cycle of bloodshed at yet another peak of denial of the existence of the Palestinian people. . . . The time has come for diplomacy and for ending the occupation, the time for bombing is over.”

     G. Jefferson Price III was foreign editor of The (Baltimore) Sun from 1991 to 2001 and Middle East correspondent for the newspaper in the 1970s and 1980s.

    

 

 

   

The blogoisie -- who knew?

If you are a blogger and you want some idea of who pays attention to or notices your blog, go a few months without posting anything and see if anyone notices. My blogging was interrupted for several months because I was pre-occupied with other things. No one noticed!

Today is Poppy Day

Originally this date was set aside as Armistice Day, less formally named Poppy Day, to commemorate the end of The Great War at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month and the millions who perished in that conflict, also known, hopefully, as The War to End All Wars: 17 million dead; 20 million wounded. That spirit of hope was torn apart within a mere 20 years when The War to End of All Wars became known with horrific  simplicity as World War I and eventually Armistice Day became known by different names because so many other wars have been fought  and so many more people have perished, so many more dead to memorialize.

In the U. S. we call it Veterans Day. In Great Britain and the British Commonwealth states, they now call it Remembrance Day. Veterans Day in America probably is more notably marked as a time for big sales on everything from cars to bed sheets. The lessons of 1914 to 1918, like the ones of 1939 to 1945, elude us. This seems less so in Great Britain, where the day is marked by greater solemnity and the wearing of plastic poppies to remember the fallen of World War I in the trenches and bogs of the European lowlands. Remarkably, the arrival of spring every year of the war and ever afterwards brought the fresh crop of poppies, blood-red covering the fields of death.

The phenomenon inspired a poem “In Flanders Fields,” written in 1915, less than a year into the war, by Major John McCrae, a Canadian soldier serving in the battle field of Ypres, Belgium,  whose friend and fellow Canadian, Lt. Alexis Helmer had just been killed by a German shell blast.

As the story goes, there was no chaplain on hand to conduct a funeral for Helmer. McCrae was asked to fill in. After burying his comrade in arms, McCrae wrote the following poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Easy to assume that in writing of keeping the faith with those dead passing on the torch, McCrae had in mind a more glorious experience than this ghastly war turned out to be. It was early on, and who could have imagined the bloodbath to come and the one that would follow within a single generation?

     By the end of the First World War, the tone of poetry from that generation was far less optimistic and glorious, as in such as “Dulce at Decorum Est,” by Wilfred Owen, a soldier poet who was killed by a German bullet on the battlefield of Northern France, November 4, 1918, only one week before the end of the war. This poem, published two years after Owen’s death, described a battlefield under gas attack, the first widespread use of chemical warfare that characterized the war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*

 *Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, from Horace’s Odes, translates roughly to “How sweet and right it is to die for your country.”