ANOTHER WAR ANOTHER iSRAELI/US 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.