Talk More of Defending Palestinians and Less of Securing Israel.

Similar to the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, Israeli forces slowly learned they had had nowhere to go except to kill more civilians. The Israeli forces neither exhibited many destroyed rocket launchers nor demonstrated harm to the supposed 10,000 Hamas armed insurgents. Except for the longer range Grad rockets, many of the rockets and mortars that shelled Israel were homemade devices. Therefore only the Grad rockets and some Qassam rockets, few of which did much damage, were smuggled into Gaza. Hamas demonstrated no military capability; that is no capability and not just limited capability– no surface to air missiles, no anti-tank rockets, no organized attacks on invading soldiers. Media descriptions of coming battles never materialized. Fighting, which requires two combatants, was an exaggerated word. Israeli forces moved forward without much fear of attack and with only ten reported deaths, of which five were accidental. Since Hamas didn’t display many weapons with which to fight, how much smuggling of meaningful armaments could have occurred? Neither facts nor images supported reports of weapons caches and weapons destruction. Israel’s soldiers must have felt contrite and questioned what they were doing.

Did rocket fire, which had been happening continuously since 2002, cause the conflagration? The initial break in the lapsed truce, which caused no casualties, followed Israel’s neglect of Hamas’ pleas. Combine Israel’s ongoing refusal to give the slightest recognition to a democratically elected Hamas government with the world’s refusal to counter Israel’s intransigence and we have, not the reason, but the cause of the latest conflict.

The forces that control actions of the world community seemed to have been guided by only what served Israel’s interests rather than what was beneficial for the world, what would stabilize the Middle East and what would be helpful to the Palestinians. Although casualties are always disputed, most reports indicate that the inability to deter Israel’s attack resulted in the deaths of more than 1300 Palestinians, wounding of more than 5400, damage to more then 22,000 buildings, including United Nation structures, mosques, universities, a medical school and almost every police station. Predictions have Gaza’s flimsy gross domestic product being reduced by 85 percent or almost to nothing.

Hamas survived and Gaza was partially destroyed. A credible conclusion is that if Israel could not succeed in the former tactic, it was eager to accomplish the latter result.

A legitimately elected government Hamas requested halts to a punishing blockade and to attacks on its citizens in the West Bank and Gaza. Silence. More pleading and more silence. Finally, militants fire an uncontrollable salvo of rockets, positioned so no fatalities could occur, alerting Israel and a complacent world that Hamas could no longer permit its people to be starved into surrender.

Hamas’ demands deserved discussion. Instead, Israel responded with missile strikes, which instantly killed 250 Palestinians, assured retaliating rockets would finally kill Israelis and signaled an eventual violence against Gazans and a politically motivated invasion of the territory.

The attack on Gaza cannot remain an isolated incident that slowly fades into history. This attack has been etched into the psyche of an embittered Arab world. Sympathy for the Palestinians has been extended worldwide. These phenomena have dictated a new look at the Middle East contestants and a new approach to resolving the conflict. It’s possible we will witness more talk of defending the Palestinians and less of securing Israelis, more efforts by Arab nations of uniting the Arab world and its factions and less efforts by the western world to dictate a path to unification, more attempts to resolve Middle East problems and less considerations to Israel’s agendas.

Text taken from Israel Faces the Gaza Aftermath : From Self-deception to Self-destruction by Dan Lieberman.

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