Editorial | Gaza needs good sense

Nearly a week after Hamas’ murderous assault on Israel, where its fighters indiscriminately slaughtered women and children, the group will probably feel that it is close to achieving all its initial objectives other than inflicting maximum terror.

One is creating a deep sense of vulnerability among Israelis. Their vaunted intelligence apparatus, and one of the world’s most sophisticated militaries, failed to discern or intercept this attack by a ragtag army of terrorists, who killed more than 1,200 Israelis, wounded hundreds of others and took 150 captive. From Hamas’ perspective, a probable equal, if not more important, policy gain is Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, a 25-mile-long by six-mile-wide strip of land with 2.3 million people, which Hamas has ruled since 2007. To put this into perspective, Gaza is like packing 83 per cent of Jamaica’s population into the parish of St James.

By Thursday, much of Gaza lay in rubble, in line with the doctrine for this operation, as outlined by an Israeli Defence Force spokesman, Daniel Hagari: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

So far, more than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed in the bombings, close to 6,000 have been injured. Tens of thousands have fled their homes. But in that narrow, tightly packed enclave, there is hardly anywhere to run to.

Israel has also tightened its blockade of the territory, cutting off electricity, water, food and medicines. And its soldiers seem poised for a ground invasion of Gaza.

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The likely outcome of this is that more Palestinians will die, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pursues his declared mission of crushing Hamas.

“Every Hamas member is a dead man,” he said. “We will crush and destroy it.”

Whether the militant group’s operational viability in Gaza will be permanently dismantled is questionable. But its immediate strategic and tactical priorities will do doubt have been met.

Most of the world is empathetic to Israel and defends its right to hit back at Hamas’ terrorism. But, as Hamas wanted, the Israel-Palestinian question is back on the world’s agenda.

Critically, too, for Hamas and its supporters, such as Iran, Syria and the Lebanese paramilitary/political organisation, Hezbollah, the US-brokered Abraham Accords that normalised relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan are suddenly on shaky ground. The populations of these Arab countries who were uneasy with these agreements, are increasingly vocal in their concern that the accords were permitting an end run around the Palestinians. The next phase of these accords, negotiations for Israel’s formal recognition by the region’s pre-eminent country, Saudi Arabia, will likely to slow down. The Saudis, notwithstanding the country’s autocracy, will now be testing the mood at home and elsewhere in the Middle East.

While Hamas’ attack on civilians was vile, utterly reprehensible and condemned in the harshest terms, that there would be an attempt to undermine a Saudi-Israeli accord was highly predictable. For it contains a fundamental flaw. It fed Mr Netanyahu’s presumption that he could claim the big prize of normalised relations between Israel and key Middle East neighbours, while fudging on the Palestinian issue.

There would be obligatory declarations of support for a two-state solution, but as a practical matter, the question of an independent Palestinian state would atrophy and, if not quite die, remain in a state of suspended animation.

Indeed, until Benny Gantz, the moderate leader of the Blue and White party and a former prime minister, joined the government this week, Mr Netanyahu led Israel’s most right-wing administration ever, filled with a bunch of zealots who publicly belittled the idea of an independent Palestinian state, promoted the development and expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank, and increasingly denuded the credibility of the already-unpopular Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Before last Saturday’s events, more than 300 Palestinians, mostly in Gaza, and over 30 Israelis had been killed in clashes this year – the most since the first half of the 2000. Palestinian homes in the West Bank have also been demolished and their land confiscated.

TOLERATE AND EMBRACE

It isn’t clear how popular Hamas really is in Gaza or among Palestinians as a whole. It is obvious, though, that the policies of recent Israeli governments, especially Mr Netanyahu’s, have rather than cause Palestinians to cringe at Hamas as a nasty piece of work, to tolerate, and even embrace them as the ones who, some might claim perversely, protect their interests.

This, therefore, is a delicate moment of Israel – and its major backer, the United States. Primordial instincts might drive Israel into Gaza. They may turn the place into broken concrete and mangled rebar. But that would not be without cost in human lives on both sides, and political and moral capital. Israel will find it difficult to maintain the high ground it occupies in the face of Hamas’ atrocities.

So despite what they say in public, Israel’s backers, the United States in particular, must force upon it the wisdom of a policy reset and recalibration.

All Hamas members may indeed end up as dead men. But the Palestinian sense of hopelessness and belittlement, which they have carried for 75 years, and which their leaders often stir to seething anger, would not die because Hamas is dead. Mr Netanyahu helped to feed Hamas’ relevance and inflamed Palestinians’ grievance.

The best way to ensure Israeli right to exist in a largely hostile neighbourhood is by ensuring that Palestinians have a real shot at creating a state, rather than something akin to a Bantustan.