Letter from Israel: The Gaza Conflict

Ninth in an ongo­ing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — The Israeli mil­i­tary started bom­bard­ing Hamas instal­la­tions through­out the Gaza Strip on Sat­ur­day, and Israeli sol­diers and tanks are cur­rently sta­tioned along the bor­der in prepa­ra­tion for a pos­si­ble ground inva­sion. In response, Hamas has fired numer­ous addi­tional rock­ets into south­west­ern Israel. So far two peo­ple have died in Israel, and more than three hun­dred have died in Gaza.

Var­i­ous com­men­ta­tors and gov­ern­ment spokesper­sons have appeared through­out the media world­wide, but most of them, of course, are biased towards one side or the other. In this Let­ter from Israel, I hope to present the his­tor­i­cal and present facts sur­round­ing the sit­u­a­tion and then give my (biased) thoughts later.

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Israel Leaves Gaza

In 1967, Israel con­quered and occu­pied the Gaza Strip — along with the Pales­tini­ans liv­ing there — from Egypt in the Six-Day War. (Egypt and Jor­dan, along with other Arab coun­tries, had attempted to invade and destroy Israel. The Jew­ish state gained the West Bank from Jor­dan in the war as well.)

In 2005, for­mer Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ariel Sharon uni­lat­er­ally with­drew the country’s armed forces from Gaza and forcibly removed all of the Israeli set­tlers who had moved there to live amongst the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion. Sharon had report­edly planned to do the same in most of the West Bank to make room for a future Pales­tin­ian state, but he suf­fered a stroke and fell into a coma from which he has yet to recover. The cur­rent prime min­is­ter, Ehud Olmert, took over for Sharon.

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Hamas Comes to Power

After Israel left the Gaza Strip, the ter­ror­ist group Hamas, which had always been based in the ter­ri­tory, gained in strength and began reg­u­larly fir­ing rock­ets into south­west­ern Israel. But they had been some­what checked by the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity, which was dom­i­nated by Fatah, a rival, mod­er­ate polit­i­cal party.

As part of the Bush administration’s plan to spread democ­racy through­out the Mid­dle East, the United States pushed for the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity to hold elec­tions and form a rep­re­sen­ta­tive par­lia­ment. Despite objec­tions from Israel and some Pales­tini­ans them­selves — both of whom feared that Hamas might gain power — the elec­tions were held in 2006. Hamas won a plu­ral­ity of the seats in the par­lia­ment, giv­ing the ter­ror­ist group the right to form a new gov­ern­ment and name a prime min­is­ter. The Fatah party still held the post of pres­i­dent — largely sym­bolic, like the Queen of Eng­land — because Mah­moud Abbas had been elected to the post earlier.

The Pales­tini­ans had always been split amongst them­selves: Fatah, the mod­er­ate party that report­edly sup­ports peace with Israel and a two-state solu­tion, had been pop­u­lar among Pales­tini­ans in the West Bank. Hamas, the ter­ror­ist and human­i­tar­ian group that wants to elim­i­nate Israel, was very pop­u­lar among those in Gaza. As I wrote in a prior let­ter, Hamas was formed to fight Israel, but it was also founded to build daily neces­si­ties like schools and hos­pi­tals at a time when Yasser Arafat and his cor­rupt Fatah party trans­ferred mil­lions in inter­na­tional aid into their pri­vate bank accounts and pur­chased items like weapons rather than those like medicine.

In the months fol­low­ing the elec­tion, the Pales­tini­ans waged a low-level civil war between Fatah and Hamas. The ter­ror­ist group suc­ceeded in vio­lently kick­ing Fatah out of Gaza — some Fatah mem­bers were thrown off of build­ings or had their kneecaps shot off — and Hamas gained com­plete con­trol of the ter­ri­tory. Hamas started fir­ing more rock­ets into south­west­ern Israel, and the Jew­ish state block­aded the Gaza Strip in response. The block­ade helped to stop weapons from enter­ing the Gaza Strip, but it also pre­vented items like food, gas, and med­ical sup­plies from reach­ing inno­cent Pales­tini­ans in Gaza as well.

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For months, this was the sta­tus quo in Gaza. Hamas would fire rock­ets into Israel, and the Jew­ish state would con­tinue treat­ing Gaza like a large jail by not allow­ing any­one or any­thing to enter or leave. (Egypt, for the record, also closed its bor­der with Gaza because the coun­try does not want extrem­ists and ter­ror­ists to enter as well.) Still, Hamas still received weapons and train­ing from Iran and Syria through under­ground tun­nels that the group had dug under the bor­der with Egypt. The rock­ets that Hamas fired became increas­ingly advanced, and hit more and more Israeli cities fur­ther away from Gaza.

Gaza was a pow­der keg that was wait­ing to explode. Most of the Pales­tini­ans there are either mil­i­tant Islamists or inno­cent civil­ians who suf­fer from the lack of daily neces­si­ties. Both par­ties, for dif­fer­ent reasons, are not very happy with Israel. On the other side, the Israeli gov­ern­ment was fac­ing more and more crit­i­cism at home that it was unwill­ing to defend Israeli cit­i­zens by doing noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant to stop Hamas from fir­ing rock­ets into Israeli towns.

Last week, Israeli news­pa­pers car­ried a report that intel­li­gence ana­lysts believed that Hamas now had the capa­bil­ity to hit Beer­sheva, the major city in the south-central part of Israel. It is east of Gaza. Such an attack would be too much for the Israeli gov­ern­ment to bear, so it only became a mat­ter of time before the Jew­ish state took action. [Five min­utes after I wrote this, two rock­ets landed in Beersheva.]

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The Cur­rent Situation

Of course, no one knows what the Israeli mil­i­tary is going to do. But it is clear that they want to elim­i­nate Hamas’ abil­ity to fire rock­ets into Israel at the least. This involves tar­get­ing every known weapons stor­age facil­ity, Hamas office, and stag­ing area — or, in other words, many build­ings in every part of Gaza.

How­ever, this also results in the unin­tended deaths of many civil­ians because 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple live in an area that is roughly twice the size of Wash­ing­ton, D.C. When­ever a bomb falls on a mil­i­tary tar­get, it is inevitable that any peo­ple nearby will also be killed. This is unavoidable.

World opin­ion is divided. Sup­port­ers of Israel’s actions argue that the Jew­ish state has no choice but to do what­ever it takes to stop a ter­ror­ist group from fir­ing rock­ets into towns, and they state that any other coun­try would do the same thing. Oppo­nents state that Israel’s response is dis­pro­por­tional and exces­sive because hun­dreds of Pales­tini­ans — includ­ing inno­cent ones — are dying in Gaza in just a few days even though Hamas’ mis­siles have only killed a dozen in Israel over the past sev­eral years. (The group that is prob­a­bly most in the mid­dle is the Pales­tini­ans who sup­port Fatah. The mod­er­ate party detests Hamas, but they can­not afford to be seen as unsym­pa­thetic to the plight of peo­ple in Gaza.)

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My Analysis

Although I am biased, I can­not help but blame Hamas for the cur­rent con­flict for sev­eral sim­ple reasons:

• If Hamas did not shoot rock­ets into Israel, then the Jew­ish state would have no need to block­ade the ter­ri­tory and attack in response.
• If Hamas was only con­cerned about block­ades and bor­der clos­ings, then they would attack Egypt as well. When the cur­rent con­flict started, Egypt closed the bor­der and pointed machine guns towards Gaza. Egypt wants noth­ing to do with Hamas as well. But the fact that Hamas tar­gets only Israel proves that they have an irra­tional hatred of the Jew­ish state.
• If you pay close atten­tion to com­ments that Hamas makes to the press, you will always see that the ter­ror­ist group always advo­cates for a cease-fire once Israel retal­i­ates. Hamas never wants a final peace set­tle­ment that would allow the two sides to live in peace. There is a pat­tern in Gaza: Hamas attacks, Israel responds, Hamas demands a cease-fire, Israel agrees, and Hamas builds up its weapons arse­nal once again. Then the cycle repeats. Hamas can­not be rea­soned with rationally.
• Of course, many more peo­ple in Gaza have died as a result of Israel’s mil­i­tary actions than Israelis as a result of mis­siles fired by Hamas. But this is a dis­trac­tion from the prior three issues that I just described. In the end, Hamas is respon­si­ble for all of the death and destruc­tion. Hamas stores weapons in — and fires them from — hos­pi­tals, schools, and homes. So when Israel responds, these build­ings are destroyed, and any peo­ple inside are usu­ally killed.

Right now, I am sit­ting in a bar in Ris­hon Lezion, the main city south of Tel Aviv, eat­ing din­ner and watch­ing the news with friends. I am thirty min­utes north of Gaza and an hour north­west of Beer­sheva. In the­ory, if Hamas can hit Beer­sheva, which they just did ten min­utes ago, then they can hit the city where I live. Until now, the war had just been some­thing on tele­vi­sion, but now it is some­thing much more to me.

Prior let­ter: The Opti­mistic Future.