The latest Israeli assault did not start with the deaths of three Israeli teenagers who lived in the illegal settlement of Gush Etzion in the West Bank. Within a week of them being declared missing, thousands of Israeli soldiers raided houses and camps in the West Bank wounding and killing shocked Palestinians and arresting several hundred people including those earlier released as part of a prisoner swap. Tel Aviv, from the beginning blamed Hamas for the kidnapping and later the deaths when the bodies of the three were discovered even though to this day no evidence to back its claim has ever been provided and despite Hamas’s own denial of any responsibility. All this was before Israel launched its air assault on Gaza. It drops leaflets telling ordinary Palestinians to flee just before the bombings and firings. So if ordinary people including women and children are killed en masse you must believe that Hamas is at fault for using them as ‘human shields’ not those who do the actual killing. As one nauseating Israeli slogan in effect says – ‘we use our weapons to protect our civilians, they use their civilians to protect their weapons’. And if any home, hospital, school is deemed to possibly have weapons stored, it becomes a legitimate target and bombed. What can one say about a government that can behave in this way?
But the real reason for Israeli actions lies elsewhere than in presumed vengeance. Earlier this year under great pressure from the Palestinian public in the occupied territories (OT) the two leaderships of Fatah and Hamas came together to try and form a unified government For Israel this would potentially undo what had been secured earlier. Tel Aviv has always preferred dealing alone with Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah as someone much more easily manipulable and controllable in what has been, since the Oslo Accords of 1993, the effective subcontracting of the occupation to the Palestine Liberation Authority (PLA). This arrangement was seriously threatened when in January 2006 Hamas won the elections to the Palestinian parliament overthrowing a Fatah leadership which for various understandable reasons had disillusioned the Palestinian public. What followed was collusion between the US, Israel and Fatah to prevent overall control of the OT by Hamas resulting in internecine fighting leaving Hamas only in control of Gaza, the world’s largest open air prison fenced in on three sides, with Israel controlling access to the coastline and dominating the skies and the Egyptian army (financially beholden to the US) maintaining the tightest of controls over movement of goods and people at its Rafah Crossing.
Underground tunnels have been the only way for Gazans illegally blockaded by Israel (which also controls the Erez Crossing) to bring in construction materials, power generation equipment, necessary supplies of all kinds, and, yes, weapons. An illegally occupied people have the right to use force in their self-defence but not to target or hurt/kill enemy civilians. The latest Israeli ground invasion has been resisted through those acquired weapons and, in causing the deaths of several invading Israeli soldiers, has acted as a real deterrent to Israel even as there is no comparison in terms of body count and injuries or in civilian casualties between both sides. Israel however cannot by law and elementary moral principles claim ‘self-defence’ for attacking a people and territory they illegally occupy or control, though it often tries to justify this through deliberate misrepresentation of international law. The earlier truce proposal brokered by an Egypt hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood and therefore to Hamas, did not demand as it must, that Israel take immediate steps to end its Gaza blockade; a commitment incidentally that Israel agreed to in December 2012 but which it reneged upon. Fatah had earlier joined Israel, US and Egypt in talks that deliberately excluded Hamas but called for an unconditional truce by Hamas. This would have allowed Israel to simply get away with it has done without imposing any restrictions on it. Fortunately, Fatah has now been forced, by public pressure in the West Bank, to align itself with Hamas in saying that ending the blockade is a necessary condition for ending the current fighting. In fact this and other basic humanitarian measures to make life liveable in Gaza were put forward in early July by Hamas for a 10 year truce to all armed activity on both sides! These unobjectionable demands came out in the Israeli Maariv Hebrew newspaper and elsewhere, but have not been highlighted by any Indian paper which says something perhaps about the nature of public discourse here on this issue.
The fact of the matter is that, so strongly is the overall relationship of forces internationally and regionally tilted in Israel’s favour that it feels no compulsion to push for peace or for any kind of a settlement even one which would create a Bantustanised Palestine neither sovereign nor independent in anything but name. The occasional rounds of formal negotiations mediated by that thoroughly dishonest broker the US are simply a ploy to show some possibility of forward movement to keep the US and European governments and their gullible majorities assuaged while Israel carries on expanding and consolidating its control over the West Bank, increasingly making a two-state solution unviable. Given that a bitter and angry Palestinian people are more defiant than their leaderships, periodic deployment of Israel’s military might and mass terror strikes are necessary. These displays are also internally oriented. Israel is a garrison state that must cultivate a garrison mentality domestically. It must paint the Palestinians in general and now Hamas in particular, as grave threats to the very existence of Israel. In fact Israel wants to weaken, not destroy Hamas, for then it would be depriving itself of a much needed enemy figure that poses an ‘existential threat’.
Israel’s military forces are probably the fourth strongest in the world and more than a match for the forces of all the Middle Eastern countries put together. It has nuclear weapons. And it is also backed by the world’s greatest military power. Yet the myth of the ‘perpetual victimhood of Israel’ survives among a global and Indian public which should know better. When will this myth be consigned to the historical dustbin where it belongs?
The author is a former Professor of International Relations and Global Politics, University of Delhi