The celebratory gunfire in Gaza that greeted the start of Wednesday’s truce, may have been in part to greet the end of the slaughter of the Israeli onslaught. This has seen at least 162 Palestinians die, the majority of them civilians, and in excess of 1,200 people injured. Some of these will die later and many more will have to live with crippling disabilities for the rest of their lives.
But the hail of bullets that was fired into the air also marked a victory. The Israelis had done their worst and had discovered that in return, Hamas rockets had been fired at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Once again, the Palestinians trapped in the Gaza ghetto had not been cowed and this time, the Israeli Army had hesitated to send in ground forces, because the Netanyahu government had a good idea of the fierce opposition they would meet. No one on either side has forgotten the humiliating defeat that Israel’s once seemingly invincible troops had met in 2006 in southern Lebanon, at the hands of the more lightly armed, but carefully organized Hezbollah militia.
There was however more of a victory on Wednesday than most of the jubilant Hamas fighters realized. That victory is this: Whatever happens now to the cease-fire, Israel has just experienced a psychological and strategic defeat, largely of its own making, which its leaders and generals would do well to recognize and analyze. The truth is, Israel’s strategic and military options are running out. The country now stands alone in the Middle East. Turkey was once a quiet but steadfast supporter. Last week its premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded Israel a “terrorist state.” Senior Israeli officers are being tried in absentia for their part in the murderous attack of the Turkish Gaza aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in which their troops shot down nine Turkish activists who had resisted the boarding of their ship with iron bars and fire extinguishers.
Israel’s refusal to listen even to friends in top military echelons in Ankara, not only undermined Turkish generals but edged the moderate Islamist Erdogan government toward making this astonishing declaration, which will doubtless have made fellow NATO members, not least the United States, particularly uneasy.
Egypt is also no longer a friendly neighbor, prepared to help Israel enforce its economic blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza. The Mursi administration is a long way from repudiating the 1979 Sadat-Begin peace accord between the two countries. However, public opinion on the streets, has swung decisively in favor of the people of Gaza. This has come about, thanks almost entirely to the merciless Israeli assault on the tiny territory’s two million people. Nor can Israel count upon Jordanian pragmatism. The government there is already challenged by popular unrest at sharp reductions in subsidies. Public anger has only been broadened by the enormity of Israel’s behavior toward the luckless inhabitants of Gaza.
The Assad regime can no longer use the issue of the Golan Heights and further Israeli aggression as it levers to keep its own people in order. The new government in Damascus is certain to be entirely uninterested in maintaining the old status quo. Nor can Lebanon be invaded and bent to Israel’s will, as in the past.
The upshot is that Israel finally finds itself entirely friendless in the Middle East. Beyond the region, only the Europeans and the Americans remain on side, and since the Israeli sabotage of progress on the Oslo Accord, not least by its continued building of illegal settlements in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Europeans have begun to waver.
And herein lies the hidden victory that Hamas won with Wednesday’s cease-fire. Israel’s customary violent response had no longer worked and is unlikely ever to work again. There is now only one way that Israel can now move within the geopolitical realities of the region. It has to get absolutely serious about peace.
However, even if this reality is appreciated intellectually by an increasing number of leading Israelis, emotionally the lesson is going to be harder to learn. Every nerve fiber of the Israel political mind is connected to the suppression and humiliation of the feared Palestinians, along with the manic and dangerous dream, that colonies of illegal settlements will ultimately annex all the Occupied West Bank.
Israel has grown and flourished through the conflict it has manufactured since 1948. It does not have a clue how to survive as a state at peace. It fears the consequences. But those triumphant volleys fired in Gaza should signal a start of a move to a new reality, which will bring peace to the region and a decent and honorable settlement for the people of Palestine.
Editorial: Israel running out of shots
