LA JOLLA, California — This time, Hamas launched 1,500 rockets that killed six Jews and injured many more, and Israel retaliated. And, as usual, this deadly exchange of fire ended with a “ceasefire,” mediated by some do-gooders, that allows the terrorists to replenish their arsenals with more advanced longer- ranged missiles, and to fight another day when it suits their master, financier and weapon-supplier, Iran.
Now, Hamas is awaiting to collect its rewards: money from the Arabs and from the bankrupt Europeans and Americans for “humanitarian reasons, to rebuild the poor people’s houses destroyed by Israel” etc.We have seen this movie many times before. (Since the Oslo agreement in 1993, the U.S. has given the Palestinians more than 4 billion dollars; In the last four years, the Obama years, the U.S. gave an average of 600 million dollars a year plus 200 million to UNRWA; a good part of these gifts went to Hamas, officially named a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department)
Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi , of the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is an offshoot, will share in the rewards for “working indefatigably to convince Hamas” to please agree to a “hudna,” that temporary ceasefire prescribed in Islamic Scripture, which has been used by the Prophet himself, to be broken at will when conditions are more propitious. On top of lavish praises by Hillary and Obama (and by Israel!) ,Morsi’s prestige in the Arab world will be enhanced; he will get more American billions; his wish to free the blind Sheik from American prison may be granted; and his coup d’etat making him a dictator pre-acquiesced to, and not denounced, by Obama. Not bad for a Muslim Brotherhood leader.
In this whole episode, what remains very puzzling is Israel’s government decision to accept another “hudna,” knowing full well it would be temporary and they would have to fight later under worse circumstances. No wonder 70% of the Israelis were against this “ceasefire,” including the soldiers who were mobilized to put an end to this unending charade. We can only guess what happened: Some observers attribute Israel’s decision to the unbearable pressure put upon them , accompanied with threats to cut supplies of spare parts, by Obama and his envoy, Hillary, who interrupted her Asian trip to come as “savior” and intercede with Morsi to “help Israel.”
Others believe that Obama convinced Israel to avoid a ground war in Gaza with the promise that he would “help” with the gravest threat to Israel, a nuclear Iran.
I will not speculate. What I know is that Israel has never had more optimal geopolitical and military circumstances in all its bloody conflagrations with its neighbors. Here are the most significant:
.- The geographical boundaries of the conflict are small and limited to a part of the Gaza strip. Compare with the Six-day war of 1967, when Israel had to conquer territory many times its own size, extending in three countries, and it did it , even with inferior technology, in six days.
.- The probability of Arab intervention that will widen the conflict is almost nil: Egypt is in turmoil , in the midst of a second revolution against a Morsi dictatorship and Islamist total dominance. Syria is in the throes of a civil war after the dictator, Bashar Assad, killed 40,000 of his own people, and the rebellion is getting stronger every day. Other Sunni Arab countries hate Shiite Iran , the sponsor of Hamas, and fear its nuclearization,and will applaud,secretly,the demise of Hamas.
It was hoped that, this time, Israel would avoid the street-by-street and house-by-house combat and their high level of casualties on both sides just to destroy the launching pads and tunnels which ,as happened before, would be rebuilt and replenished. The majority of Israelis expected this time te annihilation of Hamas’ military might and their civilian leadership who will be dead, in flight, or prisoner. Only then shall the trumpets of Israel declare to the people of Gaza that Hamas is no more, that Israel has nothing against the people, and that they will be rewarded if they work together with the authorities and show them the caches of weapons , the launching sites and the tunnels which will be eliminated at no cost of lives.
As happened in the past — I myself witnessed, in the Six-day-war, in a place called Tubas in the West Bank, how a large group of Jordanians fleeing the combat zone spat on the picture of their king and cursed him, and shouted “Viva Israel, God must be with you since you have won! “when we fed them and listened to their complaints. They believe that “Eddunya ma’a elwaqef” (The world is with the one standing,i.e.the winner) and its corollary “Elli yakhod omna huwa abuna” (He who takes our mother, i.e. the winner, is our father.) That scenario will have to wait.
But politics , and life in general, being so tortuous and counter-intuitive, one can observe this intricate and unpredictable enigma of the Middle-East chaos and conclude (especially after the incredible UN decision to award “Palestine” with the status of “non-member observer state,” a contradiction in terms,) that it is preferable to let Hamastan survive as an antidote to Abbas’ Fatah and perpetuate their antagonistic division.
Could that, with the decision to build a few thousand of residential units in East Jerusalem, be the Israeli response to the stupid and arrogant decision of the clearly irrelevant United Nations?
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Yetiv is a freelance writer and lecturer in La Jolla, California. He may be contacte at isaac.yetiv@sdjewishworld.com
