What Provoked the Arabs to Attack Israel Again

The Gaza doom loop

What's happening in Israel and Gaza is the near-inevitable result of a grim condition quo.

Past May 13, 2021, viii:00am EDT

Israeli police run afterwards a Palestinian demonstrator at the al-Aqsa Mosque during Israel's Jerusalem Twenty-four hour period on May ten.

Laurent Van Der Stockt/Getty Images

Dozens have already died in the fighting betwixt Israel and Hamas, and more will perish if the fighting continues to escalate.

Merely there is little chance that the root cause of all this death — the long-running political status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — volition be altered in the slightest. Israeli-Palestinian warfare has become routinized; information technology follows a familiar script that repeats itself endlessly.

Since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, there have been iii full-calibration wars and numerous rounds of lower-level fighting. But the basic structure of the conflict — Israel's blockade of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank, and Palestinian rule divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Say-so in the West Bank — has remained remarkably durable.

It would seem as if the current circular of violence emerged out of a complex series of events in Jerusalem, most notably heavy-handed deportment by Israeli police and aggression by far-right Jewish nationalists. But in reality, these events were merely triggers for escalations made almost inevitable by the way the major parties have chosen to arroyo the conflict.

Israeli constabulary entered the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem'south Onetime Metropolis on May 10. The Jerusalem Day holiday celebrates the unification of the city under Israel'due south control following the 1967 Six-Day War, and comes amid protests over the eviction of Palestinian families.

Mahmoud Illean/AP

Both Israeli and Palestinian leadership have basically accustomed the painful political status quo in Gaza, seeing the violence and humanitarian suffering it causes as bad only basically tolerable equally part of an endeavour to secure their hold on power. Israel's leadership bears particular responsibility: As the most powerful actor in the conflict, it has the greatest ability to break the pattern. But the factions in control of Israel's government take potent ideological and strategic reasons for keeping the Gaza policy in place.

As a outcome, the underlying status quo will probable outlive this conflict, guaranteeing more violence.

"It's similar the worst version of Groundhog Day," says Khaled Elgindy, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute. Leaders "just put a Band-aid on it and we go dorsum to the pre-crisis normal."

It's a horrible equilibrium, ane in which "manageable" levels of violence stand in for doing something to really improve the lives of Israelis or Palestinians. It is also a directly issue of the deepest political construction governing the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the iron hand of Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza's edge.

The Israeli-Palestinian doom loop

The current violence began with a series of conflicts in Jerusalem.

Israeli law in the city blocked off the Damascus Gate, a popular gathering place for Arabs during Ramadan, sparking protests. An attempt by Jewish settlers to evict longtime Arab residents of Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, inflamed tensions, leading to vehement clashes with Israeli police. Arab youth attacked ultra-Orthodox Jews in the urban center, and Jewish extremists assailed Arab residents. All of this culminated in a violent Israeli constabulary raid on the al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem's holiest site for Muslims, located on the Temple Mount (the holiest site in the world for Jews).

Then Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem. Ostensibly, this was a display of solidarity with the protesters on the ground. But information technology appears to have been a political calculation — Hamas attempting to capitalize on Palestinian acrimony over the violence in Jerusalem to aggrandize its own influence, especially in the wake of recently canceled Palestinian elections that likely would accept strengthened its political position.

"This is much more about internal Palestinian politics than it is about what's been going on in Jerusalem," says Michael Koplow, policy director at the Israel Policy Forum.

The attacks on Jerusalem crossed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to as a "red line," breaking the unspoken rules that limited the pace and range of rocket attacks to limited barrages more often than not targeting southern Israel. State of israel responded with overwhelming force: massive airstrikes targeting Hamas emplacements in densely populated Gaza. This prompted more than rocket attacks from Hamas and, in turn, more than bombings from Israel. As a result, as of May 12, at least seven people in Israel and around 70 Palestinians had been killed — with no cease in sight.

Simply while the events that led to this indicate are unique, the broader pattern of events is not. This calendar week's violence is office of a recurring pattern adamant by structural factors in the conflict. If the events in Jerusalem hadn't prompted Hamas rocket fire and Israeli escalation, something else almost certainly would have.

"The nearly probable scenario is unfortunately the one we've been in for the past fifteen years," says Ilan Goldenberg, the director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Goldenberg co-authored a written report in 2018 documenting what he terms "the cycle of violence" between Israel and Hamas. It documents the means in which the political status quo is arranged in a way that makes frequent vehement flare-ups all but inevitable.

The stage is set, Goldenberg and his co-authors say, past the policy approaches of both sides. Israel aims to minimize the threat posed by Hamas and other militant factions, imposing a harsh blockade on Gaza that limits the flow of goods and people into the territory. Hamas aims to cement its hold on power and expand its influence relative to its Palestinian rivals, seeing violence against Israel every bit a central tool in this struggle. This creates an underlying reality in which fighting breaks out again and again.

"Eventually, humanitarian and economical pressure builds inside Gaza, and Hamas escalates its apply of violence both to generate domestic political support and to pressure Israel to ease the economical situation," they write. "Israel responds with its own escalation, including military strikes inside Gaza and punitive economic measures that farther choke the Strip."

One time the fighting starts, information technology's not clear how much it'll escalate. Sometimes information technology ends swiftly and with minimal loss of life. Other times — every bit in 2008 to 2009, 2012, and 2014 — information technology turns into an all-out state of war, with hundreds of (more often than not Palestinian) casualties. The electric current fighting is speedily moving in that direction, with Israeli leaders pledging to go along the bombardment of Gaza indefinitely.

"The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] will keep to strike and bring complete silence for the long term," Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on May 12.

A damaged edifice in Gaza City that was hit by an Israeli airstrike on May 12.

Adel Hana/AP

Ultimately, the warring parties either unilaterally make up one's mind to end bombing or else agree to an internationally brokered settlement that does picayune to modify the fundamental dynamics. This is the nature of current conflict: Many people die, and many more suffer, without whatever existent prospect for change.

"The question isn't why this keeps happening," Elgindy says. "It'southward why anyone isn't doing annihilation to foreclose it from [continuing to] happen."

The doom loop has deep roots in Israeli politics

Information technology'due south clear that that this status quo produces horrors. The problem, though, is that these terrible costs are seen as basically tolerable by the political leadership of all the major parties.

Hamas continues to be able to rule Gaza and reaps the political benefits from existence the party of armed resistance to Israeli occupation. Palestinian Authorization leader Mahmoud Abbas appears cowed by Hamas'southward ability — most analysts believe he canceled the Palestinian ballot considering he thought he would lose — and so is content to permit Israel go on his rivals contained in Gaza.

Israel is the most powerful actor of the three: It controls access to the Gaza Strip and operates a military occupation in the West Bank. If the Israeli leadership wanted to accept actions to short-circuit the cycle of violence, similar easing the occludent of Gaza, it could. Just despite the persistent rocket threat, the leadership isn't willing to endeavor something new.

Why?

The last time I was in Israel, on a reporting trip in Nov 2019, I spoke with Yehuda Shaul, the founder of Breaking the Silence, a group that helps Israeli soldiers tell their stories about service in the Palestinian territories. He told me that the traditional categories used to draw politics — left, right, and center — are fundamentally inadequate when information technology comes to explaining what happens in Israel.

These days, he argues, nearly of Israel's leadership falls into what he terms the "looting" camp or the "command" camp.

The annexationists are Jewish extremists, who want to formally seize large chunks of Palestinian country while either expelling its residents or denying them political rights — ethnic cleansing or apartheid. The "control" campsite, which includes electric current Prime Government minister Benjamin Netanyahu, sees things primarily through the lens of war machine and physical security: how the Palestinians are ruled is less important than minimizing the threat they pose to Israeli lives.

"The driving principle [of the control camp] is a national security idea," Shaul explains. "Nosotros are in a naught-sum game: Between the river and the sea, there is room for one sovereign power. It's either the states or the Palestinians."

The status quo in Gaza serves both groups. From the annexationist view, keeping the Palestinians weak and divided allows Israeli settlements to go along expanding and the seizure of both the West Banking company and East Jerusalem to continue quickly. Lifting the blockade on Gaza, and working to promote some kind of renewed peace process involving both Hamas and the Palestinian Dominance, jeopardizes the agenda of "Greater Israel."

"It is Israeli policy to fragment Palestinians politically and geographically, to isolate them into these dissimilar areas. It'due south classic colonial strategy of separate and conquer," Elgindy says.

Meanwhile, the "control" military camp sees this as the to the lowest degree bad option. Any easing of the Gaza blockade would risk Hamas breaking containment and expanding its presence in the W Bank, which would be far more dangerous than the rockets — a threat heavily mitigated by State of israel's Iron Dome missile defence force system. In this analysis, periodic flare-ups are a price that has to be paid to minimize the threat to Israeli lives — with heavy escalations similar this one required to restore a basically tolerable condition quo.

I witnessed one of these flare-ups on the same trip where I met Shaul, reporting from Israel and the West Bank as Israel and Hamas exchanged fire. After a few days of mayhem and air raid sirens, life but went back to normal in Israel — as if cipher had happened, as if dozens of Palestinian lives had not just been snuffed out (at that place were no Israeli deaths in that round).

"A lot of the Israeli security and political establishment has sort of internalized this idea that ... in that location'due south a sort of stable equilibrium," says Koplow. "You become occasional rockets, and Israel volition respond with a few missile strikes on Gaza, but it happens very occasionally and things immediately quiet downwards."

For much of Israeli history, a 3rd camp — which Shaul calls the "equality" camp — presented a different vision for achieving Israel's security needs. Epitomized by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's authorities formed in 1992, it believed that Palestinians deserved a political voice as a matter of principle — either in a single state or, more typically, through a two-state arrangement. Such an agreement would sap Palestinian support for violent groups similar Hamas past taking away the population's underlying grievance: the lack of a state to telephone call their own.

Still the equality camp practically collapsed after the failure of the peace process and the second intifada in the early 2000s. Its political vehicles among Israeli Jews, the Labor and Meretz parties, make up a footling more than x percentage of State of israel's current Knesset (parliament). The result is indefinite occupation with no terminate in sight; no central rethinking of the approach to either Gaza or the Westward Bank.

"Equally a society, the view is that the risks necessary to solve [the disharmonize with the Palestinians] are non worth it and information technology won't work," Goldenberg says. "So all we can deal with is the problem in front end of us today, without really thinking long-term. Nosotros'll bargain with the other problems tomorrow — that'south basically the Israeli mental attitude."

None of this excuses Hamas from its part in escalating the electric current conflict, or makes the deep divisions between Palestinians themselves less significant. The status quo is not simply Israel's error.

But the Israeli government sets the terms for how Israelis and Palestinians interact, the underlying policy architecture that shapes the options available to the diverse sides.

An image of the Dome of the Rock synthetic with rubber bullets and stun grenades fired by Israeli police against Palestinians in Jerusalem on May 10.

Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Then long equally the annexation and control camps are in the commuter'southward seat in State of israel, information technology will pursue policies that aim to maintain control over Palestinian land while simultaneously minimizing the security threats intrinsic to the enterprise of military rule over a hostile population. The Gaza situation is an outgrowth of this reality, the sort of policy that one pursues in a world where a more cardinal revision is ideologically foreclosed.

Disallowment some international intervention, information technology'south difficult to see how things get much amend — and easy to see how the same terrible things proceed happening, over and over over again.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/22430488/israel-gaza-war-2021-hamas-sheikh-jarrah

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