Israel Gearing Up for Long-Term Action Against Hamas (UPDATED: News Round-Up & Commentary)

by Damozel | The current death toll is 225, according to The New York Times.  And there are more airstrikes to come.

Israeli military officials said the airstrikes, which went on into the night, were the start of what could be days or even months of an effort to force Hamas to end its rocket barrages into southern Israel. The operation could include ground forces, a senior Israeli security official said.

Palestinian officials said that most of the dead were security officers for Hamas, including two senior commanders, and that at least 600 people had been wounded in the attacks.  (NYT)

Barak Ravid, Haaretz correspondent, says that the operation has been in preparation for six months and was the fruit of "[l]ong-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public."

The disinformation effort, according to defense officials, took Hamas by surprise and served to significantly increase the number of its casualties in the strike.

Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well.

This intelligence-gathering effort brought back information about permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps, the homes of senior officials and coordinates for other facilities.   (Haaretz)

According to them, they did all they could to give peace a chance.  Hmmm.  I am not sure that the blockade of Gaza qualifies as "giving peace a chance."

 In a public message to international media, Livni said Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to give peace a chance, but Hamas overrun it, leaving the Jewish state with "no other option but to strike" in order to protect its citizens.

 Israel would continue to provide humanitarian aid in order to minimize the damage to the civilians, added Livni, stressing that Hamas should be held responsible for both the artillery attacks against Israel and Israel's military response. (China View)

But holding Hamas responsible doesn't preclude holding Israel responsible as well, of course. As always, each side is blaming the other.  Hamas clearly decided to start this round of fighting and  to end the ceasefire, making the usual argument for weakness and impulsiveness in the face of a grievance:  that violence is the only possible response.  Israel is now making the identical argument.

How this violence would redress its grievance it did not, because it could not, say.  It won't.  But of course this begs the question of Israel's responsibility for everything predating Hamas's response.   

Hamas blamed Israel for the end of the ceasefire on Friday, saying it had not respected its terms, including the lifting of the blockade under which little more than humanitarian aid has been allowed into Gaza....

Israel said it initially began a staged easing of the blockade, but this was halted when Hamas failed to fulfil what Israel says were agreed conditions, including ending all rocket fire and halting weapons smuggling.

Israel says the blockade - in place since Hamas took control of Gaza in June 2007 - is needed to isolate Hamas and stop it and other militants from firing rockets across the border at Israeli towns.

The UN's relief agency says the situation has created a "profound human dignity crisis".

Announcing the end of the truce on its website, Hamas said: "The ceasefire is over and there won't be a renewal because the Zionist enemy has not respected its conditions."...

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Hamas had chosen "violence over truth and rocket-shooting over ceasefire".

He said it showed that Hamas "does not have the best interest of Palestinians in mind".

"We have said publicly on many occasions that we think the continuation of the ceasefire is in the best interests both of Israelis and of Palestinians," he said.  (BBC 12-22-08)

Anyway:

On November 19, following dozens of Qassam rockets and mortar rounds which exploded on Israeli soil, the plan was brought for Barak's final approval. Last Thursday, on December 18, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the defense minister met at IDF headquarters in central Tel Aviv to approve the operation.

However, they decided to put the mission on hold to see whether Hamas would hold its fire after the expiration of the ceasefire. They therefore put off bringing the plan for the cabinet's approval, but they did inform Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of the developments.

That night, in speaking to the media, sources in the Prime Minister's Bureau said that "if the shooting from Gaza continues, the showdown with Hamas would be inevitable." On the weekend, several ministers in Olmert's cabinet inveighed against him and against Barak for not retaliating for Hamas' Qassam launches. (Haaretz)

Was this a disproportionate response?  Perhaps the answer does depend in part on how close you live to Hamas's rockets....or so I tell myself, because I'm trying to keep an open mind, however sickened by the prospect of more of the same.

According to Haaretz,

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert earlier on Saturday said no country in the world would put up with the rocket and missile strikes Israel suffers from and that the time had come to react.

Olmert's words came during a press conference he held hours after the Israel Defense Forces and the IAF carried out attacks in Gaza that Palestinian officials said left at least 230 dead and hundreds wounded.

"Israel has done all it could to preserve the cease-fire with Hamas, but our desire for quiet was met with terror," Olmert said.

Olmert added that Israel "is not itching for a fight, but will not back down from one either."

The Prime Minister also vowed to restore quiet to the lives of Israel's southern residents, adding that they "will not be abandoned." He also said that the IDF operations in Gaza would take time, and asked for patience.

The BBC has an eyewitness account.

Doctors say the operating rooms are full and the morgues are full and they have no place to put the dead bodies.

They are asking for every doctor who is not working today to come and help.

We have seen in the streets of Gaza today and this evening many funerals....

I have witnessed one of the compounds - which is 20m [yds] away from my house - I was standing on the balcony and I have seen the Israeli airplanes hitting the place.

Some of my balcony was damaged and my kid was injured.

Many people were injured inside their houses today.

I saw an Israeli fighter drop a bomb on a building, flattening it. Smoke was coming from it. Kids were panicking and screaming.

It took rescue teams six hours to evacuate injured from the place and they are still searching under the rubble, trying to find any survivors." (12-25-08)

That's a lot of "collateral damage" for what's billed as just the first act in an ongoing series of actions.

As much as one would like to believe that this slaughter will achieve ANYTHING AT ALL that could be weighed against the human cost, I have a hard time believing this.  Maybe they can take out Hamas.  Even if so, it seems doubtful, to put it mildly, that this will end the terrorism against Israel.  For that to happen, other changes would be needed, and unfortunately--- history provides the evidence--- the current response of Israel makes those changes less, rather than more, likely.

Hey, but never mind that.  Who's to blame?  Other bloggers have considered the issue. 

M.J. Rosenberg reckons there is plenty of blame to go around:

Who do I blame other than Hamas and the Israelis? The Bush administration. It forced the election that brought Hamas to power against the strong urgings of the Palestinians and the Israelis. It insisted on democratic elections and then, when it didn't like the result, authorized Israel to do whatever it could to destroy the victors.

This war belongs to Bush, perhaps his Presidency's last violent legacy. (TPM)

There's plenty of Orwellian doublespeak to go around as well.

The Hamas chief in Damascus is threatening revenge against attacks, saying that the time for the third intifada has come.  (Haaretz)

"This Intifada will be peaceful for the Palestinians but lethal for the Zionist enemy," Meshal said, adding that this 'new Intifada,' will "rescue Gaza and protect the West Bank."(Haaretz)

Peaceful for the Palestinians?   Doubtful.

Ian Welsh says:

This beauty from Tzipi Livni is completely Orwellian:

The government ordered the strikes on Hamas only after it saw no other way to stop rocket attacks on its southern towns, she said.

Welsh condemns the attacks.

I can imagine no scenario under which bombing Hamas will stop rocket attacks. In particular, these attacks were aimed at the security forces, killing the police chief and the security chief and 140 Hamas Security forces.

Now, who do you think enforced the truce? Who is it that Hamas uses to make sure rockets only get launched when Hamas wants them to? That would be... the police and the security forces....

[T]hese are the folks who thought they could destroy Hezbollah with an air war and that the route to peace is to continue to build more and more settlements. Either they don't want peace, or they are criminally incompetent, or they are driven entirely by craven personal political motives.

Or....they're tired of  having rockets fired at them by Hamas.   I can see that.  Say that's the sole reason for this.  If so, is this  a proportionate response?  I know Marty Peretz is tired of people asking this question.  Even so.

Scott Lemieux says:

I assume most of our readers will (like me) see the Israeli response as disproportionate and also see Hamas' apparent conviction that this time firing some rockets at civilian targets will achieve political and security goals is roughly as rational as the continuation of the American embargo against Cuba (even if the reverse of the power symmetry makes it more understandable.)

Greenwald also gets it right.

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it."  Still, any minimally decent human being -- even those who view the world through the most blindingly pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive (though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza -- would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.

At Haaretz, Bradley Burston lists, in order to refute, "the worst anti-Israel charges" he expects to see from "the left."

I mention this because I am quite fed up with any criticism Israel does being construed as anti-Israeli. It's not a choice between siding with Israel or siding with Hamas.  Like every other sane person, I deplore Hamas. There are other interests at stake here which I won't set aside for anyone----not my own government and certainly not a foreign one's.

Sadly, our ruling oligarchs seem to extend the notion of patriotism to unequivocal support for everything Israel does with no accountability of any kind for Israel.  That's just insane.  Wanting the best for Israel doesn't mean wanting the worst for the Palestinians.  It's not "either/or."  I want the best for both Israel and the Palestinian people and I want to see an end to Hamas.  But according to history, this is not the way to get any of those goals met.

I understand why some American Jews (e.g., Peretz) are so fearful of anything less than complete and unqualified support for Israel, but that sort of 100%-with-us-or-against-us thinking isn't a good long-term strategy if Peretz and others want to see continuing widespread support for Israel among American taxpayers. 

Greenwald says, and it seems to me that he's hit the nail on the head:

Apparently, not only should we continue to feed Israel billions of dollars a year of American taxpayer money and massive amounts of weapons -- thereby ensuring that the world, quite accurately, perceives their actions as American actions -- but we should then take the position that they are free to do anything they want with it, no matter how extreme or destructive to our interests, and our only view on all of it should be that we blindly support whatever they do.  Or, as Clinton aide Ann Lewis put it during the primaries, in response to Obama's observation that he needn't have a "Likud view in order to be pro-Israel":

The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties. 

Yesterday, the Bush administration applied this mindset, naturally, by expressing unequivocal support for Israel and heaped all blame on Hamas.  And, needless to say, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the administration's view:...[S]he wrote that "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."...

Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation.  It is all one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.  (emphasis added)

I don't know what else to say about Israel's most recent action, except that it seems almost certain not to work over the long haul.

To me, that would have been a sufficient reason for Israel to resort to other measures.  If they could spend six months planning these attacks, it's quite likely they could have spent six months working to avert the necessity of carrying out this action in this manner. 

On the other hand, nobody is firing rockets at my town. Those who think justice/vengeance trumps common sense, the hope of peace, and the lessons of history may applaud this action. 

I can only wring my hands and hope for the best. 

If future events somehow prove me wrong---I doubt that they will, but suppose---I will be very happy to retract..... 

Memeorandum has more.

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