War as a Distraction

What do you do when you have 50% unemployment, your regional allies are no longer tenable for one reason or another and life for average citizens is mired in hopelessness, suffering without any end in sight, dire poverty and a government that seems only able to the meager budget it has on munitions and their deployment? Add a neighbor that you have richly and continuously defined as the devil himself, that your basic political charter was born of destroying this devil, and you have an estimated ten thousand rockets and missiles (incapable of specific targeting), the ability to sacrifice your own citizens (men, women and children) as bloodied victims with global sympathy for the images of carnage you are able to generate. This defines that portion of Palestine between Israel and Egypt, where 1.7 Palestinians (almost all Sunnis) live: the Gaza strip.

As Hamas lost the sympathetic Muhammad Morsi’s fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Brotherhood as an ally-government in neighboring Egypt, as they had to distance themselves from the Sunni-killer Bashar al-Assad (Alawite/Shiite) regime in Syria, and as Israel clamped down around Gaza’s natural borders, Hamas was running out of options and rapidly approaching a “nothing left to lose” scenario (“option zero”). Struggling for economic subsistence, recently Hamas even agreed to a “unity government” with West Bank Palestine’s “Fatah,” Hamas’ moderate political rival, but the concessions angered many in Hamas and generated virtually no economic support for the Strip.

Gazan leadership opted to spend what money they had building lots of exceptionally well-engineered, steel and concrete reinforced tunnels (one is pictured above) into Israel, gathering as many rockets as they could find and training soldiers for war with Israel. As its 40,000 government workers struggled without pay, Gaza seemed cornered with no place to go. The Israel blockade and the closure of the Egyptian border decimated the Gazan economy. If the leadership were going to maintain any semblance of political power, they had to prove to the local population that their focus on military counter-measures against Israel would somehow lead to a better life for average Gazan Palestinians.

Quite willing to store arms in classrooms, station rocket launchers near schools and hospitals or in heavily populated residential areas, Hamas was able to generate reams of photographs and video footage of civilian casualties, particularly children, attributed to the “overkill” of the Israeli military’s response to the two thousand or so rockets Hamas launched into Israel. Meanwhile, while Israel lost soldiers (most in scrambled Hamas attacks through those notorious tunnels), its highly effective anti-rocket defense system (anti-rocket missiles known as the Iron Dome) worked so well that there were no off-setting hordes of Israeli civilian casualties to counter the sympathy-generating Gazan bloody images.

The sympathy based on this imagery alone has generated harsh global criticism of Israel – which asked the question of “what happened to the complete demilitarization of Gaza that Hamas agreed to in a treaty” that simply fell on deaf international ears. The United Nations even hinted that there might be subsequent war crimes prosecuted against Israeli commanders and politicians as a result of the moves that the Jewish state simply views as a path to its own survival.

When Ben Gurian International Airport – Israel’s commercial air connection to the rest of the world – was hit by rocket fire, as international carriers (including American flights under orders from the FAA) cut off their flights, some argued that this was the final straw that would force the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to finish off Hamas. Others said it was clear evidence to the Palestinian people of the success of Hamas hit-and-run ground attacks and surface-to-air rocket slams into Israel. Finally, Hamas was able, they reasoned, to inflict some serious economic damage on Israel.

As much as Gaza’s ordinary residents want all the violence to stop, they also know that they really cannot go back to the pre-conflict life with no jobs and no opportunities. Perhaps Israel, under all this international pressure, would agree to lift a big chunk of their blockade. Maybe Egypt would, as a part of the ceasefire they are championing, agree to re-open their border with Gaza and allow trade to reignite. Of the ten thousand rockets and missiles stockpiled in Gaza, as noted above, Hamas has launched 2,000, lost 3,000 to Israeli forces… leaving a hefty 3,000 left to be deployed. They have noted that Israeli forces have missed a lot of those well-engineered tunnels, that they have been arming their forces with small explosive devices that can still inflict a lot of damage on the IDF. Will reason ever enter this equation?

As Hamas’ fatalities mount, rising toward 700 (75% civilian, over 100 of which are children according to the U.N.) against less than 5% of that total for Israel (virtually all IDF), there comes a day of reckoning. Gaza residents are anxiously watching. Hamas has to deliver both a ceasefire and economic concessions from Israel – which is feeling the hot breath of international criticism as well as the hard economic costs to itself. If the war doesn’t settle soon, if casualties and war damages continues to escalate in the Strip, Hamas faces a hopeless population that is capable of turning against their leaders. Results are needed!

“But Hamas’s gains could be short-lived if it does not deliver Gazans a better life. Israel says its severe restrictions on what can be brought into Gaza, such as construction materials, are needed because Hamas poses a serious security threat, and the discovery of the tunnels has served only to validate that concern….

“Gazans did not get a vote when Hamas chose to escalate conflict, nor did they when Hamas selected areas near their homes, schools and mosques to fire rockets from the densely populated strip. At the family house of four boys killed last week by an Israeli strike while playing on a beach, some wailing women cursed Hamas along with Israel.

“‘It comes at an exceptionally high price,’ said Khaled Elgindy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former adviser to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. ‘When the bombs stop and the dust settles, people might have different calculations about cost-benefit.’

“It is also unclear whether, when the fighting ends, Hamas will have the same kind of foreign support it has had in the past to rebuild its arsenal or its infrastructure; Egypt, under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has destroyed hundreds of the tunnels that were used to bring in arms, money and supplies, and has kept the proper border crossing mostly closed. There are also some diplomatic efforts underway seeking to force Hamas to surrender its weapons in exchange for a cease-fire, a demand it is not likely to accept.” New York Times, July 22^nd. Simply, Gaza’s leaders won’t accept an overall ceasefire without a release of the Israeli blockade, and the last thing Israel wants is an open right for Hamas to import whatever they think they want (like rockets). Impasse and more violence.

It’s hard to see the winners in this conflict, if indeed there are any. You can sympathize or blame one side or the other. But in the end, this is about suffering and pain with too many victims. One can only hope that when the rockets and bullets do stop flying, somehow this becomes a tipping point for positive change in this war-torn region. We have to pray that this does not become just one more, long pause before death and destruction return to the scene of the crime.

I’m Peter Dekom, and understanding the variables means looking at the horrific conflicts from every side of the destructive equation.