So now that Israel has declared that Israel, in Olmert’s words, has “reached all the goals of the war, and beyond” and unilaterally is declaring a ceasefire, what happens next?
Clearly a lot depends on the next sets of moves by all involved. As the previous cite continues:
I personally am disappointed that Israeli leadership is now committing to withdrawal within the week, for precisely the reason that the second commentator expresses. My preference would be to stay put doing no more than taking out Hamas rocket launchers used to continue attacks if they happen, until third parties present some means by which a moderately long lasting halt to rocket attacks can be assured while allowing other supplies in without restrictions. (Of course those will not be completely successful, but it is enough.) Then withdraw, quickly followed, from a position of strength, significant unilateral concessions to the PA in the West Bank as a means to jump start some meaningful final status negotiations, and to strengthen the hands of those Arab powers who want to deal with Israel and to diminish Hamas and other Islamists.
Of course most of this could have been accomplished without as big of a ground operation in my mind.
But if Hamas does refrain until after Israel withdraws, and Israel does withdraw without getting such third parties assurances or those assurances are made and Hamas begins rocket attacks anew within a few weeks any way, then the future depends heavily on how the world responds. A lukewarm or even Hamas sympathetic response from major world players is possible; they may do nothing leaving Israel no choice but to re-engage and the world’s players may again condemn Israel for responding in the only way it sees left open to it. That possible series of events would poison the well for any future Israeli concessions in the West Bank for many years to come. It cannot be allowed to occur.
This will never happen unless the US leans very heavily on Israel to do so, and maybe not even then. The only ‘significant’ concession would be to reduce the footprint of the Israeli West Bank settlements, and the infrastructure to protect and connect them. That has never happened; that footprint has only grown, and never shrunk, over the past 30 years.
Israel apparently desires an increasingly radicalized Palestinian and Arab population, because that’s going to be the only lasting goal of this Gaza operation. Palestinian support for Hamas a month ago was below 20%; now Israel has empowered them again, regardless of what it may have done to their ability to fire missiles into Israel.
If Israel managed to destroy Hamas, lock stock and barrel, it would only be replaced by something more radical.
But yes, meanwhile other building has been allowed to continue, and too little actual dismantlement has occurred to count as “significant”. New settlement construction must be frozen and that followed up on as well as following up on dismantlements previously promised.
And there are other concessions that can be made, publicly, such as ceding some on water rights, a real bread and butter issue that matters more over the long term than whether the future Palestinian state is 93% or 97% of pre-1967 borders.
Yes, it is possible that American pressure needs to be applied, (and we’ve had that discussion recently.) These are difficult concessions for any Israeli politician to make, especially with elections coming up. Yet the recent actions may earn the current administration enough toughness cred that the public will allow them to make concessions in the service of future security.
I think there are several different components to this.
Regarding Hamas themselves , the Israeli army was probably getting diminishing returns from ground combat. After several weeks of fighting , its not too hard to believe that Hamas individuals are plain tuckered out, the survivors that is.
Second is the Obama presidency is a reality on Tuesday ,and I would imagine that the Israeli leadership wants to start the new relationship on a positive note, they have pretty much gotten what ever results that they have wanted, from here on, if they had stayed in Gaza would have just caused a steady stream of low level casualties.
Third , from here on , had they continued operations they may have forced Egypt , Jordan, and everyone else who has been reacting positively towards Israel, in the neighborhood, to back pedal and turn on Israel.
Fourth , and not the least last , is that the Israeli people probably want their people back home , and somewhat safe.
Declan
I don’t see how Israel can reasonably expect any more legitimacy than they have already. They sat there and accepted hundreds of rockets and dozens of civilian deaths for months, and still people condemned them for the invasion.
Hamas is going to spin any ceasefire as a victory for them.
I think a lukewarm response if and when the rocket and other attacks resume is the best Israel can hope for.
Military actions should be taken for military reasons. If Israel’s goal was to destroy the rocket launchers, then good - they have done that to whatever degree is reasonable to expect. If Israel expected to gain international sympathy by declaring a ceasefire, I think she will be disappointed.
The fighters Hamas lost will be replaced by people who just had their homes blown up, and now want to fight Israel. The tunnels Israel destroyed will be rebuilt. The weapons Hamas used/lost will be replaced. In essence, we will be pretty much back where we started in three years. This war will accomplish as much as the one in Lebanon did, and that was pretty much bupkis. Except, in that case Hezbollah came out with more power than they had before. That won’t happen for Hamas simply because there’s no real way for them to have more power than they already had.
Exactly. Even as they do one of their all-too-rare dismantlings of an illegal settler outpost, other settlements and infrastructure continue to grow.
Did you know that the Israeli population of the West Bank went from 135,000 in 1995 to 270,000 in 2007? (Neither did I, until recently - stuff like that gets underplayed, or left out altogether, by our mainstream media.) That’s a pretty serious increase of colonization. It’s hard to take seriously Israel’s desire for peace on anything besides their own terms when they let things like that happen.
Dozens of civilian deaths? When? If I understand things correctly, before the latest Israeli attack, Hamas rockets from Gaza hadn’t even injured a single Israeli let alone killed one. Even if that is wrong, certainly the number of Israeli civilians killed by such attacks was very, very low. And Israel hadn’t just been sitting there. Before the latest attack, they launched numerous strikes on Gaza which killed civilians as well as militants.
The reason the Israeli attack has been condemned around the world is because it is widely considered a form of collective punishment; a strategy which is seen as morally equivalent to terrorism. The idea appears to be that if sufficient pain is inflicted on the people in Gaza, they will turn against Hamas. Shimon Peres has said as much recently and Tom Friedman wrote a column in the NYT recently how about how all that civilian suffering in Lebanon and Gaza was a form of “education” for Hezbollah and Hamas.
I’d like to see a cite for those numbers, as well as an answer to 2 important questions:
Do those numbers include East Jerusalem?
How much of the increase is from immigration, and how much is “natural growth” - meaning settlers having children? The reason I ask is that, while very few Israelis that I know of actually moved to the Territories after Oslo, settlers tend to be religious people with large families, and 1995 is when the children of the first generation of settlers (who came there in the early 1970s) started having kids of their own, precipitating a minor “baby boom.”
If a colony grows without an influx of outsiders, is it still colonization?
It can’t be easy to attack an enemy that launches their attacks from an area densely populated with civilians without hitting a few civilians. What steps could Israel have taken to minimize civilian casualties?
To put it bluntly - if five rockets were hitting your town per day, completely at random, would you take your child to the playground? Answer me honestly.
From the numbers I’ve seen, looks like about 50-50. See the table I mention in the first cite below, which shows growth of about 48K naturally and 45K otherwise during the 1995-2003 period.
I’m positive I read the 135K and 270K for 1995 and 2007 on the American Prospect website, which I’ve found factually reliable, but can’t seem to locate those numbers now. However, the table near the bottom of this page, which only covers 1996-2003, gives growth over previous year for 1996, and based on that, we get 138,600 for 1995.
For the 2007 number, I found this PowerPoint which, in Slide 3, gives a 267,500 figure for 2007, and specifically says the figure excludes East Jerusalem.
Absolutely. Has Israel made kids who grew up in West Bank settlements move back within the pre-1967 boundaries after they reached adulthood? In the absence of such a policy, births as well as new colonists create facts on the ground, as the phrase goes, that makes the colonization more rooted and more difficult to undo.
You’re still looking at a limited number of endgame options for the West Bank: voluntary withdrawal by Israel, forced withdrawal of the Palestinians (i.e. ethnic cleansing), assimilation of Israelis and Palestinians alike into a mixed Jewish-Palestinian West Bank/Gaza state, a perpetuation of the current state of apartheid, assimilation of the Palestinians into Israel but as second-class citizens of some sort, unification of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza as a Palestinian state with an Israeli minority…I don’t know if that covers the waterfront, but it’s close.
The increase of West Bank settlements by whatever means make certain outcomes more likely, and other outcomes less likely. The question is: what’s Israel’s supposed goal, and is this increase consistent with, or contradictory to, the attainment of that goal?
They could have decided that certain military objectives were not valuable enough to offset the cost of the unavoidable civilian casualties that they would incurr. That is the question: how much additional benefit was gained by the ground campaign and at what additional cost in terms of civilian deaths and civilian infrastructure damage? It seems to me that the marginal benefit was fairly small and the marginal cost relatively large.
But yes, assuming the decision to achieve a justifiable military objective, and the environment, they did a good job at minimizing civilian losses while not increasing the risks to their own troops.
Nonetheless, deeds committed in the name of self-defense can be equivalent to terrorism.
It hardly appears that the attacks on the West Bank have in any way resembled a surgical strike.
Dropping bombs from the air on civilians with nowhere to flee is an act of terror. I don’t see how any reasonable person can claim otherwise.
If “the world” blockaded my city by land and sea, I’d point out that firing fairly ineffectual rockets at one of the blockading nations was not likely to make our situation better. But I suspect my voice would be drowned out, because you know how most people, anywhere, anytime, react to such things.
Just for context, many of the settlers are Orthodox and have high birthrates, as high or higher than the Arab population of the West Bank. (Secular Israeli Jews tend to have lower birth rates.) So much of that population growth was “natural” not immigration. Not all but much. I note that you make little distinction RTF but it should be noted for the sake of those who do.