by Prof. Hillel Frisch
To understand this, one must reflect on the strategic objectives of the major actors regarding the southern front.
Gazan Palestinians rioting at border fence, photo via IDF Flickr CC
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,292, September 17, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel’s inability to
thwart Hamas on the Gaza front, even as it persistently worsens the
lives of the 20,000 Israeli citizens who live in the “Gaza envelope,” is
a national shame. Yet PM Benjamin Netanyahu is correct that this pain
must be borne as Israel focuses on the Iranian threat and Israel’s
northern front.
It is shameful that Israel permits the Qatari
envoy to distribute cash to Gaza – cash that certainly finds its way to
Hamas coffers – only to be repaid by Hamas-incited violence along the
border fence.
It is shameful to sit by and watch as Hamas
continuously innovates new means of violence – first, weekly
demonstrations; then daily harassments using noise, smoke, garbage, and
excrement; then incendiary balloons; then balloons booby-trapped with
explosives; and now explosives-laden drones – while the IDF seems frozen
in its responses.
It is shameful to watch the enemy use cheap and
plentiful means to undermine Israeli prophylactics whose costs, like
those of the fence and the underground wall, run into the billions.
It is difficult to watch the Israeli army, once
famous for its daring innovation and courage, become (or seem to become)
helplessly defensive.
Yet PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach – as
unpopular and emotionally unpalatable as it might be – is
geostrategically correct. The southern front must remain as quiet as
possible for the time being, even at the cost of the punishing toll
Hamas extortion is taking on the inhabitants of Sderot and the
neighboring communities and kibbutzim. It is the right approach even at
the cost of the shame and indignation most Israelis feel at giving in to
that extortion.
To understand this, one must reflect on the strategic objectives of the major actors regarding the southern front.
By far the most important objective, from Israel’s strategic perspective, is that of Iran.
Iran wants to spark war on Israel’s southern front
to deflect attention away from its strategic buildup in Syria,
Hezbollah’s Lebanon, and Iraq. The long-term objective of that buildup
is to solidify the missile threat against Israel. To achieve this end,
Iran is using Islamic Jihad as a tool to provoke Hamas and Israel into a
large-scale provocation.
This also explains why Egypt is so energetically
involved in keeping the southern front quiet. Like Jerusalem, Cairo
(along with the other Sunni states) wants the heat to be on Iran and
Israel’s northern front.
Without Iranian backing, both Hezbollah and Hamas
will be reduced over time to the stature of the kinds of small local
terrorist movements Israel has lived with almost since its
establishment. Terrorist organizations are only powerful to the degree
that they enjoy the power of a state behind them.
One has only to compare the fate of ISIS, which
had no state sponsor, with that of Hezbollah, a state and army contained
within a larger state whose own army is helpless. ISIS, a major social
phenomenon and political actor that erased a major barrier between major
Arab states, succumbed relatively quickly to Russian and allied air
power and small ground forces that were brought to the field either by
the allies or by the Kurds.
Hezbollah, by contrast, dominates Lebanon, thanks to Iranian support.
One of the reasons Israel wants the US and others
to subject Iran to biting economic sanctions is to reduce its ability to
finance Hezbollah and Hamas. A quiet southern front is required to
ensure that focus.
The same quiet is required in order to concentrate
attention on Iran’s strategic buildup in Syria, Hezbollah’s Lebanon,
and Iraq. Naturally, Tehran wishes attention to be deflected from that
buildup, which is designed to concretize Iran’s missile threat against
Israel.
Preventing the Iranian buildup might require
massive retaliation in Lebanon – an outcome that would bring about a
campaign of massive de-legitimization against the Jewish State. At such a
critical time, why waste Israel’s precious few reserves of legitimacy
on the far less lethal southern front?
Hamas’s strategic objective is different from that
of both Iran and Israel. The former wants a hot war on the southern
front, and Israel and its tacit Sunni Arab allies want no war. Hamas
wants to continue to use intermittent and limited violence to extort
Qatari aid and Israeli concessions, which include indirect subsidies –
like the creation of a new electricity line from Israel, which Hamas
knows Israel will subsidize for a considerable period of time (as it has
done in the past, in another shameful act).
Despite election rhetoric, no serious politician
or political party disagrees with Netanyahu’s reading of Israel’s
geostrategic predicament, his steadfast approach to handling it, or the
need to bear the pain and shame of a quiet southern front.
Netanyahu’s detractors, Ganz and Lapid (and, to a
much lesser degree, Yaalon), take him to task for failing to leverage
the past three and a half years to explore international and regional
schemes that supposedly would put Gaza on a trajectory of peace.
Netanyahu’s acumen and courage stand out against
these detractors’ empty rhetoric. They should read Professor Benny
Miller, an astute geostrategic Israeli scholar, on regional war and
peace in the Middle East. He states that outside powers are helpful in
ending wars and preserving cold wars, but it is local powers that decide
on war and peace.
Israel’s enemies know what they want, and it is
certainly not peace. So much for the importance of international and
regional schemes.
Only another round of war, ending in Israeli
victory, will do in the case of Hamas – but not right now. Iran and the
northern front are far more important for the foreseeable future.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September 14, 2019.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-tolerate-hamas/
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