Barack Obama got to the heart of the matter in July when he visited Sderot in Israel, a town in range of Hamas missiles. ‘If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep,’ Mr Obama said, ‘I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect the Israelis to do the same thing.’ No less acutely, he observed that it is ‘very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognise your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon and is deeply influenced by other countries’.
As the rest of the world makes one of its periodic moral flyovers to scrutinise the latest round of bloodshed in the Middle East — and none can doubt the terrible human cost of the Israeli assault on Gaza — it is as well to recall the sequence of events that led to the air-strikes. Hamas (which controls the Gaza Strip that Israel quit in August 2005) and Israel had been observing a nervous six-month ceasefire brokered by the Egyptians. Israel offered a resumption of trade with Gaza if the violence ceased completely. It did not. Even at its lowest level, 15 to 20 rockets were still raining down on Israel each month. Hamas also abused the cessation of violence to re-arm itself via the underground tunnels that run from Gaza into Egypt. The Islamist terror group then announced the end of the ceasefire, claiming that Israel’s refusal to resume trade was a demonstration of its bad faith. On Wednesday, 70 rockets were fired on Israel. Three days later, Israel began its assault on Gaza.
Let us be clear: Hamas chose, and chooses, violent confrontation. In this context it is notable that both Egypt and Fatah have laid the blame for the bombardment of the past few days squarely at its door. Of course, the conflict is asymmetric, in the sense that the Qassam rockets deployed by Hamas are not as sophisticated as Israel’s modern ordinance. But proportionality does not require Israel to lower itself to Hamas’s technological level. Proportionality required restraint from Israel until restraint was no longer rational: that point was passed last week, if not before.
The high death toll — apparently 281 at the time of writing — is self-evidently ghastly. But those who rightly lament the civilian casualties should direct their fury at Hamas, which deliberately embeds its fighters and weapons in the civilian population. Indeed, the callous disregard of Hamas towards those it claims to champion was demonstrated on Friday when one of its rockets misfired and killed two Palestinian schoolgirls.
Those who criticise Israel’s actions should consider what Britain would have done if Sinn Fein had come to power in the Irish Republic during the Troubles and rockets had been regularly fired across the border. It is hard to imagine Her Majesty’s Government sitting idly by. Equally, it is hard to imagine that any Israeli government would have acted differently from the way this Kadima-led coalition has. Israeli elections are indeed imminent. But simply to interpret the military response as a cynical electoral ploy to shore up Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, and Ehud Barak, its defence minister, is to see the conflict through lazy Western eyes: from its foundation Israel has believed, correctly, that its very survival is at stake. Its leaders have acted accordingly, often in a fashion that baffles those fortunate enough not to live in nations encircled by foes that call for their extinction.
Hamas is radically different from the old PLO. First, it is Islamist, and second, it is largely dependent on Iran for funding and weapons. (The co-operation between Sunni Hamas and Shiite Iran should give pause to those who dismiss all reports of co-operation between terrorist groups and states across Islam’s confessional divide.) Moderate Arab states feel deep unease about Hamas, as they do about Hezbollah, another Iranian terror proxy force. It is indicative of their concerns that they are soft-pedalling their criticism of Israel — the Arab League meeting has been postponed for four days — as they did in 2006 when it launched a major assault against Hezbollah.
President-elect Obama would be well served to concentrate on the Iranian aspect of the problem, as Dennis Ross, Middle East peace envoy under President Bush Sr and Bill Clinton, and Martin Indyk, an ambassador to Israel under Clinton, are urging him to do. Attempts at direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians will be futile as long as the rejectionists of Hamas remain dominant in Gaza, pawns in Tehran’s chess game. The Camp David talks that came so close to securing a Middle East settlement at the tail end of the Clinton presidency mean that the outline of an eventual Middle East peace deal is already fairly clear. But no progress can be made until Hamas ceases firing rockets into Israel.
In the meantime, the incoming Obama administration should continue with the Bush administration’s efforts to improve governance in the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. It was, after all, the rank corruption of the PA that allowed Hamas to make its electoral breakthrough in the 2006 elections.
This has been a bleak and bloody week in the history of the Middle East, a horrible throwback to the slaughter of the Six Day War and the conflict of 1973. But nothing should detract from the fact that Israel, like every other sovereign state, has the inalienable right to defend its citizens and territory against attack. No progress can be made until the finger-waggers of the West acknowledge that right.
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