The Luxury of Iron Dome

Most of the Israeli tweeps I follow on Twitter are leftists. I follow them because I tend to agree with them. The occupation is morally indefensible and nationally suicidal, Bibi and his comrades are compass-less vile warmongers, yada, yada, yada. The whole 9 yards. This Operation Protective Edge is as stupid and morally indefensible as Cast Lead and Defensive Shield before it.
But...
What in God's name is a government and army supposed to do when 100 missiles a day are fired willy-nilly into your territory? Every single former interlocutor with Hamas reports that Hamas had ample time amidst unambiguous signals of restraint from the dithering Israeli security cabinet to try to ramp down this confrontation, and the universal and consistent message from Hamas, from the Islamic Jihad, and from the Popular Resistance Committees of Gaza was a defiant "NO!"

So I read someone like Noam Sheizaf, who so often I find myself in agreement, writing a piece under the completely accurate headline "Why I object to this military campaign, even as missiles fall on my city". But I have to ask Mr. Sheizaf, and all the others who hold the same opinion - yes, this bloodshed is the direct result of the blind & idiotic 47-year long occupation, but if there were no Iron Dome missile defense, and that M75 rocket that was intercepted over the Azrieli Towers had reached its target, would you still be able to pen such a piece? 

You see, Mr. Sheizaf, the missile hasn't actually fallen on your city. You have the luxury that your counterparts in Gaza don't - an army and a civilian government which protects you when you are under attack. It's true that this is the same government that has spurned peace overtures, that exacerbates the conflict, that defies international law. But today, having placed you in such grave danger, it is saving your life. 

Can't say the same for Hamas.

Operation Protective Edge vs. Operation Ramadan

I meant this to go up last night, and saved it only as a draft. In the meantime, both of my "indicators" came true today:

And so it begins, the next stage. In the wake of an attempted "pause" that fizzled out, rocketeers from Gaza - some certainly Hamas this round - fired nearly 70 rockets into Israel in the last 24 hours, and tonight the Israel Air Force and Navy launched a rain of fire on Gaza in an operation dubbed in English "Protective Edge" and in Hebrew צוק איתן, so the English is not exactly literal. Whatever its name, the coining of an operational name is meant to communicate to the Israeli citizenry that the Government of Israel has finally made up its mind. After 4 days of hemming and hawing (which brought the long-simmering feud between Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to the breaking point) the folks at the Kiryah were instructed to produce another tough-sounding 2-word combina and let 'er rip.
For every onlooker who believes this tit-for-tat was orchestrated by an Israel chomping at the bit to torpedo the recently announced Palestinian unity government, there is a similar contingent who are convinced that Hamas was itching for a grand confrontation with the Zionist occupiers during the sacred month of Ramadan.
Both conspiracy theories sound wise and plausible; far more likely neither is true. Instead, the simple explanation seems best. The discredited US "peace processors" who argued  that the absence of even the hint of a diplomatic process would lead to certain disaster turn out to be exactly correct. In this conflict, take away the diplomats and all you have left are angry, humiliated people with long-festering grudges. 
Predictably, the Twitter-verse is immediately taking sides. In one corner are the #GazaUnderAttack people. who are blind to the horror of lobbing rockets willy-nilly onto a civilian population. In the other corner are the #IsraelUnderFire folks who are blind to the horror of lobbing not-nearly-as-precise-as-imagined munitions onto a civilian population.
If experience is a guide, the Islamic Jihad rocketeers will pull out their longer Fajr models, the ones that can put metropolitan Tel Aviv on edge. Two things to be looking for in the next 24 hours: 1) will anything be heard from Hezbollah in the north? and 2) how widespread will the next round of military mobilization (formally announced at a "mere" 1,500 so far) in Israel be? Watch for these two indicators - they will tell you if this pile-on will be more like 2009's Cast Lead (i.e., ground invasion) or 2012's Pillar of Defense (i.e., air alone). So far, less than 12 hours in, it looks like this confrontation will be more like the latter than the former.

Israel: The Ramadan Intifada?

I just returned from a 10-day visit to Israel, my first in 2 years - quite possibly the longest break in what has turned out to be more than 25 visits. My flight from Ben Gurion airport occurred on the eve of the discovery of the corpses of 3 Jewish teenagers who had gone missing 2 weeks earlier. This came after an over-the-top security crackdown in the Palestinian West Bank in which 5 Palestinians were killed in confrontations with the Israeli army.
Within 24 hours of the discovery of the 3 teenagers, a Palestinian teenager was found dead in a forest on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the most reasonable conclusion is this murder was a revenge act carried out by Jewish civilians. The Israeli capital has since been witness to ongoing and growing skirmishes which have wrecked the municipal light rail connector to a northern Jewish suburb of Jerusalem. All this takes place during the first week of the Islamic commemoration of the first divine revelation to the prophet Muhammad - a time of increased religious sensitivity - coinciding with the Muslim month of Ramadan. Israeli authorities blocked the family of the slain teenager from congregating at the Noble Sanctuary of the Dome of the Rock, and this Friday morning's upcoming communal prayers at the Noble Sanctuary hold the potential for a new crescendo in intercommunal violence.
At the same time, and quite certainly unrelated to the savage death of these children, a barrage of Gaza-based rockets have been falling on southern Israel, with the predictable Israeli response: air attacks on targets in crowded Gaza with the attendant "collateral damage," a visible strengthening of ground forces around the Gaza ghetto, and behind-the-scenes consultations with Egypt, who convey Israeli demands to the leaders of Gaza, and provide assistance in closing off Gaza from the Egyptian side.
Israel is now descending into a cruel kind of hell - not unprecedented - but heavily laden with potential regional repercussions. Within hours of the discovery of the 3 teenagers, the inner sanctum Israeli security cabinet held an emergency meeting, where a significant rift emerged between one camp that wanted to "go medieval" on Hamas and the Palestinian territories, and one camp counseled a more attenuated response. The security cabinet has now met 4 times in the last 3 days, unable to reach a unanimous consensus on how to proceed. In the meantime, Israel's army anticipates a limited mobilization and contemplates far more.
Nothing of the last 4 days represents a change in the broader regional equation. There will be no truly destabilizing state-to-state conflict as a result of this blood revenge. Egypt's generals are not going to go to war even if Israel launches yet another full-scale assault on Gaza; Syria is completely consumed with her own struggles with ISIS, as is Jordan. There will be no war in Israel-Palestine this summer.
But there is the possibility of two kinds of unmanageable outcomes: a growing Palestinian expression of despondency and humiliation in the form of a new "shaking off"/intifada, which would mark a historic low point in the Israeli/Palestinian struggle; and a sudden escalation of the missile strategy on the part of Gazan rocketeers and possibly Hezbollah to the north, placing far more than the southern Gaza-ring Jewish citizens under potential threat. Either scenario is judged manageable by Israeli security analysts (armed with UAVs and Iron Dome), but if history teaches us anything, it is that events can often go careening off into trajectories not anticipated by the wisest of generals.
The "peace process" is dead. The Palestinian unity government, which is a precondition for any successful 2-state solution, is teetering, to the delight of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who has no interest in consummating any kind of political deal at this time.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are frustrated and enraged, but both sides hold chess pieces in a complicated balance-of-terror calculus. What is true of this dangerous moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the same truth that has dictated the conduct of all sides since the struggle commenced. There are no peacemakers amongst the government in Jerusalem, the council of clerics in Gaza, and the technocracy in Ramallah. In any event, the general populace of Jerusalem, Gaza, and Ramallah are taking matters into their own bloody hands. All sides sadly must play out their bad positions until they conclude they must try another way. The history of this conflict is that each side is convinced that the other side only "understands" violence and threat. In the absence of a political process, communal violence and more-tit-for-less-tat reprisals are the standard operating procedure. 
This slow-motion descent into savagery will have to play itself out, until someone says "uncle." Innocents and guilty on both sides alike will die as a result. Be prepared for a rough, but not apocalyptic, Ramadan intifada for the month of July.

Let's Make A Deal

The prisoner swap scheduled to take place next week -- over 1,000 Israeli-held prisoners for one kidnapped Israeli soldier -- has generated a great deal of speculation and analysis. There are so many potential dots associated with this surprising bargain that need to be connected -- so many players, so many "under the table" components -- that virtually anybody with even a half-baked "insight" has felt compelled to rush forward with a "thoughtful" interpretation of what looks on the surface to be a hard-to-swallow transaction. The more dots, the grander the interpretation and more fanciful the account of the Gilad Shalit deal, bordering on full-blown conspiracy theories. The consumer of analytical pieces on the Arab-Israeli conflict oftentimes feels that he who connects the most dots wins: whoever manages, by dint of knowing obscure facts and being privy to the "inside baseball" machinations of all the players, to create a grand unifying theory that ties together every loose end has probably got the story right.

In this case, however, the less dots connected, the closer one comes to what I believe is the true story.

The most grandiose "connect all the dots" interpretations have come from not a few Israeli journalists, usually of leftist sympathies, and also from the Iranian media, who have speculated that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is "clearing the decks" of all old business, thereby strengthening his domestic stature, in anticipation of launching a military strike against Iranian nuclear sites. In this version of things "as they really are," even this week's US announcement of the uncovering of a sinister Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on American soil is part of the groundwork in anticipation of a coordinated attack on Iran.

If, however, we step back from these preposterous conspiracy tales and concentrate on the principal players in the deal, we might draw a different conclusion.

Who then are the players? First, we have HAMAS in Gaza and to a lesser degree in Damascus. Second, we have the Israeli coalition government of PM Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Third, we have the Egyptian military junta (the "Supreme Council of the Armed Forces"; or SCAF) in Cairo. Finally, we have the exchangees and their surrogates: on the Israeli side we have Gilad Shalit's family and friends; and on the Palestinian side we have hundreds of detainees, some convicted of murder, some detained for less weighty security reasons. Seen from this more direct perspective, we don't have so many dots to connect.

Instead, what we have is a deal that makes sense for everyone involved. As with all plausibly successful transactions in the Arab-Israeli conflict, everyone can walk away claiming victory, and everyone also loses.

First, let's look at HAMAS. HAMAS hasn't had much going for it in recent months. Inside Gaza, HAMAS was reportedly losing its popularity, unable to convincingly move the needle in any positive way for the residents of the Strip. A unification deal with the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority unraveled, and the PA campaign at the UN left HAMAS without a viable strategy. The component of HAMAS based in Damascus was also facing the prospect of diminished influence as Syria descended into near-civil war. So it made sense for HAMAS to slightly alter its negotiating stand in the Shalit package in order to sweeten the deal for Israel, and thereby gain back a bit of stature.

On to the Israelis: PM Netanyahu has just passed through a very difficult summer domestically and internationally. The unprecedented "social justice" campaign and the continued uncertainty created by the Arab Spring caused the typically reluctant Netanyahu to take a decision on a matter of national consensus, to bring a hapless soldier home from captivity. With the military and intelligence communities prepared to sign off on a slightly sweetened package, Netanyahu likely saw a window of opportunity suddenly open and soon close, and took the deal.

Interlocutor Egypt has faced growing domestic and international opprobrium, the latter directly related to SCAF's sclerotic response to last month's momentary crisis with the Israeli embassy fiasco. SCAF's standing hardly improved in the wake of the Maspero pogrom this month. Here was a chance to rehabilitate the international respectability of SCAF.

A sidebar to this story is the heroic status of the Shalit family in Israeli reckoning. It is not easy for outsiders to understand the special status that families of hostages hold in Israeli society. Some observers of Israel stand in awe of the special regard such families tend to receive; on the other hand, Israeli leaders can be drawn into entertaining ridiculously lopsided arrangements because of the cultural status accorded such families by the media and political elites. Even so, the Shalits have been relatively ineffective in hastening their son's homecoming.

The Palestinian detainees, particularly the hardcore HAMAS vanguard, have practiced the art of sumud ("steadfastness") to perfection. A few of the soon-to-be released detainees have been under Israeli detention for over 30 years, and those that are not being released have reportedly accepted their fate for the sake of their brothers and sisters. Israel clearly crossed through some of its so-called "red lines" -- but not all. It is not the first bitter pill to be swallowed by the Israelis in such deals, but in the end it looks like it was HAMAS that blinked most recently, allowing for the deal to be made.

The outlines for this deal have been on the table for over 3 years. With every delay, the terms of the deal tightened. All 3 players stumbled into an international environment which begged for closure to this one tiny irritant against a complex weave of problems which cannot be resolved. The deal was always out there to be made. Reluctantly, they all stumbled into the chance to each improve their own standing, if only for a news cycle. Nothing more.