Biden’s envoy on way to Israel is too little too late to stop the violence

Israeli armed forces upped their bombardment of the Gaza Strip overnight, with shelling from land and sea aimed at destroying Hamas military tunnels and command posts.

In Gaza on the fifth day of violence, the authorities reported that 119 people have been killed, including 31 children and 19 women. Israel reports eight killed since the outbreak of serious communal violence at the weekend and the rocketing of Israeli towns and settlements by Hamas. Since the weekend Hamas has fired more than 1,800 rockets, 55 overnight.

As the weekend approaches, the Friday day of prayers for Muslims, and the Jewish Sabbath on Saturday, no end to the shelling and rocketing and the street battles seems in sight. All sides seem caught in a cycle of stale and discredited tactics, and weak, regressive politics.

Overnight Israeli forces used tank as well as artillery fire and bombardment from gunboats offshore to hit Gaza. Some 7,000 troops are poised on the borders of the Gaza Strip, but commanders have hesitated to send them across on a mission of dubious durability. 

Troops were committed to Gaza in the 51 day operation known as ‘Protective Edge’ between July and August 2014. This resulted in at least 2,120 Palestinian dead and huge destruction of buildings, facilities and factories.

A repeat performance of this is unlikely. Now there is serious concern about the population inside Israel of 1,800,000 Arabs with nominal Israeli citizenship. They have become restive in a number of mixed communities, triggered by disturbances in East Jerusalem and the Old City a week ago. Many of their new leaders say Israeli Arabs are very much second class citizens, victims of an unwritten apartheid with their communities under-resourced compared to those of Israeli Jews. 

Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, has taken command of security in the areas of communal interface. They say they have arrested 750 ‘troublemakers’ over the past two days. 

The five days of fighting has brought an unexpected short-term benefit to the acting prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After he failed to put together a working coalition after last March’s general election, the challenge of putting together a new government was handed to Yair Lapid, a former ally. Lapid had been trying to stitch together an alliance with the former Netanyahu loyalist, now turned critic, Naftali Bennett. Though stridently nationalist and pro-settler, Bennett and Lapid had been reaching out Israeli Arab members of the Knesset, among them Mansour Abbas  of the Islamist Ra’am party. 

Naftali Bennett has just announced he is giving up trying to form a government. He supports Netanyahu staying in office, a thirteenth year as prime minister, as the leader to see the country through its hour of crisis.

This is a huge boon for Netanyahu, who is currently on trial for corruption, fraud and reputational damage. If he were to be pushed out of office, he would face a real prospect of jail  — if convicted.  

Now he is on the offensive. “We will continue to do what we’re doing with great intensity,” Netanyahu warned yesterday. “The last word has not been uttered.” His defence minister, former rival and former IDF general, Benny Gantz has boasted of ‘a rich target bank’ in Gaza. Haaretz, the influential leftwing daily, fears that Gantz is talking up bombing parts of the Gaza Strip ‘back to the stone age,’ to enhance his own electoral prospects.

Palestinian refugees have been fleeing north from Gaza City, many in their festival clothes for Eid al-Fitr, the feast that marks the end of Ramadan. Once again they are fleeing their desperate home turf, much of which has been made a wasteland by repeated Israeli bombardment in the past three decades, leaving parts of it an open sewer.

Water supplies and sewage facilities are severely challenged in the Strip – a piece of semi-arid land 25 miles long by between 3.7 and 7.5 miles wide. It is inhabited by just over two million people, one of the most crowded pieces of land on earth. In 2012 the UN reported that the deterioration in water supplies, sewerage and other facilities would render the Strip uninhabitable by 2020. Then came the war of 2014, and by 2017 the UN was reporting that conditions were worsening faster than predicted. 

The humanitarian crisis, especially in health and hospital facilities, have barely been mentioned in the commentary and headlines since the weekend. President Biden seems to ignore it, merely commenting that the Israelis were entitled to defend themselves. 

It is hard to see what the Israeli command and government have in mind as a realistic, productive strategy – something that could achieve peace. The stated aim by the IDF, the armed forces, is to destroy Hamas and its command – a tall order that Israel hasn’t managed to come near in nearly 40 years. The new fight is already costing Israel in goodwill. Arab nations  that had been working towards better relations – notably UAE, Bahrain and Morocco through last year’s Abraham Accord – are now turning away and distancing themselves.

President Biden’s envoy is now on the way to the region. In the past two days the president has spoken to Prime Minister Netanyahu. It looks too little, too late. Biden has shown reluctance to get involved in the wicked issues and knotty problems that litter the region – possibly a legacy of his time in the Obama administration with its foreign policy of semi-detachment from nasty entanglements. This posture already looks highly damaging – in the US pullback without redress from Afghanistan, for instance. Less publicized, but toxic is the low profile approach to the dispute of the Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, which has brought Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan to the brink of war.

A timely note of caution, however,  is being sounded by Israel’s liberal press, and the evident reluctance of many of the country’s citizen army to get involved in another self-defeating occupation of the Gaza Strip. Army commanders are reported to be wary of toppling Hamas altogether – it is the elected civil as well as military authority in Gaza, after all. These commanders or fear a policy of all out destruction would create  a power vacuum in Gaza, and lead to chaos.

The English-language editorial in today’s Haaretz concludes: “A reminder: both the 2014 Gaza conflict and the 2006 Lebanon War erupted due to failures in communication, misunderstandings and mistaken considerations on both sides, not as a result of some malicious plan.”