Gaza crisis: A narrative
The current crisis in Gaza began with Israel breaking the ceasefire with Hamas on November 4, 2008. The five-month ceasefire was unsustainable for two reasons.
First and most importantly, Israel condemned the Palestinians of Gaza to a slow and wasting death with the blockade of Gaza. As part of this blockade, Palestinians could not leave the territory.
This included, in high-profile cases, students who had obtained admission and visas to study abroad, but also people who later died because they could not receive treatment for cancers and other medical problems.
The Gaza strip is 360 square kilometres, with 1.5 million people. The people have skills, strong social cohesion, and traditions of hospitality, but the area is not self-sufficient and the economy cannot work without free movement of people and goods in and out.
Leave aside the moral rights, the legal right of Palestinians to self-defence was denied by preventing arms supplies (to even mention this as a possibility is to break a taboo). Every other aspect of life was also disrupted by the blockade. Education was disrupted as Israel refused to allow paper, ink, books, and other supplies to Gaza. Health care was also disrupted as Israel refused to allow medical supplies.
Nutrition and normal child development was disrupted both by the refusal of Israel to allow food supplies and sonic booms, which the Israeli air force uses to frighten the population, along with periodic bombing and assassinations.
At this point, Israel is not even allowing Palestinians to leave, so displacement is not the goal, at least for the time being. On the other hand, when body counts rise into the thousands or tens of thousands, Israel might then allow the Palestinians to flee further massacres, and be lauded for its generousness by the international community.
The second reason the ceasefire was unsustainable is more complicated. So long as Israel is unwilling to negotiate a political settlement and share the land with the US on its side and with shedding Palestinian blood being a source of political credibility in Israeli society, Palestinians have no choice but to resist. If they are not starved and bombed, they will be more effective at resisting their own displacement and colonization. With each step Israel takes to try to take apart Palestinian resistance, a genocidal logic advances. Palestinians have been walled in and blockaded. Now they are bombed and invaded.
Palestinians have been thrown out of their land and into neighbouring countries, they are attacked in those countries, in their refugee camps. Indeed, the people of Gaza are mostly refugees who were thrown out of lands in what is now Israel.
Once the ceasefire ended, Israel was at war. This was a war of choice, and a war it had prepared for extensively on diplomatic and military levels.
The diplomatic scenario was favourable to Israel in several ways. Palestine had been further divided. The West Bank was controlled by Mahmoud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority collaborates with Israel.
The PA is currently maintained in power because the elected Hamas parliamentarians are in either PA or Israeli prisons and because Israeli security forces, as well as the PA, arrest scores of people in the West Bank every week. Gaza was controlled by the elected Hamas leadership.
Israel could focus on one enemy and leave the suppression of the Palestinians of the West Bank to the PA. Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinian children in the West Bank and shot and killed many demonstrators there in recent weeks, but these violations have become routine and barely register next to the more spectacular massacres of dozens at a time in Gaza.
Hizbollah in Lebanon, who in 2006 interrupted a pattern of massacre and strangulation that Israel was conducting in Gaza ("Summer Rains"), have domestic constraints preventing them from intervening, which would bring more thousands of dead to Lebanon in a new Israeli air campaign, against which Hizbollah has no defences.
Egypt has been more co-operative with Israel than ever before, keeping the Rafah crossing sealed and, at the official level, blaming Hamas for bringing the massacres on themselves.
According to Hamas, Egypt also told them that Israel was not planning an attack which gave the Israelis the surprise that helped them to massacre over 200 Palestinians in a single day at the start of their air campaign.
As usual, Israel can count on unconditional official US support from all parts of the political spectrum, which seems to be enough to prevent any useful intervention by anyone else in the world.
On the military level, some basic points. Calling the current conflict a 'war' is more of an analogy than a description, because the word 'war' still evokes the idea of armies meeting on a battlefield and contesting territory.
Israel has all the weapons of war, but it does not really have an opposing army to fight. It can take any territory it wants and easily kill anyone trying to contest it. It can hit, and destroy, any target, anywhere Palestinians live, at will.
Israel's actions are not constrained by the opposing army but by two political considerations: Disallowing journalists and observers is part of Israel's strategy to deal with this, as it was for the US in Iraq. Israel's ground invasion has been accompanied by a total blackout even of Israeli reporters.
Given the intensity of its intelligence and the precision of its weapons, Israel is able to choose the death toll, with some precision. At least some of the current killing is likely designed to push the limits and see how far Israel can go before eliciting any serious reaction.
The second consideration is, can Israeli military casualties be kept low enough the Israeli public continues to support war? To deal with the latter, Israel uses air power and artillery to destroy from a distance, and opened its ground invasion at night.
Since it has long since dismantled Gaza's electricity infrastructure, its soldiers are the only ones who can see at night through their infrared goggles Gaza's people, civilians and anyone who might want to try to defend them, are in complete darkness.
Israel's active military is estimated to be some 170,000. With universal conscription, it has some 2.4 million people between 17-49 years old fit for military service and everyone has had some training. Its military budget is 9% of its substantial GDP, totalling some $18.7 billion.
It receives about $3 billion per year from the US. It has about 1000 main battle tanks, 1500 lower quality tanks, over 1000 artillery pieces, over 500 warplanes, about 200 helicopters, 13 warships, and 3 submarines. It has the latest unmanned aerial vehicles and can gather very precise intelligence using aerial photography and satellites.
Hamas is mainly a political organization, but it has an armed wing that has the capacity to improvise rockets and explosives and to train fighters with small arms. Hizbollah in Lebanon had some success against Israeli ground forces in 2006 partly because of armaments: they were able to destroy Israeli tanks with antitank missiles and fight against Israeli soldiers at night with night-vision goggles.
Hamas does not have access to such weaponry. In 2002, when Palestinian fighters defended Jenin from Israeli forces, they improvised some explosions but ran out of ammunition and supplies and were ultimately defeated when Israel levelled the central part of the camp with bulldozers.
Israel invites to dehumanize Palestinians by estimating how many of its victims were 'militants' and how many 'civilians'. In this game, Israel claims everyone it has killed was a militant and those who were not are victims of the militants because they hide among civilians.
The United Nations has accepted the broad features of the game, estimating at one point that one-fifth of those killed were civilians. The details can then be quibbled over.
Though there is some doubt about Hamas's military competence, invading Gaza will not likely be a replay of Lebanon 2006. Palestinians might be motivated and have little to lose, but they cannot compete with Israel's weaponry.
Indeed, the reason the Israelis were surprised in Lebanon was that they had got used to fighting lightly armed and helpless opponents. Israel knows how to occupy Gaza. Before the 2005 'disengagement', their forces operated from fortified settlements and cut Gaza in three parts, blocking the three main north-south roads with armour.
Israelis used extensive aerial surveillance and cameras from towers to watch every square inch of Gaza and snipe at people, including children, at will. They came out of their bases in massive armoured force and with air support to bulldoze houses and neighbourhoods, after first using artillery and air strikes.
If everything goes Israel's way, as it seems to be going, the next question is how Israel will decide if it has won. It can probably destroy many tunnels and, by occupying the area, silence the rockets.
It can probably also conduct house-to-house searches and massacres, and will probably take on to capture or kill the elected Hamas leadership. Since most countries refuse to recognize Hamas's government and many have accepted Israel's request that it be listed as a terrorist organization, there is nothing protecting these leaders' lives any more than the lives of the people who voted for them.
With its soldiers back in Gaza, Israel will be able to return to its noble project of starving the Palestinian population, this time with an even more destroyed infrastructure and from up close.
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