The Cost of War
By admin • Mar 1st, 2009Livni, the candidate of the ruling Kadima party, has pledged to continue negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. But there has been no talk from her, or any other leaders, of offering bolder steps towards peace such as freezing West Bank settlements, to follow up the Gaza operation. Indeed, depending on its outcome, one legacy of the war may be to reinforce those who would rather use military force than diplomacy. If the Gaza offensive leads to a halt of rocket attacks, the public may draw the conclusion that “we depended on our guns and it worked,” says Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg.
“Peace initiatives come when people see an opening for them,” he says. “The time when the Israeli peace movement flourished was after [Anwar] Sadat’s visit, which produced a psychological change, in that people believed there was an Arab leader who wanted to make peace. But now Abu Mazen [Abbas] is weak, Hamas controls Gaza, the Palestinians are divided, they have been firing rockets and the [prevailing] public view is there is no possible peace.”
Dissenting voices. Some dovish Israelis say the war has shown to what extent the public will tolerate high civilian casualties on the Palestinian side - something they say augurs poorly for both peacemaking and the future of Israeli society. The army counters that Hamas used civilians as human shields and bears res-ponsibility for the high number of civilian deaths. Much of the media behaved as if it was mobilized during the war, focusing overwhelmingly on Hamas rocket attacks against southern Israel, which killed four people, while largely ignoring Palestinian civilian casualties.
Militarism drowned out democratic values, human rights groups charged. The fact that Israel barred international media from entering Gaza to cover the conflict - an unprecedented infringement of press freedoms - added to this sense. “We are witness to a moral corrosion in Israeli society,” said Michael Sfard, an attorney for the dovish Yesh Din organization. “Five years ago, when the air force dropped a one-ton bomb on the house of Hamas leader Salah Shahadeh and killed 15 civilians, it caused a serious public debate. In this war, it has been done daily and no one said a word. The army has stopped voicing regret over killing civilians.”
In the view of Galia Golan, a political scientist at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, Israel claiming victory poses a problem. Hamas’ rockets may not stop despite the talk of deterrence, she believes. “Ultimately, no one expects that we won’t return to rocket fire at some point in the future,” she says. The only tangible achievement Israel can point to from the war is a new commitment on the part of the international community to stop the flow of weapons that reach Hamas in underground tunnels from Egypt to the Strip,” Golan adds.
To stop Hamas’ rockets, Israel will need to undermine Hamas politically, by agreeing to a negotiated solution similar to the one proposed by the Arab League: territorial withdrawal and the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. “If you end the occupation and end the conflict, I don’t think Hamas will have a leg to stand on,” she says.
Golan believes that the new Obama administration’s policy should be to en-courage a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, and then work with the new government that comes out of that. Ismail Haniya, the head of the Hamas government in Gaza, called for such reconciliation a day after Hamas declared a ceasefire.
Some analysts say that bolstering hatred of Israel after the war need not be an obstacle to political progress between Israel and Abbas. “Regardless of what has happened, there was no great love between the two sides even previously,” says Shlomo Brom, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “If there is progress, it is only because of interests,” he says. “They may hate Israel but they also have to take into account their interests.”
