Decoding the Israel-Palestine Conflict
By: Dr. Rahul Bharatbhushan Kamble
The attacks on Israel last week are only the beginning of a larger conflict. Netanyahu has already promised to “Deliver a huge price” and will have little interest in backing down from that vow. This is not going to be a small tit-for-tat; the unparalleled nature of the attack won’t allow for it. Surprise attacks have happened before, and the fact that this one occurred fifty years and one day after the start of the Yom Kippur War is a reference that will be forever etched in the history books.
But for years, Israel and Hamas (and other Palestinian militant groups) have engaged in multiple rounds of rocket fire from Gaza and attacks, followed by Israeli responses striking the Gaza Strip. This move is totally in a new dimension. It is not the usual barrage of thousands of rockets that keep surfing from Gaza. It’s the complexity of what was an extremely well-planned and well-prepared attack in which Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel by land, by sea, and even by air (via paragliders); embarking on an unprovoked and indiscriminate killing spree of men, women, and children in their homes, on the streets, and where not.
This was an intelligence failure; it could not be otherwise. It was a security failure, undermining what was thought to be an aggressive and successful layered approach toward Gaza by Israel. But the examination of intel and security failures, which will surely come first, has to take a back seat to the reality of a war that is almost certainly just starting. While it’s too early to draw conclusions on the attack, Israel’s lack of preparedness or its possible impact on Israel’s continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories, one question that demands an urgent attention is why did Hamas launch such a massive incursion into Israel knowing that the response would be disproportionate. Israel, in the past, has showered fire and fury on Gazans, including civilians and children, in response to rocket attacks. Still, deterrence did not hold. Why? At least three factors–Palestinian, Israeli and geopolitical–could have influenced Hamas’s thinking.
Firstly, the Palestine-Israel relations have steadily deteriorated in recent years. Israel has been carrying out military raids in the occupied West Bank almost on a daily basis, besides tightening the screws of the occupation. In April, Israeli police raided Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam’s third holiest place of worship, triggering rocket attacks from Gaza, which were followed by Israeli air strikes.
In May, Israel and the Palestine Islamic Jihad, which is based in Gaza, fought a short battle, and in July, Israel carried out a major raid in the West Bank town of Jenin, which has emerged as a hotbed of militancy in the West Bank. Currently, there is no peace process. Violence is perverse. And anger has been building up among Palestinians against both the Israeli occupiers as well as the Palestinian Authority, the provisional administration of the West Bank that’s led by President Mohammad Abbas’s Fatah.
By launching such a massive attack from Gaza and asking “all Arabs of Palestine”, including the Israeli Arab citizens, who make up some 20% of the Israel’s population, to take up arms against the state of Israel, Hamas is both trying to cash in on the public anger against occupation and emerge as the sole pole of the Palestinian cause.
Secondly, Israel is also going through a difficult phase. The country is ruled by its most right-wing government whose key domestic agenda is to overhaul the structures of power so that the elected government would be more powerful than other institutions. The government has already pushed one part of its ambitious legislative agenda seeking to curtail the powers of the judiciary through Parliament, which triggered massive protests.
Thousands of military reservists, the backbone of the IDF, had joined the sit-ins and threatened to resign in protest against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan. So the government’s focus was on its legislative agenda; rights groups are up in arms showing deep divisions in society; and there were resenting voices even within the military. Hamas might have thought that Israel was at a weak moment internally, which provides an opportunity for it to launch an unprecedented attack from Gaza and trigger more resistance violence in the occupied West Bank.
Lastly, it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the Hamas attack came when Israel and Saudi Arabia are in an advanced stage of normalisation talks. Recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in an interview that both countries were making progress every day. If Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the two holiest mosques of Islam and arguably the most influential Arab country, normalises ties with Israel, it would not only reset West Asian geopolitical dynamics but also put Hamas at a further disadvantageous position.
Such a realignment is also not in the interests of Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has its own problems with Israel. Iran and Hezbollah were quick to welcome the Hamas operation, describing it as “Heroic”. As Gaza is set to witness massive Israeli retaliation in the coming days, if not weeks, the prospects for an immediate normalisation deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel would be further complicated. How this conflict, and especially an extended one, impacts long-term efforts to build on the Abraham Accords and possibly normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be a critical strategic question.
Israel, as is often the case, will have some bandwidth from the international community in the coming days to launch a retaliatory strike. But the longer a war goes and the more carnage there is, the International community will begin to call for all sides to de-escalate. Jerusalem is unlikely to accede to that request unless it views that it has achieved at least some of its objectives. And while Riyadh may be privately supportive of Israel’s efforts to take on Hamas terrorists, the Arab street is not likely to be so supportive, especially as the visuals of death and destruction in Gaza and potentially Lebanon, highlight all over.
Most immediately, the biggest concerns for the Israeli security establishment are almost certainly two-fold: to protect Israeli citizens under siege by Hamas terrorists who have infiltrated the country and to try to prevent Hezbollah from joining the conflict. For years there have been warnings about the potential for a multi-front war. If this is the beginning of one, the potential death and destruction may top anything we’ve seen in decades. While sirens went off to indicate rocket attacks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv earlier today, the overwhelming majority of the attack is happening in the south of Israel. If Hezbollah enters the conflict, that will no longer be true; Israel will face a country-wide war it has not experienced in decades.
We are only at the beginning of the campaign, and it isn’t easy to know how it will develop. But it is clear that there will be long weeks of fighting ahead, and it may spill over from Gaza to other areas. In this sense, US President Joe Biden’s statement following the attacks, and now the visit, was critical because it strengthened the Israeli desire to focus on Gaza and may help to deter Hezbollah from entering this campaign. The next step is a severe Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, but it is essential that before this attack, Israel defines precisely what its purpose is.
What Israel will do in the coming days and weeks will affect not only Gaza, but the whole of Middle East from a broader perspective. The coming days and weeks are likely not only going to drive the future of Israel’s security, but they may well also drive the future of its place in the region. There’s good reason that the days-old Hamas attack on Israel is still shocking. Terrorists stormed out of Gaza, Israel’s intelligence system failed, Hamas butchered Israeli civilians, including children, and dragged scores of hostages back to the Palestinian enclave. Now, the world holds its breath as it waits for a possible Israeli land offensive in Gaza. Everyone knows it’s going to be brutal, but to guess on how it will end, looms free.
The writer is a Dentist, a freelancer writing on Defence, National Security and Geopolitics.
