Uri Avnery
21.7.08
All Quiet on the
AND SUDDENLY: quiet. No Qassams. No mortar
shells. The tanks are not rolling. The aircraft are not bombing.
In Sderot, sighs of relief. Children venture
out. Inhabitants who have exiled themselves to other towns return home.
And the reaction? An
outburst of jubilation? Dancing in the streets? Applause
for the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense, who at long last have come
to their senses?
Not at all. The expression on the nation's
face is a grimace of disgust. What kind of thing is that? Where is our victorious
army?
The people of Sderot are really angry. OK, so
there are no Qassams, but this was supposed to happen
only after the army had entered
Haaretz headed its front page with
the mendacious headline: "
"It's fragile," Ehud Olmert soothes us, it can come to an end any minute. And the other Ehud,
Barak, who pushed for the cease-fire, has an excuse: we have to go through the
motions before starting the Big Operation in
And nobody says: Thank God, the killing has stopped!
WHY? WHAT causes this almost unanimous reaction of disappointment? Why is
there a general feeling of humiliation, almost of defeat?
It's because the national ego is hurt. How wonderful it would have been
to see the Israeli army in
From the military point of view, a year of war in the Gaza Strip has
ended in a draw. IDF-Hamas 1:1. But the IDF and Hamas are not two football
teams of equal standing. Hamas is an armed political-religious movement, what
is termed in current Western parlance "a terrorist organization". When
such an organization achieves a draw with one of the mightiest armies in the
world, it can justifiably claim victory.
The aim of Olmert's war was to topple the Hamas
government in the Gaza Strip and to destroy the organization itself. This has
not been attained. On the contrary, according to all reports, Hamas is stronger
than ever, and its hold on the Strip is solid. Even in
For a year, the Israeli government has maintained a total blockade of the
Strip - on land, at sea and in the air. It has enjoyed the unqualified support
of
All this was not enough to beat poor and crowded Gaza, a narrow strip of
land
The Israeli army was helpless against this primitive weapon, which costs
next to nothing. The army killed wholesale and in retail, on land and from the
air, with missiles, shells and infantry weapons. To no avail.
Hamas has survived, but it, too, did not achieve its aim. It had no
answer to the blockade. Only the pressure of international public opinion (as
well as the Israeli peace forces) prevented total starvation, but in the Strip
there was a shortage of everything. Unemployment was rampant, fuel disappeared,
many inhabitants suffered from undernourishment, bordering on starvation.
That is the nature of a draw: neither of the two sides is able to force a
decision and impose its will on its opponent.
A CEASEFIRE only comes about when both sides need it. (True, Carl von
Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher, has said that in war it is
impossible for a situation to be beneficial to both sides at the same time, that
something that is good for one side is necessarily bad for the other. But in
real war there are exceptions.)
Indeed, the Israeli army needed the ceasefire no less than Hamas. That
became clear from the comments of the "military correspondents",
almost all of whom are thinly disguised army spokesmen. Of course, not one of
the cabinet members would have agreed to a ceasefire if the army brass had
objected.
Usually, the army bosses press for one more action, one more operation, one more war. Have they suddenly turned into doves? Not
really. But they knew that they had to choose between two "bad"
options: a ceasefire or the "Great Operation" - the re-conquest of
the entire Gaza Strip.
The commanders did not like the first option, and that is an
understatement. It means admitting failure. But the second option they liked even
less - much, much less.
The Great Operation, which a large part of the public yearned for, which
almost all the media demanded at the top of their voices, is very
problematical. Hamas has had a lot of time to prepare for it. No army likes to
fight in a built-up area, among a crowded population. Every alley is a
potential trap, every man - and every woman - a potential suicide bomber. Even
if the army succeeded in entering and occupying the strip with only
"tolerable" casualties, that would just be
the beginning of the troubles. Every day soldiers would be killed. The mutual
bloodletting would be endless. See: the
Public opinion is fickle. Every dead soldier whose smiling picture is
shown on television increases the pressure to get out. Sooner or later the army
would be compelled to leave - and the situation would revert to what it was
before, only worse.
The army chiefs know this. Olmert and Barak
also know this. The lesson of the Second Lebanon War has not been forgotten.
There is no mood for war.
THE CEASEFIRE has far-reaching political implications. It changes the
Palestinian - and perhaps the regional - map.
One can protest from here to eternity, one can shout from the rooftops
that "we don't negotiate with Hamas" and that "we have no
agreement with Hamas" - every child understands that we indeed do, and
indeed have.
This is an agreement between the Government of Israel and the
In the eyes of the Palestinians, the situation is clear: Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah has not got anything from the Israelis,
Hamas has.
Abbas tries by peaceful means.
He is the darling of the Americans and the Israelis. But since the great
performance in Annapolis, not only has he not achieved any meaningful concessions
at all and not freed a single prisoner, but additional prisoners are being
taken every night, the settlements are being enlarged and the Israeli
government announces grandiose new building projects in East Jerusalem and the
entire West Bank. And the Israeli government would not dream of agreeing to a
ceasefire there.
While at the same time Hamas, besieged by the whole world, losing
fighters every day, has attained a significant military and political
achievement: goods will flow into the Strip, cars will again bounce along the
potholed roads, the Rafah crossing, which cuts off the
Strip from the world, will be opened. In the coming prisoner exchange, hundreds
of Palestinian prisoners will be released in return for the captured Israeli
soldier, Gilad Shalit.
The conclusion? Everybody can ask themselves:
if I were a Palestinian, what conclusion would I draw?
The ceasefire affects the balance of power within the Palestinian people.
Hamas has proved that it can maintain an orderly government. Now it is proving that it can control the
radical organizations, too.
The wisest thing Mahmoud Abbas can do now is to
form a Unity Government, based on both Hamas and Fatah.
WILL THE ceasefire hold? The correspondents report that nobody expects it
to.
When Olmert says that it is fragile, he knows
what he is talking about.
There is no written agreement. No orderly mechanism for settling
disputes. No arbitrator to decide, in case of need, which side is responsible
for a violation.
If somebody in
It can be done in other ways, too. The army will kill half a dozen Islamic
Jihad militants in the
Every agreement holds only as long as both sides believe that it serves
their interests. If one of them thinks otherwise, it will break it (and assert
that the other side broke it first). In this case, the first to break it will
most likely be the Israeli side.
A CEASEFIRE is not peace (salaam), and not even an armistice or truce (hudnah). It is no more than an agreement between combatants
to stop shooting for some time.
In the nature of things, each side will use the ceasefire to prepare for the
next round of fighting - to breathe deeply, to rest, to train, to plan, to
obtain more advanced weapons.
But the ceasefire can become more than that. It can lead to Palestinian
unity, to Israeli re-thinking, to a practical advance towards a peaceful solution.
At the very least, every day of the ceasefire saves human lives.
And in the meantime the Hebrew and the international dictionaries have acquired
another Arabic word: Tahdiyeh, calm.