terça-feira, 19 de março de 2024

Netanyahu Is Making Israel Radioactive

 



OPINION

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Netanyahu Is Making Israel Radioactive

March 12, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/opinion/israel-hamas-war-netanyahu.html?searchResultPosition=3

 

Israel today is in grave danger. With enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, Israel should be enjoying the sympathy of much of the world. But it is not. Because of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition have been conducting the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, Israel is becoming radioactive and diaspora Jewish communities everywhere increasingly insecure.

 

I fear it is about to get worse.

 

No fair-minded person could deny Israel the right of self-defense after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis in one day. Women were sexually abused, and children were killed in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. Scores of abducted Israeli men, women, children and elderly people are still being held hostage in terrible conditions, now for more than 150 days.

 

But no fair-minded person can look at the Israeli campaign to destroy Hamas that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, about a third of them fighters, and not conclude that something has gone terribly wrong there. The dead include thousands of children, and the survivors many orphans. So much of Gaza is now a wasteland of death and destruction, hunger and ruined homes. Urban warfare brings out the absolute worst in people, and that is certainly true for Israel in Gaza. This is a stain on the Jewish state.

 

But Israel is not alone in creating this tragedy. The stain on Hamas is black as well. This Islamist militia started the conflict on Oct. 7 without any warnings, protections or shelters for Gazan civilians, and it did so knowing full well from experience that Israel would respond by bombing Hamas strongholds tunneled under homes, mosques and hospitals. Hamas showed a total disregard for the lives of Palestinians, not just Israelis. But Hamas was already branded as a terrorist organization. It is not a U.S. ally and never claimed to practice purity of arms.

 

All of that said, Israel’s standing in the world could take another very big hit soon because of something that made me wary of its invasion from the very start: Netanyahu has sent the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza without a coherent plan for governing it after any Hamas dismantling or cease-fire.

 

In my view, there is only one thing worse for Israel, not to mention Gazans, than a Gaza controlled by Hamas: That’s a Gaza where nobody is in charge, a Gaza where the world will expect Israel to provide order but Israel cannot or will not, so it becomes a permanent, grinding humanitarian crisis.

 

My own recent visit to the Gaza border suggested to me that that is exactly where we’re headed. On March 2, I accompanied the U.S. Centcom commander, Gen. Michael Kurilla, on his visit to the Erez crossing point between Israel and Gaza. Kurilla was in charge of the U.S. humanitarian food airdrop that was about to take place.

 

With the sound of drones buzzing overhead and the distant rumble of artillery, a local Israeli commander explained that most Israeli forces in northern Gaza, which includes its largest urban area, Gaza City, had pulled back either to the Israeli border area or along the road that divides Gaza from north to south. Henceforth, another senior Israeli officer told me, Israeli troops and special forces would go in and out of northern Gaza only to strike at specific Hamas threats, but basically no one was providing day-to-day governance for the civilians left behind, save for a few hundred Hamas fighters and local gang leaders.

 

I immediately understood how a chaotic scene unfolded over food distribution two days earlier. Israel is breaking Hamas’s control yet refusing to take responsibility with its own forces for civilian administration in Gaza — and refusing to enlist the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has thousands of employees in Gaza, to perform that task. It is behaving this way because Netanyahu does not want the P.A. to become the Palestinian government in the West Bank and Gaza, which might give it a chance at credibility to grow into an independent Palestinian state there one day.

 

In other words, Israel has a prime minister who apparently would rather see Gaza devolve into Somalia, ruled by warlords, and risk Israel’s military gains in dismantling Hamas than partner with the Palestinian Authority or any legitimate, broad-based, non-Hamas Palestinian governing body — because his far-right cabinet allies, who dream of Israel controlling all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, including Gaza, will oust him from power if he does.

 

Netanyahu’s government is apparently hoping to enlist local Palestinian clan leaders to post-Hamas Gaza, but I seriously doubt that will work. Israel tried and failed that strategy in the West Bank in the 1980s, as these locals were often stigmatized as collaborators and never gained governing traction.

 

I confess that as I contemplated all of this from the border, I had two flashbacks that were sort of daytime nightmares.

 

The first was remembering how the U.S. invaded Iraq with the aim of building a new democratic order to replace Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, which I supported. But when it came to implementation, the Bush administration broke the Iraqi Army and the ruling Baath Party with no coherent plan for creating better alternative governance. This turned many anti-Hussein Iraqis against the U.S. and created the conditions for the anti-U.S. insurgency.

 

I summarized all of this in a column published on April 9, 2003. It was 20 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and I had entered the country with a team from the Kuwaiti Red Cross that was delivering medical supplies to the main hospital in the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. There were three things I noticed almost immediately: how few U.S. or allied troops were around keeping order, what chaos this was producing and how sullen the people were. I wrote it this way:

 

It’s hard to smile when there’s no water. It’s hard to applaud when you’re frightened. It’s hard to say, “Thank you for liberating me,” when liberation has meant that looters have ransacked everything from the grain silos to the local school, where they even took away the blackboard. … It would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a prepolitical, primordial state of nature. For the moment, Saddam has been replaced by Hobbes, not Bush.

 

I added that I had gone in with members of a Kuwaiti relief team, “who, taking pity on the Iraqis, tossed out extra food from a bus window as we left. The Umm Qasr townsfolk scrambled after that food … jostling for breadcrumbs. This was a scene of humiliation, not liberation. We must do better.”

 

I concluded: “America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn’t flow, if the food doesn’t arrive, if the rains don’t come and if the sun doesn’t shine, it’s now America’s fault. We’d better get used to it, we’d better make things right, we’d better do it soon, and we’d better get all the help we can get.”

 

Flashback No. 2: It is May 22, 2018, and I am writing near the Gaza border with Israel a column that would be titled “Hamas, Netanyahu and Mother Nature.” Relying on data from Israeli and Palestinian environmentalists, I wrote about how — because of Hamas’s mismanagement of the Gaza economy and diversion of building materials to dig tunnels to penetrate Israel — Gaza was suffering a critical shortage of infrastructure, particularly sewage treatment plants. So Gazans were dumping about 100 million liters of raw sewage into the Mediterranean every day.

 

Why should Israelis care? After all, Gaza is “over there,” behind a fence. Meet Mother Nature. Because of the prevailing current in the Mediterranean, most of Gaza’s untreated sewage dumped into the Mediterranean flowed northward to the Israeli beach town of Ashkelon, the site of Israel’s second-largest desalination plant. Eighty percent of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination and 15 percent of its drinking water from that Ashkelon plant alone.

 

As a result of Gaza’s floating waste, that Ashkelon desalination plant had to close several times to clean Gaza’s gunk out of its filters.

 

Israelis and Palestinians are interdependent. Lost there, felt here. The only question is whether they can one day forge a healthy interdependency or will be doomed to an unhealthy interdependency. But interdependent they will be. Each community needs a leader whose actions are motivated by that fundamental truth. Right now, neither has one.

 

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook

IDF Claims Deadly Hospital Raid On Hamas, Netanyahu Slams US "Falsehood", "Israel provoking famine"

Israeli forces raid Gaza City's al-Shifa hospital | BBC News

Israel’s Shifa raid shows its grip is slipping as a ‘forever war’ looms

 


Analysis

Israel’s Shifa raid shows its grip is slipping as a ‘forever war’ looms

Jason Burke

in Jerusalem

Retaking of Shifa complex shows Hamas militants, despite heavy losses, are still operational in northern Gaza

 

Mon 18 Mar 2024 11.45 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/18/israel-shifa-raid-shows-its-grip-is-slipping-as-a-forever-war-looms

 

The latest raid on al-Shifa hospital reveals that the Israeli military’s hold on the areas of Gaza supposedly cleared of Hamas militants is considerably more tenuous than the country’s political leaders have claimed – and suggests the region’s military superpower is facing its own “forever war” in the territory with enormous costs for everyone involved, particularly civilians.

 

The fighting around the Shifa hospital and its eventual seizure was the climactic moment of the first phase of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, launched last year after Hamas killed 1,200 and captured 250 people, mostly civilians, in a surprise raid on 7 October. There was bitter argument over whether the hospital’s buildings and basements had been used by Hamas as a covert command centre, as Israel claimed, but none over the strength of Israel’s control of the site when its soldiers moved in on 15 November.

 

Three months later, Monday’s raid is an implicit admission that this control seems to have slipped.

 

It is clear that Hamas is operating in parts of northern Gaza that were supposed to have been cleared by Israeli forces a long time ago. In February, there was fighting in Zeitoun, a neighbourhood of Gaza City, and al-Shati camp, further up the coast. There have even been clashes in Beit Hanoun, which was one of the first places overrun by Israeli forces at the very beginning of the war.

 

Three things are happening. One is that, though Hamas has sustained heavy casualties, it still has enough men under arms and sufficiently functional command systems to launch sporadic attacks on Israeli troops when circumstances are right. Its extensive tunnel system helps here. These cause little damage and few casualties but will add to pressure on Israel in any talks over a ceasefire and hostage for prisoner exchange. They will also help Hamas frame the conflict’s eventual outcome as a victory.

 

A second is that Israel has demobilised most of its reservists and transferred key regular units to its northern border or the occupied West Bank. The current phase of its offensive in Gaza involves targeted strikes and raids instead of massed confrontations. For economic and political reasons, Israel’s strategic planners had few options, but this means there are few troops permanently on the ground in northern Gaza. Most are confined to so-called ‘bastions’ on the outskirts of population centres or at strategic points such as road junctions.

 

The third is that war – like nature – abhors a vacuum. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has refused to discuss seriously any realistic plans for governing in Gaza after the war and is apparently content to allow swaths of the territory to slide into chaos in the weeks or months Israel achieves his stated war aim of “crushing” Hamas.

 

But others are filling the yawning governance gap. There are criminal gangs, major families with their own quasi-militia, informal neighbourhood committees set up by desperate civilians and, inevitably, Hamas. The militant Islamist organisation has run Gaza since 2007 and its structures, overt and covert, are deeply embedded. So too are its ideas.

 

This has not escaped even friends of Israel. The annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, published last week, predicted that Israel “probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralise Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces”.

 

There is now a situation of deadly stasis in Gaza. Neither the Israelis nor Hamas are likely to reach their ultimate objectives, however defined, anytime soon. A ceasefire could take many weeks or may not be possible at all. Meanwhile, more than 31,000 people have been killed in the Israeli offensive, mostly women and children, according to local health authorities, and famine looms.

 

Netanyahu has said that once Israel’s forces have destroyed their enemy’s forces in Rafah, the southernmost town in the territory and where more than a million displaced are sheltering, then the war will in effect be over. Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, recently told US officials: “Ending the war without clearing out Rafah is like sending a firefighter to extinguish 80% of the fire.”

 

Monday’s raid on Shifa makes clear that, despite the grey ash and rubble across so much of the territory, the fire in Gaza is not fully extinguished anywhere.

Israel delegation to visit US over Biden concerns on Rafah offensive

Israeli delegation to visit Washington to discuss planned offensive on Rafah

 


Israeli delegation to visit Washington to discuss planned offensive on Rafah

 

US says attack would be ‘mistake’ as Biden and Netanyahu talk by phone for first time in over a month

 

Julian Borger in Washington

Mon 18 Mar 2024 17.36 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/18/israeli-delegation-us-officials-plan-offensive-rafah-gaza-war

 

Israel will send a team of officials to Washington to discuss its planned offensive on Rafah, the White House has said, as the Biden administration insists that an attack would be a “mistake” and seeks to persuade Israel to allow in more aid in the face of an imminent famine in Gaza.

 

The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, announced the Israeli visit after a phone call on Monday between Joe Biden and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, focusing on the planned Rafah assault that Netanyahu has vowed to launch.

 

Sullivan confirmed that Israeli forces had killed Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, and one of the masterminds of the 7 October attacks, in an operation last week, one of thousands of Hamas fighters he said had been killed. But he added: “a military plan cannot succeed without an integrated humanitarian plan and political plan.”

 

Sullivan said it was “first and foremost” Israel’s obligation “to step up and ensure that more is done to deliver food to starving people in northern Gaza”, in the wake of a warning from UN organisations that famine was “imminent” in northern Gaza, with an onset at any time between mid-March and May. Administration officials made clear that Israel would bear primary responsibility if a famine was allowed to happen.

 

“With just two previous famine declarations in the 21st century, this is a horrific milestone,” Samantha Power, the head of the US Agency for International Development, said. “We call on Israel to take immediate action to put an end to this mass – and preventable – suffering.”

 

Sullivan restated US opposition to the planned Rafah offensive, pointing out that more than a million Palestinians had taken refuge in the southernmost Gazan town having fled other cities ruined by Israeli bombing.

 

“Israel has not presented us or the world with a plan for how or where they would safely move those civilians, let alone feed and house them and ensure access to basic things like sanitation,” Sullivan said.

 

He also pointed out Rafah was the main entry point for the small amount of aid reaching Gaza, and it could seriously affect Israeli relations with Egypt, on the other side of the border.

 

Sullivan described the Biden-Netanyahu call, their first in over a month, as “businesslike” but said the US president had dismissed “straw man” arguments put forward by the Israeli leader.

 

“The president has rejected and did again today the straw man that raising questions about Rafah is the same as raising questions about defeating Hamas. That’s just nonsense,” he said.

 

Sullivan admitted that Israel had made military gains against Hamas but said, “A major ground operation [in Rafah] would be a mistake.” It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza, and further isolate Israel internationally.”

 

In the call, Biden asked Netanyahu to send a team of military, intelligence and humanitarian officials to discuss Gaza and talk about alternatives to attacking Rafah.

 

“Now we really need to get down to brass tacks and have the chance for a delegation from each side on an integrated basis, everyone’s sitting around the same table, talking through the way forward,” Sullivan said. “Send your team to Washington, let’s talk about it. We’ll lay out for you what we believe is a better way.”

 

He said Netanyahu accepted the invitation and the meeting should happen at the end of this week or the beginning of next week.

 

“We have every expectation that they’re not going to proceed with a major military operation in Rafah until we have that conversation,” Sullivan added.

 

The national security adviser said talks were also continuing in Doha between Israel, Qatar and Egypt aimed at securing a hostage deal, and that if Hamas agreed to release the elderly, sick and women hostages “tomorrow” there would be an immediate six-week ceasefire.

 

“We believe those discussions are very live, that a deal is possible, that we should be able to achieve it and that it is the best way both to get hostages home and to alleviate the suffering of the civilians in Gaza,” Sullivan said.

 

He said the US was hoping to beat the projected schedule of 45 to 60 days for building a floating dock off the Gaza Strip for delivering aid delivered by sea. The plan is for US military engineers to put the dock together at sea and then for it to be floated into shore and secured by Israeli troops, Sullivan said. Aid agencies have warned, however, that the famine would already have a grip on Gaza by the time any such a pier is built, it remains unclear how food would be distributed, and it would be no substitute for opening more land routes for more aid to flow into the besieged coastal strip.