Wednesday, August 27, 2014

An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth

From Tablet Magazine, August 26, 2014, by Matti Friedman:

A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters

A TV reporter does a stand-up near the Israeli/Gaza border as a 24-hour ceasefire begins on July 27, 2014.
(Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)




The Israel Story
Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. 
A representative article from a recent issue of The New Yorker described the summer’s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed génocidaires of ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.
When the hysteria abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as particularly important. People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including many unarmed innocents. I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths, or the deaths of Israel’s soldiers, will change something, that they mark a turning point. But they don’t. This round was not the first in the Arab wars with Israel and will not be the last. The Israeli campaign was little different in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a country’s own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid civilian deaths.
The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.
While global mania about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility—in this case, journalists and editors. The world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that profession—my profession—here in Israel.
In this essay I will try to provide a few tools to make sense of the news from Israel. I acquired these tools as an insider: Between 2006 and the end of 2011 I was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s two biggest news providers. I have lived in Israel since 1995 and have been reporting on it since 1997.
This essay is not an exhaustive survey of the sins of the international media, a conservative polemic, or a defense of Israeli policies. (I am a believer in the importance of the “mainstream” media, a liberal, and a critic of many of my country’s policies.) It necessarily involves some generalizations. I will first outline the central tropes of the international media’s Israel story—a story on which there is surprisingly little variation among mainstream outlets, and one which is, as the word “story” suggests, a narrative construct that is largely fiction. I will then note the broader historical context of the way Israel has come to be discussed and explain why I believe it to be a matter of concern not only for people preoccupied with Jewish affairs. I will try to keep it brief.
How Important Is the Israel Story?
Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.
To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.
The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.
News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.
What Is Important About the Israel Story, and What Is Not
A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.
Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)
Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.
The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.
There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. 
During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)
But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.
The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.
It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.
What Else Isn’t Important?
The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.
Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.
This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.
How Is the Israel Story Framed?
The Israel story is framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest for a “two-state solution.” It is accepted that the conflict is “Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. 
The conflict is more accurately described as “Israel-Arab,” or “Jewish-Arab”—that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “Israel-Muslim” would be more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims worldwide.) This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “Palestinian” was in use.
The “Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party. It also includes the implicit assumption that if the Palestinian problem is somehow solved the conflict will be over, though no informed person today believes this to be true. This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part, to be described not as what it is—one more destructive symptom of the conflict—but rather as its cause.
A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so forth.
Hamas is not, as it freely admits, party to the effort to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It has different goals about which it is quite open and that are similar to those of the groups listed above. Since the mid 1990s, more than any other player, Hamas has destroyed the Israeli left, swayed moderate Israelis against territorial withdrawals, and buried the chances of a two-state compromise. That’s one accurate way to frame the story.
An observer might also legitimately frame the story through the lens of minorities in the Middle East, all of which are under intense pressure from Islam: When minorities are helpless, their fate is that of the Yazidis or Christians of northern Iraq, as we have just seen, and when they are armed and organized they can fight back and survive, as in the case of the Jews and (we must hope) the Kurds.
There are, in other words, many different ways to see what is happening here. Jerusalem is less than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.
The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the “Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.
The Old Blank Screen
For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place.
Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial, post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this one.
When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.
Some readers might remember that Britain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fallout from which has now killed more than three times the number of people ever killed in the Israel-Arab conflict; yet in Britain, protesters furiously condemn Jewish militarism. White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “Manhattan” or “Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.
You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.
Who Cares If the World Gets the Israel Story Wrong?
Because a gap has opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy, “virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone was surprised.
Whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain
And there was the Spanish civil war: “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’ ” That was George Orwell, writing in 1942.
Orwell did not step off an airplane in Catalonia, stand next to a Republican cannon, and have himself filmed while confidently repeating what everyone else was saying or describing what any fool could see: weaponry, rubble, bodies. He looked beyond the ideological fantasies of his peers and knew that what was important was not necessarily visible. Spain, he understood, was not really about Spain at all—it was about a clash of totalitarian systems, German and Russian. He knew he was witnessing a threat to European civilization, and he wrote that, and he was right.
Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.
Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.
Many in the West clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’ problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.

UNRWA Reform Initiative 2014





From Israel Behind the News, 25 August 2014, by The Center for Near East Policy Research:


The Center for Near East Policy Research (CNEPR) has launched a campaign aimed at reforming the United Nation Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA), to ensure that Western taxpayer money does not aid and abet the growing phenomenon of war education and terror advocacy that we have documented in our research. 

In these most trying times for Israel, during the ‘Protective Edge’ War this summer, we have further witnessed the misuse of UNRWA facilities callously taken over by Hamas’ in its’ campaign against Israel. This crime effects those that need UNRWA the most, as what was once a safe haven for Palestinian refugees has become a hotspot for terrorism, in an immoral and illegal occupation of UN property for dubious purposes.


It is with great urgency that we continue to investigate and document the misuse of UNRWA resources and take our findings to the 38 Western countries that fund UNRWA using your tax money, demanding transparency and serious reforms, so that UNRWA can continue the important services it was established to do. The question must be asked – how is it that after 64 years, Gaza remains unchanged and to this very day, is in a worse humanitarian situation than it has ever been in before?...
In parallel, UNRWA has suffered from three main problems, in which it has been led astray from its own mandate:
  1. The agency will never re-settle any of its’ constituents, as it promotes a ‘right of return’ to villages in Israel, many of which no longer exist. 
  2. The commitment to liberate all of Palestine through Jihad and martyrdom. 
  3. Denial of the legitimacy of the State of Israel and demonization of Jews, with a war-based curriculum in UNRWA schools and youth camps
We believe it is necessary to fix these burgeoning problems for a true and lasting peace that our children and grandchildren will benefit from, for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.
UNRWA:
UNRWA was established in 1950 as a humanitarian agency for those who fit the UNRWA definition of “people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab -Israeli conflict.” 
In 1965, UNRWA did what no other refugee aid agency has ever done, they extended refugee status to the descendants of those refugees from 1948, and today we have an estimated 8.1 million refugees around the world (5.1 millions living under the auspices of UNRWA), who are kept in perpetual limbo, poised and taught that they will return to Israel through force of arms.
Today, there are 29,000 workers staffing UNRWA, with an annual budget that tops $ 1.2 billion. 38 Western, democratic countries are main source of funding for UNRWA and its’ taxpayers bear the burden of this expense. UNRWA has no governing board or oversight whatsoever, never been audited or under any review.
Here is the breakdown of UNRWA’s top donors: 8
- United States (top donor)$294,023,401
- European Commission$216,386,867
- United Kingdom$93,737,454
- Norway$34,595,162

UNRWA GOES TO WAR:
People may ask what UNRWA has to do with the current war with Hamas in Gaza? How many people realize that 75% of the people of Gaza dwell in “temporary” UNRWA refugee camps in Gaza for 66 years, under the specious premise and promise of the “right of return” by force of arms and ‘jihad’ to Arab villages that existed before 1948. How many people realize that UNRWA schools and youth clubs train 492,000 students in Gaza to prepare themselves to kill and die in a war with Israel, under the slogan of “right of return” to Jaffa, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beer Sheva and Haifa, which replaced Arab villages from before 1948?
The CNEPR has documented the takeover of UNRWA by Hamas and the danger it poses to Israel as the number one obstacle to peace in the region. 9 As long as this refugee agency keeps the people in a life of limbo, with promises of a ‘right’ of return’ and demonization of the Jewish people, we will never see peace in the land.
OUR MISSION:
Our mission under the UNRWA Reform Initiative is to demand a complete overhaul of the educational system, a new peace curriculum to be used in place of the current war curriculum, an official audit of its’ finances and a humane and just solution in resettling the refugees once and for all.
Our research, reports, monographs, articles, books and several documentary films span over 25 years of work in investigating UNRWA policies and practices. We take our findings to the governments of those donor nations that fund UNRWA and demand reform of their dangerous policies. Please review the ‘Scope of our work’ document attached to learn more about the UNRWA Reform Initiative.

Gaza truce deal: Crossings to open under Israeli supervision

From Ynet News, 26 Aug 2014, by Attila Somfalvi:
Talks in Cairo lead to long-term ceasefire accord, though central demands of both sides postponed for later negotiations.
After 50 days of intense hostilities, Israel and the Palestinians reached a framework agreement resembling the understandings reached after Operation Pillar of Defense – the sides will reconvene in a month to start deliberations on central issues like demilitarization and the establishment of ports.

Until the next round of talks, Israel has agreed to open to border crossings into the Strip and allow the transfer of humanitarian equipment and construction materials to rehabilitate Gaza – all under heavy Israeli supervision.

Israel also agreed to extend the permitted fishing zone around Gaza beyond the current three miles. It must be noted that the border crossings had been open intermittently both before and during the latest round of hostilities.

Destroyed industrial structure in Rafah (Photo: Reuters)
Destroyed industrial structure in Rafah (Photo: Reuters)

The central demands presented by Hamas – transfer of civil salaries, release of security detainees, and construction of seaport and airport – will be discussed in Cairo in a month with the rest of the group's demands.

The Prime Minister's Office claimed that the ministers had been informed of the developments and that there was no legal reason to bring the cabinet to a vote. However, four ministers – Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, Gilad Erdan, and Yitzhak Aharonovich – opposed the ceasefire, leaving the cabinet short of a majority if a vote were to be called.

A senior Israeli defense source said that "Israel got what it wanted." According to the source, "Hamas was beaten into accepting the Egyptian initiative though it opposed the plan from the start. In recent days there was tremendous pressure within Hamas to reach a ceasefire, as a result of the heavy price paid by the Gaza Strip and organization itself."


Palestinian officials were the first to leak the news of a breakthrough in the negotiations. Separate statements from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority announced that agreements on a long-term ceasefire were reached in Cairo.


Hundreds of Palestinians celebrated the 7 pm start of the truce in Gaza, cheering Hamas' "victory" over Israel.


Jerusalem sources noted that Hamas received "the worst blow in its history." Israeli sources further noted that the IDF struck 5,200 terror targets in Gaza. The army also said that some 1,000 terrorists were killed during the operation.


Political sources in Jerusalem stressed that Operation Protective Edge bolstered Israel's international legitimacy, "because of the fact that we assented to 11 ceasefires."


The source added that "there is nothing impressive about the celebrations in the Strip, even if there is only one Palestinian remaining he would manage to declare victory. Sources within the Strip estimate it will take 10 years to rehabilitate. Hamas was dealt a critical blow. But still, we live in the Middle East and cannot indulge in illusions."

Over the 50 days of fighting, 69 Israelis were killed as were more than 2,000 Palestinians. The UN estimates that at least 100,000 Gazans were internally displaced following the operation.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Who’s afraid of a war of attrition?

From JPost, 22 Aug 2014, by AMOTZ ASA-EL:
 
Israel is not used to having size on its side, but in the Gaza conflict it does – and this may require strategies it never previously considered. 

IDF in Gaza strip
An Israeli soldier sits next to tanks at a staging area near the border with the Gaza Strip 
Photo: REUTERS 
 
Having heard ideas other than his own mantra, to launch an ambitious military operation that would lead to the rapid collapse of Hamas, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman issued a warning: “Israel,” he wrote in his Facebook page, “should not be dragged into a war of attrition.”

That was Wednesday morning. By Wednesday night, it turned out that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon may actually have in mind just that – as the two, in a joint press conference, emphasized the need for patience and perseverance, stressing that defeating Hamas will “take time.”

The disdain for attrition is understandable. Such wars bring to mind demoralized troops, up to their knees in muddied trenches, surrounded by piles of casualties – day in day out, month after month, with no end in sight.

The most notorious association is World War I’s Battle of Verdun, which lasted for some 10 months in 1916 and took the lives of nearly a million Germans and Frenchmen. On that battle’s first day, German artillery fired a million shells from 1,400 cannon stretched along a nearly 13-km. strip. It was biggest single bombardment history had ever seen, all with the express aim of “bleeding France white” by luring most of its army into one salient, where the French army was to be dismembered.

In Israeli memory, what comes to mind is the War of Attrition that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser waged from late 1967 to summer 1970, when he accepted a cease-fire. It too was launched with massive artillery attacks and conducted along a static line, the Suez Canal, though it later involved many infantry, aerial and naval raids.

When it was over, Israel was looking at more than 367 dead soldiers and 1,000 injured. While characterized by many daring operations, including airborne infantry raids some 300 km. into Africa and a host of aerial clashes in which the Egyptians lost an aggregate 95 jets as opposed to the Israel Air Force’s 15 – the War of Attrition loomed as the swift Six Days War’s bitter antithesis: a bloody, protracted and inconclusive exercise in strategic futility.

Yet some wars of attrition ended entirely differently.

IN SPRING 1864, facing Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate armies in Virginia after having failed to defeat him with frontal assaults, Union Gen. Ulysses S.

Grant built a 48-km. fortification stretching from Petersburg to Richmond – almost exactly the length of the Gaza Strip, incidentally – thus obstructing supply lines to the Confederate capital and its army.

The consequent battle of attrition lasted 10 months, and ended with the South’s complete and final surrender.

Similarly, when the Soviets encircled the Germans in Stalingrad, they waited patiently until the besieged Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus’s Sixth Army ran out of supplies, and even then the Russians let the army surrender rather than massacre what was left of it.

And most memorably, from the Jewish standpoint, Roman general and future emperor Vespasian, when assigned the task of quelling the rebellion in Judea, did not immediately climb up from Caesarea to the well-fortified and densely populated Jerusalem.

Instead, he first journeyed to the Galilean periphery, collecting on the road many towns that preferred peace while subduing the few that chose war; proceeded to Transjordan, where more towns surrendered, while the rest were crushed; then ringed Jerusalem, letting it stew in its juice for so long that he had to hand its final assault to his son, Titus, due to events elsewhere in the empire. Giving attrition the extended time it required forced Vespasian to leave Judea before fully conquering it.

The strategic patience which the Romans displayed was the kind which Netanyahu and Ya’alon this week urged, and Liberman scorned. With numbers on their side, the Romans felt they had time, and therefore did not rush into battle. It was a wise, cautious and rewarding plan, one that modern military theory categorizes as a “strategy of indirect approach.”...

In short, attrition has worked repeatedly throughout history – when waged by the party that was responding to aggression, and had quantity on its side. Conversely, when waged as part of an aggression and with insufficient manpower, as happened to the Germans at Verdun and Nasser along the Suez – attrition failed.

...THE MAIN PROBLEM with an Israeli decision to choose attrition is that the Jewish state is used to seeing itself as the epitome of smallness, which in terms of territory and population it indeed is.

That is why Israel’s military doctrine, since it was first conceptualized in the 1950s, has been to shift any war into enemy territory. That, to be sure, is what Israel did in practice in all its wars. A war of attrition would be the prefect opposite of this ethos.

Yet in the current conflict, Israel is the party of quantity and this status, unfamiliar though it may be, is nothing to be ashamed of or deny.

This is not 1948, when we faced five invading armies; ’67, when we faced three; ’73, when we faced two; ’82, when we faced one and a half; or even the Second Lebanon War, when we faced a half-army.

The IDF now faces one city and within its semi-urban sprawl, one well-entrenched militia that wants Israel’s troops lured into Gaza’s narrow alleyways. The IDF, at the same time, has almost infinitely more arms, munitions, personnel, money and food, and is in a position to see and intercept whatever enters and leaves the enemy’s flatland – just as the Romans did when they encircled Jerusalem’s walls.

Speaking strictly militarily, this is a situation that demands siege rather than assault, namely: daily, systematic and indefinite bombing of every rocket launcher, bomb arsenal, munitions workshop and bunker; reflexive bombing of any location from which even a single mortar is fired at Israel; ongoing interception of any suspicious shipments into Gaza; and continuous raids, from the air, ground and sea, of Hamas’s commanders and troops.

...Hamas will be able to endure this for only so long.

To be sure, an Israeli decision to attrite Gaza rather than immediately storm it ... would leave the Israeli population exposed to rocket attacks for the duration of the war. ...[But] the British were certainly bombarded – daily, heavily and in their capital city – when their leaders chose attrition.....

... This is, of course, no way to live, and it should be fought until total victory. But if victory requires enduring this kind of life for several months or even a year while the army does what is militarily prudent and efficient, then it is a price the public can be convinced to pay – provided its mindset is shifted from operation mode to war mode.

There is no need to formally announce that a strategy of attrition has been adopted, if indeed one has been, and such a statement would in fact be idiotic. It would not be idiotic, however, to say that since the war with Gaza will be protracted, the public’s endurance is part of the war’s test.... 

How to lose friends and execute people

From Ynet News, 25 Aug 2014, by Smadar Perry:   

Hamas gave the order for the execution of 'collaborators' as soon as Israel hit the house containing three of its most senior field operatives.  

Hamas executing suspected collaborators with Israel (Photo: AFP)
Hamas executing suspected collaborators with Israel (Photo: AFP)

"Operation Strangulation" was carried out in two horrifying stages: Eleven people, including two women, who had been convicted over the death of Gazans, were thrown on Friday morning into the busy intersection in front of Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. Their hands were tied behind their backs, their mouths gagged, and no word of supplication for their lives was uttered. The executioners waited until the curious masses had gathered – the children were not kept away - and put bullets into each of the 11 heads.

That afternoon, a firing squad from the Hamas military wing assembled in the Great Mosque complex. Worshipers were then presented with a grisly surprise: the executioners and their seven victims, all of whom were masked. There was a short salvo, and the waiting ambulance was loaded up. And there was no rest for these executioners on Saturday, when they killed another four.

... the Hamas military wing executioners were given their orders immediately after Israel eliminated its three senior field commanders in one strike on a house in Rafah.... Khaled Mashal's Cairo-based deputy Moussa Abu Marzouk made a slip of the tongue when asked what pushed them to firing squads and dragging the victims into the town square in the middle of a war: 
"Because of the pressure put on us by the residents of Gaza, because of the cries of despair and so that there would not be further chaos. We decided to create deterrence, so that people would not try to be clever." 
...the charge sheets in Gaza say that hidden hands in the Strip gave the signal, issued reports, passed on correct addresses and delivered mobile numbers. With all due respect to technology, in Gaza they believe that without the suspected collaborators, there would be no eliminations. And when the military wing absorbs a blow, the military wing then settles those accounts ...

Hundreds of kilometers from Abu Marzouk, at "revolutionary tribunals" that had "seen proof", the "traitors" and "agents" "signed "fateful confessions" and were condemned without legal defense. For when the Air Force warplanes are bombing, Hamas does not bother with lawyers.

As it appears from here, this did not go so well for Hamas. The world has not yet recovered from the video of a masked man slashing the throat of American journalist James Foley, and threatening, like Hamas, to keep on executing people. We are not ISIS, said Mashal, we're not a religious extremist organization, and "only" fighting against the Israeli enemy. 

Oh really? I suggest you take a look at why you didn't get any applause from the Arab world. Or, just once, conduct an opinion poll to see who your people hate more, Israel or "the resistance" that has destroyed lives and homes and property. What would you do with the 1.8 million Gazans if they [weren't] afraid to tell you what they really think? It is true that they hate and curse us, but they hate and curse you no less