Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa | Analysis

MIDEAST: So What Was the Assault All About

Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

JERUSALEM, Feb 2 2009 (IPS) - Just over a week before they go to the polls, Israelis are in a grim mood. The gloom is fed by the leading candidates, all of whom are seeking to outdo one another in sombre assessment of the challenges that lie ahead.

“We have nowhere to go but towards the next round of confrontation…after all, what are we preparing for if not the day of a disaster?” wrote columnist Doron Rosenblum in Haaretz, starkly capturing the national sentiment.

The perception that there’s no political horizon to end the conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world is hamstringing the efforts of the governing parties – centre-right Kadima and centre-left Labour – to challenge the confrontational mindset of the party that dominates the opinion polls, the Likud party and its far right acolytes.

“It doesn’t matter,” wrote Rosenblum, “if Bibi (Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader) wins the election, the ‘Bibi agenda’ has already won, and won big.”

Since the fighting stopped two weeks ago, a daily trickle of Palestinian rockets into southern Israel surpassed on Sunday the average number of daily attacks before the war; the targets were also further afield (including the large Mediterranean city Ashkelon) than had been the case before Israeli launched its three-week offensive against Hamas.

In the public mind, deterrence, the main goal of the military assault, has been neutralised. A weekend poll on Channel 10 television showed parity between Israelis who believe the war was “a success” and those who felt it was not.

Retaliatory strikes by the Israeli air force, principally against tunnels used to smuggle arms and personnel back and forth between Gaza and Egypt, have done little to ease misgivings that the war may have not secured its objectives. This pessimism deepened after the leaders of the two principal governing parties sparred over how to respond to the continuing Hamas challenge.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Kadima successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, demanded a forceful reaction – in Olmert’s phrase a ‘disproportionate response’. Defence Minister Ehud Barak, the Labour leader, on the other hand, counselled against a gung-ho approach: “In election season, there’s a lot of chatter by people who have never held a weapon and don’t understand the conditions under which we must act and when there’s need to hold back.”

Smarting at what her Kadima supporters termed “pure male chauvinism”, Livni retorted “we need to use strength and a lot of it, there’s no reason to wait.”

At Sunday’s cabinet meeting, Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin stressed that “despite Hamas bragging”, the war was deterring the militant movement. They are “beginning to understand” the extent of the blow they have suffered, Yadlin reportedly said.

Barak translated the belief that Israel’s deterrent capability has been restored to another front: he warned the pro-Iranian Hizbullah movement in Lebanon not to risk a major attack on Israeli targets abroad. Israeli travellers have been urged to take stringent precautions for fear that Hizbullah might strike to avenge the assassination of its military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, a year ago. “They know it will not be worth their while,” said Barak bluntly Monday morning on Israel Radio.

The Israeli government is battling another perceived “failure” of the war. Nearly half of those who assessed the war was “not a success”, cited the failure to secure the release of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas for the past two-and-a-half years. Hamas says his release is contingent only on Israel’s release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners it is holding.

The saving grace for the government lies in hope that Egypt will soon manage to force through a broad ceasefire arrangement to which Hamas and Israel would both commit. Even though Hamas is seeking to consolidate the impression that the war had no effect on its power, the Israeli government also anticipates that the Egyptian-mediated Tahadiyah truce will enable President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority to get its foot back in the Gaza door.

One of the Egyptian provisions reportedly calls for the PA to monitor the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza along the lines of a 2005 arrangement struck after Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza. It’s yet to become clear what role Hamas would have at the crossing point.

But any truce arrangements concluded with regard to containing the re- arming of Hamas or to the opening of the borders surrounding Gaza for people and goods cuts little ice with the Israeli electorate’s hardening mood. Netanyahu has simply convinced many people with his argument the war should not have stopped without Gaza being “purged” of Hamas.

Whether or not Cairo is successful in forcing the agreement before the Feb. 10 elections seems unlikely to sway public sentiment. Weekend polls in mainstream Israeli media all suggest that the Likud and its religious and far- right allies would command between 65 and 70 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

Even after their crushing attack on Hamas, most Israelis still feel themselves hostage on several fronts – to Hamas policies, to their own government’s choices at election time and, to the national mindset that even management of the conflict with the Palestinians, much less its resolution, will be beyond the mandate of the government they are about to install.