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The Gaza crisis: who's to blame?
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On the surface of things, this seems like it should be a relatively easy problem to work out. Hamas, which has called for the eradication of the state of Israel, has been firing rockets into Israeli border towns for years. These attacks intensified in December with the end of a six month ceasefire that Hamas neglected to renew. These attacks occasionally kill people, wound others, and cause property damage, but are wildly inaccurate and more generally create an atmosphere of nerve-jangling fear and paranoia that makes daily life impossible.
Israel launched a holiday aerial assault, now moved to ground invasion, that by all accounts succeeded in hitting mostly just military targets. So what's the problem?
Well; the Gaza Strip, as it so happens, is small. Like, less than a third the size of Fairfax county, with around 1.5 million people. If it were ranked as a real nation, it would have one of the highest population densities in the world, above Taiwan or Bangladesh. Living conditions are pretty packed. A lot of civilians, then, are also dying; a lot of these military targets are either next to or coinhabiting with civilian homes, shops, et. al.
A lot of people are generally outraged by all the civilian deaths and, for lack of a more coherent way of expressing their indignity, agree that Israel can defend itself but complain about "proportionality", which, really, is a very silly idea from a military sense. The point of war, after all, isn't to die for your country, but to make the other guy die for his.
Civilian deaths aren't proportional to anything; they're an undesirable consequence. They can only be justified or not justified. Some have even gone so far as to say that it's a good thing that Palestinian civilians have died, since Hamas militants will be less likely to fight if they know their families may pay for it, or that the Palestinian people won't offer aid and comfort to Hamas fighters if they know it can cost them their lives; but since killing civilians with the intent of causing political change or gaining military advantage is the definition of terrorism, we'll ignore those people for now.
Are these civilian deaths justified?
I'll go to bat for Israel to defend the 1948 war for existence, where they were literally besiged and fighting for survival, or the six day war of 1967. Certainly if the merits of a government were judged solely by their treatment of their own people, you have to give it to Israel; it's the only nation in the region that has real political and social freedoms on a Western scale, whereas Hamas is not adverse to torturing their own people or even members of their own organization, shutting down opposition newspapers and killing off members of their Fatah rivals. It's not unfair to start out with the supposition that Israel are the good guys and Hamas are the bad guys.
So is Israel justified?
I'm going to have to reluctantly say no.
It's not just the rocket attacks. This situation was brought to a head by the ongoing Gaza blockade, which was Israel's first response to the rocket attacks and whose main effect was to pen up all the Palestinians in the Gaza strip with Hamas, with little food or water or medicine for months. Essentially this is an Escape from New York situation; trapped in a narrow strip of land with these Hamas thugs for a year and a half, stuck in worsening, overcrowded, undernourished conditions, did Israel really think they were going to earn points with the people? That Palestinians would start blaming Hamas, who assumed complete control over the local media, and not Israel, who were the ones actually enforcing the blockade?
So a year later the standoff is still the same; Hamas says it'll stop firing rockets if Israel ends the blockade. Israel says it'll end the blockade if Hamas stops firing rockets.
There exists, in some strategy games, a tactic called WIFOM- Wine In Front Of Me. It's a nod to the movie Princess Bride. If you haven't seen it, there's a scene early on when The Sicilian, who's kidnapped the titular Princess, is engaged by The Dread Pirate Roberts in a game of wits; the contest is simple. There are two cups of wine. Roberts informs the Sicilian that one of them has been poisoned. He then places both cups out on a table, one in front of each of them.
The game is to figure out which one is poisoned. Would you drink the wine placed in front of you? But only a great fool would drink from the wine he was offered by an enemy. On the other hand, even a simpleton would know this, and expecting such, place the poison in his own glass. And so on, and so on.
As it happens, both of the glasses were spiked with a poison that the pirate had built an immunity towards. After a lot of clever guesswork and a sneaky last minute switch, the Sicilian drinks one of them and dies. Where is this going?
Wine in Front of Me is always employed as a distraction tactic. The victim of the maneuver wastes time trying to decide which of two nearly equal options offers an incremental advantage. But no sane and rational opponent puts their chances of victory down to a coinflip; there is always a hidden trick, a catch. Maybe both cups are poisoned. Maybe the game you're caught in trying to win isn't the object of the opponent's attention at all. Playing the game allows your opponent to dictate the options, and often ends up with your voluntarily drinking poison.
Israel is caught in a WIFOM scenario. Hamas doesn't care about the blockade and never has; Hamas doesn't care about the rockets. Hamas is a bunch of thugs with guns who enjoy having power. They kill their rivals without question, commit acts of random and pointless cruelty. They rose to popularity basically on being the group that flips Israel the bird, and aren't about to turn around give up power now just because it's in the best interests of their constituency.
Hamas was democratically elected. They then, very undemocratically, eliminated their rivals through threat and actuality of force. This was the moment for Israel to step in and support their neighbors in Fatah, for all it's imperfection and corruption, as an actual democratic and somewhat sensible representative of the Palestinian people.
As it is, they allowed Hamas to secure an iron grip on the Gaza Strip, and then made sure that no one who might oppose their rule could leave, and solidified their power by making themselves a scapegoat for Palestinian troubles with a year and a half siege.
The current attack and invasion is not iself wrong so much as it is the realization of failed and wrong strategies. Israel has pursued irrational strategies, as if Hamas was an enemy that could be threatened or bargained with. These civilian deaths are Israel's fault for failing to understand what they were dealing with and developing a plan to deal with it.
What should Israel and Palestine do now? Drop the barricade for one; it does nothing but empower Hamas, who don't mind being Gaza being a pile of corpses as long as they're on top. A ground invasion is a good call, but Israel lacks the credibility to do it; if the international community really desired peace, they would appoint a neutral third party to occupy the Gaza Strip for reconstruction and the eradication of the murderous Hamas gang. Turkey, as a democratic member of NATO and a Muslim country, would be a good choice. Or, if memories of Ottoman rule are still sour, Indonesia. The G20 nations are clamoring for a bigger place in the arena of world politics; let someone else be the intermediary on this one.
Israel, for it's part, should have to pay sanctions. Although not the instigator in this, their actions have been reckless and ill-planned throughout. They ought to have learned what anyone who wants to survive on the internet has to learn; you don't feed the troll. It's like spitting at the sky. The sky never minds, and you're just likely to wind up with egg on your face The only way to win a game of Wine in Front of Me is to recognize the situation for what it is and not to play. Neither cup Hamas is offering is the one Israel wants.
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