The New Round of War with Hamas:
A Bifocal Palestinian Reality, a Bifocal Israeli Response
by Dr. Eran Lerman
Director Israel/Middle East Office
American Jewish Committee
Even as we bury our dead, even as we again feel the tinge of despair, let us remember: There are Palestinians who genuinely seek peace, prosperity, and the possibility of a better future. AJC leaders who met the PA finance minister, Salam Fayyad, felt a surge of hope. As highly placed Israelis had told them earlier, here was a man of honesty, of physical and moral courage (it takes much of both just to walk into the dens of systematic thievery—“corruption,” he explains, is too mild a word to describe the depth and extent of the rot—organized by Arafat’s men over the years to rob their own people, and to close them down), who took no personal advantage of his position nor used it for cheap propagandistic effect. He committed himself to bringing real change and a chance for peace; he asked for a better life for his people, yet understood the constraints of his Israeli interlocutors, with whom he shared a relationship of mutual respect.
At the very same time, there are Palestinians, such as the Hamas leadership—or at least most of it, and to a large extent Arafat himself— for whom there is no greater joy than to shed the blood of “the sons of pigs and monkeys,” the Jews, wherever they may be. Their position, to be frank, is reminiscent of Nazi attitudes (and leans on Nazi literature). All Jews are, for them, subhuman and subject to extermination. Thus Sheikh Ahmed Yassin can speak of the attempt on Abd al-Aziz Rantisi’s life as a “great crime,” yet take pride in the hundreds of Israeli civilians his Hamas organization has murdered over the years.
This time, in the attack in Jerusalem, their “take” was particularly gruesome: seventeen dead in all, mostly older women, an American Jewish immigrant living in Jerusalem, a semi-blind young man and young woman who were about to be married, people who never did any harm to anyone—unless you accept the Hamas verdict that it is a capital offense to be a Jew, let alone live in a Jewish state. Again, the terrible sights; again, the teams of Zaka volunteers called in to give the last measure of mercy to the victims. (Just three days earlier the AJC solidarity mission had been present as AJC donated a motorcycle to this unique organization, to help their people make their way quickly to any disaster point: How urgently we all prayed on that bright Jerusalem afternoon that it might never be needed!)
Surely, say the media (even here), Israel “brought this on itself” by “starting” this war, trying to kill Rantisi, right? Wrong. In my years as an intelligence officer, I often felt that secret intelligence gave me little more than a 48-72 hour edge over any ordinary newspaper reader. Most (not all) of what the spooks know eventually comes to light. Here, however, was a case when the time lag served to turn reality on its head: in other words, to obscure from the Israeli public—let alone from the op-ed writers of the New York Times and in much of Europe—what was cause and what was effect in this new war with Hamas.
Israeli decision makers—the small circle of professionals around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who were consulted as to the attack on Rantisi—read reality not through the newspaper headlines and CNN Breaking News, but through the lens of the intelligence product. They faced a stark piece of information. Egged on by radicals like Rantisi, and against the opinion of more cautious elements (who fear that their movement might face isolation as the Syrians and the Saudis, their hosts and sponsors, come under U.S. pressure), the political leadership of Hamas decided, immediately after the Aqaba summit, not to accept Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas’s proposal for even a temporary ceasefire (hudna, in Arabic). Instead, they launched an all-out effort to kill Israelis and derail the road map, unless Abbas surrendered and redefined the process in terms acceptable to Hamas.
Within days, seven Israelis lay dead—two of them literally butchered, cut to pieces with axes, near their car in a lovers’ lane near Jerusalem. (You did not see the pictures in your papers, but Sharon saw the file.) Four more were soldiers at the Erez checkpoint, who paid the price for the decision to relax restrictions on workers entering from Gaza. Another soldier died fighting a Hamas cell in Hebron. The DMI (Directorate of Military Intelligence) Daily Report was shot through with hot, specific alerts, as Hamas cells swung into action. In the days before the attempt on Rantisi’s life, there were several close calls, with suicide attacks foiled at the last moment.
It is easy enough, particularly following a tragic operational failure involving the loss of innocent Palestinian lives, to explain why it was wrong, even so, to have allowed ourselves to be seen in the “court of world opinion” as the ones who “fired the first shot.” There have indeed been some voices who dissented in advance. Apparently, the DMI did warn of the political consequences. Those who took the decision to go ahead, however, did not do so “to provoke” the terrorists’ response; Hamas was already on the warpath. They did so in the hope, slim as it might be, that such military pressure on the Islamist radicals might, in fact, help Abbas (and the go-between, Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman) in offering the Hamas a stark choice: Lay down your weapons and become a legitimate political force—or face destruction.
In the twisted landscape of inner Palestinian power games, they might even prove to be right. “We are facing a bifocal reality,” Mofaz told the AJC solidarity mission on Tuesday, a few hours after the failed strike against Rantisi. Israel is still quite willing to give the road map—and its interlocutors on security, Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan—a real chance; but they themselves have been telling us that they are not yet ready to take responsibility in any area of Gaza or the West Bank. A so-called hudna could have solved this for a while, but once Hamas rejected it, a confrontation was inevitable. Once the Hamas leadership does grasp that this is a confrontation they cannot win (head on), they might just reverse course and accept the need to work by Abbas’s rules, not the other way around.
To these calculations should be added another, often neglected, factor. The resilience of the Israeli public is perhaps the most vital asset in this war. To remain resilient, the public—for good reason—deserves to be confident that its elected government is doing all it can to destroy the terrorist threat. Rantisi had positioned himself as the embodiment of this threat—even if for much of the time he was just the loudmouth, not the leader. For three years, Israelis have watched this man on their screens, telling them after every atrocity that there were more to come, that their wives and children were fair game, that those who survive would all “go back to Poland” anyway. More than once I have been asked, “Why is he still alive?” Sharon had come to ask himself a similar question: Can I keep the Israeli people on my side as I go ahead, if I send the IDF to clear away outposts while Hamas kills us, humiliates Abbas, and lays down the rules of the game, all the while bragging about it with that self-satisfied smile on Rantisi’s face? At the end of the day, this proved to be as important to him as Abbas’s needs or the world’s expectations.
In this brutal environment in which we live, the only way to retain your optimism is to have it well guarded.