The Realist

Hezbollah’s al-Manar has reprinted John Mearsheimer’s latest anti-Israel screed - with, as Jeffrey Goldberg amusingly notes, a disclaimer that it does not represent the views of al-Manar – and this one bears detailed unpicking because it showcases a variety of follies.

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: 1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; 2) to restore Israel’s deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran’s nuclear program.
 
But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.
 
The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”
 
What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.

The main flaw in Mearsheimer’s argument is its complete disconnection from documented reality.  He describes Israel as if it were a monolithic, dictatorial entity which had sustained a consistent strategy for decades.  Israel is in fact a democracy whose leaders routinely have to go before the public and explain themselves or account for their motives and goals.

It has long been clear that the Israeli electorate favour peace, security and prosperity over “Greater Israel”, and this is what Kadima and Labor politicians have offered them.  Mearsheimer’s claim that there has in fact been a conspiratorial subtext – a wink between Israeli politicians and the public which cannot be discerned by the rest of us – is unfounded and flies in the face of all of the evidence.  It is reminscent of the argument that the war in Iraq is actually a war to control the oil supply, despite the years of debate and the tens of thousands of pages of analysis produced by the government, independent analysts and the military on the real reasons for war – much of it, believe it or not, by people who do not have a personal financial stake in the oil industry - and the widespread reporting of this in the media.  All of that is just a smokescreen designed to look like reality, when in fact everyone involved knows what is really going on!  Wink.

“Israelis tend to be blunt,” Mearsheimer says, ”and they occasionally say what they are really doing.”  Only occasionally, one assumes, because the rest of the time they are involved in this mendacious conspiracy to keep the rest of us in the dark. He continues:

After the IDF killed 40 Palestinian civilians in a UN school on Jan. 6, Ha’aretz reported that “senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.” One officer explained, “For us, being cautious means being aggressive. From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground … I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock.”

The argument that Israel somehow made full use of its military might to lay waste to the entire Gaza Strip is asinine.  If it had done this, then the total casualty figure might have been somewhat higher than 1,000 – 2,000 out of a total population of 1,500,000, and there might have been more than 4,000 houses destroyed.  Mearsheimer has taken a quotation clearly made in the context of ongoing operations against Hamas, not against the civilian population – and I remember reading this quotation in its original context – and either distorted it or been too stupid to see its true meaning.

There’s more:

One might accept that Israel is waging “a cruel, all-out war against 1.5 million Palestinian civilians,” as Ha’aretz put it in an editorial, but argue that it will eventually achieve its war aims and the rest of the world will quickly forget the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza.
 
This is wishful thinking. For starters, Israel is unlikely to stop the rocket fire for any appreciable period of time unless it agrees to open Gaza’s borders and stop arresting and killing Palestinians. Israelis talk about cutting off the supply of rockets and mortars into Gaza, but weapons will continue to come in via secret tunnels and ships that sneak through Israel’s naval blockade. It will also be impossible to police all of the goods sent into Gaza through legitimate channels.
 
Israel could try to conquer all of Gaza and lock the place down. That would probably stop the rocket attacks if Israel deployed a large enough force. But then the IDF would be bogged down in a costly occupation against a deeply hostile population. They would eventually have to leave, and the rocket fire would resume. And if Israel fails to stop the rocket fire and keep it stopped, as seems likely, its deterrent will be diminished, not strengthened.
 
More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger.

Hamas are “stronger”?  I didn’t realize that provoking a pointless war by purposefully targeting civilians and then scurrying to hide under your own civilian population was a sign of tremendous strength, but okay. Mearsheimer is right that ultimately there is no future for Israel if it has to continue to engage in violence against the Palestinians continuously and indiscriminately – that road leads only to self-loathing.  And on this point he quotes no other an authority than Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert!

But even if the unexpected happens and the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will become an apartheid state. As Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said, Israel will “face a South African-style struggle” if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own. “As soon as that happens,” he argued, “the state of Israel is finished.” Yet Olmert has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and create a viable Palestinian state, relying instead on the Iron Wall strategy to deal with the Palestinians.

So, the man who the record shows has attempted to avoid the pitfalls Mearsheimer warns of and pursued the goals Mearsheimer ostensibly advocates – Palestinian autonomy within a reasonable state – while making arguments to justify all this that explicitly address the points raised by Mearsheimer, is dismissed as a mere dissembler with a hidden agenda.  He ignores the obvious question of why Olmert would rip down West Bank settlements when the equivalent action in Gaza brought nothing but suffering for people on both side of the border, and the fact that it was this suffering – along with the intervention of the 2006 war in Lebanon – which stopped disengagement in its tracks after the Olmert government had already shown its willingness to tackle settlements if the result was an improvement in Israel’s security. The reason this improvement did not appear was the actions of the rejectionists, not Israel.

Nothing short of a comprehensive, unilateral abandonment to 1967 borders – with security guarantees for Israel or not, and probably not - will ever convince such ardent critics of Israel that a hidden agenda doesn’t rule the country, a black heart of unspoken evil goals and assumptions which can never be exorcised even when the Israeli electorate explicity abandon them.

After all, you know what those Jews are like. Wink.