Since it's been a while since we had an Israel/Palestine thread...

vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Caught this on FP Passport:

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has castigated Israel and U.S.-allied Arab countries as Israeli troops press further into Gaza, but he has also refused to unleash Hezbollah’s rockets, which could wreak havoc in northern Israel. So why, as Tom Ricks wonders, hasn’t Nasrallah joined the battle?

Because he isn’t suicidal. IDF generals have made clear that another war with Hezbollah would likely be far more destructive than the 2006 confrontation and would likely include a ground invasion. Hezbollah is adept at fighting an insurgency in South Lebanon because they have always been able to draw on the support of the Lebanese Shia and capitalize on a weak or complicit central government in Beirut. If Hezbollah initiated a war with Israel, there is no guarantee that it would benefit from either of these factors.

“If they start something, they know the biggest loser will be their constituency, the Shia community of Lebanon,” former UN Interim Force in Lebanon spokesman Timur Goksel told me. Many of the predominantly Shia villages in South Lebanon have not yet been fully reconstructed from the Israeli assault in 2006. The Shia support Hezbollah because it represents their sectarian interests, provides social services, and defends them from Israel. Hezbollah does not want to test whether their constituency is ready to once again pay the price for furthering its international agenda.

In the larger Lebanese political scene, this is an awkward time for military adventurism. The pro-Western forces in the government have insisted on a “national dialogue” to determine a national defense strategy, which could constrain Hezbollah’s use of its militia. Hezbollah and its allies have managed to stall this discussion, but if Hezbollah were to unilaterally launch a war against Israel they would be subject to renewed pressure from their domestic opponents.

Lebanon is also gearing up for parliamentary elections on June 7, and Hezbollah hopes to win enough seats to be the primary player in a government of its own. The near-unanimous condemnation of Israel’s actions in Lebanon plays into Hezbollah’s hard-line stance towards Israel, and puts America’s allies in Lebanon in a difficult position. For Hezbollah, using the Gaza issue to sweep into power is a far better option than launching a war it cannot hope to win.
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C

crackerjack

Well-known member
Here's your answer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/08/gaza-israelandthepalestinians2

At least four rockets were fired from Lebanon into northern Israel today, leading the Israeli army to return fire and raising fears that the conflict in Gaza could spread.

The exchanges came as Israeli air strikes destroyed several houses in the town of Rafah, on Gaza's southern border, today after what Palestinians said was one of the heaviest nights of bombing since the conflict began 13 days ago.

Intense artillery strikes and waves of aerial bombardment, were reported across the Gaza Strip.

Israeli tanks were seen moving in southern Gaza and leaflets were dropped near the border with Egypt warning residents to leave the area "because Hamas uses your houses to hide and smuggle military weapons".

Around 5,000 Palestinians fled their homes and took refuge in two UN schools that had been set up as shelters.

For the first time, the conflict widened to northern Israel, where four katyusha rockets fired from southern Lebanon landed near the town of Nahariya, injuring two people.

The Israeli military fired back at the point from which the rockets were launched.

Military officials said they were concerned about attacks by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Two years ago, Israel fought a heavy, month-long war in Lebanon that claimed hundreds of lives.
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
It's not clear that the rockets were fired by Hezbollah. From the same article:

There was no confirmation or denial of responsibility for the rocket attacks from Hezbollah itself. Lebanese security forces believe they were probably fired by a Palestinian group inspired by Hezbollah.
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
The War in Gaza: Tactical Gains, Strategic Defeat? Anthony H. Cordesman, CSIS

The fact remains, however, that the growing human tragedy in Gaza is steadily raising more serious questions as to whether the kind of tactical gains that Israel now reports are worth the suffering involved. As of the 14th day of the war, nearly 800 Palestinian have died and over 3,000 have been wounded. Fewer and fewer have been Hamas fighters, while more and more have been civilians.

These direct costs are also only part of the story. Gaza’s economy had already collapsed long before the current fighting began.... Its infrastructure is crippled in critical areas like power and water. This war has compounded the impact of a struggle that has gone on since 2000. It has reduced living standards in basic ways like food, education, as well as medical supplies and services. It has also left most Gazans without a productive form of employment....

It is also far from clear that the tactical gains are worth the political and strategic cost to Israel... the reporting from within Gaza indicates that each new Israeli air strike or advance on the ground has increased popular support for Hamas and anger against Israel in Gaza. The same is true in the West Bank and the Islamic world. Iran and Hezbollah are capitalizing on the conflict. Anti-American demonstrations over the fighting have taken place in areas as “remote” as Kabul. Even friends of Israel like Turkey see the war as unjust. The Egyptian government comes under greater pressure with every casualty. The US is seen as having done virtually nothing... and the President elect is getting as much blame as the President who still serves.

One strong warning of the level of anger in the region comes from Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Prince Turki... has always been a leading voice of moderation... he has been a supporter of the Saudi peace process and an advocate of Jewish-Christian-Islamic dialog. Few Arab voices deserve more to be taken seriously, and Prince Turki described the conflict as follows in a speech at the opening of the 6th Gulf Forum on January 6th, “The Bush administration has left you (with) a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza…Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza.” Neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces this reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world.

This raises a question that every Israeli and its supporters now needs to ask. What is the strategic purpose behind the present fighting? After two weeks of combat Olmert, Livni, and Barak have still not said a word that indicates that Israel will gain strategic or grand strategic benefits, or tactical benefits much larger than the gains it made from selectively striking key Hamas facilities early in the war. In fact, their silence raises haunting questions about whether they will repeat the same massive failures made by Israel’s top political leadership during the Israeli-Hezbollah War in 2006. Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal or at least one it can credibly achieve? Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process?

To blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes. To paraphrase a comment about the British government’s management of the British Army in World War I, lions seem to be led by donkeys. If Israel has a credible ceasefire plan that could really secure Gaza, it is not apparent. If Israel has a plan that could credibly destroy and replace Hamas, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to help the Gazans and move them back towards peace, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to use US or other friendly influence productively, it not apparent.

As we have seen all too clearly from US mistakes, any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni, and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends. If there is more, it is time to make such goals public and demonstrate how they can be achieved. The question is not whether the IDF learned the tactical lessons of the fighting in 2006. It is whether Israel's top political leadership has even minimal competence to lead them.
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S

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
Has anyone picked up a New York Times today? A13, 3/4 page ad from the Anti-Defamation League with a diagram demonstrating the range of Hamas missiles if they were situated in Manhattan, New York.

The headline is:

"WHAT IF HAMAS WAS IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD?"

They'd need a lot more range, is my guess.
 
D

droid

Guest
crackerjack said:
Is there any evidence for this? I've read it a thousand times and never once seen any.
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Yes, sorry. See the 'American Conservative' article below with references to texts. IIRC, Seymour Hersh has written about this as well. Possibly in 'The Samson option', but its been a long time since Ive read it.

How Israel helped to create Hamas

By Brendan O'Neill

...But there is something bitterly ironic in Israel’s support for Fatah against Hamas—and it should be a lesson to governments everywhere that meddle in other states’ affairs. In the past, Israel supported Hamas against Fatah. Indeed, in the 1970s and 80s, Israel played a not insignificant role in encouraging Hamas’s emergence in the belief that such an Islamist group might help rupture support for the mass nationalist movement of Fatah. Twenty years later, Israel has switched sides, hoping that it can encourage Fatah to see off Hamas. It wants “moderate” Palestinians to take on the “extremist” Palestinians it helped create. Like America and Britain before it—both of whom have supported and armed Islamist movements in the Middle East in attempts to undermine secular nationalist parties—Israel is learning the hard way that it is one thing to let radical Islamists off the leash but quite another thing to rein them back in again. If you make monsters, you shouldn’t be surprised if they come back to bite you.

Hamas first emerged in 1987. It was formed from various charities based in the Palestinian territories with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement born in Egypt in the 1920s from which many of today’s radical Islamic sects, including al-Qaeda, have sprung. Israel allowed these Islamic charities to gain strength and influence in Palestinian areas, hoping that they would counter the influence of secular Palestinian resistance movements. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas until his death by Israeli air strike in 2004, formed Hamas as the military wing of his group the Islamic Association, which was licensed by Israel 10 years earlier. During that period, when there was open conflict between Israeli forces and Palestinian nationalists, Israeli officials gave the nod to and even indirectly funded the establishment of Islamic societies in the West Bank and Gaza that might weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization. Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, has said, “[W]e saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism.” The very Islamic groups “cultivated” by Israel in the 1970s became Hamas in the 1980s, which went on to become Israel’s biggest nightmare in the 1990s. It remains so today.

After the Six Day War of 1967, Israel began administering the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula. Where the Arab nationalist forces that had previously controlled these areas were hard on Islamist activists, rightly judging them to be enemies of secular nationalism, Israel was much more lenient, even permissive in its attitude towards the Islamists. One of the first actions taken by Israel after its victory in the 1967 war was to release from prison various Muslim Brotherhood activists, including Ahmed Yassin, future founder of Hamas. Yassin and others had been jailed by the Egyptian authorities after the Muslim Brotherhood tried to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the anti-colonialist and pan-Arabist who considered political Islam a threat and an anachronism and was fairly unforgiving in his treatment of its practitioners. Israel, by contrast, sensing that such radical Islamists might be helpful in undermining Arab nationalists like the Nasser-influenced Fatah in the Palestinian territories released the Islamists from their cells and encouraged them to take root in Palestinian society.

According to Robert Dreyfuss, author of the enlightening and exhaustive book Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, political Islamism grew exponentially as Israel took control of the Palestinian territories:

Starting in 1967, the Israelis began to encourage or allow the Islamists in the Gaza and West Bank areas, among the Palestinian exiled population, to flourish. The statistics are really quite staggering. In Gaza, for instance, between 1967 and 1987, when Hamas was founded, the number of mosques tripled from 200 to 600. And a lot of that come with money flowing from outside Gaza, from wealthy conservative Islamists in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. But, of course, none of this could have happened without the Israelis casting an approving eye upon it.

It is from these Islamist roots that Hamas emerged in 1987. Dreyfuss continues

There’s plenty of evidence that the Israeli intelligence services, especially Shin Bet and the military occupation authorities, encouraged the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood and the founding of Hamas [in Palestinian territories].

Indeed, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman, Shin Bet—the Israeli counter-intelligence and internal security service—knowingly created Hamas: “Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet, which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO.”

A former senior CIA official recently told UPI that Israel’s duplicitous support for the Islamist groups that subsequently became Hamas was “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.” Dreyfuss agrees, pointing out how useful it was for Israel that an Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories antagonized, in some cases violently, the mass Fatah outfit:

The Hamas organization was a bitter opponent of Palestinian nationalism and clashed repeatedly with the PLO and with Fatah, of course. And there were armed clashes on university campuses in the 1970s and 1980s, where Hamas would attack the PLO, the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], the PDFLP [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine], and other groups, with clubs and chains. This was before guns became prominent in the Occupied Territories.

In allowing the emergence of radical Islamism, Israel was following in the footsteps of successive British and American governments and their policy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood itself, midwife to Hamas, is a creation of British colonialism. In the 1920s, the British, then the colonial rulers of Egypt, helped set up the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of keeping Egyptian nationalism and anti-colonialism in check. Dreyfuss describes the original Muslim Brotherhood as an “unabashed British intelligence front.” The mosque that served as the first headquarters of the Brotherhood, in Ismailia, Egypt, was built by the (British) Suez Canal Company. In the 1930s and 1950s, with Britain’s knowledge and tacit approval, the Brotherhood both challenged anti-colonial parties within Egypt and spread to other parts of the Near and Middle East, setting up branches in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, where under the “approving eye” of Israel from the late 1960s to the 1980s, it eventually mutated into Hamas. Following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power in 1954, both the British and Americans viewed the Brotherhood as a useful weapon against secular nationalism and communism. In his book Sleeping With the Devil, former CIA officer Robert Baer describes the “dirty little secret” in Washington in the early 1950s, namely that “the White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against—what else?—communism.”

Al-Qaeda itself, that most radical and obscure of Islamic sects, springs from the Muslim Brotherhood. Osama bin Laden is heavily influenced by the thinking of Sayyid Qutb, a radical member of the Brotherhood. The Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s second-in-command and currently the public face of al-Qaeda in its occasional grainy videos and crackly audio recordings, was first radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood before moving on to the more radical Islamic Jihad group in 1979 and subsequently fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Indeed, in both intellectual and physical terms, al-Qaeda has benefited from Western intervention in Middle Eastern affairs. It takes its intellectual inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood, that group supported by both American and British intelligence in the early and middle 20th century, and it was physically forged in the heat of the Afghan-Soviet War, a conflict largely facilitated by American, British, and Saudi support for the Mujahideen.

In playing the same game as the Brits and Americans—the “devil’s game”—Israel created its own gravediggers. Israel’s encouragement of Hamas’s emergence to counter secular nationalism represented an attack on the idea of popular and secular democracy, so it is not surprising that Hamas retains its somewhat extreme religious leanings and suspicion of traditional politics.

From Egypt to Palestine to Afghanistan, the explicit aim of Western and Israeli support for radical Islamism has been to isolate, weaken, and ultimately destroy popular political movements that very often were based on Western ideas of democracy and progress. Israel is now trying to rein in the consequences of its earlier actions by encouraging Fatah to take on Hamas, which is a recipe for further conflict and division in the Palestinian territories.

http://amconmag.com/article/2007/feb/12/00017/
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D

droid

Guest
And also - Yitzhak Segev, military governor of Gaza gave an interview to David Shipler in the NYT in '81 (for which he was severely reprimanded by the Israeli government) in which he discusses his role in encouraging the emerging Hamas movement through the financing of certain mosques from a special government fund :

...It's reasonably well-attested that the growth of Hamas originated partly with a very cynical Israeli decision to build up fundamentalism in Gaza as a weapon against the secular and leftist elements who were then running the Palestinian resistance. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, the military commander in the Strip, said as much to the New York Times in 1981. Whether that is true or not I don't know, but I do remember sitting in the Gaza garden of Dr. Haider Abdel-Shafi in the summer of 1981, after his clinic had been burned down by an Islamist mob shouting "God is great." Dr. Abdel-Shafi was not a corrupt Fatah official but a very conscientious and skilled physician, who headed the Red Crescent in Gaza. (He later gave a brilliant opening speech, at the Madrid peace conference in 1991, as leader of the Palestinian civilian delegation.) Abdel-Shafi dryly noted to me that, for the first and only time in anyone's memory, the Israeli occupation forces had not turned up to a scene of violent disorder, and had simply let the clinic burn....

http://www.slate.com/id/2135098/
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...Shaikh Yasin never concealed his dislike of Yasser Arafat. “Pork eaters and wine drinkers”, was his contemptuous denunciation of the secular PLO leadership. He was even more hostile towards communism and left nationalist factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).

For this reason, the Brothers received additional support from an unexpected quarter: Israel. The Zionist state and its security forces actively encouraged the Brotherhood as an alternative to the PLO. Its opposition to terrorism and emphasis on charitable and educational activities made it preferable to the PLO, despite its call for the destruction of Israel. The Israeli occupation authorities viewed the Islamic groups as a useful tool for fomenting dissension within the Palestinians. The former military governor of Gaza, General Yitzhak Segev, explained how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and Stalinists. According to the journalist Graham Usher, he said, “The Israeli government gives me a budget and we extend some financial aid to Islamic groups via Mosques and religious schools, in order to help create a force that can stand up against the leftist forces that support the PLO.”

David Shipler, a former correspondent of the New York Times, wrote: “In 1980, when Islamic militants set fire to the office of the Red Crescent Society in Gaza, headed by Dr Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Communist and PLO supporter, the Israeli army did nothing, intervening only when the mob marched to his home and seemed to threaten him personally.”

As early as 1978, the commissioner of Muslim waqf, the religious trust, warned Israel against registering and thus recognising the Islamic Congress and allowing it to gain control of the waqf. The waqf was comprised of lands, shops, businesses and agricultural land and constituted approximately 10 percent of the economy of Gaza Strip. Israel ignored his advice and gave the Brotherhood’s front organisation a licence in 1979.

Within a decade, Yassin built the Islamic Congress into a powerful religious, economic and social institution in the Gaza Strip. He developed a welfare network around the mosques, many of which served also as community centres. The number of mosques in the Gaza Strip tripled from 200 to 600 between 1967 and 1987, while the number of worshippers doubled. In the West Bank, the number of mosques went from 400 to 750 in the same period. Women were required to cover their heads and wear robes over their clothes, and young men to grow beards. Sport was used to draw in the youth and bind them to the Islamic League.

The Brotherhood targeted youth in the villages and refugee camps, school students, teachers, civil servants, and particularly the poor. It shunned workers and women in trade unions and professional organisations. While eschewing violence against Israel “until the time was right”, its youth trashed shops, cafes and businesses selling alcohol and threatened and harassed the population to force them to return to supposedly traditional Islamic ways and abstain from Western style music, past-times and habits.

It carried out organised attacks on the PLO and its organisations, and clashed with student supporters of the PLO and left groups in the universities. After a series of particularly violent clashes between 1982 and 1986, it took over Al Azhar, the Islamic University in Gaza, where it purged the school of PLO supporters in a mini-civil war against the PFLP and its Stalinist supporters and turned the staff and students into a reserve of 700 “soldiers”. It was only when Fatah indicated that it would no longer stand aside and let its supporters be ousted in this way, that Israel took action to stop the fighting...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jul2002/ham2-j06.shtml
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craner

craner

Beast of Burden
I think Scott might go mad when he sees that Brendan O'Neill has been cited as a credible source.
 
D

droid

Guest
Thats a bit weedy now isnt it Oliver? I'm certainly not his biggest fan, but he's not a member of a group closely associated with the Palestinian 'intelligence services', and as I mentioned, there are several references to texts in the article which I would recommend to anyone wanting to investigate further as O'Neills information is garnered almost fully from those books.

BTW, so you actually disagree with the assertion? Maybe you should take it up with Yitzhak Segev and the NYT...
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
What do you mean? I have zero interest in O'Neill. I never read Living Marxism or Spiked. But he drives Scottie up the wall. There must be better articles than that to link to, though, Droid?

I notice he quotes Bob Baer. That's fair enough. Baer's new book Devil We Know: Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower is very, very good.

Jeffrey Goldberg's NYT op ed yesterday was typically elegant and informative.
 
D

droid

Guest
Theres actually very little on the web about this.

Which gives it even more credibility!
 
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