[By pursuing its current war with Hamas, Israel is working against
the goal of preserving the nation state of Israel.]
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WHY ISRAEL SHOULD ADOPT AN IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE  
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Nick Licata
November 8, 2023
Counterpunch
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_ By pursuing its current war with Hamas, Israel is working against
the goal of preserving the nation state of Israel. _

, Photo by Gayatri Malhotra

 

It is counter-intuitive that any country winning a military struggle
would initiate a call for an immediate ceasefire. But that is
precisely what Israel needs to do to achieve their primary objective,
preserving the nation-state of Israel. By pursuing its current war
with Hamas, Israel is working against that goal.

Hamas may be prepared to have all its combatants killed in this Holy
War against Israel because their ultimate victory is the elimination
of Israel. That will only occur if the Muslim, Arab, and Persian world
is united in that goal. The humanitarian tragedy resulting from Israel
bombarding and invading Gaza invites and reinforces that unity.

The war with Israel meets Hamas’s goal of derailing the budding
positive relationship developing between Israel and Palestine’s
largest Arab donors.
Weeks before Hamas attacked Israel, President Joe Biden was meeting
with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly observing
that a “historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia”
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within reach. That would devastate Hamas’s plans for driving Jews
out of the Middle East.

Under President Trump, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco
all signed on to normalization agreements with Israel. The top Arab
donor from 1994 to 2020 was Saudi Arabia at $4 billion, followed by
the UAE ($2.1 billion). But in 2020, Saudi Arabia cut its aid to
Palestine by 81.4%
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Other Arab countries had also begun cutting back their financial aid
at the urging of President Donald Trump to push Palestine to be less
critical of Arabs reaching agreements with Israel.

Hamas could see that its role as the liberator of Palestine from
Israel’s domination was slipping away. Within the past two years,
Arab funding for Palestine has dramatically shrunk. They had to do
something dramatic and quick to stop Saudi Arabia from signing an
agreement with Israel — they brutally attacked Israel.

The 6,000-plus missiles slamming into Israel was a horrific experience
for Israel. However, having terrorists get past Israel’s “iron
wall,” breaking into your home and killing your family members is a
personal traumatic defilement of one’s life. It was sure to arouse
Israel’s new far-right government to launch a counterattack against
Gaza, Hama’s base of operations.

Did Hamas intend to provoke Israel to invade Gaza?  The first rule
for winning a fight is to choose the battleground. Hamas was prepared
to fight the war on its ground. Israel was surprised by the brutality
of the Hamas attack, but Hamas was not surprised by Israel’s
response.

If so, as in past conflicts, Israel’s military intervention was
expected to awaken furious support for the Palestinians within the
Arab countries. Those countries’ leaders were forced to stall
establishing better relations with Israel.

It may seem inconceivable that Hamas is winning the war, with its top
leaders being picked off, their central city falling into rubble, and
hundreds of their children dying. But consider this. Hamas built an
infrastructure just for an Israeli attack.

According to military analysts, Hamas’s costly, extensive,
sophisticated network of tunnels would have required at least two
years of planning and construction. Tunnels are not needed for
diplomacy. But they are necessary for an all-out war with Israel. But
how could a poor country afford to build such an extensive underground
fort?

There is little verifiable accounting of the billions of aid Palestine
has received from the West and Arab countries. Israel monitors that
aid to ensure it bypasses Hamas’s manipulation.

However, the autocratic Hamas-run Gaza government benefits from
foreign countries footing the bill for schools, hospitals, and
infrastructure. That aid frees Hamas to usetaxes collected from their
impoverished citizens to do other things – like building tunnels and
purchasing weapons.

As of 2020, less than half of Palestinian households were food
secure. Meanwhile, unemployment in the West Bank is at 14
percent, and it is nearly 50 percent in Gaza. These are conditions
that brew discontentment toward Israel since it controls Gaza’s
contact with the outside world, restricting its ability to be
economically independent. This allows Hamas to point to Israel as the
cause of their sorrows. The current war ignites that anger and
supports Hamas’s attacks on Israel.

Hamas can tolerate the destruction that is leveling their country
because Israel’s massive military response is reinforcing their more
significant objective. It is difficult to imagine that Hamas was
unaware that thousands of Palestinian civilians would die once Israel
started firing missiles back at the dug-in missile launchers located
under Gaza’s densely populated country.

It is possible that some Palestinians approved of Hamas’s attack on
Israel in retaliation for what they see as occupiers of their
homeland. But there is no way to know what most of the Palestinians in
Gaza freely think. That’s because Hamas controls Gaza’s internal
communications to the extent that they do not tolerate any open
opposition to their rule.

Hamas has snuffed out elections, public polling, and open forums in
Gaza. They are a classic theocratic government, like Iran, in
determining internal and foreign affairs within a religious prism,
dividing the world into good and evil.

Israel is a functioning democracy, albeit some rights groups argue
that dozens of laws indirectly or directly discriminate against Arabs.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-conservative government is
deeply committed to following scriptures from the Hebrew Bible. The
Prime Minister said in an October 30 speech that Israelites should
remember from their Bible what happened to the ‘Amalek,’ a
nation.
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destroyed it as an act of revenge.

In line with that position, Netanyahu rejected calls for a cease-fire
in the war and would continue to destroy Hamas’ underground network
of tunnels. But it’s unclear if he cares to discriminate killing
Hamas from the many civilian Gaza residents who may consider Hamas
combatants as their freedom fighters.

Consequently, Israel’s air and ground assault on Gaza is creating a
humanitarian crisis, with estimates that hundreds of children are
dying each day that it continues. The demands for a ceasefire are
often being made by non-partisan agencies who witness the plight of
Palestinians who have had 30% of their housing demolished and their
hospital and care facilities severely damaged or operate with
minuscule medical supplies.

Israel’s government believes that accepting a complete ceasefire
will happen after it eliminates Hamas. As articulated by Netanyahu,
Israel’s main objective is to destroy Hamas.

However, journalist Jay Michaelson sees another long-term objective
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Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party have pursued. They believe
that an independent Palestine is the greatest threat facing
Israel. Their effort has been to tolerate Hamas to keep them as a
counterbalance to the other Palestine party, the Palestinian
Authority, which controls the West Bank.

Celebrating when some Hamas leader who was responsible for organizing
the attack on Israel is killed is not going to eliminate Hamas. More
importantly, the larger story is often the large numbers of civilian
deaths and injuries that are explained away as unintended collateral
damage.

Israel is stubbornly blind to how their massive military incursion
into Gaza’s air and ground space is affecting a new generation of
Palestinians. For every Hamas combatant killed, a future
fundamentalist combatant will arise from the thousands of homeless or
orphaned children in Gaza grieving for their killed parents. Why
wouldn’t their traumatic experience create a future army of children
nourishing hatred, not love, towards Israel and Jews?

Journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote
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Israel’s experience when it invaded Lebanon in 1982 should encourage
restrain its current invasion of Gaza. Their objective then was to
drive the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of parts of
Lebanon bordering Israel.

For years, the PLO fought skirmishes with Israel’s army and killed
Israeli civilians. Israel used 80,000 troops and 1,200 tanks to drive
the PLO out of power. In that victory, more than 17,000 people in
Lebanon were killed and more than 30,000 injured.

Forty years later, another, more powerful and dangerous advisory,
Hezbollah, has emerged with an estimated 60,000 fighters and 150,000
rockets and missiles.
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comparison, Hamas is estimated to have about half the number of
fighters and less than a quarter of the missiles.

Israel must now address this deadlier threat to its existence, along
with trying to eliminate Hamas.  This should make Netanyahu and his
government acknowledge that it is a dead-end solution to continue
killing more Palestinians, Muslim, or Arab civilians in search of the
terrorists.

There are 8 million Jews in Israel, and there are over 360 million
Muslims in the Middle East. The Hamas party and its government may be
destroyed, but the Arab movement that wishes to destroy Israel will
now have more recruits.

Rightly or wrongly, Israel, not Hamas, is blamed for creating a
humanitarian tragedy. Many, if not the majority, of media outlets
outside the U.S. and Western European countries repeat that theme.
Meanwhile, except for retrieving hostage Israelis, Hamas’s initial
terrorist acts are becoming old news.

Israel must grapple with its image as a ruthless aggressor that has
gone way beyond defending its territory. It must act decisively and
boldly in a manner that will alter the conditions that will lead to a
more dangerous, not safer, future for it to survive.

Israel can do something that Hamas is unprepared for and cannot stop.
Israel can declare a unilateral ceasefire. Hamas could not tolerate
that move. It wrecks their narrative. It allows the Arab nations to
withdraw support from Hamas.

Yes, Hamas, for a limited time, may well continue to fire missiles
into Israel, and some Israelis may die.  But with each missile
fired, Gaza, as the continuous victim of Israeli aggression, will
crumble. The world will be reminded that Hamas started this war. And
they will lose their standing as a legitimate government.

Israel has amply demonstrated that it could inflict much greater pain
upon the people of Gaza, but it could also prefer to withdraw as an
honorable nation. If it did, the Arab nations would be stunned into
acting to free Gaza citizens from Hamas authority. With their
assistance, a new non-Hamas government could emerge.

A unilateral ceasefire is a bold strategy that aligns with the winning
tactic of dividing your enemies. Not only will the more moderate Arab
nations withdraw support from Hamas, but Palestinians may follow along
if Israel can change its current overall approach to Palestinians
living in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Only Israel can stop the war. Even if the U.S. ceased all aid to
Israel, Netanyahu’s government would continue the war. The movement
for a peaceful settlement and a stabilized Israeli–Arab Middle East
relationship must come from within Israel.

This moment in history requires an Israeli political leader to be
fiercely pragmatic in hammering out a new relationship with the
surrounding Arab states. Netanyahu’s recent speech
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this conflict and future conflicts with Palestinians as a Holy War
does not allow for that approach.

From Netanyahu’s past words and actions, he never endorsed an
independent Palestine state alongside Israel as a two-state solution.
It is a position that Iran’s leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Khamenei, wholly supports since he considers Israel an occupier
regime
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does not deserve to exist in Palestine. Both leaders’ attitudes can
lead to eradicating Palestine or Israel as nation-states.

If Israel can abandon the hard-right fundamentalism that grips
Netanyahu’s party, a pragmatic Arab leader would be able to emerge
to work for a peaceful, long-term solution. By continuing
Netanyahu’s uncompromising warfare strategy, Israel is sowing the
seeds of never-ending wars, no matter how many Hamas leaders are
eliminated.

_Nick Licata is author of_ Becoming A Citizen Activist,
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served 5 terms on the Seattle City Council, named progressive
municipal official of the year by The Nation, and is founding board
chair of Local Progress, a national network of 1,000 progressive
municipal officials._

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Ceasefire
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* peaceful co-existence
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