In the last 48 hours, the growing chaos in Gaza has threatened to spill over the Strip’s borders and spark a new round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Even as infighting between Hamas- and Fatah-affiliated gunmen has spiraled out of control, Hamas militants have launched a barrage of at least 50 of their crude Qassam rockets into Israel.
In response, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert authorized a “severe and harsh” response “to target the those who launch rockets and their commanders, to thwart their ability to fire [rockets] and to damage the terrorist infrastructure.” At the same time, Olmert called on residents of the Israeli town of Sderot – where rocket fire seriously wounded a 70-year-old woman – to avoid creating “exactly the pictures that Hamas is waiting for” by fleeing their town.
I spent the last two weeks going though the interim report of the Winograd Commission, which investigated the Israeli government’s handling of the march towards the Second Lebanon War in July 2006. And the events of the last 48 hours have downright eerie. In July 2006, as now, Olmert decided that making the perpetrators of a genuine violation of Israel’s territory “pay the price” for their actions was worth putting aside several years’ worth of restraint and attempted containment; then, as now, he promised that military action would “thwart their ability to fire [rockets]” and “damage the terrorist infrastructure.”
In 2006, according to Winograd, these promises were completely false: even as they made the decision to launch an intense aerial and artillery bombardment, Olmert and the IDF had plenty of evidence at hand indicating that Hezbollah’s rocket fire could not be suppressed by precision air and ground fire. As the Commission documents, the decision to engage an enemy whose strategic deterrent could not be suppressed at standoff ultimately forced the decision which Olmert wished to avoid: launching a costly ground offensive into the heart of
Hezbollah territory.
Whether this tragedy will repeat itself, culminating in an Israeli incursion into "Afghansomaligaza," remains to be seen. The parallels between the two situations should not be overstated: Hamas' stockpile of improvised Qassam rockets, fired from the roughly DC-sized Gaza Strip, cannot be compared to Hezbollah’s strategic deterrent, an arsenal of thousands of sophisticated Russian-,
Syrian- and Iranian-manufactured long-range rockets scattered in hidden and often hardened locations throughout southern Lebanon. It is possible that the Israel Air Force will be able to suppress the Qassam fire over the next few days just enough for Olmert to claim success and avoid a ground incursion.
On the other hand, the utter chaos rampant in the Gaza Strip, and
Hamas’s record of dispatching suicide bombers in response to Israeli air-strikes in Gaza, makes the current crisis multi-dimensional in a way which the quasi-conventional confrontation in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah was not.
Perhaps the most intriguing player in the drama of the last 48 hours is not Olmert, or Hamas, or any other familiar political or militant figure, though: it’s the Russian-French-Israeli-Angolan oligarch (and alleged arms trafficker and money launderer) Arcadi Gaydamak. Gaydamak, a Ukraine-born tycoon, is an enigmatic figure in Israeli public life. He owns the Israeli soccer team Beitar Jerusalem, a team historically associated with the far-right Beitar movement, but has also emerged as one of the champions of Bnei Sakhnin, a team whose predominantly Israeli-Arab fans share a history of very bad blood with Beitar’s. When Gaydamak decided to form a new political party earlier this year, the party was said to be likely to ally itself with Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party – even though Gaydamak’s platform called for coexistence between Jews, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians.
Ok, so what does this have to do with the fighting in Gaza? Only this: when Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz refused to evacuate Sderot, Gaydamak decided to do it for them, paying out of his own pocket for transportation and housing for all residents who chose to leave town. (This isn’t the first time that Gaydamak has shown a rather feudal approach to winning the hearts and minds of Israeli voters: on Independence Day in April,
Gaydamak threw a “Surprise Party for Israel” in a Tel Aviv park, complete with free food and beer, which reportedly drew 150,000 of the country’s 7,500,000 residents.) So far, estimates of the numbers of Sderot residents who’ve taken Gaydamak up on his offer range from dozens to hundreds. (Peretz, Sderot’s most famous resident, is not one of those – though a Qassam did land right outside his house on Wednesday).
Military historians like the Israeli scholar Martin van Creveld have long warned that the rise of non-state military actors presages the arrival of a “post-nation-state” period in human history. As a prosperous democracy watches a private billionaire protect its citizens from homemade rockets fired by members of a loose coalition of militias and street gangs, it’s hard not to wonder whether the Israeli state is becoming a mere spectator to the drama playing out on its own border with Gaza.
