Attacks from Gaza on Israel have
ramped up significantly in the last several days. An Israeli patrol was hit by what was
thought to be a roadside bomb on Tuesday (three were wounded), near the border
fence with Gaza. On Saturday,
terrorists in Gaza fired an anti-tank missile at an
Israeli jeep with four infantrymen in it, as the
patrol operated in the area of the roadside bomb attack. The four soldiers were wounded, one
severely. More than 80 rockets have
been launched from Gaza into Israel since the attack on the jeep on Saturday, 10
November. At least three Israeli civilians were injured in the rocket attacks.
Geography is beginning to rear its
head again, as Israel has also sustained incursions into the Golan from Syria in
recent days. On Sunday, Israel
fired “warning shots” into Syria after the latest incursion, which involved
mortar rounds from Syria landing in the
Golan.
Egypt is seeking to
broker
another soon-to-be-violated ceasefire between Gaza and Israel, but on Israel’s
Egyptian flank, the stakes are being raised by “non-state actors.” On Sunday, unidentified “gunmen” opened fire on an Egyptian security forces
camp near the border with Israel in the
northeastern Sinai. Security in the
Sinai has been a major – and legitimate – concern for Egypt since before the
Arab Spring began; Iranian-sponsored subversives were identified as operating there while Mubarak was still in
power, and as recently as August 2012, terrorists in the Sinai attempted to use stolen
Egyptian military equipment to ram structures at the Kerem Shalom crossing into
Israel.
Israel has responded to the attacks
from Gaza with air attacks on the terrorists’ infrastructure, as well as an
immediate counter-attack against the position of the anti-tank missile launcher
on Saturday. Defense Minister Ehud
Barak says Israel won’t hesitate to launch a Gaza operation, presumably similar
to Cast Lead in early 2009.
A month ago, The Israel Project
published an excellent analysis pointing out that the posture of Hamas in Gaza was very much like its
aggressive posture in 2008, from militarizing
civilian facilities like mosques to unifying Gaza-based terror groups under its
political leadership. In terms of
the latter, an armed faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed
responsibility for the missile attack on the jeep on Saturday, along with Hamas’s Izz al-Din
al-Qassam Brigades. It is quite
possible that both groups are acting under Hamas’s operational leadership at the
moment.
Changing conditions for peace
The Arab Spring has changed the
factors in this dynamic since the timeframe of Operation Cast Lead,
however. In January of 2009, Israel
didn’t face the prospect of a significant remilitarization of the Sinai
Peninsula. Today, she does. No one nation or event has created the
situation that now exists, but it could be something of a Catch-22 for
decision-makers in Jerusalem. Crack
down on Gaza hard enough, and the resulting spillover into the Sinai will give
Mohammed Morsi legitimate reasons to increase his military presence there. Yet Israel doesn’t have the option of
simply allowing Hamas to ramp up its attacks on civilians across the south – or
on Israeli infantry patrols, for that matter.
Could Israel get an explicit,
enforceable agreement from Morsi to coordinate each and every military
deployment into the Sinai, so that Israel would effectively have a veto over
deployments she considered too dangerous?
It doesn’t matter that those are essentially the terms of the
treaty. Morsi is a new ball-game. Nothing is clear
right now, partly because we don’t know how fast Morsi wants to move on his
ideological designs on
Jerusalem –
and partly because it isn’t clear what the United States will
do.
The US was the essential third leg of
the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace accord, and our affirmation of interest in it is the
only thing that will keep it in force, at least for a time, if Egypt decides
it’s better to start maneuvering around the treaty than to honor it
straightforwardly. During Egypt’s
turmoil in the first half of 2011, President Obama did not reaffirm that the
1979 accord was a core national security interest of the United States – a
measure that would have been simple, basic statesmanship. His administration has been virtually
silent on the subject.
The point here is not to assert that
Obama doesn’t care about the treaty and will stand by passively as it is
contravened. The point is that we
don’t know what he’ll do. My own assessment is that what he does
will depend on how Morsi handles an effective treaty breach. If Morsi’s words meet the criteria by
which Team Obama’s ideologues judge foreign actors, the US Congress may be the
last stand in the United States for the principle of the 1979 accord – which
could be breached by inches, with small, day-to-day tactical choices, without
anyone ever announcing that that’s the intention.
There are two potential conditions
ahead: one in which Israel is basically on her own, apart from some American
rhetoric, and one in which the US leverages our relationship with Egypt to deter
further remilitarization of the Sinai.
We can’t achieve this latter
condition by standing aside and making sanctimonious statements to the
media. But we could do it by
strengthening our counter-terrorism cooperation with Egypt, and taking Morsi as
his word that he really does think transnational jihadis roaming the Sinai is a
bad thing. Help him rid the Sinai
of them, and thus undercut the justification for remilitarizing
it.
Morsi is a fact now, and besides
having a border with Israel, he has the Suez Canal and long frontage on the
Mediterranean and Red Seas. It
would be very foolish not to remain engaged with him. But more than that, it is not good for
US or regional security for America to be passive and unpredictable in this area
of the world. We already have established lines of engagement
with both Egypt and Israel. We
should use them to deter remilitarization of the Sinai.
Arms and the sea
We should also be doing everything
possible to prevent the arming of Hamas.
It is not clear whether both of the attacks on the Israeli infantry
patrols last week were made with anti-tank missiles, or if only the second one
was. But Hamas has used them before, not only against Israeli Merkava
tanks during Cast Lead, but against an Israeli school bus with children
unloading from it in April of 2011.
The attack range and level of damage in the jeep incident on Saturday
suggests that the same anti-tank missile – the
9M133 Kornet (NATO designation AT-14 SPRIGGAN) – was
used.
The IDF may figure out
where Saturday’s anti-tank missile was produced, but we don’t know for certain
right now. We do know the Kornet
makes Hamas much more tactically effective (see discussion in my piece, first
link in last paragraph). We also
know that Iran started producing her own version of the
Kornet in
July 2012. So Hamas has at least
one supplier that is eager to continue sending it weapons of this
kind.
Iran was also reported
in 2011 to have spirited weapons from Muammar Qadhafi’s stash out of
Libya, which would be another obvious source of
arms for Hamas. It is worth noting
that known events suggest a pathway by which Iran could ship Libyan weapons to
Hamas. I wrote in late October
about Iranian cargo ships plying a circuit between Iran,
Egypt, and Libya over the past year, and the main
Egyptian port frequented by these ships is Damietta, on the eastern side of
Egypt’s Mediterranean Sea coast.
(One of the suspect ships, M/V Tandis, pulled into Damietta on 1
November. These operations
continue. The Iranian ships are
fraudulently flying the flag of
Tanzania.
More here.)
Damietta is the port
through which, in 2009, Iran effected the transshipment of arms intended for
Hezbollah to
M/V Francop, a cargo ship operated by
a reportedly unwitting European shipper.
Security and customs are managed in Damietta by a private
port-administration firm, a situation in which – as long as the host nation
isn’t forcing the issue – the enforcement of sanctions often takes a back seat
to simply weighing cargo and assessing fees. Damietta was modernized from 2007 to
2009 by the commercial consortium now running the port – whose major investors
are Kuwait, France, and China – and it’s a big money-maker for
Egypt.
These particular
administrative factors aren’t necessarily implicated in the delivery of arms to
Hamas. But Damietta’s location is
favorable for primitive delivery methods, like transferring weapons cargo to
fishing vessels, and thence to small boats, in which Hamas and its benefactors are known to
engage.
That said, Damietta is
not as close to Gaza as is the port of El-Arish, in an area where Egypt has been
sending additional military assets in the last couple of weeks to combat
increasing terrorist attacks on Egyptian
forces
there. The trend of attacks in the
vicinity of El-Arish amounts to a creeping “geographization” effort in the
Gaza-Israel dynamic. The conflict
now is not just “about” terror
attacks against Israel, and counter-attacks by Israel on the terrorists, in a
static geography. In the last month
or so, it has become about pushing for a new geographic access point – i.e.,
El-Arish – one that would benefit terrorists in Gaza and open a new
vulnerability for Israel.
We don’t know exactly
which terrorists these are in El-Arish.
But it would be shortsighted to assume that it must be an Iranian-sponsored
effort. The same kind of jihadis –
Arabs, Sunnis – who have been
operating as insurgents in Libya and Syria are no doubt operating in the
Sinai. Whether they are in league
with Hamas, or have their own agenda, is also
uncertain.
And that means that the
strategic problem here is more complicated than the well-worn dynamic of Hamas,
Israel, and the Western media. This
isn’t the prelude to Cast Lead. The
situation is different now: geography is in play, and Egypt and America are
question marks. A great deal will
depend on what it appears America is going to do.
J. E.
Dyer
CDR, USN
(Ret.)
Hemet,
CAdyerbag@msn
No comments:
Post a Comment