A
lot of people have asked the purpose of Israel’s defensive war against
Hamas. Some, including those supposedly expert on the region, have been
mystified. They cannot seem to figure out what is going on or
what the goal of this Israeli operation could be.
The
answer is simple. Given the premise that Hamas is in a permanent state
of war with Israel and will attack Israel whenever it can get away with
it, Israel needed to do three things.
First, show Hamas that it cannot daily attack Israel and
Israeli civilians without a cost.
Second,
show Hamas that the cost is unsustainable and that it needs to keep the
peace or suffer massive losses to its governmental, economic, and
military infrastructure. This includes a personal cost to those who have
taken the lead in attacking Israel and especially to those who have
organized terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.
Third,
remove from Hamas the means of making war by destroying its rockets,
missiles, and other weaponry. Of course, they will rebuild but it is
better to have an enemy that must start over again from near-zero than
one that is adding thousands of weapons onto the thousands it already
possesses, including the addition of more advanced arms and especially
longer-range missiles.
Ending
the current fighting in the Gaza Strip is also simple. There are two
requirements: an international willingness to do it and an important
decision from the new
Egyptian government.
Ideally,
the world would help overthrow the illegal Hamas
regime that represses people in the Gaza Strip and repeatedly drags
them into costly and losing wars with their stronger neighbor. But
that’s not going to happen. So the next best-thing is a ceasefire that
will last several years at least. While Hamas still has ties with Iran,
and some factions are closer to Tehran, the Gaza regime’s real patron is
Egypt. Both places are ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
We
have been constantly told that the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt
is really moderate. The Obama Administration helped put that government
into power. Yes, it won elections but from January 2011 onward,
Washington
basically backed the Brotherhood in a number of ways. The U.S.
government has constantly defended the Brotherhood as being moderate and
criticized the Egyptian military when it tried to keep that group out
of power.
So
the Egypt government supposedly wants to focus on domestic affairs and
doesn’t want to be dragged into war with Israel. It is being given huge
amounts of goodies without any apparent conditions. This includes a
staggering $6.3 billion in loans from the European Union; $4.3 billion
from the International Monetary Fund, and $450 million from the United
States, plus another $1 billion plus in U.S. military
aid.
Perhaps
Egypt can do something in exchange for all of this political support
and money, including loans that will never be repaid. Let Cairo make
clear to its Hamas clients that it wants a real ceasefire and does not
accept Hamas periodically firing large numbers of rockets, missiles, and
mortars, plus cross-border attacks, on Israel. Egypt wants quiet in
order to deal with its tremendous problems of poverty, pending
bankruptcy, and also the regime’s program to turn Egypt into an Islamist
state.
I
could add cynically—but accurately—that it also wants time to lower the
status of women, install ever-larger amounts of Sharia law, and
intimidate Christians into servitude. But these things apparently don’t
really bother the West so they are going to happen any way without real
leverage being applied.
Egypt
can let all the food and goods anyone wants to enter the Gaza Strip
across their mutual border.
It can at the same time prevent the crossing of weapons, including
motors for rockets and Iranian-made missiles. The Cairo government can
help Hamas raise the living standards in the Gaza Strip as high as it
wants without helping it destroy them by going to war. The truth is that
the Egyptian government may issue statements to a credible Western
media from time to time that it’s cracking down on the smuggling of arms
into the Gaza Strip but that regime actually needs to do something
real.
The
same applies to permissiveness toward cross-border raids from Egyptian
territory into Israel. Again, there have been lots of
Western media items about how much Egypt is doing to stop such attacks
or arrest those involved. The problem is that these efforts have been
token ones mainly directed at ensuring the terrorists don’t attack the
Egyptian military and don’t launch operations too often.
There
has been a lot of talk in ruling circles in Egypt about revising the
peace treaty with Israel. Well, Israel is open to negotiating an
increase in the level of Egyptian military presence in the eastern Sinai
as long as the additional soldiers are stopping smuggling into the Gaza
Strip and the use of Egyptian territory to attack Israel instead of
taking bribes and looking the other way, or even helping the
terrorists.
One
is free to look at such a solution in two ways. If you want, you can
believe that Egypt really is ruled by moderates who put peace and
prosperity over jihad in their priorities’ list or, alternatively, it is
equally okay to think that the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt is
quite radical but that its interests dictate restoring calm and avoiding
war for several years to come even though they would prefer otherwise.
What makes the difference is Israeli credibility, willingness to defend itself, and ability to do so effectively.
It
is now the job of the United States, whose president has spoken and
acted as if the government in Egypt is his client, and all the vaunted
leverage that the U.S. government says it has gained in the
Arabic-speaking world through various actions over the last four years.
America and Europe need to use the aid and backing they have given to
Egypt as a way to get something in return.
Barry
Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs
(GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International
Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for
Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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