WarSclerotic

Secret Cairo message: Hamas won’t bend because it wasn’t beaten. IDF: Beware of waiting game.

DEBKA – August 10, 2014, 11:08 AM (IDT)

Cairo sent a secret message to Jerusalem Saturday night, Aug. 9, saying that Egypt had been unable to bring Hamas around to any compromise because “you [Israel and the IDF] haven’t hit them hard enough.” This is revealed by DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources. Therefore, there was no point in sending Israel’s envoys back to the Egyptian capital for negotiations on a durable ceasefire, because they would be coming on a fool’s errand.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu cancelled their departure, after understanding the import of the message: The Egyptian ceasefire initiative proposed by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi had nowhere to go, until Israel’s armed forces clobbered Hamas’ military wing, Ezz e-Din Al-Qassam, into submission.

After their price for a ceasefire was rejected, Hamas and Islamic Jihad considered dropping out of the negotiating track. But meanwhile, on Friday, Aug. 8, they went back at their old practice of shooting rockets at the Israeli population, while also reserving the option to ramp the barrage up or down as it suited their plans.

By Sunday morning, Aug. 10, the short 72-hour respite for southern Israeli was over and the diplomatic impasse in Cairo had evolved into a diplomatic void.

From the first week of the IDF ground operation in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s leaders had been groping for a way out of the hostilities. Half a dozen ceasefires were declared – and violated by Hamas, who viewed the effort as a sign of Israeli weakness.

The prime minister and defense minister Moshe Ya’alon had counted on the 72-hour ceasefire, which expired Friday morning, providing Hamas commanders with a chance to come out of their bunker hidey-holes and view the devastation on the Gaza Strip surface. They would then be shocked into throwing in the towel – or so it was hoped.

But instead, Hamas commanders immediately seized on the ruins as an opportunity to parade the Palestinians of Gaza to the world as victims of “Zionist” inhumanity, of which they hands were entirely clean.

By now, Netanyahu and Ya’alon appear to be stumped for a policy.

All their military and political maneuvers, including their decision to limit the IDF ground incursion in the Gaza Strip last month to a depth of no more than one kilometer, failed to wrest the tactical initiative of the war from Hamas or bring harm to its military wing.

Friday, when Hamas resumed its rocket barrage Friday, it was in good shape, unlike the Gazan population, to embark on a war of attrition and keep it going for weeks, if not months.

The inhabitants of the communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip were cast into a depressing uncertainty. After living under rocket attacks of varying intensity for 14 years, many decided to finally pull up roots, when promises by the prime minister and army leaders, that the bane was finally over and they could live in peace and safety, went out the window.

IDF generals warned Sunday morning of the dangers to the Gaza communities of a protracted period of indecision. They recalled the situation on the eve of the 1967 Six Day War, when the army stood ready, day after day, to rebuff Arab aggressors around its borders, while the late Prime Minister Levi Eshkol dithered and the Chief of Staff, the late Yitzhak Rabin, couldn’t take the suspense.

Today, too, IDF divisions stand at their staging posts, ready and willing – just as soon as they get the order – to drive deep into the Gaza Strip and finally dislodge the fundamentalist Palestinian orchestrators of the senseless violence emanating for so many years from this sliver of territory.
If this order goes out, then, perhaps, Egypt may find Hamas more amenable to negotiating some sort of durable cessation of hostilities and an end to the destruction.

Netanyahu: Gaza operation continues, Israel will not negotiate under fire | JPost | Israel News.

At cabinet meeting, Netanyahu calls for patience as ministers voice criticism; Liberman: “The only thing left to do is defeat Hamas, clean up the territory and get out as quickly as possible.”

Operation Protective Edge will continue until quiet is returned, and Israel will not negotiate under fire, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday in Tel Aviv.

“I said at the beginning of the campaign that it will take time, and patience is needed,” Netanyahu said to his ministers, some of whom voiced criticism before the meeting – both direct and veiled – of how the government was waging the campaign.

Israel will continue to act “in all ways to change the current reality, to bring peace to all its citizens,” Netanyahu said.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said that Israel entered the negotiations in Cairo last week after the terror tunnels were destroyed and neutralized, and a 72-hour cease-fire was declared.

Since Hamas restarted the rocket fire on Friday morning, he said, the IDF has hit back hard, attacking “many dozens” of targets, including terrorists, command centers, rocket depots, and rocket launchers.

In an apparent reference to increasing frustration being voiced by residents of the South, Ya’alon said he understands their desire for security and quiet, and that Israel would not compromise until the rocket fire and terror from Gaza  ends. “Operation Protective Edge will continue until we achieve that,” he said.

Before the meeting, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman told reporters that the current situation cannot be allowed to continue, and if the government had listened to his arguments from day one, “we would now be beyond all this.”  Liberman called from the beginning for the toppling of Hamas.

“The  only thing left to do is defeat Hamas, clean up the territory and get out as quickly as possible,” he said.

Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar said that “what we need to do is break Hamas’s military strength in Gaza. That was true before, it is true now, and will be true the longer we wait.”

.

.

.

Israeli officials: We won’t return to Cairo talks until rocket fire ends
By HERB KEINON, KHALED ABU TOAMEH
08/09/2014 23:40 via The Jerusalem Post

(ISIS or whatever the hell the press calls them now is watching and taking notes. You can bet on it.-LS)

Israel will not send a team back to Cairo to discuss a cease-fire until Hamas rocket fire ceases, and will respond forcefully to all Hamas attacks, senior diplomatic officials said Saturday night.

The officials said if there was a continuation of the rocket fire that began at 4 a.m on Friday, and intensified four hours later with the end of the 72-hour cease-fire, then Israel would consider “all options on the table” and was not limiting itself to striking back from the air.

The officials said the Israeli team that was in Cairo negotiating with the Egyptians over a longer-term deal returned to Israel at 7 a.m. on Friday when it became apparent that Hamas was not going to extend the cease-fire.

Once the cease-fire formally ended, and Hamas fired rockets into Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon instructed the IDF to respond “forcefully.”

It was also made clear that Israel would not conduct any type of negotiations under fire.

The full cabinet is scheduled to meet Sunday in Tel Aviv to discuss the developments.

Communications Minister Gilad Erdan, a member of the eight-person security cabinet, said in a Channel 2 interview Saturday night that while no one has a formula for ensuring that one day “it all ends,” the government is determined and has made commitments to the Israeli public that “what was, is not what will be, and we will stand by that promise.”

It is possible, Erdan said, that Israel might send its ground forces back in to Gaza.

“A wide ground incursion and the toppling of Hamas is being discussed,” he said.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said on Friday after the firing restarted that this was a test for Israel’s deterrence that would have ramifications for years. As such, he said, the response needed to be “hard and painful.”

He said Israel needed to decisively win this battle, whether UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon “likes it or not. Operation Protective Edge is not over, Hamas has not yet been defeated, and Israel’s citizens need to be strong and prepared for what comes next.”

Another security cabinet member, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, said Hamas should not get anything it is asking from Israel that applies to a possible final agreement with the Palestinians, such as a safe passage – which they are demanding – from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, an airport or a seaport.

“I support continuing firing toward Hamas,” she said. “We should not pay Hamas for quiet. Hamas’s fire will not bring it to better achievements.”

Hamas, meanwhile, warned over the weekend that it would continue to attack Israel as long as its demands are not fulfilled.

The warning came as a Palestinian delegation representing various groups, including Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, continued discussions with Egyptian security officials about achieving a long-term cease-fire with Israel.

The Hezbollah-affiliated newspaper Al-Akhbar quoted Hamas sources as saying that the movement would attack Tel Aviv on Sunday if its demands were not met by then.

The sources said the Palestinian delegation has informed the Egyptians that its members would leave Cairo on Sunday if no progress is made in the cease-fire talks.

However, the head of the Palestinian delegation, Azzam al-Ahmed of Fatah, said on Friday that the team would not leave Cairo until an agreement is reached that complies with all Palestinian demands, including giving the Gaza Strip its own airport and seaport.

“We haven’t asked for anything new and that’s why Israel has no right to say this is permitted or that it not permitted,” the Fatah official said. “We have told the Egyptians that we will stay in Cairo until we reach an agreement to end the bloodshed and lift the siege on the Gaza Strip.”

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said, “There is no going back and the resistance will continue with full force. There will be no concessions on the demands presented by the Palestinian delegation in Cairo. Israel’s intransigence and foot-dragging won’t benefit it.”

Izzat al-Risheq, a Hamas member of the delegation, claimed that Israel used Saturday as an excuse to stay away from indirect talks [with Hamas] in Cairo.

“Its army is continuing its aggression and shelling of the Gaza Strip on Saturday,” Risheq said. “This excuse is silly.”

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said his movement would not make any concessions regarding its demand to have a seaport in the Gaza Strip.

“Such a port would be the Palestinian gate to the outside world,” he said.

Senior Hamas official Ahmed Bahr reiterated his movement’s refusal to disarm.

“The weapons of the Palestinian resistance will stay as long as Israeli occupation exists on our occupied land,” Bahr said. “The painful strikes of the resistance on Israel will drive the Israeli negotiator to accept all the demands of the resistance. This is the only language of negotiations they understand.”

Meanwhile, a Palestinian official told AFP that Egyptian and Palestinian delegates have reportedly reached a new agreement on a draft cease-fire proposal that will be submitted to Israel.

According to the official, the deal would see the Palestinian Authority and the government in Cairo render control of the Rafah border between Gaza and Egypt.

Israeli officials told The Jerusalem Post that Israel already accepted the idea of Palestinian Authority security officials manning the Rafah proposal, when it was presented in Egypt’s initial cease-fire proposal some three weeks ago.

In addition, under the reported terms of the new proposal to be presented to Israel, Hamas would in effect enact a unity deal signed in April with the PA, entrusting the group’s demands for a port in Gaza to the Ramallah-based government for negotiations at a later point with Israel.

In a related development, Netanyahu gave interviews over the weekend to three leading US, French and German television stations.

In the interview with both Fox News and France’s ITV, the prime minister responded to criticism of civilian casualties by underlining an incident that happened during World War II.

Netanyahu told ITV that in 1944, “the British Royal Air Force sets out to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. A legitimate target.

Okay? But the British pilots miss. And instead of the Gestapo headquarters, they hit a children’s hospital nearby, right next to it, and some 83 children, I think, are horribly burned to death.

That’s not a war crime. And that’s not a massacre. What that is, is a terrible tragedy of war that accompanies every legitimate action.”

The difference between Israel and Hamas, he stressed, was that while Israel deliberately targets military and terrorist targets, and accidentally hurt civilians, “they deliberately hurt civilians, target civilians.”

In a related development, US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron on Saturday called for an immediate cessation of hostilities in Gaza and pressed for action that would lead to a permanent cease-fire.

“On Gaza, they condemned the resumption of rocket fire and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities leading to a sustainable ceasefire,” the White House said in a statement about the call between the two leaders. “President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron reiterated support for Israel’s right to self-defense while emphasizing the need for all sides to minimize civilian casualties.”

Jerusalem Post staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

Gaza’s morning after, Jerusalem Post, Amotz Asa-El, August 10, 2014

As Hamas and Israel sift their way through the rubble, the asymmetry that characterized their fight will shift to the economic and political arenas.

UNRWA school damaged by fighting in Gaza Photo: REUTERS

The efficiency with which Israel will fight on this front remains to be seen, but the broader diplomatic picture will eventually become clear in any event. Yes, the guns of Summer ’14 have set forth some tremors in Israel’s foreign relations, but when the dust settles two fundamentals will loom: the non-Muslim world faces a scourge called Islamism, and the West faces a ploy called asymmetrical warfare, which should be renamed “unfair fighting.”

As understanding of these grim facts spreads, the effort to present Israel as part of the problem will give way to its acceptance as part of the solution.

Gaza’s time for such a transition has no doubt arrived, yet the coastal town that has been sacked and rebuilt countless times during its 3,500 years is about to learn that, much like the latest war it provoked, its economic and political healing will be asymmetrical with Israel’s.

The lull in fighting has yet to mature into a longer- term arrangement. However, as negotiators talk in Cairo, this round’s violence seems to have peaked, and its preliminary damage assessment indicates that the fighting’s impact on the Israeli economy is marginal.

The most glaring proof of Hamas’s economic ineffectiveness was the successful initial public offering last week on the New York Stock Exchange of MobilEye, an Israeli inventor of – how ironic – collision- prevention technology. Having raised $1.02 billion, reflecting a company valuation of $5.3b., it was the most successful share offering an Israeli firm ever managed abroad, and it happened in the heat of the fighting in Gaza.

MobilEye’s success, which would have been remarkable regardless of its unique timing, reflects not only American investors’ underplaying Hamas’s threat to their money, but also a dramatic transformation in Israel’s wartime economics.

During the great conventional wars of 1967 and 1973, Israel’s population was hardly half its current size, the economy was but a fraction of its present numbers and diversity, and the battlefield demanded hundreds of thousands of reservists, a massive recruitment which nearly paralyzed the economy.

In this bout, by contrast, the IDF made do with 86,000 reserve soldiers, a number which hardly even dented the overall economy. Whereas the economy and the population multiplied over the past four decades, the battlefield shrank. In the past, the IDF faced entire countries and multiple conventional armies; now it faced a guerrilla force limited to one urban sprawl.

While Hamas’s location and tactics created new military challenges, economically the warfare it required cost less than previous wars. One tabloid’s alarmist headline this week, that this summer’s was the most expensive war in the IDF’s history, could not have been more ignorant.

Iron Dome’s roughly 500 rocket interceptions during the operation cost up to $50 million. The air force’s hundreds of sorties and the munitions they used, the armored corps’ and artillery’s shells and engine hours, and the reserves’ enlistment were surely expensive, and Treasury officials assess them at roughly NIS 4.5b. Still, this cannot even begin to compare with the costs of the Yom Kippur War’s losses of hundreds of tanks and fighter jets, and the enlistment of hundreds of thousands of reservists, often for half a year.

Obviously, Operation Protective Edge hurt the economy in several of its corners. The main victim is the tourism industry, whose leaders believe that incoming tourism for the year’s second half will be halved, and one-fifth of hotel employees will be laid off. Yet the entire hotel industry’s turnover last year, which benefited from a record 3.54 million arrivals in Israel, was $2.7b., which is but 1.2 percent of Israel’s gross domestic product.

The main microeconomic victims have been factories and businesses in the most intensively targeted locations. Retailing in places like Ashdod and Ashkelon obviously slowed sharply over the past four weeks, and industrial plants’ output declined in some cases up to 30%, due to disruptions in shipments and worker attendance.

Still, the Manufacturers Association of Israel assessed that nationwide industrial profits declined during the fighting by up to 8% at most.

Similarly, farmers in the South who have seen crops rot while they were prevented from going to the fields sustained much damage as individuals. However, collectively they lost an estimated NIS 50m.

The numbers being as they are, compensation from the Treasury for the war’s economic victims is overall affordable, and already in the process of being calculated and delivered – based on the principles that businesses within 40 kilometers of the Gaza border will get the most, and hotels will receive aid regardless of their location.

In all, the government will likely spend NIS 1b.

in compensation packages, Tax Authority director Moshe Asher estimated this week.

Hamas’s equivalent of Moshe Asher, if he exists, has yet to emerge and explain to the Gazans who lost houses and businesses how their government intends to help them back on their feet.

THE DAMAGE in Gaza is clearly in the billions of dollars, though exact and impartial figures will take a while to emerge.

With thousands of its houses leveled and the sewage, power and water infrastructures even more inadequate than they were before the fighting, Gaza is thirsting for a massive reconstruction. Then again, the 365-square-kilometer coastal strip has been begging for economic surgery for years, and there were those who actively blocked the surgeon’s arrival.

Gaza has been on its own for nearly a decade now, since Israel’s retreat in ’05. Throughout this period, the US, EU, Japan and China were eager to help it build a viable economy, a relatively easy task.

Considering its seaside location, fertile soil and skilled workforce, Gaza can develop solid farming, industry and tourism that will honorably feed its generously estimated 1.8 million inhabitants. However, Hamas provoked both Egypt and Israel into closing its borders, and at the same time deterred large foreign investors from putting its population to work.

With its investments in rockets, tunnels and troops now evident, it is clear that Hamas valued fighting more than prosperity. Indeed, prosperity was no goal at all, if not anathema, for a government that wanted the people both available and fueled for war.

Changing this attitude, then, is the challenge that now awaits the international community as it sets out to salvage a new Gaza from the old one’s ruins.

Chances that Hamas will change its spots and embrace a civilian agenda are slim at best. Instead, Hamas wants money from Qatar and Turkey, open borders and new ports. This way it can oversee just enough reconstruction to keep a lid on public wrath, while resuming its hefty spending on guerrilla and terror.

Most of this will not happen, as Hamas will learn that in going to war, it has overplayed its diplomatic hand.

The European proposal this week, to establish an international apparatus that will finance and oversee Gaza’s reconstruction through the Palestinian Authority while preventing military imports and buildups will be difficult for Hamas to digest, yet some such arrangement is where things are now headed. Eight years after throwing PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s people from Gaza’s rooftops, they will soon emerge from under those rooftops’ debris.

Moreover, Hamas’s other nemesis, Egypt, will also be heavily involved in Gaza’s future, a role Hamas has already grudgingly acquiesced to by accepting Cairo’s mediation.

In all, Hamas is diplomatically isolated because its last remaining allies, Turkey and Qatar, are geographically distant and politically in no position to rival Egypt and Saudi Arabia in shaping intra-Arab affairs.

Gaza’s leaders must now accept a reconstruction effort or they will lose everything, and this effort will not be theirs to control and abuse.

Meanwhile, as the fighting subsided some were under the impression that Israel, too, emerged from Gaza’s rubble diplomatically debilitated. They are wrong.

THE REPRIMANDS to Israel by the White House, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and French President Francois Hollande were nothing to scoff at. All were genuinely concerned with what they decried.

Yet in Israel, too, practically everyone is unhappy with the civilian toll of the recent fighting.

The difference is only in the Israelis’ conclusion – that this is the cost of asymmetrical fighting, and it’s either their children or the enemy’s – which has yet to convince those who do not live under rockets and above tunnels.

Israel therefore emerges from Gaza with an advocacy challenge that it will have to treat as part of the asymmetrical war, and meet it with the same resourcefulness which produced Iron Dome and the same fighting spirit that felled the tunnels.

This front has three sections: diplomacy, law and media. In all these, Israel will have two overarching aims: Firstly, rid Hamas of its image as a national liberator and present it instead as a fundamentalist oppressor, part of a belt that stretches from Nigeria’s Boko Haram through Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraq’s Islamic State, and Iran’s ayatollahs to Afghanistan’s Taliban and China’s Uighurs. While most of these are at odds with the majority of the rest, all of them share an Islamism that is anathema to the rest of the world, from the US and Europe to China, India and Africa.

Secondly, Israel will have to shift the debate from “what have you done” to “what could be done?” With Iranian training, Israel’s enemies have reshaped the battlefield in ways that international law and Western military doctrines do not address.

The updating of war laws may therefore emerge from the recent fighting as an Israeli goal, as will military solutions for isolating weapons planted among civilians.

The efficiency with which Israel will fight on this front remains to be seen, but the broader diplomatic picture will eventually become clear in any event. Yes, the guns of Summer ’14 have set forth some tremors in Israel’s foreign relations, but when the dust settles two fundamentals will loom: the non-Muslim world faces a scourge called Islamism, and the West faces a ploy called asymmetrical warfare, which should be renamed “unfair fighting.”

As understanding of these grim facts spreads, the effort to present Israel as part of the problem will give way to its acceptance as part of the solution.