Hamas Timed Its Attack Deliberately. Now Israel Is Stuck With Four Bad Options.
It can be tricky to determine how a conflict starts in the Middle East. This region is so weighed down by disputes over land and identity that there’s always some bit of nuance or scrap of context you run the risk of leaving out. But here’s how the start of Hamas’ war with Israel felt on the ground: It was Saturday morning, Shabbat. That’s when the assault started—one rocket after another, more than 2,000 of them.
“Then it starts to become clear, as the morning goes on, that the rocket fire was almost cover for something else, and that the real point of this attack was to sneak people across the border,” says Gregg Carlstrom, who covers the Middle East for the Economist. After the rockets, he says, militants streamed into Israel on paragliders, drove through border fences, even swam ashore from the Mediterranean Sea. Then they started going house to house. Soon, the full extent of the incursion became clear. Now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promising a “complete siege” of Gaza. What does that mean for Israelis and Palestinians?
In Tuesday’s episode of Slate’s daily news podcast What Next, I spoke with Carlstrom about the immediate reasons the conflict happened when it did, and where it might be going next. A portion of our conversation is transcribed below; it has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: There are still so many questions about this attack. How was Hamas able to so easily take down Israel’s border defenses? How was the Israeli intelligence service caught so off guard? But the biggest question is: Why now?
Until this weekend, Israelis seemed confident that Hamas was not looking for another large-scale conflict. Some observers have speculated that this attack has something to do with a normalization deal in the works between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The two countries have been negotiating over opening up diplomatic relations. Maybe Hamas’ goal was to whip up tension and disrupt those talks?
Gregg Carlstrom: I think it will certainly delay efforts at a normalization deal, and that is not for Hamas an unwelcome side effect of this, but I think their considerations are much more local or are domestic. If you look at the situation in the Palestinian territories, you have a succession crisis brewing in the West Bank, where the president—Mahmoud Abbas, 87 years old, not in great health—doesn’t have a clear successor, but there’s going to be a change of power soon. There haven’t been elections in Palestine in almost 18 years now, but there’s a moment where it seems like a political change is coming. And to me, a lot of this has to do with those domestic politics, with Hamas trying to do something that boosts its popularity amongst Palestinians ahead of a political change.
And of course, at the same time, Israel has moved to the far right, and it’s in a strange political situation as well.
It is, and we don’t know exactly what happened, this intelligence failure that everyone has talked about. We don’t know why it happened, and I think it will be months before we know, but one thing that I’ve heard from a number of Israelis is that it has something to do with this far-right government. First, the Israeli army, the Israeli security services—they’ve really been focused on the West Bank, not Gaza, in recent months, because this government, through planned expansion of Israeli settlements and other actions, has pushed tensions to a boil in the West Bank. And so there’s been much more concern about the West Bank than about Gaza. This is also a government where, you look at some of the ministers in this government, they have no experience in security matters. The minister in charge of the police, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a right-wing ideologue who has no background at all in security. So, you combine an army that is focused elsewhere with a cabinet that is very inexperienced on these matters, and I think that that goes some way towards explaining how Israel was caught so unaware by this.
Yeah, you’re talking about this intelligence failure, and I feel like it’s worth pausing to just explain why this attack was so surprising, which means explaining a little bit about what exactly the Gaza Strip is, which is a small sliver of land surrounded by fencing and watchtowers. It’s been called an open-air prison. It’s also incredibly dense. So it’s kind of a big deal that somehow Hamas was able to launch an attack from there without Israel knowing it was coming.
It is. It’s a very big deal. On the intelligence side, every phone call that you make in Gaza is routed through an Israeli phone network. The Israeli security services have the ability to eavesdrop on any phone call that takes place in Gaza. They also have a network of human informants across the territory. It’s remarkable when you talk to Israeli security officials; they have not been to Gaza in 18 years, since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
Because they don’t feel like they need to worry about it?
They’re not able to go into Gaza. The Israelis decided in 2005 to do what they call a disengagement, to withdraw all of their troops and essentially seal it off from the world. But they are still able to, from the outside, penetrate a lot of what’s happening inside.
Then you talk about the security situation. Again, “fenced off” is really an understatement. In some parts of the border, there are massive concrete slabs with automatic robot-controlled weapons mounted on top of them. In other areas, they are just fences, metal fences, but they are studded with high-tech electronic sensors. The Israelis spent almost a billion dollars a few years ago creating an underground barrier to try and stop Hamas from digging tunnels out of Gaza. All of this money, all of this effort that’s been put into constructing this barrier, and when it came down to it, [Hamas] just cut their way through it and drove across on motorbikes.
I do want to note something else here, which is that Hamas does not represent all Palestinians. What has happened is between Hamas and Israel, but Hamas is only part of the picture when it comes to representation of the people who are within Gaza, right?
It is, and they like to say that they are an elected government, which is narrowly true, but again, the last election, the last parliamentary election, was in 2006. The average person in Gaza is 18 years old. The median person is 18 years old, which means the last time there was a Palestinian election, most people in Gaza weren’t even born. So they literally have had no opportunity to choose their leadership. I’ve been going to Gaza for more than a decade now, and one thing that I find increasingly when I go is: There’s a level of popular anger and popular resentment aimed at Hamas. Of course, there’s anger towards Israel, there’s anger towards Egypt, both of which maintain a blockade on Gaza, but the group has lost a lot of popular support. It was elected in 2006, partly as a protest vote against Fatah, which is the nationalist party that controls the West Bank. It’s an incredibly corrupt party. People opted for Hamas in 2006 not necessarily because they agreed with the group’s ideology but because they thought it was a cleaner alternative.
It has turned out not to be that. Most people in Gaza think that Hamas is equally corrupt, and they think that it has done an atrocious job running the territory over the past 16 years, but they have no opportunity to change their leaders, and so they’re stuck with this unpopular, ineffective government.
Let’s talk about what happens now, as far as we know. My understanding is, they’re still fighting off Hamas fighters inside Israel itself. Is that so?
They are. There were some ongoing hostage situations for almost two full days after Saturday’s attack, where militants were holed up inside of houses and they had taken hostages, and it took the [Israeli] army a long time to deal with those hostage situations. They also don’t know how many people, how many militants crossed the border. The border fence was cut open for a long period of time, and so they’re concerned that even if they’ve cleared out the towns and villages along the border, that there might be more militants elsewhere in Israel who they’re not aware of.
So, you have Israel still dealing with that internally at the same time, as you say, preparing for what will likely be a very large response in Gaza. There’s airstrikes that began a couple of days ago, but there’s a debate over whether Israel will launch a ground offensive. That’s something it hasn’t really done in any of its past wars in Gaza. It’s something the army hasn’t wanted to do because it would mean prolonged bloody urban combat, but it’s something that there’s a lot of public demand for right now in Israel.
Yeah. You’ve called attention to this analysis in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, saying that Israel’s got four bad options. Now, can you just lay out what those options are?
The first one is not a military option. It’s to make a deal, a prisoner swap with Hamas [around] these dozens of Israelis who’ve been taken hostage and brought back to Gaza. The point of capturing them was obviously to exchange them, as Israel has done in the past. In 2011, for example, [Israel] freed about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held in Gaza for five years. Hamas would like to make a similar deal and hand over these hostages in exchange for thousands of Palestinians who were being held in Israel.
That does not seem likely, given how brutal the attack was.
No, it doesn’t. I think neither the political class nor the public right now is in any mood to make a deal.
So that leaves you with more-military responses, one of which is what Israel has done in past wars, which is a campaign of aerial bombing against Gaza, which has already started. That has been in the past, and that will be, again, devastating for Palestinians. In 2014, during that long war, you had thousands of people killed. You had tens of thousands of people who were left homeless afterwards. And at the end of that, the concern in Israel is that you do all of that and you don’t actually change the status quo. In Gaza, you don’t remove Hamas from power by doing that. You don’t, perhaps, seriously degrade its military capabilities, and so this cycle might continue to repeat.
So then, the other two options that have been floated, one of them is to tighten even further this blockade of Gaza and essentially try to starve not just Hamas but 2 million people into submission. That is more or less what Israel has been doing for the past 16 or 17 years, and it hasn’t worked. The blockade has immiserated Gaza. It has left it at a point where two-thirds of the population is unemployed; 80 percent of people need humanitarian aid to survive. It has destroyed the economy, but it has not brought political change. So that’s not really a viable option either.
And the last is to go ahead with a ground offensive, which will be devastating for everyone involved.
You’ve actually argued that what happened this weekend basically tells you about how Israel’s approach to Palestinians has failed, because it was assumed that if you divided the Palestinians so they couldn’t reach each other—there’s the West Bank; there’s the Gaza Strip—it would sort of dilute the power of this group. And something else happened instead, which, as you said: It just lays out that there are not good options here.
And I think what’s particularly a grim irony about the divide-and-rule concept is: You have two entities in the Palestinian territories. You have Hamas, which is a militant group, which has been bent on Israel’s destruction for decades. And then you have the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, which is led by a party that is open to a two-state solution, is open to negotiating with Israel about an end to the conflict, and has been committed to that for 30 years now. What Prime Minister Netanyahu has done—what he has made policy over the past decade and a half that he’s been in power, for that almost full stretch, uninterrupted—what he has done is tried to empower Hamas and weaken the P.A. Because his ultimate goal is: He doesn’t want to negotiate. He doesn’t want to have a two-state solution. He doesn’t want to make a deal with the Palestinians, and so he has done everything in his power to weaken the P.A. He’s refused negotiating with it. He has, at various times, imposed economic sanctions on it, cut off tax revenues that are meant to be handed over to the P.A. He’s tried to weaken the more moderate body. And at the same time, he has empowered Hamas by being willing to cut prisoner deals with it, negotiate with it on various economic concessions to Gaza, and we see where that has led.
