[Marxism] Likely next Israeli prime minister commits to more war v. Gaza

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Israel's Key Election Issue: Did War End Too Soon?

By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 2, 2009; A01



JERUSALEM, Feb. 1 -- Just over a week before Israel holds elections to
choose a new government, the outcome of the war in the Gaza Strip has
emerged as a central issue in the campaign, with the candidates sparring
over whether the massive military operation went far enough.

The argument reflects the reality that elections here often turn on a single
question: Who looks tougher on national security?

The war, initiated to stop Hamas rocket fire that has persisted for years,
was viewed by many here as motivated at least in part by electoral politics.
Two of the three Israeli architects of the war, Defense Minister Ehud Barak
and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, are candidates to become the nation's next
prime minister.

The operation in Gaza drew condemnation abroad for the high Palestinian
death toll, and praise at home for the relatively low number of Israelis
killed. But it has not done much to elevate Barak's or Livni's prospects of
winning the top job. Now their even-more-hawkish opposition is on the
offensive.

In recent days, former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who according to
polls appears poised to reclaim his old job, has argued in speeches and
interviews that his political rivals ended the war prematurely. Israel, he
says, should have destroyed Hamas -- which he views as an outpost of Iranian
power on Israel's southern border -- rather than withdrawing amid a shaky
cease-fire. He has left little doubt over what he would do if elected.

"The next government will have no choice but to finish the work and remove
the Iranian terror base for good," he said in a radio interview last week.

One of his top lieutenants in the right-wing Likud party, Zeev "Benny"
Begin, was even more emphatic at a rally in Jerusalem, describing the
military operation in Gaza as a failure. "One million Israelis remain under
the threat of rockets," Begin, son of Israel's first Likud prime minister,
Menachem Begin, told a cheering crowd. "After this operation, the terrorists
came out of their hiding places waving not white flags but the green flags
of Hamas."

In Israel's fractious political culture, left and right are generally
determined by a party's relative willingness to cede land to the
Palestinians in exchange for a peace deal, as well as by its criteria for
going to war.

Netanyahu's Likud has generally been critical of U.S.-backed negotiations
between Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which are
aimed at creating a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has also advocated an
uncompromising stand against Iran, particularly when it comes to that
country's nuclear ambitions. But during his tenure as prime minister in the
late 1990s, he demonstrated a willingness to govern more pragmatically than
he had campaigned, agreeing to a limited peace accord with the Palestinians
on control of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Likud's criticism of the recent Gaza operation is aimed squarely at
Netanyahu's two main rivals for the prime ministership, Livni and Barak.
They have strongly defended the conduct of the military campaign, while also
hinting that Israel is not finished in Gaza and that there could be more
attacks before the Feb. 10 elections.

"We are on the right course to achieve peace and quiet," Barak, leader of
the center-left Labor Party, told students in the seaside city of Herzliyya.
"The operation had real accomplishments. Our deterrence has been restored.
Hamas was dealt a blow like no other since its creation."

But he also vowed that Israel would "keep one hand on the pistol."

Beginning Dec. 27 with a surprise air assault, Israeli jets pounded Gaza for
22 days and nights, with tanks overrunning large swaths of the coastal
territory.

Approximately 1,300 Palestinians died in the operation, about half of them
civilians, according to Gazan medical officials. Thirteen Israelis were
killed, three of them civilians.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in launching the war that the intent
was to stop the persistent rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel and to
end the smuggling of weapons into Gaza from Egypt.

But when the dust cleared, Hamas declared victory and quickly reasserted its
control over the strip. In the two weeks since the cease-fire took effect,
the smuggling has resumed, scattered rocket fire has continued and an
Israeli soldier was killed last week in an attack carried out by a radical
splinter group of Hamas that does not support the cease-fire. Hamas itself
denied involvement but praised the killing.

On Sunday, Palestinian fighters launched about a dozen rockets and mortar
shells toward Israel, slightly injuring at least three people, according to
the Israel Defense Forces. Olmert, in his weekly cabinet meeting, vowed that
Israel's response to the attacks would be "disproportionate." Since the
cease-fire took hold, Israel has responded to attacks from Gaza with
periodic airstrikes aimed at Hamas fighters and at tunnels.

Although Israel won the war by almost any military standard, Hamas's
resilience has provided a political opening for Netanyahu. For more than a
year before the government launched the operation, he had agitated for war
from his seat as leader of the opposition. During the operation, he was a
vocal supporter.

But since it ended, he and his party have gone into attack mode, accusing
the government of weakness for not killing top Hamas leaders or reclaiming
the strategically important Philadelphi corridor, which runs along the
Gazan-Egyptian border and is dotted with smugglers' tunnels. Netanyahu and
his allies have tried to paint the decision to halt the operation as just
another failure of the ruling Kadima party, which also spearheaded Israel's
disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

The argument seems to be working: Netanyahu has consolidated his position as
the election's front-runner in recent weeks, despite his opponents'
orchestration of a popular war.

"If Likud was in power, the operation would not have ended. It started well,
but it ended too soon," said Leon Amoyal, a 59-year-old retiree who traveled
to Jerusalem from the northern city of Haifa this week to cheer Netanyahu.
"We could have eradicated Hamas."

Netanyahu got a boost last week when one of the operation's key commanders,
reserve Brig. Gen. Zvika Fogel, publicly declared that Israel had missed "a
historic opportunity" to crush Hamas's military capabilities.

"Hamas was really at a breaking point," said Fogel, who commanded artillery
and other units. "We should have turned up the pressure."

Instead, he said, Israel's political leaders first stalled the operation,
then pulled the plug, announcing a unilateral cease-fire Jan. 17. Fogel said
he believed the decision was made to avoid heavy Israeli casualties in the
weeks before an election and to spare President Obama from having to deal
with the war during his first days in office. "On January 20th, they didn't
want to see the TV screen divided in two parts -- one for the ceremony and
the other for the war," he said.

But backers of Livni and Barak say the war ended at just the right moment.
In 22 days of fighting, they say, Israel achieved its goals without being
drawn into a quagmire. Throughout the war, military planners worried that
Israel would sustain high casualty rates if it sent large numbers of ground
forces into Gaza's densely packed cities and refugee camps in search of
Hamas leaders. They also fretted over what would come next if they really
did destroy Hamas: The relatively moderate Fatah movement has little
organized presence in Gaza, and a power vacuum in the strip could lead to an
even more dangerous situation for Israel.

At a question-and-answer session with students at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem last week, Livni cited her own diplomatic efforts as crucial,
first to keeping the war going despite international pressure for it to end,
and then to bringing about a responsible conclusion.

Netanyahu, she said, is "an extreme ideologist" who may know how to fight
but won't know how to work with allies, including the United States, to
achieve peace.

Livni, wary of looking soft, also spoke out forcefully against Hamas and
said Israel will continue to strike at the group when necessary. Her party,
Kadima, has featured images of tanks rolling into Gaza in its
advertisements, part of a bid to toughen her image.

Livni, who took control of the centrist Kadima last year after Olmert
stepped aside amid corruption charges, is running second in the polls, with
Labor's Barak a distant third.

During the Gaza war, all of the first-tier parties, as well as many of those
in the second tier, favored the decision to fight. Even a party considered
to be a stalwart of Israel's peace camp, Meretz, initially backed the war,
although it later called for a cease-fire. The party's campaign does not
highlight Gaza, focusing instead on education and social issues.

During Livni's Hebrew University speech, several dozen backers of one group
that did oppose the war -- the small leftist party Hadash -- rallied
outside, though their voices could not be heard in the auditorium.

Members said later that they see no significant differences among the major
candidates for leadership in Israel.

"They're two faces of the same coin," said Hanaa Mahamid, 24, a student and
an Arab citizen of Israel. "All of them are war criminals."




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