Who is to blame for the fighting in Gaza?

By M.S.

THE general impression in America is that the most recent round of fighting in Gaza got started when Israel retaliated for a major ramp-up in rocket launches by Hamas this year, with a crescendo in October. "What did Hamas hope to gain from this latest round of fighting, which it started with a barrage of about 150 rockets into Israel? To formally translate Hamas’s recent strategic gains into a new, more favorable status quo with Israel," writes Charles Krauthammer. A New York Timeseditorial during the thick of the fighting said Hamas was "so consumed with hatred for Israel that it has repeatedly resorted to violence, no matter the cost to its own people. Gaza militants have fired between 750 to 800 rockets into Israel this year before Israel assassinated one of its senior leaders last week and began its artillery and air campaigns." And so forth. This is the received wisdom on the American side of the Atlantic.

On the European side of the Atlantic, and in a few pockets of the American left, a different narrative contends for space. That narrative received its most succinct airing on the BBC's "Question Time" last week, when Owen Jones, a columnist for the Independent, lit into a two-minute tirade that then went modestly viral.

Firstly, this whole idea that Hamas broke the cease-fire is just not true. In fact, it was broken after in October, Israel killed 15 Palestinian fighters, they shot dead a mentally disabled Palestinian, they killed another 13-year-old in an intrusion, and when there was an attempt to actually get a cease-fire, negotiations were ongoing, that is when they assassinated Ahmed Jabari, completely ending those cease-fire talks.

This version of the timeline is laid out in more detail by Ali Abunimah at the Electronic Intifada. Mr Abunimah points out that after heavy rocket fire at the end of October, Israeli sources reported just a few rockets until November 10th, when Palestinians fired a missile that hit an Israeli army jeep, leading to heavy Israeli counterattacks. However, according to the Israeli Twitter feed @QassamCount, there was no rocket fire on November 11th, and Israeli and Hamas representatives were reportedly in serious cease-fire talks mediated by Egypt over the next few days. On November 13th, things looked promising enough that Reuters reported the two sides had "stepped back from the brink of a new war in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, sending signals to each other via Egypt that they would hold their fire unless attacked." Then, the next day, Israel assassinated Mr Jabari, and all hell broke loose.

Is this account accurate? Would it be fair to say that Israel provoked this round of violence in Gaza? After careful consideration, my conclusion is...meh.

Mr Jones's version of the story is tendentious. The killing of the "15 Palestinian fighters" to whom he refers began on October 7th, when an Israeli airstrike killed two men whom Israel believed were terrorists involved in a June attack on Israel via the Sinai desert. Hamas retaliated by firing some 50 rockets and shells into Israel, and Israeli aircraft hit Gaza in further retaliation. The cycle of Hamas rockets and Israeli airstrikes escalated on October 22nd and continued until, by October 29th-30th, Hamas fired over 150 missiles into Israel in a 24-hour period. The "mentally disabled" Palestinian was killed on November 5th, after the heavy Hamas rocket fire and Israeli airstrikes of October 22nd-November 2nd, when he wandered into the Israeli-defined no-man's-land near the border fence and ignored warning shots; this seems to have nothing to do with breaking cease-fires. The 13-year-old (actually 12) was killed on November 8th, during a clash between the PRC Palestinian militia and Israeli bulldozers and tanks, which had made a "short-range incursion" into Gaza to hunt for explosives-smuggling tunnels. Those deaths were clearly regrettable, they may even have been reprehensible, but did they violate any tacit or explicit truce? At various points there were rumours that Egypt had brokered a tentative cease-fire, but those rumours were denied by both Israel and Hamas.

Mr Abunimah's timeline focuses in on a more specific issue: the assassination of Mr Jabari. Did Israel scupper a nascent cease-fire by killing him? Maybe. Perhaps Reuters's account was correct, and a truce really was taking hold at that point. It's possible that Israel did so with the deliberate aim of prolonging hostilities. Ethan Bronner of the New York Timesreported on the Israeli Defence Forces' use of the "mowing the grass" metaphor for Hamas in Gaza; maybe Israel felt it needed a chance to deplete Hamas's rocket stores, test out its Iron Dome system and kill a few more important military figures. It's certainly possible that the assassination of Mr Jabari was, as Roger Cohen characterised it, a choice by Binyamin Netanyahu to escalate the conflict and go for a clearer military victory.

Then again, maybe it wasn't. Maybe the Egyptians were over-optimistic again, and the cease-fire wasn't solid on either side. Maybe the Israelis had decided to assassinate Mr Jabari at an earlier stage of the conflict, and had time-limited knowledge of his location; maybe Mr Netanyahu's decision to go ahead was more of a reluctance to exercise restraint with a top target in sight, rather than a decision to destroy a truce. Again, maybe you think the idea of Israel assassinating Hamas military leaders is reprehensible, or maybe, considering Mr Jabari's involvement in terrorist attacks, you don't. But did they violate the truce? I don't think it's possible to figure out clearly who was the provocateur at any given moment, when the situation moves fluidly between states of semi-peace and semi-war, with no more than a day or two elapsing between calm and violence. Was a given rocket or airstrike a retaliation? A provocation? Sometimes it's possible to tell; more often, each act of violence is both.

In any case, this all seems very much beside the point.

For both Israelis and Palestinians, the question of responsibility has nothing to do with who acted first to break the latest truce. For israelis, Palestinians are at fault not because they decided to start launching rockets at Israeli towns on October 8th or October 29th or November 16th, but because they launch rockets at Israeli towns at all. Launching poorly-guided rockets at Ashkelon, Beersheva or Tel Aviv cannot conceivably have a legitimate military purpose. Israel's strikes on Gaza kill hundreds of civilians, and an international court might very well determine after detailed investigation that some of those strikes had no legitimate military targets, and constituted war crimes; but a court examining Hamas' rocket attacks on Israeli towns would need perform very little investigation at all to make the same determination. It is a cliche, but a perfectly accurate one, that no people would tolerate militias launching rockets at them from neighbouring territories, and Israel is perfectly justified in using military means to stop it.

Mr Jones's reply is that while no people would tolerate having rockets launched at its territory, no people would tolerate being cooped up in a state of perpetual siege, either. This is a rather poor justification for Hamas's launching of missiles at Israeli population centres. The fact that you are being oppressed provides no justification for engaging in lethal violence deliberately targeting civilians, particularly violence that has no rational connection to any plan for ending your oppression. I mean, I consider the continued emission of greenhouse gases at current rates to be a moral outrage, but that doesn't provide any justification or even any coherent reason for me to start shooting passing motorists, much less to open up my office window and chuck out hand-grenades in random directions.

Yet in another sense, Mr Jones is quite right. Palestinians consider Israel to be responsible for the recent violence in Gaza not because Israel scotched the cease-fire negotiations and killed a high-level Hamas officer, but because Israel has driven the Palestinians out of most of the territory in which they historically resided, confining them to ever-shrinking patches of parched land, sealing their borders, crippling their economy, stunting their political aspirations, jailing or killing their heroes, and blasting apart whatever chance they might have had at a prosperous, well-governed state if left to their own devices—not that those chances were necessarily particularly high. Of course they blame the Israelis. Of course the Israelis blame them. Thinking about the problem through the prism of who is at fault for the most recent cease-fire violations or escalation of violence doesn't seem a terribly useful exercise.

(Photo credit: AFP)