Well things in Gaza are largely quiet, and Israel plans to have its troops outbefore the inauguration.
I would note that the matter of weapons movement across the Philidelphi crossing is still unresolved, which to my implies that this is not really much of a victory.
I’m not sure how they could have achieved a victory in any case, unless they had recovered Gilad Shalit.
I expect rockets to fall again before the election, and for Netanyahu to win as a result.
The cease fire is to be effective at 2:00am Sunday morning local time, or about 4½ hours ago.
Note that Hamas has not signed on, and that soldiers will apparently maintain their positions.
As near as I can tell, at least at this point, the only definitive winner in this cease fire is Benyamin Netanyahu.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a mess.
Jeffrey Goldberg says that Israel can’t make Peace with Hamas.
That their philosophy and theology will simply never allow them to make a real peace.
He relates his discussions with Nizar Rayyan, in which the now dead Hamas leader says that the first priority is to “deal with” Arabs looking for peace deals (i.e. Fatah), calls Jews the descendants of apes and pigs, denies the Holocaust, and says that God is opposed to a religious state in that part of the world.
Let’s be clear there can be no deal with Mr. Rayyan. With him, the point was mooted when he was killed.
On the larger point, the question is, “Can you negotiate a peace with people who believe as he does?”
The answer is clearly no.
Neither can you bomb them until they give up. They are, to quote Elwood Blues, “On a mission from God.”
You can’t kill them all, and any attempt to do so is likely to create more radicals.
What you can do, however, is destroy them as a viable political force. I’m not sure how, but you can reduce people like this to the soap box ranters you see now and again in places like the Boston Common, and that should be the strategy.
That being said, I have no idea how to do that, particularly because today the soap box ranters are a rather potent political force in the territories.
We are getting conflicting reports on how much longer the fighting will go on, with reports of 2 more weeks, that it may end tonight, and that Hamas has rejected the cease fire terms.
We’ll know its over when its over, I guess.
Part of the reason for this is that
there appears to be a rift between Hamas in Gaza and their nominal leaders in Syria, with the latter taking a much harder line….Which is easier for them, because they, and their neighbors are not in the cross fire.
On a tactical level, we now have reports of ubiquitous recording of events on video by the IDF, on the theory that this will be an effective defense against accusations of war crimes.
This means, at the very least, that there are elements in the IDF who believe that they are following טוהר נשק, because people who believe that they are committing war crimes don’t video tape it these days.
Additionally, we have reports of extremely close coordination between UAV’s and ground forces.
This is because they are under the direct control Army, and not AF units, which is something that the US Army should note, because the USAF wants direct control of anything larger than a seagull.
I would also note that IDF armor is doing very well, unlike in Lebanon in 2006.
I think that this is because there is no longer an Air Force man as chief of staff, and so they have moved away from the US “long range PGM” model, and back to maneuver warfare.
It doesn’t hurt that their APCs are the heaviest in the world (contra the direction of the US Army with its light weight FCS manned vehicles), and that the Merkava has a number of systems, remote machine guns and a 60mm mortar, that are very effective in urban combat too.
Finally, we have a video of a trip to a missile factory.
I will note that you can hear children in background at one point, and whether this is evidence of human shield use, or simply an artifact of living with 1.5 million people in a space the size of Washington, DC, is left to the reader.
H/T Danger Room for the vid.
Also, I will post on Jeffrey Goldberg’s NY Times OP/ED later.
Israel continues its advance into Gaza city, and Aviation Week has an analysis of the tactics of the the ground assault on Gaza by the Israelis (paid subscription required) and it appears that the tactics were a surprise to Hamas, which is a very real difference from what happened in 2006 against Hezbollah.
They were expecting an incursion from the north, and by attacking from the east, they cut both the supply and communications to the militias who had moved north to face an assault that never happened.
In 2006, the IDF, under the command of a Chief who was an Air Force General, showed none of this initiative, because, big surprise here, the Air force always thinks that it can win a war on its own.
An interesting bit of technology has entered the fray, a FLIR with automatic gain control, which can give near-instantaneous BDA while the fireball is still present.
That being said, for all the tactical and technological skills on display here, I still don’t see a strategic goal in anything done so far, with the possible exception of the seizure of Hamas broadcasting facilities.
There are reports that Hamas is now calling for a week long cease fire, and they are demanding an Israeli troop pullout as a part of this.
I am not sure if this is a sign of weakness or strength on the part of Hamas, or just some sort of theater.
In Israel, the Central Elections Committee has banned the two major Arab parties, Balad and United Arab List-Ta’al, from standing in the next election.
It appears that this pops up periodically, and the Israeli Supreme Court shoots it down while the ink is still wet.
This is just amazingly stupid. It’s electioneering at the expense of country.
H/T WallStreetJackass.
The IHT is now reporting that Israeli ground forces have moved into some of the most heavily settled areas of Gaza, particularly Gaza City, and that more reserves are being called up.
I’m not sure if this is a pre-cease fire push, or just an increase in operational tempo.
Regardless of the final status of a negotiated solution regarding Israel and a Palestinian entity (or entities, with the West Bank and Gaza going separate ways), there will doubtless be compromises on both sides that will outrage significant constituencies on both sides of this dispute.
Whether one is talking about East Jerusalem, the “Right of Return”, water rights, transit rights, etc., it there will be provisions that people on one side or the other will not be happy about.
If one, for the moment, ignores the substance of these compromises, and agrees to the existence of these compromises, it raises an interesting question: Is there actually anyone in the Palestinian community who can negotiate such a deal and survive long enough to make it stick?
We know that the compromises of Michael Collins with regard to the 6 northern counties or Ireland were directly responsible for his death at the hands of anti-Treaty faction of the IRA.
The important thing to remember in the case of Michael Collins is that despite his death the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was a done deal, and remained a done deal.
While there is a a real possibility of political assassination, as a result of successful negotiations, it has already happened with Rabin in Israel, but on the Palestinian side there is a real possibility that with the assassination and/or the overthrow of of whoever signs such a deal will abnegate whatever deal that is signed.
Hamas is for the foreseeable future without the institutional imperatives to even enter into such a negotiation, and on the PA side, Mahmoud Abbas carries the moral weight of Hillary Duff.
He’s a party apparatchik who survives through appeasing the various factions and playing them off one against the other, and as such it is unlikely that he would have the political ability to survive a successful final status negotiation.
So, the question is how does one create an environment that will facilitate the creation a movement and/or leader in the Territories that will have the political and moral infrastructure to allow for a successful negotiation?
By the standards of any counterinsurgency campaign, the IDF has superb intelligence on the other side.
There is also some luck involved, as when Israeli paras captured a man and found a detailed map of the measures that had been taken by Hamas in the al-Atatra neighborhood in Gaza. (see also here)
I would assume here that the reason that this man was targeted in the first place was because it was believed that he had valuable information.
An interesting side note to all this, is that Hamas is going Beau Geste in their plans, using manikins to tactical advantage.
The irony there is obvious.
It looks like the war is reviving the political fortunes of both the Labor Party and Ehud Barack.
It was firmly mired in 3rd place, and at risk of dropping further, with polls showing their winning 8 seats in the 120 seat Knesset, and now the polls are showing 16-18 seats, which might put them in 2nd place.
To my mind, one of the real problems is not security, but the fact that the Labor Party has largely abandoned labor as a movement, and when there is that much buy-in on Thatchernomics, they lose a clear differentiator between them and Kadima, in particular.
It appears that most of Labor’s new support is coming at the expense of Kadima and other members of the coalition, so I think that Likud is still favored to win the election.
Well, there was a 3 hour truce to deliver supplies, and then the fighting started up again, and the Israeli cabinet has OK’d continued conflict.
On a brighter note, things seem to be developing diplomatically, with a lot of people on both sides in Cairo.
Finally, if you think that the Middle East can make you cynical, you haven’t ever truly experienced real cynicism. Just check out the War Nerd’s latest, it’s on Gaza, and it makes everyone else that I’ve ever heard of sound like Little Orphan Annie.
To paraphrase Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, that’s isn’t cynicism, this is cynicism
In what may be the most significant move of the war, Israelhas seized the Hamas TV station, Al-Aqsa.
Really I’m serious. I believe that one of the strategic goals of this war for the Israelis is seizing Hamas’s media tools, which play a significant part of their political apparatus.
I’m not making joke about how this war is really a hit called by Disney Corporation, because Al-Aqsa broadcast “Farfour,” an anti-semitic Mickey Mouse look-a-like.
There is more to this action than that, though I would still day, whatever you do, don’t f$#@ with the mouse.
The most interesting thing here is just how terrified surrounding Arab governments are of Hamas.
Notwithstanding Hamas’s Sunni theology, their close ties to Iran have Egypt, Jordan, and the House of Saud in particular concerned about some sort of revolutionary Shia tidal wave hitting them.
In addition to their use of the US made Small Diameter Bomb (SDB), the Israelis have been using a number indigenously developed bombs to take out tunnels and buried weapons caches.
It appears that the IMI PB500A1 is figuring rather prominently,which appears to allow for a 1000 lb class weapon to match the penetrating power of a 2000 lb class weapon, which allows an aircraft to carry more weapons per sortie.
Just heard on the radio.
posted via cell phone
I guess that the lede here is the deaths of Nizar Rayyan, who appears to be the most senior member of Hamas’ military wing, and Azkariah al-Jamal, leader of their rocket forces.
While al-Jamal was hit in his car, Rayyan was hit at his home, where he was staying with his 4(!) wives and 10 children, who were also killed in the strike.*
I can’t say that I’ll shed a tear over Rayaan or al-Jamal, though the deaths of family members is unfortunate.
Israel is still resisting calls for a truce, and there are increasing indications that Israel is preparing for a ground assault (also here)
In the world of the more surreal aspects of the war, there is a PR campaign between Israel and Hamas being conducted on YouTube, and in the reports of Israeli cell phone warnings to civilians in advance of strikes, we have another report confirming this activity, along with reports that Hamas is sending text message threats.
Again, let me state that I really want to hear the War Nerd’s perspective on all this, because his lack of moral dimension on his commentary provides more military insight.
*Reports are that he refused to go to ground, a stupidity that should be restricted to military leaders, and that he refused to allow his family to go elsewhere, which is wrong, and cowardly, on many levels.
First, something we can all agree on, that this clusterf&$% is Bush and Condi’s gift to the middle east.
You remember, first they insisted on elections in the territories, and then when Hamas won, because the PA is corrupt and incompetent at governing even by the standards of the Arab world, they proceeded to encourage Israel and the PLO to go after Hamas, which led to Hamas kicking the PLO out of Gaza, because the PLO is the worst army ever.
In breaking news, it looks like there may be a 48 hour cease fire, though both sides are currently acknowledging any negotiations.
Also I have one report of a ground offensive starting, it’s an eyewitness account, but it has since been corrected to say that tanks are shelling from over the Green Line.
The here lede is that Israel is calling up reservists, and armored units are massing on the border.
I would assume that infantry units are massing as well, as sending unsupported armor into an urban combat situation is suicidally stupid.
In terms of tactics and technoligy (I really wish that the War Nerd were not on vacation), we have a report that IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi demanded a clear exit strategy during the planning of this action.
It shows that he’s rather a bit more together than the flyboy who screwed up in Lebanon in 2006.
It also appears that Israel navy is heavily involved too, though it’s unclear if they are shelling, enforcing a blockade, or using the ships as bases for UAV flights. (My guess would be all three)
We are also getting some reports on the use of sophisticated multi-spectral sensors to locate targets. (The top image is post strike imagery of an underground missile launch site, the bottom image is pre-strike imagery of a Hamas military post)
We also have a “News” story from Haaretz making rather a big deal of the fact that this operation has been actively planned for months:
Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well.
It’s not really news. It’s the job of the military to plan for contingencies, and to keep their mouth shut about it.
It would be news if the Defense minister and the Chief of Staff weren’t planning for a breakdown in negotiations. It’s their job.
Politically, it appears that the Israeli right wing is seeing the immediate benefit of combat operations, with Israel Beiteinu, which advocates redrawing the borders of Israel so that predominantly Arab areas of Israel are included in a Palestinian entity (I call it ethnic cleansing, but you are moving lines, not people so pedants may disagree), picking up support.
I imagine that the same thing is happening on the Palestinian side.
Finally, as to the report in the comments (BTW, go to the commenter’s blog, it’s cool) that Israel sent SMS warnings to warn civilians living near Gaza that they needed to get out and keep their heads down, I now have two links, one from bazonline.ch (Google translation that reads a bit like a Salvadore Dali paintint) and one from The Forward, though the latter says that it’s voice mails:
Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language voice mails on their cell phones from the Israel Defense Forces, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.
While identifying the appropriate recipients of message is involved, it’s by no means impossible, particularly when the basic directory information should be available to Israeli telcos.
Note that this sort of action has been policy, and documented by independent sources going back to the 1948 war for independence.
One of the things in the coverage that has surprised me is that Guardian Columnist Seth Freedman has come down fairly hard on Hamas.
I reviewed his articles, and his beat seems to be largely Israel, Palestine, and the NGOs therein, and he generally hews fairly close to the Guardian editorial line, which has been unsympathetic to Israel for about 30 years.
In the process of googling things about the blow-up in Gaza, I came across an opinion piece in the the Grauniad* that I found rather interesting by Seth Freedman.
Well before quoting someone’s OP/Ed, I always check out their other articles, and/or Wiki them, just to make sure that they are not raving moonbats.
It is a policy that I wholeheartedly recommend.
In any case, it turns out that Mr. Freedman is not a raving moonbat, his opinions on the conflict seem to be pretty much in line with the Guardian‘s editorial stance.
He is “in country”, and writes rather a lot about what is going on there, and his “beat” seems to involve a lot of writing about what is going on with the various NGOs out there.
So, I’m perusing his articles, and I come across one that he wrote just over a week ago, “Aid workers reveal their deep malaise in ‘western-style gym’ battle,” and I gave it a read.
It appears that there is a mailing list dedicated to discussing issues confronting employees of NGOs in the territories, and someone posted what should have been an innocuous question, “Is there a proper, western-style gym in Ramallah? If so, where is it?
The response from a sane human being should be some asking what the person wants from the gym. “Western-style,” could mean fancy machines, or mixed gender, or any other number of options.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, someone suggested that the request was racist, “You forgot to add: ‘where only white people go,’ so it can’t be ‘proper’ if not ‘western-style’? If you miss western styles that much, get your ass out of here and keep it in your western world.“
From that point, it devolved in a flame war lasting at least a week.
Too many people in this world take themselves way too seriously.
In any case, it is a very amusing read.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
OK, Israel has launched a large air strike on Gaza, see here, here, and here, with total reported casualties somewhere in the 225 range.
As to what the eventual death toll will be, FAIR’s report on Jenin noted that similar numbers were initially counted there, but it turned out to be 52, and the original estimates at deaths on 911 were over 6,000, when the final tally was 2974, so the final number is likely to be much lower.
Note that is not meant to minimize what happened, but to note that people who are going to simply spew what are very preliminary numbers by and imply that this constitutes reasoned arguments are ninnies.
I tend to be more hawkish on these things than my other political leanings would indicate, so here is my assessment at this point.
I do not think that this, whether or not it is followed by a ground assault, will solve anything in the long term, but it will have the effect of disrupting the chain of command of Hamas, particularly as the leadership of the organization is likely to go to ground at this point, as they have when similar strikes have been launched against them.
It does not buy peace, but it will buy somewhere between 6 and 18 months of quiet.
I disagree with the rather simplistic assessment at Worldwide War Pigs of, “Don’t like getting bombed? Clean up your act,” particularly when he invokes the rather awful Sly Stallone movie Cobra in the process.
Nothing good ever comes from evoking Sylvester Stallone, and there is no purely military solution.
By the same token, I think that Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director of J-Street is wrong too, where he makes rather mealy-mouthed statements about, “Respecting Israel’s right to defend itself,” but at it’s core is the argument that this will contribute to the, “cycle of violence”, which is such a useless cliche that it borders on the moronic.
Further I disagree with Mr. Ben-Ami’s assertion that, “strong diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire,” is essential.
The Quartet has been part of the problem, as it has distracted the principals, Israel, the PA, and Hamas, away from dealing with each other, and toward gaming their position vis-a-vis support from the 4 nations. It has taken negotiation, and made it theater.
I believe that the stage given to all parties by the Quartet serves no one except the members of the Quartet, who are allowed to pretend that they are doing something positive.
At this point, the best course is for the rest of the world disentangle themselves from this situation.
As to final status negotiations, I do not believe that Israel can achieve its goals purely through military force, and I do not believe that the Palestinians, either Hamas or the PA are currently able to negotiate in good faith, as any serious good faith negotiations would result in compromises that would delegitimatize whoever made them.
I would also note the lesson of the American Civil War, where ambiguities that were “left for later”, became the basis for conflict. Incrementalism is the enemy of a solution, not a friend.