The logic behind Israel’s Gaza attack, if any, is anyone’s guess
JVL Introduction
Our thanks to Middle East Eye for permission to repost this article by Meron Rapoport – who finds the events of the past week remarkably odd.
Israel in a surprise move decided to restrict traffic around Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza-Israel boundary – a surprise because no such unusual incidents preceded the restriction.
Three days of further calm followed – after which Israel launched precision missiles on three apartments in a residential building in Gaza City.
It killed Taiseer al-Jabari, a commander of al-Quds Brigades. It also killed Alaa Qaddoum, a five-year-old girl, together with a 23-year-old woman and seven other Palestinian men.
Only then were missiles fired from Gaza.
Meron Rapoport tries to explain why Israel may have launched an attack on Gaza at this point in time. As he points out Israel lacked even its usual excuse that it was “responding” to attacks on its civilians and soldiers.
He finds no convincing rational answer…
This article was originally published by Middle East Eye on Sun 7 Aug 2022. Read the original here.
The logic behind Israel's Gaza attack, if any, is anyone's guess
Election campaigning? Undermining Hamas and Iran? Or neither? The unprovoked bombing campaign makes little to no sense
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Can anyone comment on Friday’s (?) BBC News online report By Yolande Knell in Jerusalem which stated – “On Monday night Israel arrested Bassem Saadi, reported to be the head of PIJ in the West Bank. He was held in the Jenin area as part of an ongoing series of arrest operations after a wave of attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians that left 17 Israelis and two Ukrainians dead. Two of the attackers came from the Jenin district”.
I have not been able to find anything to corroborate this report. We’re 17 Israelis killed in Palestine and this didn’t deserve any mention in the main news?
Meron rapoport is perplexed. He tries to find the logic behind the latest Israeli aggression against Gaza. He examines the national security angle. It leads nowhere. He then examines the electoral angle. Once again, no success. Thirdly, he attempts a geopolitical angle. Sadly, that approach also fails. So he’s compelled to renounce rationality altogether, attributing all this mess to a distorted social psychology which possesses current Israel. I won’t dispute him on the latter point, but allow me to reintroduce some rationality into this debate:
Israel, even when governed by a stable government, headed by a popular/populist Prime Minister, is essentially an army with a state (see Prof. Haim Bresheeth-Zabner’s book, ‘An Army Like No Other’). All the more so nowadays, that Israel has a transitional government, headed by a Prime Minister very few take seriously, whose defence minister is an ex chief of army, whose main interest, besides personal political career, is providing the military-industrial complex with additional public funding. The actual fact in recent years has been that each military “operation” (- Putin has taken a leaf of the Israeli book on terming acts of warfare aggression), was successfully (!) followed by demands for huge increases of the military budget, far beyond the cost of ammunition spent on massacring the Gaza Population.
I’m simply offering another angle for your consideration.