Webloggin » The Hidden Story On Gaza

For the past two weeks, I’ve trying to put together the answers to a couple of questions on the Gaza War,knowing that in the Middle East, things are never as simple as they seem. Why, after all this time did the troika of Olmert, Livni and Barak choose now to go after Hamas? Why did Hamas deliberately provoke Israel? Having watched Israel decimate its fighters and put Gaza City under siege,why has Hamas refused a ceasefire? And what is the end game likely to look like?

Now that a few more pieces of the puzzle have revealed themselves, here’s how things fit together.

The Israeli public has a deep contempt for Ehud Olmert and the rest of the government he put together, and rightfully so. Having been lied to first about how the Gaza retreat was going to bring peace to Israel by getting rid of those nasty ’settlers’ and then seeing the criminally mismanaged Lebanon War fought for no appreciable result under his watch, Olmert reputation as Israel’s weakest and most ineffectual prime minister was assured even without his appetite for bribery and corruption. Add that to the mix,and Olmert’s popularity probably doesn’t extend much past his own immediate family.

While foreign minister and Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni and defense minister and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak are not as unpopular as Olmert,both of them are tarred by the failure of Israeli government to defend its citizens living in the south of the country from Hamas.Both are running behind in the polls in the upcoming elections and neither can afford to be thought of as soft on defense.

Olmert,of course isn’t running for anything except maybe for an acquittal if he can manage one (Note to Israel: this is what happens when you let a shifty, dishonest lawyer run the country). However,he has something to gain here as well. Israel, like most democracies isn’t going to put an ex-leader in jail for anything less than premeditated murder, for obvious reasons. Olmert will likely be convicted,but the conditions under which he leaves office next month could have a great deal to do with the price he ends up paying for it.

In other words, all of these three stand to benefit from a successful war in the south that eliminates the Hamas threat they were responsible for creating and abetting in the first place, although it’s important to remember that the Gaza campaign would not have happened if Hamas had not made the decision to accelerate the frequency, power and range of the rocket attacks on Israel as a causus belli, a deliberate act of war.

Why exactly did Hamas choose to initiate hostilities ? Thanks to the Olmert government, there was a ceasefire in name only for the last six months that still allowed Hamas to fire rockets and mortars into Israel while building up their armaments. It could well have continued in just that way…so why did Hamas suddenly decide to quash the ceasefire and ramp up their attacks?

Having ousted Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah from Gaza, Hamas assumed total control of the area,but they failed in one key area - gaining legitimacy as a ’state’ along the lines of Abbas and Fatah even after winning an election among the Palestinians by a 70% majority. Instead of acceptance and legitimacy, they were blockaded by Israel and Egypt and the west threw its vote for Preferred Palestinian Terrorist to Abbas and Fatah.

Hamas was left with Gaza to govern,which they proved spectacularly bad at, even with major aid from the west via UNRWA and the Fatah government,which dutifully sent a portion of its jirzyah from the infidels to the Strip.

With Abbas’ presidential term coming to an end and elections looming, the Hamas leadership also had a vested interest in hostilities with Israel. Contrary to the nonsense you’ll hear peddled elsewhere, Hamas won the huge majority they did precisely because Fatah had been miserably defeated in its war with the hated Jews in the intifada, and Hamas promised both a hardline stance and victory. With new elections coming up, Hamas saw an opportunity to gain relevance for itself and oust Fatah if there was even a semblance of a fair election by once again being identified in the Palestinian street as the leader in the jihad against Israel.

And of course, the idea of ramped up hostilities against Israel worked well with the goals of the third party in this conflict- Iran.

While Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, its real leadership resides in Syria, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the dominant factions in the Strip, are both wholly owned subsidiaries of Iran, their main source of financial and military aid.

Iran also saw the political advantage to Hamas increasing the missile attacks on Israel and ousting Fatah, and after Israel’s debacle in Lebanon, neither Iran or Hamas dreamed that the response to Hamas’ aggression would be as forceful as it was. They miscalculated badly to say the least.

However, Iran had another goal in mind as well..taking the spotlight off its nuclear weapons program. That’s one reason why Iran ordered Hamas not to accept a ceasefire even after the decisive nature of the Israeli response became clear….

Read the whole thing at Joshuapundit

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