[R-G] Gaza, and Israel's Wars of Forced Regime Change

[Anthony Fenton]

MIDEAST:  Gaza, and Israel's Wars of Forced Regime Change
Analysis by Helena Cobban*
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45352

WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (IPS) - The war that Israel launched on Gaza Dec. 27  
is the seventh war of choice Israel has launched against its  
neighbours since 1973, the last year in which it fought a war that was  
forced upon it.

Of the seven wars one -- in Lebanon, 1978 -- had the goal of  
establishing an Israeli-controlled "security zone" running inside  
Lebanon's border with Israel. The other six, including the present war  
on Gaza, all aimed at imposing a "forced regime change" on Arab  
communities neighbouring Israel through the violent physical  
dismantlement of politico-military structures then present in, or on  
occasion dominating, those societies.

The five earlier attempts at forced regime change all had interesting  
-- and quite unintended -- consequences that might have given Israel's  
leaders serious pause before they launched the present war.

The first of those "forced regime change" (FRC) wars was the one Ariel  
Sharon, as defence minister, planned and launched against the PLO's  
structures in Lebanon in 1982. The PLO mounted a spirited defence. But  
after seven weeks of terrible destruction, pressure from their  
Lebanese allies forced the PLO leaders to agree to an internationally  
mediated ceasefire that mandated the evacuation of the entire PLO  
security force to distant Arab lands.

 From a military viewpoint, Sharon's war had "worked". But it had two  
intriguing political-strategic consequences. Regarding Palestine,  
Palestinians in the occupied territories who previously had waited to  
be "saved" by PLO forces from outside realised after 1982 that they  
needed to work for their own liberation.

They launched their first intifada against Israel in 1987. In Lebanon,  
meanwhile, the IDF was left as a badly over-stretched occupation  
force, unable to counter the emergence of a new, indigenous Islamist- 
nationalist organisation that hadn't even existed before 1982:  
Hizbullah.

In 1992, Hizbullah's political wing ran in Lebanon's parliamentary  
election, winning four seats and considerable additional legitimacy in  
national politics. The next year the IDF launched another FRC war in  
Lebanon, this time against Hizbullah. That war, the IDF was unable to  
win. It ended in a fairly fragile -- because unmonitored -- ceasefire.

In 1996, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, worried about his chances in an  
impending Israeli election, ordered the IDF to try again. That FRC war  
was even less satisfactory for Israel. Hizbullah's resilient military  
and mass-organisation structures withstood the IDF's repeated attempts  
to bomb them into either annihilation or submission.

The IDF's violence and the mass killings it inflicted proved  
politically counter-productive to Israel at both the Lebanese and  
international levels. After some weeks Peres had to agree to a  
ceasefire resolution in which the subsequent actions of both sides  
would be subject to international monitoring. The IDF returned to the  
"security zone" demoralised. (And Peres lost his election.)

Regarding Palestine, the first intifada had led to the Oslo Agreement  
which led to the establishment of a somewhat autonomous "Palestinian  
Authority" (PA) in the occupied Palestinian territories. Oslo also  
mandated that negotiations on a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace  
would be finished by 1999. As Israel stalled on those key negotiations  
and continued to plant settlers in the Occupied Territories,  
Palestinian frustration grew. In September 2000, the second intifada  
erupted.

That eruption was sparked when Ariel Sharon very provocatively entered  
Jerusalem's holiest Islamic space, the Haram al-Sharif, accompanied by  
more than 1,000 armed police. By then, Sharon was leader of the  
opposition Likud Party, despite his earlier exclusion from high office  
in line with the recommendation of the Kahan Commission regarding his  
actions in the 1982 war in Lebanon. Elections were getting ever closer  
in Israel. They were held in February 2001. Likud won, and Sharon  
became prime minister.

In 2002, he ordered Israel's fourth FRC war of the modern era. This  
one was against the PA's structures in the Occupied Territories --  
both the security forces and those delivering social and economic  
services.

Sharon largely succeeded in smashing the PA's infrastructure, but once  
again the political-strategic consequences proved counter-productive.  
Hamas, a militant Islamist-national group that Israel had once  
incubated, had always criticised the PLO for giving away too much in  
its never-ending peace talks with Israel. Now, with the PLO both  
incapacitated and humiliated, Hamas saw considerable new growth. In  
January 2006 it ran for the first time in PA legislative elections --  
and won.

Sharon had recently suffered a stroke. He was replaced by Ehud Olmert,  
a much younger figure who seemingly needed to prove his military  
toughness. In June 2006, Olmert unleashed another FRC war, this one  
against Lebanon's Hizbullah. Hizbullah withstood that one, too. It,  
and the whole of Lebanon, suffered badly in 2006. But by the middle of  
2008 Hizbullah's political position in Lebanon was stronger than ever.

For his part, Olmert was badly damaged politically by the strategic  
ineptitude he and the IDF displayed in 2006. He clung to office, his  
power much diminished. At the end of 2008, as foreign minister Tzipi  
Livni and defence minister Ehud Barak were squaring off to fight each  
other and Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu in the February 2009 election,  
the Israeli cabinet decided on Israel's sixth FRC war: this one  
against Hamas in Gaza.

The history of Israel's FRC wars deserves close study. All have been  
"wars of choice" in that the "unbearable" situations that Israeli  
leaders have cited, each time, as giving them "no alternative" but to  
fight can all be seen as having been very amenable to negotiation --  
should Israel have chosen that path instead.

Also, all these wars were planned in some detail in advance, with the  
Israeli government just waiting for -- or even, on occasion, provoking  
-- some action from the other side that they could use as a launch  
pretext. All have received strong financial, rearming, and political  
support from the U.S., not least because they were waged in the name  
of counter-terrorism.

But the outcomes are important, too. At a purely military level, the  
two FRC wars against the PLO were the ones that Israel was able to  
"win", in terms of being largely able to dismantle the structures it  
targeted. But the longer term, political-strategic outcomes of both  
those wars were distinctly counter-productive for Israel since they  
paved the way for the emergence of much tougher minded and better  
organised movements.

By contrast, Israel was unable to win any of its three FRC wars  
against Hizbullah. In each, Hizbullah withstood Israel's assault long  
enough to force it into a ceasefire. All these wars ended up  
strengthening Hizbullah's position inside Lebanese politics.

So how will Israel's current attempt to inflict forced regime change  
on the Gaza Palestinians work out? If history is a guide, as it is,  
then this war will bring about either Hamas's dismantling or a  
ceasefire on terms that will lead to (or at least allow) Hamas's  
continued political strengthening.

A dismantling is unlikely, since Hamas's leadership is located outside  
Gaza and has links throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds that ensure  
that annihilation of Hamas in Gaza would have serious global  
consequences. But if Hamas is dismantled in Gaza, it is most likely to  
be replaced there -- faster or slower -- by groups that are even more  
militant and more Islamist than itself.

Meantime, the high human costs of the war continue to mount daily.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs  
at www.JustWorldNews.org

(END/2009)