Israel’s Netanyahu defiant despite pressure

July 28, 2014 5:11 pm
Israel’s Netanyahu defiant despite pressure
By Joel Greenberg in Jerusalem FT

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced increased international pressure on Monday to wind down Israel’s military offensive against the Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but he has strong support at home to continue the campaign.

“We have to be prepared for a protracted battle,” Mr Netanyahu told Israelis on Monday, pledging to continue the offensive until a network of Hamas attack tunnels was destroyed.

After US president Barack Obama and the UN Security Council called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, Mr Netanyahu lashed out at the council’s non-binding “presidential statement” calling for a halt to hostilities to allow for delivery of urgent humanitarian assistance, calling it one-sided.

In a conversation with Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, Mr Netanyahu charged that the statement dealt with “the needs of a murderous terrorist organisation that attacks Israeli civilians, and does not address Israel’s security needs”, according to an account by the prime minister’s office.

A key reason for Mr Netanyahu’s defiant tone has been the popularity of the Gaza campaign at home, where Israelis have rallied behind the government and the army in the war against Hamas.

Absorbing daily rocket strikes directed at big cities and towns, Israelis have accepted Mr Netanyahu’s depiction of the campaign as an effort to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities in Gaza, including its missile stocks and attack tunnels, while bringing a long-term halt to the rocket attacks.

Polls have shown overwhelming opposition to a ceasefire. One survey published by Israel’s Channel 10 television on Sunday showed that 87 per cent of Israelis were in favour of continuing the Gaza operation and just 7 per cent wanted a full ceasefire. Another poll showed similar figures, with only 9.7 per cent agreeing with the statement: “Israel had enough achievements, soldiers have died, and it is time to stop”.

“What most Israelis perceive is the fact that the Palestinians are sending rockets into Israel, to very central places, and this is something they expect the government to prevent, so they will not support leaving Gaza without getting the job done,” said Tom Segev, a historian and author. “There is no opposition, except for a few thousand people who demonstrated against the war.”

Contributing to this public perception is the sympathetic Israeli media coverage of the military campaign, which has largely shielded Israelis from the graphic scenes of death and destruction viewers are seeing around the world.

Israeli news broadcasts focus on military operations against the tunnels and the damage and disruption caused by the rocket strikes in Israel, with relatively few images of the civilian casualties and devastation in Gaza.

With Israeli journalists barred from the coastal territory, except when embedded with army units, the bulk of Israeli reporting on the war is being done by military correspondents, with studio commentary provided by an array of ex-generals.

Mr Netanyahu has also taken pains to limit public scrutiny of his conduct of the war. In televised statements to the nation, flanked by the defence minister and army chief of staff, he usually takes no questions from reporters. With parliament in summer recess and support for the campaign reaching across the political spectrum, the prime minister has not been summoned to explain his policies before the Knesset.

While the 47 soldiers killed so far is a relatively high death toll in Israel for a campaign in its third week, the military’s dead and wounded are widely seen as a painful but necessary price for halting years of rocket attacks on civilians.

Mr Netanyahu has praised the Israeli public for its resilience, asserting that it has enabled the government to prosecute the war. “Your steadfast fortitude gives us the ability and the time to take strong action against our enemies, and we are all proud of you,” he said in one national broadcast.

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system, which has intercepted scores of rockets headed for significant population centres, along with an early warning system that has sent millions of Israelis to shelters before rocket impacts, have kept the civilian casualty toll low. Two Israeli civilians and a Thai labourer have been killed in rocket strikes.

Many of the nearly 2,000 rockets and mortars that have hit Israel have landed in open areas.
After an ebb in fighting early on Monday at the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, rocket fire at Israel and Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip resumed, with fresh deaths reported on both sides.

Four Israeli soldiers were killed in a mortar strike near the Gaza border, and 10 Palestinians, most of them children, were reported killed in an explosion in a park that local officials said was caused by an Israeli airstrike. Another strike hit an outpatient clinic at Gaza City’s main hospital, Al-Shifa, but there were no casualties. The Israeli army said both blasts were caused by impacts of misfired rockets launched by militants.

As the offensive has moved from land, air and sea bombardments to a ground invasion by infantry and tanks, the war aims have expanded. Initial government statements that “quiet will be met with quiet” have given way to demands by Mr Netanyahu that the Gaza Strip be demilitarised, ridding it of Hamas’s stocks of missiles and tunnel networks, some dug toward Israel for cross-border attacks.

Mr Obama acknowledged that demand in a phone conversation with Mr Netanyahu urging a ceasefire, though he appeared to defer any resolution of the issue to a final political settlement with the Palestinians.

“Ultimately, any lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must ensure the disarmament of terrorist groups and the demilitarisation of Gaza,” Mr Obama said, according to a White House statement.

Many Israelis, meanwhile, seem to be in no mood for a truce until the declared aims of the Gaza campaign are achieved. A woman from a rocket-stricken city in the south of the country captured the public mood in comments broadcast on Israel Radio. “We’ve been suffering here for 14 years,” she said. “We’re ready to suffer more now, but until they finish it off. I’m not willing to even hear the word ceasefire, not even for a minute.”

Source: FT