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A key strike and some portents

The recent killing of eight Jewish seminarians in Jerusalem ignited a frenzied response. The attack on the Merkaz Herav religious school has indeed added a new dimension to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The March 5 attack by a 25-year-old Palestinian, Ala Hashem Abu Dhaim, hit Israel hard in several ways.

First, it has exposed certain weaknesses in the complex security network that Shin Bet, the Israeli counterintelligence and internal security agency, had evolved to keep suicide bombers at bay. One of its key elements is early warning. In most cases Israeli intelligence could nullify suicide attacks by penetrating bomber cells, which invariably included several individuals. However, the masterminds of the operation that targeted Merkaz Herav managed to achieve their objective without the Israeli security agencies coming to know about it. A leak was avoided by getting a lone ranger to plan and execute it.

Jerusalem’s police chief Aharon Franco acknowledged that Abu Dhaim was “not known to the security forces.” He remarked during an interview with an Israeli TV channel: “He was a normal man... who was going to wed soon.”

Second, the attack delivered a huge psychological blow to the Israeli settler movement, which has over the years made any reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians hard to achieve.

The Merkaz Herav is no ordinary seminary. Founded in 1924, it has been the intellectual powerhouse for the spread of religious Zionism. By providing moral and intellectual justification for this project, it has remained the driving force behind the expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory that Israel occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The seminary’s role has been inseparable from the evolution of the Gush Emunim movement. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the son of Abraham Isaac Kook — the founder of Merkaz Herav — was its chief ideological leader. The movement grew in response to the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which resulted in the handover of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. It represents an alliance of ultranationalist activists, war veterans and right-wing rabbis.

Rabbi Kook’s core doctrine revolved around the belief that the “messianic age” had already dawned, and that it would end with the arrival of a Jewish Messiah. The arrival of the messiah could be hastened by establishing settlements on land over which Jews have had a divine right, as revealed in the Hebrew Bible. These areas included the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, which collectively have been viewed as parts of Eretz (Greater) Israel. Consequently, the movement has ordained the establishment of settlements in all the areas that Israel occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war as a religious duty that its followers are expected to perform without compromise.

In an article in the Israeli daily Haaretz, columnist Gideon Levy elaborated on how Merkaz Harav has played a key role in obstructing reconciliation between Israelis and Arabs: “Without the settlement enterprise, peace might have reigned here already; without the Gush Emunim movement, supported by successive Israeli governments, there would be no settlements; and without the Merkaz Herav yeshiva, there would be no Gush Emunim. This institution, then, was the cradle of the settlement enterprise and its driving force.”

The attack has generated a debate among Palestinians and Israelis on whether the Hamas and its affiliates have now acquired the power of military “deterrence” vis-a-vis Israel.

Those espousing the view that a doctrinal shift in Israel favouring military restraint towards the Palestinians is imminent, point to a variety of military and psychological experiences that the Israeli armed forces and the political establishment have undergone in recent weeks.

Despite the asymmetry in military capability, Israeli troops encountered credible resistance during their five-day incursion into northern Gaza that ended on March 3. More important, the Palestinians kept up the tempo of firing rockets on the Israeli mainland during this period. In fact, the rocket attacks acquired a new dimension during the incursion. Not only could Hamas fighters successfully target Ashkelon, a vital Israeli industrial hub on the Mediterranean coast, they could do so using the long-range Grad-type rockets. One of them targeted an apartment block and it went through the roof of the building in Ashkelon.

On March 10, sections of the Israeli media reported that the military had been instructed to exercise restraint in Gaza, provided the Palestinians refrained from firing rockets.

This prompted Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to say that the group had acquired sufficient capability to deter Israel from using unbridled force. “We see the change in the Israeli position — the halt to attacks on Gaza — as an admission of failure. It reinforces the theory of balance of deterrence that the resistance has established,” he said.

Israeli law-maker and senior politician Yuval Steinitz of the Likud Party also arrived at a similar conclusion. Speaking to Israel’s Army Radio on March 10, he acknowledged that Hamas had “successfully created deterrence against Israel.” While a durable ceasefire with Hamas makes sound military logic, the Israeli government is likely to face enormous domestic pressure for a full-scale invasion of Gaza. The attack on Merkaz Herav has generated a huge wave of right-wing anger against the government.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli government has undermined the shaky ceasefire which was taking root with Egyptian mediation by killing in Bethlehem four prominent fighters of Islamic Jihad, a Gaza-based ally of the Hamas. The assassinations prompted another round of rocket attacks from Gaza, breaking the nascent calm.

As the Israeli government scrambles to secure its citizens against rocket attacks, its options are limited. An all-out attack to unseat Hamas in Gaza is now too risky an option, and is likely to backfire. Israel can ill-afford to get bogged down in Gaza at a time when Hamas has powerful allies in the Lebanese Hizbollah and further away in Syria and Iran.

Consequently, after going ahead with an initial burst of high-intensity violence to placate right-wing public opinion at home, Israel is likely to recalibrate its responses towards Hamas, in line with the group’s growing military strength. Under the circumstances, Israel and Hamas may soon slide into a phase of low-intensity conflict, with periods of relative calm interspersed with brief explosions of violence.

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