Meanwhile, the Israelis are inching toward…

something:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Palestinian militants holding an Israeli soldier gave Israel less than 24 hours Monday to start releasing 1,500 Palestinian prisoners and implied that he would be killed if it did not comply, but Israel said it would not negotiate.

Cpl. Gilad Shalit’s captors are presumed to take orders from hard-line Hamas leaders based in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

“We will know how to strike those who are involved,” Peretz told a meeting of Israeli Labor Party officials.

However, the Israeli government sent mixed messages, with its military chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, not ruling out talks for a prisoner swap.

The militant groups, in a statement posted on the Web site of the ruling Hamas party’s military wing, did not expressly describe the consequences but implied the soldier could be killed.

“We give the Zionist enemy until 6:00 tomorrow morning, Tuesday, July 4, (11 p.m. EDT Monday)” the groups said in their statement, which was also faxed to news agencies.

“If the enemy does not respond to our humanitarian demands,” it said, “the enemy must bear all the consequences of the future results.”

As I noted yesterday the Israelis are in an unenviable position:  the Palestinians have made it clear that the Israelis are not confronting an army but a people.  Strictly speaking, there are no military targets in Gaza.  But rockets are flying from there to Israeli cities every day and that’s where they’re holding Israel’s kidnapped soldier.

There are points that I agree with in what Nikolas K. Gvosdev of Washington Realist wrote:

What more can Israel do? It has shut down the infrastructure, arrested members of the Palestinian government; short of a full scale reoccupation and then wholescale deportation of the population.

The Israeli strategy is to try and demonstrate to ordinary Palestinians that the Hamas approach is untenable. I think that strategy is bound to fail. The middle class that helped to curtail violence in Northern Ireland has been utterly decimated in the Palestinian areas. Israel might have been able to do business with Palestinian nationalists, but the irony is that the religious movements it tacitly supported in the 1980s to undermine both the “mayors” of the West Bank towns and Arafat are prepared to accept suffering as a religious duty–much as many of the Russian peasants did (and Tsar Alexander proclaimed the fight against Napoleon to be a holy war).

Hamas also has the long view. The Crusader kingdoms lasted under two centuries before being completely engulfed. I’m sure that most of their leadership is betting that Israel will suffer the same fate as Outremer.

How to demonstrate to ordinary Palestinians the staying power of Israel–and to make it economically worth their while to accept–I don’t know how this can be down, at least right now.

While the analogy with the Crusader kingdoms may be what the Palestinians have in mind, I think it’s misplaced.  Did any of the kings of Jerusalem think of themselves as natives?  Or did they think of themselves as Franks?

The Israelis, on the other hand, rightly or wrongly view themselves as the true native population of Israel.  And many of them simply have nowhere else to go.

4 comments… add one
  • I foolishly hoped that the death of Arafat would open things up, and it certainly has. While I support Israel’s right to be Israel and a Palestinian homeland, I am becoming even more pessimistic about the situation.

    There has been very few caualties so far, but I don’t see how Israel can fight without putting itself at great risk or committing a genocide.

  • An interesting point–did any of the kings of Jersualem see themselves as “native” to the Holy Land? Not immediately, no, but I think there was a ongoing process of “going native”, aided by intermarriages between Crusaders and locals. But it is true, the schism between eastern and western Christians always proved to be a major barrier–something also seen in Cyprus, where generations of Latin nobles never quite blended with their Greek population.

  • Hi Eye!
    In the first place, to the Crusaders Palestine was an objective to liberate from the atrocities the Muslims were committing against pilgrims to the Holy Land and a counterblow to Islamic aggression against Europe..and there’s no doubt that after a century or so they considered it home.

    However to the Jews, Israel was and is their homeland, with a continuous Jewish presence even after the diaspora in 70 CE.

    As for what Israel can do…they will NEVER have peace next door to the so-called `Palestinians’ who wish to establish a second Arab Palestinian state and ethnically cleanse every Jew out of what is now Israel.

    The Israelis tacitly recognized that fact by electing Kadima, who’s platform embraced the fable that Israel could somehow wall of it’s genocidal enemies…something that has never worked throughout history. The Israelis are now realizing that Olmert’s `disengagement’ idea is likewise a fantasy, as rockets fly into Israel daily and armed attackers tunnel under those walls.

    A second Arab Palestinian state is a not feasible economically or geographically unless it is closely allied and at peace with Israel. The Palestinians have seen to it that this will NEVER happen.

    There are really only two solutions: one is for the Arab nations at long last to recognize and take responsibility for the refugee problem that they caused by attacking Israel in 1948 and four times subsequently and either give these people land of their own away from Israel’s borders or integrate them witing their countries as part of a final settlement with Israel.

    I rate the chances of that as slim and none.

    If Israel wants peace on its borders, it will have to adopt the same solution King Hussein of Jordan used vis a vis the Palestinians during `Black September’ in 1970 when the Palestinians attempted to depose the Hashemite monarchy…he unleashed his army on them, killed about 10,000 Palestinians, defeated Arafat and the PLO and drove them out of his country over the border to Lebanon.

    He never had a problem with them after that.

    If Egypt and Jordan are unwilling to sit down with Israel and craft a diplomatic solution, Israel will eventually have to do the same thing, trashing Oslo and the Road Map, defeating Hamas and Fatah and destroying what has become a terrorist enclave on its borders.

  • Thanks for weighing in, Freedom Fighter. I’m glad this caught your eye. 😉

    In the first place, to the Crusaders Palestine was an objective to liberate from the atrocities the Muslims were committing against pilgrims to the Holy Land and a counterblow to Islamic aggression against Europe..and there’s no doubt that after a century or so they considered it home.

    I was referring specifically to the kings of the Crusader kingdoms. As best as I’ve been able to discern very nearly all of them were born in France and had Frankish fathers and mothers. That doesn’t suggest much naturalization to me. Their men-at-arms, perhaps, yes. But there wasn’t a great deal of democracy back then and the role of the men-at-arms in creating policy was limited.

    As you note, that’s a considerable difference from the position of the Jews in Israel.

    The best realizable solution, it seems to me, is for Jordan and Egypt to reclaim the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, along with their populations and work out some kind of modus vivendi.

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