The Israeli Threat to Gaza

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Once again, Israel is threatening the Gaza Strip with an invasion or with harsh military strikes, as though it had succeeded in achieving its objectives in its previous wars. Its military commanders stand issuing threats with arrogance and conceit, as if Gaza were nothing but a fragile egg whose pieces could be scattered with a single grip of the hand. Such threats may overwhelm some minds, but practical logic says otherwise:

Israel failed completely in its 2008/2009 war on Gaza (the War of al-Furqan, or the Winter War). There are those who try to convince Israel that it achieved some of its objectives — particularly some among us Palestinians — but the days that followed proved the opposite. Some claimed that Israel had managed to silence Gaza’s rockets, and that the resistance factions were observing calm because they had been defeated. Naturally, some Palestinians despise victory or steadfastness, simply in order to justify their own collapsed strength.

Israel fought in 2008 with the aim of changing the political situation in Gaza, but it met with solid resistance, which forced it to change its objectives mid-war, until it settled for the goal of suppressing rocket fire. Of course, the halt in Palestinian rocket fire after the war was not because the resistance had capitulated, but in order to reorganize its ranks and prepare, through manufacturing and smuggling rockets, to rebuild the stockpile that had been largely depleted during the war.

Israel tried its luck again in 2012, and failed to achieve any objective at all; indeed, it discovered that the resistance’s rockets had become longer-ranged and more accurate. This is why that war did not drag on, and the Israeli forces were forced to accept yet another military humiliation.

[…] there are no new military or security facts on the ground pushing it to test its position against Gaza again, at least for the time being. There may in fact be new Palestinian military and security facts in Gaza that make the Israelis’ task more difficult than before. Gaza never sleeps — not Hamas, not Islamic Jihad, not the Popular Resistance Committees, nor any of the resistance movements. Gaza still keeps its nights awake, preparing, gathering its strength, and raising its level of vigilance, caution, and defensive readiness.

The Israelis may be counting on the disputes that have recently arisen between Hamas and Iran, or on Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran being preoccupied elsewhere. But my own analysis of the matter points to the opposite of this bet. Iran is still cooperating with the Palestinian resistance, and so is Hezbollah. The Palestinian resistance is gaining ever more momentum and strength, and it is capable of holding out and absorbing air, land, and sea strikes for a period exceeding a year. So does Israel have the stamina to sustain its aggression over the course of a year, whether at the level of the global situation or its own internal situation? No.

There are those who say that Israel is capable of destroying the entire Gaza Strip. True. Israel possesses enormous destructive power. But is it capable of actually doing so? No — it is neither capable of it nor does it dare, because the balance of power is no longer what it once was.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “التهديد الإسرائيلي ل غزة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.