Creative name, but same old strategy

The IDF is calling it “Guardians of the Wall.”

In the 24 hours since the first seven rockets were fired at Jerusalem, at least 800 have been shot from the Gaza Strip, with 480 crossing into Israeli territory.

Ashdod, Ashkelon, Sderot, Nir Am, Nir Oz, Be’eri, Karmiya, Netiv Ha’asara, Be’er Ganim, Beit Shikma... the list of municipalities under attack is long.

Rockets were fired throughout the day on Tuesday, one every three minutes, the IDF said. Thousands of Israelis are in bomb shelters. Schools have been closed, and businesses are only allowed to remain open if they have easily accessible shelters.

“Deterrence isn’t built in a day, and it doesn’t disappear in a day,” said former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. But in terms of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, it sure seems like it.

Walking around Sderot in the afternoon, there were interceptions of rockets every few minutes. But the few residents who ventured outside did not even raise their heads to see where the boom had come from.

• street her mother and her dog sat in her brown Mitsubishi, while Cohen worked the phones and tried to figure out where they could go.

“I don’t know what we are going to do,” said Cohen, tall with mid-length gray hair, still shocked at how they had narrowly missed disaster.

“I looked around in the house, nothing broke except the windows,” she said. “It’s pretty miraculous.”

She noted that her glass table on the porch survived. “Even my bonsai didn’t break.”

The barrage of rockets was so intense on Tuesday afternoon that police asked city residents not to leave their homes. Those that did found themselves falling to the ground every few minutes as sirens rang out, or running for a nearby shelter.

Although Palestinians in Gaza have launched rockets at Ashkelon for more than a decade, they are now more powerful, and the pace more frequent than anyone can remember.

A short distance away, Tzuri Gerbi was cleaning out the freezer that stood outside his small market.

“There was a siren,” said Gerbi. “We went to the safe room and then there was a strong explosion,” and the building seemed to shake. Now, he said, “I am trying to put things in order so we can open as usual.”

Throughout the day, close to 100 wounded, many suffering from shock, streamed into nearby Barzilai Medical Center.

Among them was Yosef Earkei, who was using a sharp knife when the siren startled him. The knife slipped and cut his hand, sending him to the emergency room, where he fainted upon arrival. Hospital staff initially imagined that he was a serious trauma victim and cut his clothing.

Tzuri Teshuva was on his way to work in Ashkelon when he heard a siren and hid by his car, only to discover that his sister and her husband had been injured in an attack on their home. The couple, he said, was not able to make it to the shelter.

He was not waiting alone. His sister’s husband is one of seven brothers, most of whom arrived at the hospital and now waited outside.

Sivan Naim was with her one-year-old, but fell down a flight of stairs heading to a shelter. Now she lay in a hospital bed, having hurt her legs.

Hagai Ezra hurt his hand as he headed to a safe room with his two daughters.

“I was more scared than they were,” Ezra said.

When asked how long he felt the city could survive such a rocket barrage, he responded, “it’s hard,” adding that “it has never been this bad.”

Another Ashkelon resident said that the situation “had already crossed the line” into intolerable. •

LOD

it’s very hard knowing that,” Harris said. “They didn’t stand up and make it stop.”

She said that until now inter-communal relations between Jews and Arabs had been positive, although not “a fairytale,” and that she herself works together with Arab residents of Lod in the community center and that the two groups have gotten along well.

Harris expressed strong criticism toward the police for failing to turn up sooner, and said she was worried for her safety and the safety of all the students.

She said the events had made her feel insecure in the city, and that even though she did not want to think about moving out because of the strong community that has been built, life in Lod would be different as a result of the riot.

“We won’t be able to continue living like this, something will have to change,” said Harris.

Tzur Raanan, a resident of Ramat Eshkol of six years and father of three small children, said that “the majority of the time” there have been good neighborly relations between Arabs and Jews, noting that in his apartment building there were four Arab families and four Jewish families.

“We are still shocked by what happened here last night, but it seems this tension has always been with us under the surface,” said Raanan.

Like Harris, he was very critical of the slow police response to the violence, and that together with other incidents, it has given rise to the feeling that the rule of law is not imposed in Lod.

Asked if he believed the riot by Arab residents reflected sentiment among the broader Arab population of Lod, Raanan said he did, to a certain extent.

“Maybe it would be easier for us to say it was just a small minority, just youths, but I saw with my own eyes out of my window lots of people coming out of buildings in the blocks around me, covering their faces so they couldn’t be identified, and joining the people burning stuff,” said Raanan. “And I saw in videos people of all ages, 40-year-olds and older, people who burnt the Israeli flag, women who encouraged them. I cannot say that all Arabs in this city were active participants, but it is definitely a general sentiment among the Arab population. It is not lone individuals”

Raanan said he was not especially disappointed in the Arab community because “I would never trust with a whole heart Arab neighbors, even when we have good neighborly relations with them. I am not shocked by what happened yesterday; I knew that things like this could happen.”

Around the corner just a few hundred meters away, one Arab resident saw things very differently.

Mohammad, a lifelong Lod resident in his late 20s or early 30s who not would give his last name, was visibly angry over the situation in the city.

He insisted that there had been no need for Hasuna to be shot and killed, and said the protest was peaceful, although he admitted he had not been present.

Mohammad was also furious at the police response to the disturbances, saying that it had been too aggressive.

“There was no need to come in firing rubber bullets and stun grenades, and with all these troops,” he protested. “It made us feel that we don’t belong here, and that this is not our home.”

Mohammed said relations between the Arab and Jewish communities had been badly damaged by Monday’s events and the death of Hasuna, but expressed hope for better times.

Despite the pall hanging over the city and the ongoing inter-communal tensions, Mohammed together with Harris and Raanan all said they greeted their respective Jewish and Arab neighbors with their usual smile and a “good morning” after Monday night’s events.

One spark of hope in a city still smoldering. •

It was eerie. Driving in the South on Tuesday, the roads were almost empty.

Many of them were blocked by the Military Police out of concern that Hamas and PIJ might target civilian vehicles with anti-tank guided missiles like PIJ did on Monday.

But those who could get past the blockades were greeted only with military vehicles carrying troops or munitions.

On one road close to Sderot, I drove past a convoy of 15 trucks carrying artillery shells for the batteries deployed in the area.

In the various nature reserves that dot the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, dozens of soldiers could be seen.

Many of them – from Maglan, Givati and other units – were dispatched to the South as reinforcements for the Gaza Division.

Speaking to troops, one got the feeling that another war is about to start.

“We have to hit them hard,” one officer told me. “We can’t be suckers anymore.”

“We don’t want to enter Gaza,” said a Givati soldier blocking a road toward Be’eri. “But if we have to, we will.”

Commenting on the violence that rocked Lod and Ramle, a soldier from the Nahal Brigade said the clashes on the Temple Mount were the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“People are fed up,” she said. “The coronavirus pandemic is over, and tempers are flaring. The Gazans are no different. They are fed up, and they need to vent [their anger]. Unfortunately, we are the address of their anger.”

None of the soldiers I spoke to ever took part in a military operation, and none have entered Gaza.

The officer I spoke to enlisted just a few months after Operation Protective Edge ended, while the Givati soldiers enlisted in the IDF only six months ago.

Operation Protective Edge in 2014 was the last time Israel entered Gaza. Neither side won. Should Israel decide to conduct a ground operation, it’s highly likely nothing will change.

Both sides will lose combatants. Civilians will die. Hamas will remain. So will PIJ.

What has changed are their capabilities. Israel has better missile defenses and intelligence. Hamas has more advanced rockets.

So what is Israel to do? Send those same Nahal and Givati soldiers into Gaza? What would that achieve?

The IDF has to do something different. It has to be more creative – and not just with the names it gives military operations.~

NEED

try to weaken and undermine the Jewish state.

Because this week’s convenient excuse is Jerusalem, Hamas opened up the round of violence with a salvo of rockets directed at Israel’s capital, something not seen since Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. This was meant to be a symbolic gesture by Hamas, to show off that it is the so-called protector and defender of the Palestinians in Jerusalem.

Once it got that out of the way, the fighting – as seen on Tuesday – was mostly isolated in the South in places like Ashkelon, which Hamas and Islamic Jihad feel they can strike more freely as opposed to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, attacks against which constitute a sharp escalation.

These are only convenient excuses because Hamas does not really need a reason to attack Israel. That is its raison d’etre, and has been since it was founded in the late 1980s. To pin this round of violence on something specific is to lose sight of the big picture: Hamas is bent on trying to hurt, weaken and destroy Israel. It can name a specific excuse why it fires a rocket today as opposed to yesterday, but that is merely a tactical issue. The strategy remains one and the same. And until that changes, these rounds of violence will continue.

Is it possible that had the situation in Jerusalem been handled differently, Hamas would have had a harder time instigating a conflict, since it would not have had an easy excuse? Possibly. But it does not matter.

Hamas would have found something else, some other reason to start shooting, especially when considering its bigger objective right now: showing the Palestinian people that it is still alive and kicking, even though the Palestinian Authority elections slated for this month have been canceled.

With this as the basis for what it is happening, the possibility of a decisive victory will continue to evade Israel.

In the end, Israel will cause Hamas and PIJ extensive damage, will kill a number of their operatives – as it has already done – and destroy some of their infrastructure.

But in the battle over the narrative, Hamas will push the story of Jerusalem. Israels need to win that war too. Desperately.