Hamas Has Failed to Rally Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to Its Cause

To the surprise and consternation of many Israelis, the current war with Hamas has been accompanied by the rioting of Arab citizens. On Tuesday, just as the riots had started to wane, both Hamas and its rival Fatah called for an Arab “day of rage” and general strike. Oded Granot comments:

For the past nine days, terrorist organizations in Gaza have made enormous efforts to ignite Judea and Samaria and to incite rebellion among Israel’s Arab citizens. The desire has been to achieve what thousands of missiles fired from Gaza have failed to: create a sense of insecurity and anarchy among Israeli citizens, inflict a large number of casualties on Israeli security forces, and prove that Hamas is the flagbearer for the “struggle to liberate the homeland.”

Only a handful of Palestinians, [however], left their homes to clash with Israeli security forces, and even what initially seemed like a “civil war” between Arabs and Jews in the mixed cities quickly emerged as unbridled rioting by gangs of Arab youths, extremists, hotheads, and those incited by the Islamic Movement in Israel—some with the criminal intent of harming Jews and lynching them. . . . The situation in Judea and Samaria, meanwhile, has remained under control. The Palestinian public, for the most part, didn’t take to the streets to demonstrate against Israel. The majority of Arab Israelis didn’t join the firebrands in [the cities of] Lod or Wadi Ara.

According to initial figures, however, many Arab citizens appear to have ignored . . . calls and showed up for work regardless. Jewish-Arab relations sustained a severe blow over the past few days, but co-existence did not collapse and civil war did not erupt.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Hamas, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF