There’s no escaping Gaza

Try as it might, Israel cannot ignore the Gaza Strip. The lessons and implications of last summer’s Operation Protective Edge remain unheeded, but the unavoidable fact is that the fighting will erupt again and again.

Ha’aretz

The Gaza Strip is often described as “the world’s largest open-air prison.” There is a lot of truth in that description, but at least in one aspect, the Strip is open. Few of the residents, or inmates, can leave, but they are free to communicate with the outside world. At any moment, phone conversations on landlines and cellular connections and millions of bytes of data in downloads, uploads, Facebook updates, tweets and emails, digital images, Skype calls, Snapchat messages and videos posted to YouTube are transmitted on the underground cables that pass beneath the Nahal Oz crossing and into the Israeli network. This outpouring of human communication from Gaza’s 1.8 million inhabitants is naturally a rich mine for Israel’s intelligence services.

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But beyond the listeners and analysts who are busy translating and collating, few Israelis have any interest in life within the Gaza Strip. The data are routed through Israeli servers and pumped out to the world through the cables laid on the Mediterranean seabed. Gaza’s daily story, its sadness and isolation, its tiny triumphs of everyday life, the clamor and appeals, all pass Israelis by, shut out from their consciousness. Gaza has become a black hole for Israeli civilians. The Israel Defense Forces maintains its billion-shekel “smart” fence around the Strip and deploys thousands of sensors, infrared cameras, radar stations and drones to deter and detect any incoming threats. For the rest of us, Gaza grabs our attention only when rockets are launched and tunnels open up on our side of the border. When that happens too often, on average every couple of years, another massive campaign is launched with hundreds of casualties, mainly on the Palestinian side. And as soon as the campaign is over, Gazans are left with the ruins and Israelis push them out of their minds again. A year later, a United Nations report appears with allegations of war crimes and Israelis simply don’t understand what the world wants from them.

Even for Israelis who live close to its borders, the Gaza Strip is present only as that haze on the horizon over which a white surveillance blimp floats serenely. Ten years ago this summer, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called time on Israel’s presence in the Strip, uprooting 8,000 settlers and leaving Gaza to its own devices and an inevitable Hamas coup. The huge popularity of Sharon’s unilateral disengagement, leaving no framework of cooperation or coordination behind, disclosed just how much Israelis simply wanted to forget Gaza. No one, not even politicians on the left, is inclined to discuss the relationship with this neighborhood on the outskirts of Sderot and Ashkelon. It is once again a lurking menace, as in the pre-1967 period, when Israelis feared incursions from the camps of displaced refugees biding their time until they could descend on the Jews.

Operation Protective Edge, launched by Israel on July 8, 2014, was the longest war (though we are not allowed in Israel to call it a war) in Israel’s history since the 1947-49 War of Independence. For 50 days, the rockets flew to Tel Aviv and the towns and villages of the south daily, reaching targets as far away as Jerusalem and communities south of Haifa, even shutting down Ben-Gurion International Airport for 24 hours. When the rockets threatened to hit populated areas, they were swatted away by the Iron Dome missile-defense system. And the Gaza Strip was pounded by the hour, first by the Israel Air Force and then in a ground offensive that focused mainly on capturing the area near the border and destroying Hamas’ tunnels. But nearly as soon as a cease-fire was finally brokered, Israelis once again just tried to forget a summer spent scurrying to the shelters; Gaza is too close, too unsolvable and too unimaginable to be thought about.

Like the place and its people, last summer’s war has already been consigned to the black hole of collective amnesia. Until Gaza reaches out again to shake us from our stupor and the rockets and missiles are already flying again, still in “tolerable” numbers; until one of the tunnels being dug again opens up on the Israeli side and Hamas fighters come running out, we can ignore it.

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Not that things aren’t changing in Gaza – they are, and for the worse. Hamas, its political and military wings torn over issues such as a new alliance with Iran, struggles to retain control as more-radical groups pledge allegiance to Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL. Gaza is now hostage to its other neighbor, Egypt, which is pursuing a scorched-earth campaign against Hamas’ Muslim Brotherhood patrons and fighting more Islamic State supporters just across the border in Sinai.

The world doesn’t care about the Gaza Strip. No foreign government is currently pressuring Israel over it. Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, has relinquished all responsibility for the territory, its unity government with Hamas a farce, and it has blocked much of the international funding earmarked for rebuilding the neighborhoods destroyed in Operation Protective Edge. In the last stuttering round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Gaza’s status didn’t even feature. Other nations that postured as its saviors are otherwise occupied, Qatar with trying to save its 2022 FIFA World Cup and Turkey with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attempt to reincarnate the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps one day the International Criminal Court will get around to acting on a UN report and initiate proceedings against Israel and Hamas, but that’s years down the road, if ever.

But Israel cannot escape Gaza. The Strip is an integral part of this sliver of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, its people part of the Palestinian nation living among and alongside us. The lessons and implications of what happened last summer remain unheeded, but the unavoidable fact is that the black hole will erupt again and again.