Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the world body at the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 23, 2011. (Photo: Damon Winter / The New York Times) Bibi Netanyahu returned a few weeks ago from his annual pilgrimage to Washington DC, where he met with the president and thrilled an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) crowd with his usual baleful predictions of Jewish catastrophe at the hands of a nuclear Iran. Though the hysteria of the prime minister's portrayal of the Iranian threat led anyone listening to believe that he would attack Iran sometime down the road, it wasn't clear to me whether he would wait, as Obama sought to do, for sanctions to debilitate Iran's economy, or go it alone and strike sooner.Events after Bibi's return to Israel clarified this. Within days, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had assassinated Zuhir al-Qaisi, the leader of the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), violating a ceasefire that had been in place since the end of Operation Cast Lead in 2010. As in the past, Israel took action knowing what the Palestinian response would be: a rocket barrage on southern Israel. This is precisely what happened. Two hundred rockets fell on Israel in a matter of days. The IDF retaliated, and 26 Gazans were killed, six of them civilians and among those, two children.
Israel justified the assassination, claiming that, just as the PRC had inspired the Eilat terror attack of last summer - in which eight Israeli civilians and three Egyptian police officers were killed - the PRC leader this time was supposedly planning a similar assault. The only problem with this narrative is that Israeli journalist Alex Fishman and Ben Gurion University political blogger Idan Landau proved that the PRC was not involved in the Eilat attack. Rather, Sinai, Egypt-based, al-Qaeda-inspired Islamists perpetrated that assault, completely independent of any Gazan involvement. Egypt even subsequently arrested the ringleader of the Eilat attack, and he was from Sinai - as Fishman and I had predicted he would be.
The Israeli justification for the recent killing of al-Qaisi - the claim that he was planning a new terror operation - quickly fell by the wayside. The Israeli government needed the excuse for just a day or two following the killing. Once events shifted to the Gaza missile fire, Israel no longer needed its justification, and after that, you never heard about it again.
What did Israel gain by attacking Gaza? Israeli anti-Occupation activist Professor Neve Gordon wrote in Al Jazeera English that Israel deliberately provoked the Gaza response because it wished to test its new Iron Dome anti-missile system. In the fighting, reports of the weapon's success varied, but Israelis generally viewed it as quite effective. Given the terror that the rocket barrages previously caused inside Israel, it can't be underestimated how much relief this caused the Israeli public. Knowing it was protected by its own government from these dangers brought feelings of confidence and gratitude from the would-be victims. READ MORE
