From Haaretz (14.11.12)
Ahmed Jabari was a subcontractor, in charge of maintaining Israel's
security in Gaza. This title will no doubt sound absurd to anyone who in
the past several hours has heard Jabari described as "an
arch-terrorist," "the terror chief of staff" or "our Bin Laden."
But that was the reality for the past five and a half years. Israel
demanded of Hamas that it observe the truce in the south and enforce it
on the multiplicity of armed organizations in the Gaza Strip. The man
responsible for carrying out this policy was Ahmed Jabari.
In return for enforcing the quiet, which was never perfect, Israel
funded the Hamas regime through the flow of shekels in armored trucks to
banks in Gaza, and continued to supply infrastructure and medical
services to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Jabari was also Israel's
partner in the negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit; it was he
who ensured the captive soldier's welfare and safety, and it was he who
saw to Shalit's return home last fall.
Now Israel is saying that its subcontractor did not do his part and did
not maintain the promised quiet on the southern border. The repeated
complaint against him was that Hamas did not succeed in controlling the
other organizations, even though it is not interested in escalation.
After Jabari was warned openly (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff reported
here at the beginning of this week that the assassination of top Hamas
people would be renewed), he was executed on Wednesday in a public
assassination action, for which Israel hastened to take responsibility.
The message was simple and clear: You failed - you're dead. Or, as
Defense Minister Ehud Barak likes to say, "In the Middle East there is
no second chance for the weak."
The assassination of Jabari will go down in history as another showy
military action initiated by an outgoing government on the eve of an
election.
This is what researcher Prof. Yagil Levy has called "fanning the
conflict as an intra-state control strategy:" The external conflict
helps a government strengthen its standing domestically because the
public unites behind the army, and social and economic problems are
edged off the national agenda.
This recipe is familiar from 1955, when David Ben-Gurion returned from
his exile in Sde Boker and led the Israel Defense Forces to a
retaliatory action in Gaza, and his party, Mapai, to victory in the
election. (Barak recalled this period with nostalgia, when he spoke last
week at a memorial for Moshe Dayan). Ever since, whenever the ruling
party feels threatened at the ballot box, it puts its finger on the
trigger. The examples are common knowledge: the launch of the Shavit 2
missile in the summer of 1961, in the midst of the Lavon affair; the
bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981; Operation Grapes of Wrath in
Lebanon in 1996, and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza on the eve of the 2009
election. In the two latter cases, the military action turned into a
defeat in the election.
There is a disagreement among historians as to whether it is necessary
to add the Yom Kippur War to the list. In that conflict, which broke out
on the eve of the 1973 election, the Arabs fired first, but their
decision to go to war was taken in the context of the increasingly
extreme position of Prime Minister Golda Meir's government which had
refused Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's peace offer and declared an
expansion of Israeli settlements in Sinai.
This, for example, is the opinion of researchers Prof. Motti Golani and Shoshana Ishoni-Barri.
The current operation, Pillar of Defense, belongs in the same category.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is interested in neutralizing every
possible rival, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak is fighting for enough
votes to return to the Knesset. A war against Hamas will wipe out the
electoral aspirations of the ditherer, Ehud Olmert, whose disciples
expected him to announce his candidacy this evening and it will kick off
the agenda the "social and economic issue" that serves the Labor Party
headed by MK Shelly Yacimovich.
When the cannons roar, we see only Netanyahu and Barak on the screen, and all the other politicians have to applaud them.
The political outcome of the operation will become clear on January 22.
The strategic ramifications are more complex: Israel will have to find a
new subcontractor to replace Ahmed Jabari as its border guard in the
south, and it will also have to ensure that its action in Gaza does not
cause the collapse of its peace treaty with Egypt under the leadership
of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Hamas movement's patron.
These are not easy challenges and the results of the operation will be judged by the extent to which they are met.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-killed-its-subcontractor-in-gaza.premium-1.477886
