From Taliban to Hamas, Middle East vacuums never end well – opinion
All withdrawals in this part of the world end the same, with the vacuum being filled by hostile and radical terrorist elements.
It wasn’t even really a battle. On June 10, 2007, clashes erupted between Hamas and Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip. Israel had withdrawn from the coastal enclave two years earlier, and after Hamas came to power in the January 2006 election, the two sides were constantly fighting over how to jointly rule over the Palestinian people.
At the time, an American general was stationed in Israel responsible for helping to train Fatah forces loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton, US security coordinator as he was called, explained his mission in late 2006. Iran, he said, was helping arm Hamas, and the US wanted to prevent “moderate forces” from being eliminated.
What happened over five days in the summer of 2007 cannot be blamed solely on the Americans. Fatah – the movement and security force that had received support from the West – fell apart in a matter of days. Years later, Fatah members still recall with trauma the way Hamas threw their friends off the roof or tied them up to motorcycles and dragged them through Gaza’s pothole-laden streets.
In the 14 years since, Hamas has assumed complete control of Gaza. Outside of transferring tens of millions of dollars every month to pay for some salaries, Abbas has zero influence over what happens in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is the sovereign power.
Senior Israeli defense officials recalled this week those five days in June 2007, after watching the images roll in from Afghanistan. It reminded those Israelis – many of them veterans of the Second Intifada – of what happens when you count on someone else to do your work, whether it be Fatah, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani or the Southern Lebanese Army.
It is a lesson that Israel has learned the hard way. In the mid-1990s, the IDF started handing over security control of West Bank cities to the Palestinian Authority, only to reconquer the entire area a few years later during Operation Defensive Shield. In 2000, it withdrew from Lebanon only to have soldiers abducted by Hezbollah five months later, and then war in 2006. Today, Hezbollah has 10 times the number of rockets it had just 15 years ago.
In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. At the time, government officials warned of severe consequences if even one rocket was fired at Israel. We all know how well that worked out.
It is a phenomenon that is not unique to Israel. All withdrawals in this part of the world – Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen – end the same, with the vacuum being filled by hostile and radical terrorist elements bent on undermining any work that is done to promote democratic values and freedoms.
The thought that Afghanistan would somehow end differently was ludicrous and unproven by history. Money, training and hope are not enough to change a country. That same recipe has failed too many times in too many places.
The question now is what comes next. In the next few weeks, Afghanistan will fall off the world’s agenda and people will forget the horrific images of Afghanis falling from transport aircraft whose wings and wheels they had held on to for dear life hoping they would carry them to safety.
Israel’s focus – never really on Afghanistan to begin with – will settle on Washington, where Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will visit next week as a guest of President Joe Biden. The leaders will hold talks on a range of issues, although exactly what depends on who you listen to.
If you get your news from Bennett, the visit will be about Iran. That is what the prime minister said on Wednesday night when he announced the upcoming trip. But if you read the statement put out by the White House, the topics broaden a bit. Yes, Iran was mentioned, but so were the Palestinians, who the two politicians would talk about to find ways “to advance peace, security, and prosperity.”
Bennett will need to consider what he brings to Biden as a goodwill gesture. It won’t be enough to just arrive at the White House expecting to convince the president of the problems with the Iran deal, and hope he will abandon it. It also won’t be enough to explain to the president and his staff how Abbas is corrupt, Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people, and a Palestinian state will fail – all comments Bennett has made in the past. That is not what the White House wants to hear.
In recent weeks, a number of defense officials have met with Bennett and offered him a series of civilian projects to improve the quality of Palestinian life in the West Bank and help boost the PA economy. There were ideas about digitizing crossings to ease the way workers enter Israel; to build new joint industrial zones; and even to start work on a train system that would help move products through the West Bank and beyond.
So far Bennett has mostly listened, but has not yet adopted any of the plans. Biden will want something tangible out of their meeting that is more than just listening to another Israeli leader warn of the dangers from Tehran. China – as mentioned in these pages last week – will certainly come up, but so will the Palestinians.
One idea for Bennett would be to call Abbas before he leaves Jerusalem. While some of his ministers as well as President Isaac Herzog have already spoken with the Palestinian leader, Bennett hasn’t, and would probably prefer to never have to.
That can’t last forever. A call to Abbas – which at this stage need be nothing more than just thanking the Palestinian leader for sending firetrucks to help combat the Jerusalem-area fire earlier this week – would score points in Washington. There would be nothing binding about it, but simply the opening of a line of communication.
Biden doesn’t expect much. He recognizes that Bennett’s six seats in a fragmented coalition leave him with very little political maneuverability. Biden won’t, for example, push him to freeze settlement construction the way Barack Obama pressured Benjamin Netanyahu when the former leader visited the White House for the first time in 2009.
But Biden could do to Bennett what Obama did to Netanyahu when the former president visited Israel in 2013. Netanyahu accompanied the president to the airport to bid him farewell, and Obama pulled Netanyahu into a tent and had him place a call to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom Israel was in a massive fight at the time (and still today), and apologize for the loss of life in the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident three years earlier.
Biden could, for example, put Abbas on the phone in the Oval Office and insist that the two leaders set up a meeting. What would Bennett do? Refuse to talk to the Palestinian leader in Biden’s presence? Unlikely.
The president who Bennett will meet next week will be different than the one he would have met had the meeting taken place two weeks ago, before Afghanistan fell apart and when Biden was riding high on the passing of his massive infrastructure bill.
It is true that Biden’s position in the region is now weaker, but that doesn’t mean that he will be easy to move. A distraction from Jerusalem and Ramallah might be exactly what he needs to turn attention away from Kabul. If so, Israel better be ready.
On Sunday, photos showed up on Twitter of Netanyahu, his wife, Sara, and their son Yair in San Francisco International Airport, reportedly on their way to a vacation in Hawaii. One photo showed Netanyahu sitting on top of a suitcase resting on a Smart Carte trolly, the kind you rent for $5 in the airport terminal.
Netanyahu did not look happy being photographed. He looked tired and drained, which is understandable considering that he is almost 72 and had just come off a transatlantic flight. Nevertheless, it was a very different image than what the Israeli public had gotten used to seeing from Netanyahu’s travels overseas. There were no red carpets, no black limousines, and no chartered aircraft. Netanyahu looked like a regular citizen crossing through an airport terminal, waiting in line while sitting on his Smart Carte.
It didn’t take long for the media to pounce. Some hailed the image as an illustration of the resilience of Israeli democracy. One day you are up as a leader and one day you are down. One day you are met by honor guards and the next day you are met by impatient check-in counter attendants.
Others believed the photo was staged, and that Netanyahu wanted the picture to get out so people would see that he is a regular citizen, and maybe feel sorry for him. And still others attacked the opposition leader for traveling overseas at a time when corona is surging in Israel and Bennett has asked people to refrain from flying.
My view is a little different, and can pretty much be summed up as: leave the guy alone. Netanyahu – whether you like him or not – gave 12 years of his life serving this country. He was democratically elected, he worked hard, and he sacrificed on behalf of Israel.
I have my criticisms, and have shared them widely in these pages. But I also believe that he deserves a vacation. He just stepped down after a most difficult 12 years. Let him have a break. He earned it.