The timing of Israel's assault on Gaza is closely linked with a desire to keep Binyamin Netanyahu away from the levers of power, writes Tony Kinsella
THE JEWISH people should be emerging from their long night of excruciating and unequalled suffering into a new dawn on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean but Israel now stares bloodily backwards, stumbling from war to war, prioritising instant safety over lasting security.
Internal and external personalities, politics and even sibling rivalry explain the timing of Israel's bloody, futile, and most likely counter-productive, Operation Cast Lead attack on Gaza.
The Israeli desire to exploit the dog days of the Bush administration while avoiding raining on Obama's inaugural parade offers one element of explanation, but a larger one is to be found in Israel's internal politics, its forthcoming election, and tragically, in the story of one family.
A story with elements from the central casting of modern Israel - the Eastern European grandparents, the international academic father, the three brothers who grew up between Israel and the US, excelling in their studies, and wearing their country's uniforms with pride.
Yoni, the eldest, was a New Yorker, born in 1946 and thus two years older than Israel itself. An Israeli paratrooper officer who served with distinction in the 1967 six-day war, he later became deputy commander of the Sayeret Matkal special forces where his two younger brothers also served. Yoni (Yonathan) Netanyahu was mortally wounded while leading the daring hostage rescue at Uganda's Entebbe airport on the night of July 3rd, 1976. Some explain his younger brother Binyamin's hawkish positions in terms of a desire to surpass Yoni's acclaim.
Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu is the leader of the right wing Likud party and darling of the soon-to be-out-of-office neoconservatives in Washington. He was, before the Israeli attack on Gaza, the favourite to become Israel's next prime minister.
Most governments, including Israel's, view the prospect of Bibi returning to power with a dark mixture of trepidation and desperation. The timing of Israel's muscular December 27th assault on Gaza had as much to do with enhancing the electoral prospects of the outgoing government as with countering Hamas rocket attacks.
If the polls are to be believed the coalition partners - the centrist Kadima party under foreign minister Tzipi Livni and the Labour party headed by Israel's most decorated general Ehud Barak - are progressing. Labour may double its seats in the Knesset, while Kadima could emerge as the largest party. Bibi's star fades as Palestinians die in Gaza.
Since it is being "tough" in Gaza, Israeli electors may support the more "moderate" government. This could then negotiate a settlement with more "reasonable" Palestinian representatives. Winning, moderate and reasonable are, particularly in the Middle East, utterly subjective terms - hence the obligatory inverted commas which invalidate them as reference points even for the most cynical practitioners of realpolitik.
The realpolitik argument that some dead Palestinians are a price worth paying for keeping Bibi out of power begs, as such arguments always do, the question of how many? One hundred, 500, a 1,000, 10,000? Are the terrified toddlers slaughtered in the al-Fakhora UN school a reasonable price to pay?
Any argument, however distasteful, about a reasonable price requires a definition of what is on offer for that price. The sophisticated state of Israel offers no answer to that essential question, just as it is incapable of setting any goals, never mind credible ones, for its massive operations in Gaza.
Everybody knows, and most of the protagonists accept, the broad outlines of the inevitable two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. The sizes of the two states, if not their exact borders, will have to closely resemble those of the status quo before the 1967 war.
Israel's leaders have come to accept this, and Israelis to understand it, as they recognise the demographic timebomb that transformed Ariel Sharon from a relentless hawk into a dynamic dove.
Israel has a population of around five million, one million of whom are Arabs. Gaza and the West Bank contain about another five million Palestinian Arabs, 1.5 million of whom are penned into Gaza, an area less than half the size of Co Louth.
Israel can be a democratic Jewish state, or she can be an occupying power, but she cannot be both. Ariel Sharon's preference for
a Jewish democracy led him to break with the diehards of Likud.
Israel now writhes in a macabre dance to avoid having to confront this existential choice.
When confronted with political demands it refuses to countenance, it seeks to change, or to intimidate, its partners. Israeli occupation authorities acted as midwife to Hamas in 1987 in order to undermine Yasser Arafat.
In January 2006 Hamas won an outright majority in the Palestinian elections. President Bush welcomed the results "which
. . . should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories".
That "old guard" have become the good guys, and Hamas are no longer administrators, elected representatives, or aid workers - they are now exclusively referred to as terrorists with whom negotiations are impossible.
Israeli forces prevented medical assistance reaching wounded children left to starve beside their mothers' decomposing bodies - actions that provoked the International Committee of the Red Cross into a rare public accusation that "the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law".
Israel's own young men and women are being placed in harm's way without being given an accomplishable mission.
When Yoni Netanyahu led his troops into that fateful Ugandan night, they had a clear military mission, rescuing hostages. Once they had carried it out, his commandos knew they would never have to return to Entebbe.
The alleyways of Gaza offer Israeli troops no such clarity today.
If he was half the officer he is said to have been, Lieut Col Jonathan Netanyahu could not have endorsed such aimless, pointless and thus horrific, even barbarous, carnage.