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Israel and Hamas Face Off

New violence in the Middle East

In response to the recent kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the violence that followed, we offer comments from Rafael Reuveny, an associate professor at SPEA.

Expert perspective: “The writing was on the wall. The coming of Hamas to power is the decisive force for what we're observing now. When they came to power in January, they were admittedly ignored by Israel and the United States. It was an American idea to have elections in the occupied territories. It backfired. It caught people by surprise.

“Before the elections, Hamas declared and agreed to a long-term cease fire. Some people said it was promising. There were some attacks but they were by renegade and smaller organizations. But in recent months, people became more and more desperate economically and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

"The Gaza Strip is completely surrounded and it's hard to get from Gaza to Israel. So the renegade organizations developed a rocket that is pretty inaccurate homemade equipment and they started to fire that and Israel reacted with, in retrospect, too strong of an arm. They developed a focused killing where they would send a helicopter with missiles or manless crafts that would fly low over Gaza. There were mistakes with these operations. Within a period of a few weeks, many Palestinians civilians died. The tension went up and up and those renegade organizations were able to attract more and more people.

"Two months ago, they decided that they had to react in some manner. They returned to a method of digging tunnels and the tunnel would go under an Israeli army post and they would come from underneath. It would take them several weeks—this most recent tunnel was very long. In one attack, they put explosives under the Israeli army case. In this case, they came out at night and kidnapped the soldier.

"There is one very important idea in all this. It's not just that it looks like Israel controls the situation and can decide on the moves. Israel is really not a fully independent country. It receives more than $3 billion every year from the United States and all of its weaponry is supplied by the United States. When he came to power in 2001, President Bush didn't want to be involved in the conflict in the same way that Clinton was. Perhaps Bush felt that Clinton was too involved and took it personally and it led nowhere. But the events escalated so quickly Bush began to get more and more involved. In 2003, Bush said he agreed there should be a Palestinian state, which led to the road map for peace. It was a very structured plan that said there will be a Palestinian state and Israel, for the first time, agreed to the provisions. But the plan set conditions and one of the conditions was that the violence must stop. But the violence is not controlled by the politicians and the road map never took off. It just stayed on the ground. Here we are now. The Iraq war, and Iran and North Korea and other things that are more important to the president and he is completely disengaged. It's really not on the priority list.

"The peace process is like riding a bike. It needs to keep moving or it's going to fall. With this particular bike, the pedals aren't good so the US has to push from the back. Once the US stops, the bike stops and that's it. The US is so important for Israel and has a lot of influence. The US in principle could use its power to force a political solution in the region."

The SPEA Toolkit: Rafael Reuveny is an associate professor at SPEA. His research includes various political-economic aspects of international conflict with a focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic and Jewish Fundamentalism, and the relationship between international trade and political conflict. Reuveny has recently returned to IU after a ten-day trip to Israel.

Click here to read more about Rafael Reuveny.

Click here to read about the continuing Israeli conflict