World View: Israel Backs Down from Full-Scale Attack on Gaza After Family Escapes Rocket

The Associated Press
The Associated Press
John J. Xenakis

This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

  • Israel backs down from full-scale attack on Gaza after family escapes rocket
  • Israel adopts a go-slow strategy with new ‘rules of the game’

Israel backs down from full-scale attack on Gaza after family escapes rocket

Destroyed house after being hit by rocket on Tuesday morning in Beersheba (AP)
Destroyed house after being hit by rocket on Tuesday morning in Beersheba (AP)

At 3:43 am on Tuesday, a sleeping mother and father heard warning sirens, woke up their three children, and pulled them into a safe room just before a Grad rocket fell through the roof of their Beersheba home and landed in one of the second story bedrooms, almost completely destroying the structure.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Tuesday denied that they were responsible for the missile attack, but their denials were not considered credible, since no one else has the type of Grad missile that struck the home.

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman publicly called for a powerful military response to Hamas:

“Before going to war, we need to exhaust all other possibilities, because when we’re sending soldiers to battle we know that some of them aren’t returning home. We’re obligated to exhaust every other way, every other option.

Upon entering the Defense Ministry I said — Israel has no right, no option, no luxury to conduct wars of choice. We can conduct only wars of no choice. In the last months we made every effort, we’ve overturned every stone and at this point ‘no choice’ is behind us.

We have arrived at the point where we have to land as strong as possible a blow on Hamas.

Israel’s Security Cabinet had convened for a midnight emergency session on Thursday morning and many Israelis believed that they would be at war with Gaza by morning.

However, there was no war. According to reports, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided that no such military attack would take place. Israel has invaded Gaza three times in the last ten years to put a stop to missile attacks, most recently in the 67-day summer war in 2014. Each of these wars has ended in a ceasefire and then, after another period of relative calm, another round of fighting begins.

Generational Dynamics predicts that there will never be a resolution until there is a full-scale regional war between Jews and Arabs.

I posted my very first Generational Dynamics analysis on May 1, 2003, when President George Bush published his “Mideast Roadmap to Peace,” which described the details of a two-state solution. I wrote that Generational Dynamics predicts that the plan would fail because the Jews and the Arabs would be refighting the 1948 war that followed the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. Here’s what I wrote:

We are now in the early stages of replaying the extremely violent, bloody wars between the Jews and the Palestinians that took place between them from 1936 to 1949. So far the war has been little more than a series of skirmishes, as it was in the late 1930s. The full-fledged violent, bloody war is awaiting a generational change.

There’s an incredible irony going on in the Mideast today, in that the leaders of two opposing sides are, respectively, Ariel Sharon and Yassir Arafat.

These two men hate each other, but they are the ones cooperating with each other (consciously or not) to prevent a major Mideast conflagration. Both of them remember the wars of the 1940s, and neither of them wants to see anything like that happen again. And it won’t happen again, as long as both of these men are in charge.

The disappearance of these two men will be part of an overall generational change in the Mideast that will lead to a major conflagration within a few years. It’s possible that the disappearance of Arafat alone will trigger a war, just as the election of Lincoln ignited the American Civil War. (It’s currently American policy to get rid of Arafat. My response is this: Be careful what you wish for.)

Since that time, Yassir Arafat died and was replaced by Mahmoud Abbas, who was also a survivor of the 1948 war and remembered its horrors. Since then, Abbas has lost control of Hamas, run by much younger leaders.

Since 2006, there have been five wars involving Israel and Palestinians: the war between Israelis and Hezbollah, fought largely on Lebanon’s soil in 2006; the war between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah in Gaza in 2008, that led to Hamas control of Gaza; Operation Cast Lead, the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza early in 2009; the two wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in November, 2012 and July-August 2014.

These on-and-off clashes cannot go on forever. At some point, they will be resolved by a full-fledged generational crisis war that engulfs the region. In the meantime, there is no chance whatsoever that any sort of Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” will succeed, and that is just as true today as it was in 2003. Jerusalem Post and World Israel News and Bloomberg

Israel adopts a go-slow strategy with new ‘rules of the game’

By Thursday morning, after the emergency midnight meeting of cabinet ministers, the fiery rhetoric had softened. Housing Minsiter Yoav Galant said:

I can’t address the content of cabinet discussion but I can say one thing very explicitly — the rules of the game are going to change.

We won’t accept more fire and [border] fence terror.

However, the cabinet meeting decision not to launch a military operation was condemned by other government leaders. According to Regional Council head Gadi Yarkoni:

We had every reason to deliver a serious response in a way that they would understand the message. We should have taken advantage of what happened in Beersheba to restore deterrence, but unfortunately that did not happen.

I googled Gadi Yarkoni, and learned that he was born in 1967, which would put him in Israel’s equivalent of Generation-X, much younger than Netanyahu, born in 1949, or Mahmoud Abbas, born in 1935, or Hamas head Khaled Mashal, born in 1956. When there is an all-out war between Jews and Palestinians, it will be launched by younger people, such as Yarkoni and a young Palestinian leader.

Although no full-scale war is imminent, Israel’s army has been cleared to follow more aggressive tactics. This includes a green light for troops to fire at Gazans who are farther away from the fence than previously allowed, as well a more forceful response to incendiary balloon launches. According to reports, the army will ramp up the severity of its responses gradually, but ultimately adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward rocket attacks, arson balloons and rioting along the Israeli border. Times of Israel and Jerusalem Post

Related Articles

KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Israel, Gaza, Beersheeba, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Avigdor Lieberman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yassir Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Mahmoud Abbas, Operation Cast Lead, Yoav Galant, Gadi Yarkoni, Khaled Mashal
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