Today is the third Anniversary of the launch of the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
The 22-day operation was launched at 11:30 am or so, on 27 December 2008. In the first strikes, some 250 Hamas police were mowed down at their police academy graduation ceremony in Gaza City. The debate continues over whether they were legitimate military targets, or not [many international lawyers say no].
Will sirens sound today in the streets of the West Bank, or even of Gaza? Will people stop and get out of their cars, to stand in memory of the lives lost?
And, how will the day be marked in Israel?
Israeli military spokespersons and government officials said that the target of this massive and unprecedented military operation was Hamas.
They say that Hamas was the “address” in the Gaza Strip, the political movement that could be held responsible [following its rout of Fatah/Palestinian Authority Preventive Security Forces in mid-June 2007] for any and all rocket, mortar and missile attacks.
Hamas, it was argued, was in charge of a physical space whose status has been defined [in the wake of Israel’s unilateral “disengagement” in September 2005 of some 8,000 settlers and the troops protecting] by leading Israeli experts on international law as a sui generis [of itself / unique to itself] entity — and whose population 0f some 1.5 million people is almost exclusively Palestinian.
More than half of the population of Gaza are children. Some 2/3 to 3/4 of the population are refugees who fled or who were expelled during the fighting that surrounded the creation of the state of Israel in 1948
Operation Cast Lead was carried out on a trapped population with nowhere to flee — all borders were closed.
The dropping of leaflets by Israeli airplanes warning of some of the upcoming strikes did not offer any information about where to seek refuge — they did not even say exactly which areas were about to be attacked. They simply added to the confusion and terror.
In the annals of warfare, the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead was not a war. It was a military operation, with vague aims that were, in the end, not achieved.
In grief and despair at the time, I wrote that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Gilad Shalit was not released until negotiations with Hamas– which had started well before Operation Cast Lead — were concluded this year.
The firing of rocket, mortar and missile firing from Gaza on surrounding areas of Israeli population and territory continues until this day, though sporadically and diminished — despite the agreement even at a recent Fatah-Hamas reconciliation summit in Cairo in November, in which Hamas signed on to join the popular non-violent resistance being backed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank [though Abbas did not launch the current non-violent strategy.
The IDF’s Operation Cast Lead was ordered by Israel’s “political echelon”, by popular demand, aided and abetted by the Israeli media.
Operation Cast Lead ended with two parallel cease-fires — one declared by Israel at the request of Barack Obama who was sworn into office just hours after it went into effect at 2am local time on 18 January 2009, the other one declared by Hamas to allow the Israeli ground troops to withdraw.
Maybe it can be said that one lasting “achievement” of Operation Cast Lead was the recognition of the need to turn to human rights instruments and norms to institute a “real” announced and declared naval blockade of the Gaza Strip on the night of 3-4 January 2009, as the ground phase of Operation Cast Lead got underway.
Another achievement, the growing [though not yet universal] recognition that this kind of massive use of force, against an essentially defenseless population, no matter how deep the enmity, should never be authorized again.