Rules of engagement

In

In reporting the spate of uprisings in the Arab World the printed and electronic news media have supplemented their accounts with cartographic aids, both regular and interactive maps. After all finding your way across North Africa through the Middle East as far as Iran isn’t easy. Occasionally the cartographers forget to demarcate Israel and are hard put to find space for the Gaza Strip. This understandable oversight is easily explained away. That narrow sliver of land adjacent to the western Negev is only 41 km long and between 6 and 12 km wide. By comparison the famous King Ranch in South Texas is nine times larger than the Gaza Strip. Admittedly the ranch isn’t one single contiguous plot of land; nevertheless its contiguous area is a lot larger than that narrow finger poking into Israel from Sinai.

King Ranch is a mere garden plot compared to some of the Australian sheep and cattle stations. If it were possible to carve out that small part of the east Mediterranean coastline and transport it to Australia it would fit into Alexandria Station in the Northern Territory more than 67 times and more than 94 times into the Anna Creek Station in South Australia, the world's largest ranch.

I doubt if many Israelis would miss the loss and I’m sure the Australians would regret their gain.

While there are more cattle than people in King Ranch and the Australian cattle stations, the Gaza Strip has few cattle and arguably the highest human population density in the world.

Three years ago a burning love for the Palestinian cause and an equal dislike for Israel drove Vittorio Arrigoni an Italian activist and central figure in the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement to move to Gaza. Prior to his murder last week I had never heard of him. For the sake of convenience I preferred to lump the IMS together with other pro-Palestinian support groups and knew very little about it. Furthermore I knew very little about his captors and murderers, the al-Tawhid wal-Jihad faction, one of the Salafi groups ideologically akin to al- Qaeda.

Journalist Osama al Sharif related to Arrigoni’s murder in the English language daily Arab News “The execution of Italian peace activist, Vittorio Arrigoni, in Gaza last week by a Palestinian jihadist group has dealt a heavy blow to Hamas' rule and authority. The killing of Arrigoni has focused attention on the rise of Salafist jihadist groups in Gaza and elsewhere.”

Osama al Sherif cited the clashes that took place recently in Zerqa, Jordan when hundreds of militant Salafists confronted police and other protesters using bats, knives and daggers. “More than 80 people were injured, some of them seriously, the majority of them members of the public security forces. It was the bloodiest confrontation after weeks of mostly peaceful protests by Jordanians from all walks of life who were demanding political reforms and an end to corruption.”….

“There are worrying signs that Salafist jihadism movements in the Arab world are suddenly regrouping and once again launching themselves on the scene in the wake of popular uprisings that have been sweeping the region.”

A few weeks ago Arab affairs analyst Ron Ben Yishai described the situation in Gaza as near anarchy. In the past the Hamas ruling authority was a little ambivalent regarding the armed struggle against Israel. After Operation Cast Lead it maintained an ostensible ceasefire but permitted its own military wing Izz al-Din al-Qassam and various dissident groups, mainly Islamic Jihad to continue sporadic firing of mortars and rockets at targets in Israel. Attempts to place roadside bombs along the separation fence and burrow tunnels under the fence were also part of their activities tolerated by the Hamas leadership

The political leadership in Gaza, led by Ismail Haniyeh, is responsible for the safety and welfare of non-combatants and is interested in a lull. However, the organisation’s military wing, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, and the group’s leadership in Damascus have a different view. They are interested in “limited warfare” that will not force Israel to embark on a Cast Lead-style operation, but prove to the Palestinian street and to the patrons in Syria and Iran that the “armed struggle for Palestine’s liberation” goes on.

A commonly held opinion argues that, notwithstanding Richard Goldstone’s partial retraction, the UN Human Rights Council report bearing his name still tends to deter Israel from launching another Cast Lead Operation.

However Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh knows that the Goldstone Report deterrent has a limit. Hamas anticipates Israeli retaliation for attacks on Israeli communities and towns. The response is never a knee-jerk reaction it is always a carefully considered retaliation aimed primarily at the mortar and rocket firing teams, known munitions stores and smuggling tunnels.

Hamas has never accepted Israeli pre-emptive attacks as part of the rules of retaliation. Ron Ben Yishai claims that these hit-them-before-they-hit-us attacks hurt the terrorist groups most, deterring them from engaging in a full scale war of attrition. They are especially bothered by the targeted assassinations carried out when the IDF identifies what it refers to as “operational opportunities.”

Often high ranking operatives are hit in these attacks. They harm the team’s morale and tend to erode the terror groups’ prestige and their ability to carry out “high quality attacks.”

“On the other hand,” says Ben Yishai, “Hamas and Islamic Jihad show relative understanding and restraint to IDF operations aimed at targeting a cell during or immediately after the course of an attack or while it fires at Israel.”

“Just the same,” he says, “Israel has no intention of accepting the terrorists’ ‘rules of engagement.’ Accepting them will only encourage them to scale up their attacks.

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas sent out feelers to Hamas leadership in Gaza seeking a rapprochement. Ahead of obtaining UN approval for the declaration of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in September this year. A united West Bank and Gaza Strip entity has a better chance of gaining approval.

In the meantime Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu plans to accept an invitation to address Congress next month. According to Helene Cooper the White House correspondent for the New York Times Prime Minister Netanyahu will make use of the occasion to present a new proposal to reopen the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Netanyahu has to do something to derail the proposed UN resolution approving the setting up of a Palestinian state. He also wants to make his own proposal ahead of a US initiative, the rumoured Obama peace plan.

For almost seventy years the day of the Pesach Seder at Ein Harod involved a great deal of preparation. Our traditional “Cutting of the Omer Ceremony” was held just two hours before the Seder. Now the ceremony takes place the day after the Seder enabling maximum participation by members and guests.

I have attached a few photos taken at the ceremony. A few years ago I described the ceremony in the following words

“Part of our wheat crop is cut to make silage and the rest is harvested for seed. One small corner of the wheat fields is set aside for the symbolic ‘Cutting of the Omer’ ceremony which takes place the day after the Seder. The ceremony is unique to Israel’s farming community, namely many kibbutzim and a number of the larger Moshav communities.

The ceremony has been described as a revival of a custom or practice that took place during the Second Temple period. However, there are few details of how it was celebrated. Nevertheless, the modern "Omer” ceremony has taken a bare reference and embellished it, draping it with the epic of the Jewish agrarian renaissance, the return to our ancestral soil.

The Omer ceremony has changed little since its inception and remains essentially the same.

With the passage of time the combine harvester has replaced the scythe, but then the scythe was never used to cut the wheat or barley harvest in ancient times .It serves as a symbolic representation of the sickle.

All this doesn't detract from the beautiful panorama of the wheat-field facing the valley and the mountain, the lilting melodies, the dancers and the swishing of the scythes. They have all become a tradition, an inseparable part of the secular celebration of the Pesach festival.”

Have a good weekend

Beni 21^st of April, 2011.