Selling the tahdi’eh

The Hamas-Israel ceasefire (tahdi’eh) went into operation today, thank God. But not without– as I forecast yesterday– some last-minute salvoes from each side.
The tahdi’eh is scheduled to last in the first instance for six months. According to the agreement, which was mediated by Egypt, the reciprocal cessation of attacks between Gaza and Israel will be followed in short order by Israel taking significant steps to ease and then lift the economic siege it has maintained on Gaza for two years; by steps to open the Rafah personal-transit crossing between Gaza and Egypt; and by completion of the negotiation on a prisoner exchange.
Until very recently, Israel’s leaders were adamant that they would not deal with Hamas, and Hamas’s leaders– who still do not grant Israel any of the legitimacy it craves as a Jewish state– remained very wary indeed of having any dealings with it. Since the leaders on both sides have promulgated these views very widely among their own people for many years, they have now necessarily had to accompany the release of the news about the ceasefire with their own efforts to explain to their respective followers how and why this ceasefire is acceptable.
This work of psychological leadership, or “message management”, is a necessary concomitant of all moves that leaders anywhere make from hostility to de-escalation or peacemaking. But studying it in this case is particularly interesting.
One perception the leaders on both sides have to combat is the idea that in reaching this de-escalation step they are displaying the “weakness” of their side vis-a-vis the other. In Hamas’s case, the movement addressed that concern directly yesterday. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported that,

The Hamas Movement on Wednesday affirmed that it signed the calm agreement out of strength and not out of weakness and that it would abide by all articles of the agreement as mediated by Egypt.

PIC also reported the (not completely unjustified) attempt by a Hamas spokesman to frame the conclusion of the ceasefire as a positive achievement for the movement:

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said … that both parties are committed to the agreement after approving it, adding that three days after the ceasefire goes into effect Israel would gradually open the commercial crossings and within two weeks they would be completely open.
The spokesman said that Egyptian sponsorship of the agreement was an important element in stabilizing it, adding that Hamas considers the agreement one of the fruits of resistance.

Note, in that statement, too, how Abu Zuhri, whose statements until recently would drip with scorn or skepticism regarding the credibility and trustworthiness of Israel’s leaders, is now also assuring his Palestinian listeners that “both parties are committed to the agreement.”
For the vast majority of the Gazans listening to him, the promise that the commercial crossings between Gaza and Israel will be “completely open” within two weeks will obviously come as a huge relief, and– like the cessation of Israeli armed attacks that the ceasefire also involves– a real benefit of the ceasefire. So from that point of view, the challenge that Hamas has faced in “selling” the tahdi’eh to its public has been relatively easy.
In Israel, where only a small proportion of the public has been adversely affected by the long-continuing (and highly asymmetrical) exchanges of fire with Gaza, the leaders’ selling job has been considerably harder. Israel’s leaders have therefore been trying to sell the tahdi’eh to their people in a different, much more convoluted way and, I would say, with notably less enthusiasm than the Hamas leaders.
Haaretz tells us this:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Hamas on Thursday that the cease-fire was the militant group’s last chance to avoid an IDF incursion into the Gaza Strip.
Hamas supporters and the people of Gaza were “pissed off with Hamas” after years of violence, Olmert said in an interview with Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. [Without adducing any particular evidence for his claim, which indeed would be hard to come by. ~HC]
“I think the strategy of Hamas, which does not want to recognise Israel’s right to exist in the first place, and the extremism, and the fanaticism, and the religious dogmatism, is the enemy of peace,” Olmert reportedly told the newspaper.
“We are at the end of our tolerance with regard to terror in Gaza,” he stated.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev on Thursday said Israel would fully implement all its commitments but added, “Our eyes are open, we are closely following what the other side is doing.”

That Haaretz news report also tells us this:

Meanwhile, the IDF forces on the border with the Gaza Strip have been instructed to maintain restraint early in the cease-fire and to avoid any offensive operations.
The soldiers have been told they are allowed to respond if they come under fire; however, they have not been issued precise rules of engagement for the new situation that went into effect Thursday morning.
Similarly, no specific instructions have been issued on what actions to take if armed Palestinians are identified close to the border fence inside the Gaza Strip.
New rules of engagement are expected in the coming days.
Hamas sources said they do not intend to deploy any of their forces along the border so as to prevent any IDF operations.

The main point man negotiating the truce from Israel’s side was ranking Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad. Haaretz’s Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff report that,

now Gilad needs to speak out in support of the deal he reached – without any great enthusiasm – under orders from the political echelon. In this case, it seems the politicians find it more comfortable to hide behind the broad backs of their retainers.
Gilad’s direct boss, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, was busy on Wednesday with a lightening visit to an armaments show in Paris. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made do with a few general comments.
When Gilad is called upon to explain the tahadiyeh, under conditions far from those Israel hoped for, he will say that it is a choice between a bad option and an even worse one.
A large military operation would not have immediately ended the firing of Qassam rockets or solved the problem of arms smuggling. At the same time, there was the need to quickly end the suffering of Israelis living near Gaza. Like Barak, Gilad believes that in the long run a confrontation with Hamas is almost inevitable, but then the cabinet can come to the nation with clean hands and say “we tried everything, now it is the IDF’s turn.”
What Gilad cannot say is that the choice of tahadiyeh was first and foremost a political one. From the moment Olmert and Barak reached the conclusion that they did not have public support or political breathing room for a large ground offensive in Gaza, the die was cast.

This is a fascinating commentary on the waning appetite of Israel’s citizens for continuing the wars outside their own borders that their country always– until the summer of 2006– seemed prepared or even eager to undertake. And indeed, Harel and Issacharoff (and also, perhaps, Amos Gilad), directly link Israel’s present reluctance to launch a massive attack against Gaza to the very unsatisfactory results it achieved in the large-scale war against Lebanon of that year.
The reporters write:

Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi understands the coalition picture [i.e., the government’s point of view], but there are quite a number of senior officers below him who see the agreement as a big mistake. In their eyes, Israel has not even attempted to try a long list of measured operations that are less than an conquest of the Gaza Strip, but if tried, might have forced Hamas to accept a cease-fire from a competely different postion. Brigade-level operations in the strip were halted a long time ago, and no attempt has been made in recent times to threaten the lives of senior Hamas officials.
Last month the IDF initiated seven operations in Gaza, two of them at the battalion level and five at the company level. This is not really putting military pressure on Hamas, even if Olmert and Barak claim otherwise.
It is hard to ignore the influence of the Second Lebanon War on Israel’s operations in Gaza. The pain of Lebanon is still clearly felt.[I believe this does not refer to pain in Lebanon but to the pain the Israeli body politic still feels as a result of their unsatisfactory experience in L ebanon. ~HC]Such pain adds to the limited political dialogue and dictates the choice of a cease-fire.
In Olmert’s present situation, any agreement will be presented as an achievement: not just the tahadiyeh, not just the return of the abducted soldiers in the hands of Hezbollah. Even the swift and surprising willingness in Jerusalem to discuss the return of the Shaba Farms to Lebanon with a Lebanese government in Beirut which is completely dependent on a Hezbollah veto.
The present strategic goal is not peace, but quiet, even if only for a short time – until the elections.

And then, there is the hawkish Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, himself. In this densely “interpreted” interview with him, Ari Shavit writes:

Why a truce? Defense Minister Ehud Barak has answers that are not simple but are clear. When he observes the Middle Eastern reality through the window of his home in a Tel Aviv skyscraper, it is clear to him that the situation on the Gaza border requires a decision: an agreement or an operation. Apparently, in the end there will be no getting around an operation. Israel and Hamas are on a collision course.
However, since the repercussions of an operation could be grave, it is necessary first to try the other alternative – so that every mother liable to lose her son in the Gaza alleyways will know. So that every civilian in the Gaza envelope liable to get hit during the fighting with Hamas will know. So that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will know that Israel did not choose a military move, which the Egyptians fear, before giving a chance to the diplomatic move they initiated.
Because of both the domestic Israeli consideration and the Egyptian consideration, it is clear to Barak that the Israeli leadership had to try the truce before opening fire.

Now, my clear impression in recent weeks has been that Barak, who is the head of Israel’s Labor Party, has been a significant force holding Olmert back from concluding this tahdi’eh agreement with Hamas. So what we are seeing in Shavit’s interview with him is perhaps an explanation that Barak feels he needs to give to those of his supporters who had been urging him not to conclude it.
Shavit writes,

Will the truce hold up? The likelihood that six months from now there will be calm in the South is slim. There is always the possibility that an accident will happen and the experiment will succeed. But the working assumption [from Barak, I’m assuming ~HC] is that the truce will collapse. Perhaps within months, perhaps within weeks. And even if this happens, Israel will have lost nothing by acceding to the Egyptian initiative. It has not recognized Hamas and it has not created an irreversible reality. It has maintained its freedom of action in Judea and Samaria and it has created linkage between opening the crossing points and stopping the smuggling. It has ensured serious negotiations in the matter of captured soldier Gilad Shalit, which are liable to obligate the government to make difficult decisions in the very near future.
Ehud Barak has no doubt: A sober, objective and deep analysis of the situation necessitates a truce first. Truce before action, arrangement before attack. However, the former prime minister is troubled because many of his colleagues in the leadership do not understand the obvious. In his eyes, Israel is currently a place where the obvious is being crushed. The public discourse is shallow, as though crushed by a steamroller. The media coverage is sometimes influenced by petty personal considerations. And people in the government can be diagnosed with Second Lebanon War syndrome: a lack of seriousness, a lack of responsibility, fault-finding.

This is fascinating psychological drama! But oh, how he loves to blame and cast aspersions on everyone around him.
This is how Shavit’s piece continues:

The 2006 war is still burning in Barak’s bones. He sees it as the worst Israeli failure of recent decades. The government did not want to go to war, it did not intend to go to war and it did not even know it was going to war. In retrospect it told itself that its aim had been to block the strengthening of Hezbollah, which had increased from 7,000 to 14,000 rockets during six years of quiet in the Galilee. But in the two years since the war, Hezbollah has expanded to 40,000 rockets that can reach as far as Yeruham, Arad and Dimona and are capable of hitting 97 percent of the Israeli population. The achievements of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 have been eradicated and Hassan Nasrallah has accumulated significant political power in Lebanon.
Nevertheless, some of those who embarked on the war still believe that it was a stunning success. They have not internalized the failures, they have not done an accounting and they have even learned from the Winograd Report that the military is to blame, not the government. So they are prepared to implement in the South that same superficial way of thinking that failed in the North. If it works, they will have succeeded. If it doesn’t work, it will turn out that the problem is with the reality and not with the way they managed that war.

Now, Shavit is sometimes a hard writer to read. Because he so heavily “interprets” the words– and often even the thoughts– of the people whom he interviews, it is usually (but not always) safe to assume that when he writes assessments such as the above, he is attempting to channel the thoughts of his interviewee.
But in the present piece, he abruptly at this point distances himself from Barak and becomes, I guess, himself, adding his own commentary to what has gone before. (Which casts sme doubt on the interpretation that in all that has come before he was striving straightforwardly to channel and represent Barak’s views.)
Shavit continues thus:

Barak will not admit this, but he is alone. The strategic reality is challenging: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and two sensitive and complicated diplomatic processes. The coming years will be among the most important in the state’s history. But what is really bothering the defense minister is the way politics here and the media are conducting themselves regarding these challenges. In his opinion, at a time when the defense establishment is doing impressive work, the political-media establishment is engaged in manipulations and vanities. It is making things very difficult for the two responsible adults bearing the entire burden: Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
The reality that surrounds us, Barak is thinking, does not permit us to behave as though we are participating in a reality show. To deal with what we are capable of dealing with, it is necessary to return to the essence of things. It is necessary to return to the basic values of leadership: integrity, courage, matter-of-factness and seriousness.

I guess one thing I come away from Shavit’s article with is– once again!– a strong impression of Barak’s arrogance toward his colleagues in the Israeli political system. But also, his smarts in terms of raw strategic analysis. His assessment of the outcome of the 33-day war is, I believe, spot-on.
And finally, in this round-up of the very complex ways in which Israel’s leaders have been attempting to explain and sell the tahdi’eh to their citizenry, we have this, in a Haaretz editorial whose main thrust is to welcome the ceasefire and wish it a long life. The editorial cites, with evident approval, some comments thatthe former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division, Brigadier General (res.) Shmuel Zakai, made to the Israeli Army Radio. Zakai, the editorial said,

said he is worried by the skepticism with which the government has greeted the cease-fire. “The next round of fighting with Hamas is not a decree from heaven,” Zakai said. The danger is that if we incessantly expect the next war with Hamas, we will not make an effort to maintain the cease-fire, we will be dragged into provocations, and the commander will be quick to pull the trigger. Or, as Zakai put it, “Every company commander will think that it makes no difference whether we fire the next shell now or a year from now.”

That is an interesting and significant assessment from someone who presumably understands the strategic realities in and around Gaza very well indeed.