Like every conflict, the current round between Israel and the Gaza Strip has three different fronts: there is the primary battlefield in Gaza, where the enemy is located and from where the rocket attacks originate; there is the home front – places like Ashkelon, Sderot and the suburbs of Jerusalem – where the rockets land; and there is the public diplomacy front fought on TV screens and front pages of newspapers.
The Palestinians have an interest in pushing a narrative that everything happening right now is because of Jerusalem, is because of the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and is a result of the pending court order to evict Arab families from Jewish-owned land in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
The truth is that these are simply today’s convenient excuses, a fake façade and not real. They are convenient because they serve an immediate purpose: placing the blame on someone else (Israel) so they (Hamas and Islamic Jihad) can do what they want, which is to try to weaken and undermine the Jewish state.
Because this week’s convenient excuse is Jerusalem, Hamas opened up the round of violence with a salvo of rockets directed at Israel’s capital, something not seen since the Gaza War in the summer of 2014. This was meant to be a symbolic gesture by Hamas, to show off that it is the so-called protector and defender of the Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Once it got that out of the way, the fighting – as seen on Tuesday – was mostly isolated in the South in places like Ashkelon, which Hamas and Islamic Jihad feel they can strike more freely as opposed to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, attacks against which constitute a sharp escalation.
These are only convenient excuses because Hamas doesn’t really need a reason to attack Israel. That is its raison d'etre, and has been since it was founded in the late 1980s. To pin this round of violence on something specific is to lost sight of the big picture: Hamas is bent on trying to hurt, weaken and destroy Israel. It can name a specific excuse why it fires a rocket today as opposed to yesterday, but that is merely a tactical matter. The strategy remains one and the same. And until that changes, these rounds of violence will continue.
Is it possible that had the situation in Jerusalem been handled differently, Hamas would have had a harder time instigating a conflict, since it would not have had an easy excuse?
Possibly. But it doesn’t matter. Hamas would have found something else, some other reason to start shooting, especially when considering its bigger objective right now: showing the Palestinian people that it is still alive and kicking, even though the Palestinian Authority elections slated for this month have been canceled.
With this as the basis for what it is happening, the possibility of a decisive victory will continue to evade Israel.
In the end, Israel will cause Hamas and Islamic Jihad extensive damage, will kill a number of its operatives as it has already done, and destroy some of its infrastructure.
But in the battle over the narrative, Hamas will push the story of Jerusalem. We need to win that war too. Desperately.