So much for President Obama's appeal for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. So much for the United Nations. So much for an incursion limited to destroying Hamas's tunnels into Israel. On Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces stepped up the assault on Gaza, bombing more than a hundred targets, including the Finance Ministry, two Hamas-controlled television stations, some buildings in Gaza City's harbor, and the territory's only power station.
The resumption of hostilities came after a temporary truce ended and Hamas fired more rockets into Israel. In a television address on Monday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, told Israelis to prepare for a lengthy battle. Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, the Israeli military's chief of staff, said that the offensive was being "intensified," and that was certainly how it seemed to residents and reporters in Gaza.
On Tuesday, large plumes of smoke arose from storage tanks at Gaza's sole power station, which was hit by Israeli shelling. "The power plant is finished," its director told reporters. Already forced to endure lengthy power cuts, many Gaza residents now face the prospect of having no electricity at all. (The territory imports some electricity from Israel, but many power lines have been damaged in the bombing.) The Gaza City municipality said that the bombing could also impact the local water supply, which relies on power pumps, and it told residents to limit their consumption.
Meanwhile, the casualty count continues to rise. More than a hundred Gaza residents were killed in Tuesday's attacks, according to local officials, including an undetermined number of children. All told, during the three-week campaign, more than eleven hundred Palestinians have lost their lives, and more than six thousand five hundred have been wounded, officials in Gaza say. On Israel's side, three civilians and fifty-three soldiers have been killed.
The intensified bombing campaign came less than thirty-six hours after President Obama called Netanyahu and urged him to agree to a truce. According to a statement from the White House, the President reaffirmed Israel's right to defend itself but also registered his "serious and growing concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths and the loss of Israeli lives, as well as the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza." On Monday, the United Nations Security Council added its voice to those demanding an immediate halt to the violence, calling on both parties to start negotiating a permanent agreement based upon an Egyptian proposal.
In Israel, however, these external interventions appear to have had the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than bowing to international pressure, Israel appears increasingly determined to go it alone, even if that involves a serious breach with its staunchest ally, the United States.
Opinion polls suggest that more than eighty per cent of Israelis support Operation Protective Edge, the official name for the military assault on Gaza. After President Obama called Netanyahu, a number of Israeli politicians criticized him for interfering. Uri Ariel, the housing minister in Netanyahu's conservative coalition government, tweeted, "Obama, leave us alone. Let us take care of ourselves and [you] take care of Syria. Prime Minister, proceed and don’t let the background noise interfere.” Danny Danon, a member of the Likud Party, said, "We need a ceasefire from Obama." Even some centrist and leftist members of the Knesset objected. "America has displayed a shameful lack of elementary understanding of how the Middle East works,” Meir Sheetrit, a member of the Hatnua faction, which has pressed for a permanent peace settlement with the Palestinians, said. “No matter what America says, it is forbidden to end the war as long as there is a threat of tunnels and rockets."
To some extent, such sentiments are a reflex action from a nation at war, albeit a limited war in which the vast majority of casualties are on the other side. But the criticisms of Obama also represent something deeper and more lasting: an increasingly assertive Israel that views itself as justified in its actions, besieged by international critics, and capable of following its own course without having to seek approval.
If that means making a break with the United States and the military aid it provides, some conservative Israelis, and conservative supporters of Israel in this country, are ready to go there. “The experience of the Obama years has sharpened the perception among pro-Israel Americans that aid can cut against Israel by giving presidents with bad ideas more leverage than they would otherwise have,” Noah Pollak, the executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel (E.C.I.), a group that has been highly critical of Obama, recently told Eli Lake, of The Daily Beast. In Lake's article, which was titled "Some of Israel's Top Defenders Say It's Time To End U.S. Aid," he also quoted Elliott Abrams, the neocon ex-Bush Administration official, as saying, "Israel should be less dependent on American financial assistance," and Naftali Bennett, Israel's economics minister and the head of the right-wing Jewish Home Party, who remarked last year, “Today, U.S. military aid is roughly one per cent of Israel’s economy. I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it."
Netanyahu hasn't expressed support for Bennett's sentiments, and neither have any of Israel's military leaders, who know full well the value of U.S. military cooperation in tasks like constructing a missile shield and tracking Hamas's rocket launches. With the fighting in Gaza continuing and up to a tenth of its population seeking shelter in U.N.-run facilities, U.S.-Israel ties are an issue for the future. In the coming days, the focus will remain on just how far Israel's military escalation will go, and whether the various Palestinian factions can reach a common stance on the terms of a ceasefire. (On Tuesday, a veteran Palestinian negotiator, Yasser Abed Rabbo, announced that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had agreed upon a new twenty-four-hour ceasefire, only for officials from Hamas to rebut his statement.) In the long term, though, the issue of how Israel will relate to the United States is a central one, and, following the Netanyahu government's torpedoing of John Kerry's peace initiative earlier this year, another important marker has been laid down.
With an ample basis in post-1967 history, the Washington aid budget, and the transfer of military hardware, much of the world regards Israel, ultimately, as a ward of the United States. But Israel, more and more, is prepared to challenge that characterization.
