How Much Longer This Round? And The Next? And The Next?

"Netanyahu was on the ropes at the beginning of this week. The opposition parties were poised to muster a majority."

"Netanyahu's preoccupation with his own political and legal problems is part of the reason that he has not reined in the Israeli police's heavy-handedness in Jerusalem, and part of this rapid escalation of the crisis can be explained by that preoccupation."

"He is under a huge amount of criticism in Israel, especially over the breakdown of law and order within Israel in mixed Jewish-Arab towns. That said, there is a silver lining for him here."

Anshel Pfeffer, biography author of the Israeli Prime Minister

Rockets launched by Hamas have hit Ashkelon, southern Israel  Reuters

 

Suddenly, the 'government of change', on the cusp of seeing Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed as prime minister, are themselves dismissed by the trajectory of events that has roiled Israel and the Gaza Strip. Unwittingly, the terrorist group Hamas favoured the current prime minister to extend his experienced stay as the helm of executive government administration by their own self-serving move to demonstrate to the Arab world and Palestinians in particular that they have the courage to bomb Israeli civilian enclaves.

Israel is now imploding within and without. The Israel Defence Forces have the 'without' explosions well in hand, and under the direction of the prime minister will carry on their dual task of protecting the Israeli population through coordinated defence strategies while teaching the basic elements of assaultive conflict reversed with a conscientious view to preserving human life as much as it is in their capacity to do so, to a self-proclaimed enemy of the Jewish state which they feel entitled to destroy.

Hamas has enjoyed considerable assistance from the Islamic Republic of Iran, the theocratic Islamist government whose major achievement has been to foster the formation and weaponizing of terrorist militias loyal to Iran. The arsenal of deadly weapons that Hamas has been enabled to amass has come courtesy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force for whom the destruction of Israel represents a priority goal.

 

Israelis clean up a rocket-damaged synagogue in Ashkelon  Reuters

 

The late, lamented Qassim Soleimani, sent on a pilgrimage to Paradise by former U.S.President Donald Trump in collaboration with unnamed sources, was  happily responsible for Iran's connection with Hamas, taking personal responsibility for orchestrating the arms buildup of Hamas, enabling the terrorists to make fast and loose with their expendable rockets and missiles in the knowledge that some of them would find their targets -- and they have.

Israel is leaning slightly back in its shock over the plenitude of the rocket barrages barrelling through the night-time sky crossing the border from Gaza into Israel, hitting border communities, coastal enclaves and central Israel, creating a challenge for the missile-busting Iron Dome defence system in a creative endeavour to overcome the system's capacity through sheer volume of attacks. Lest Hamas celebrate too soon, the Iron Dome is managing to stop those rockets bearing down on populated areas.

And leaving those that misfire, falling back into Gaza, to create victims there, to fall where they may, even though Hamas's public relations will relay to the collaborative media and the international community at large, that Palestinian deaths -- mostly women, children and babies of course, with special emphasis on the malice of Arab-hating Jews -- are all on Israel's vicious head. Israeli civilians caught in the maelstrom; the elderly, infirm and children, both Jewish and Arab, hit by rocket blasts are also Israel's fault. For provoking Hamas by refusing its bellicose orders.

 

Suzy, six, was rescued from rubble in Gaza City on Sunday, but five members of her family died   Reuters

 

The sturm und drang has had its dramatic effect, leading Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Jewish youth to emulate what is occurring externally, by calling out the thugs in each of them, leading them to assault one another, to threaten and commit crimes against each other in their dark vision of the enemy within, to loot and to torch schools and places of worship, and to generally make a  heroic effort to undo all the patient effort on both 'sides' to go along to get along.

The world, fed a long diet of 'pro-Palestinian' sympathy, is convinced that the heavy hand of Israeli authority has impeded free access to the Islamic world's third most sacred site in Islam, compounding the stress between Jew and Arab in Israel through a scenario where a few Israeli-Arab families have been informed they must vacate addresses whose properties are the legal possession of Jewish owners, when in fact, the crux of the matter is a Palestinian Authority administration in the West Bank that has reneged, once again, on its promise of an imminent election.

Trouble is, when Mahmoud Abbas, the current President of the PA, elected for a four-year term 14 years ago, suddenly remembered/realized/recoiled at the realization that he and his Fatah party are less popular than the equally democratically-flawed Hamas party, and election results just might make that abundantly clear. So he called off the scheduled election, claiming that Israel's oppressive manner toward Palestinians has forced him to that decision.

And the Hamas 'authorities' took it from there, to a) demonstrate to the Palestinian voters that they have the courage that Fatah/Abbas lacks, to face down the Israelis by rocket and missile attacks, penetrating 'the enemy's' defences, killing its people, destroying its infrastructure as promised in their charter, ostensibly popularizing themselves even further, and b) by their cleverly-designed strategies to mire the IDF in a conflict where rockets are fired from within civilian enclaves, luring a response to hit that enclave and exact civilian casualties; Voila!,another public relations coup results.

Too pleased with their cleverness to see past the ruse that the IDF had in store when it called up troops to mass on the Israel/Gaza border and allow media to report that a ground invasion was imminent, activating a process whereby Hamas leaders ordered their fighters into the network of tunnels in preparation for responding to any such ground invasion, allowing the IDF the opportunity to seal off entrances and exits by well-aimed explosive devices, trapping both Hamas terrorists and their cache of weapons within.