One week after the start of Israel’s 'Operation Protective Edge', also known as Hamas’ '10th of Ramadan War', Washington is looking on helplessly.
President Barack Obama offered to mediate a ceasefire last week, but the move fell on deaf ears—on both sides. Secretary of State John Kerry then made a surprise visit to Cairo on Monday in a bid for calm. Egypt soon announced a ceasefire, which was to have taken hold this morning at 9 a.m.
The Israelis agreed to the terms, but Hamas balked, claiming it was never even consulted. Rockets continue to fly out of Gaza, and Israeli warships continue to pound targets in the Hamas-controlled enclave.
American diplomacy may have failed thus far, but Washington is still crucial to this conflict in at least one respect.
Iron Dome, a missile defense system developed and funded with U.S. assistance, has reportedly intercepted some 90 percent of the Hamas rockets hurtling toward Israeli population centers.
The system is 100 percent responsible for the fact that there have been zero Israeli fatalities since this conflict erupted—so far—despite the more than 400 rockets fired by Hamas and other militant groups into Israeli airspace.
Iron Dome has allowed the Israelis to go on offense, in what has been largely been seen as a one-sided war.
The Israelis are deeply grateful to America for this remarkable technology. But, meeting with several senior Israeli officials last week, I was also struck by their equally strong desire to establish deterrence in a region that grows more dangerous by the day, and where U.S. influence is waning commensurately.
And it’s not just Israel, either. Call it a “pivot,” call it a “rebalancing”—by now, every leader in the region knows full well that the United States is trying to extricate itself from the Middle East.
They know that the current Gaza conflict, the ongoing Syria slaughter and other regional upheavals are a collective nuisance to this administration, which has conspicuously failed to craft a consistent or coherent Middle East foreign policy after six years of turmoil.
U.S. credibility took a nose dive after President Obama’s Syria “red line” reversal last September—and it plummeted further in May as Kerry’s ill-timed attempt to broker a peace deal between the Palestinians and Israelis predictably collapsed.
It doesn’t help that Egypt, the traditional American broker of calm between Hamas and the Israelis, has failed at its first attempt to do Washington’s bidding. But it’s also no surprise. Egypt has been drifting from Washington’s orbit ever since the administration cut funding after last year’s coup that heralded the rise of army strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
To be fair, it’s unlikely that even Sisi’s predecessor, Mohammed Morsi, the ousted Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader who brokered the last ceasefire with Hamas in November 2012 thanks to his longstanding ties with the group, could talk sense to Hamas right now.
As Jordanian officials confirmed to me last week, Hamas is now fractured. It has at least four power centers: Gaza Strip, West Bank, external leadership and military leadership. Dealing with one, unified Hamas that was strident and intransigent was difficult enough. The splintering of Hamas makes it that much harder to negotiate.
