To Die With The Philistines?

The most famous words ever spoken in Gaza were the last words of Samson (Judges, 16, 30): "Let me die with the Philistines!"

According to the Biblical story, Samson took hold of the central pillars of the Philistine temple and brought down the whole building upon the Lords of the Philistines, the people of Gaza and himself. The teller of the story sums it all up: "So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life."

A story of suffering, destruction and death. It may be about to repeat itself now, only with the roles reversed: the temple may be brought down by the Palestinians (who took their name from the Philistines), and among the dead will be the Lords of Israel.

Will Gaza turn into a Palestinian Massada (the place where, a thousand years later, Jewish defenders chose mass suicide rather then fall into the hands of the Romans)?

The people of Gaza are worried. The Hamas fighters are preparing for action. The chiefs of the Israeli army are both worried and preparing for action.

For months now, the political and military leaders of Israel have been discussing the "big operation": a massive invasion of the Gaza Strip in order to put an end to the launching of rockets into Israel.

The army chiefs, who are usually raring to go into battle, are not eager this time. Not at all. They want to avoid it at almost any cost. But they are fatalistic. Everything now depends on blind chance. For example, if tomorrow a Qassam rocket falls on a house in Sderot and kills a whole family, there will be such an outcry in Israel that the government may feel compelled to give the order, even against its better judgment.

For every Israeli military or political planner, the Gaza strip is a nightmare. It is about 40 km long and 10 km wide. In this 360 square kilometers of parched desert, hardly twice the area of Washington DC, there are crowded 1.5 million human beings, almost all of them destitute, who have nothing to lose, headed by a militant religious movement. (It might be remembered that in the 1948 war, the Jewish community in Palestine amounted to less than 650 thousand people.)

For months now, the Hamas leadership in Gaza has been accumulating weapons, which are smuggled into the Strip through the many tunnels under its border with Egypt (as we smuggled weapons into the country on the eve of the 1948 war). True, they have got no artillery or tanks, but they now possess very effective anti-tank weapons.

According to the estimate of our military, an invasion of the Gaza Strip may cost the lives of a hundred Israeli soldiers and thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians. The Israeli army will deploy tanks and armored bulldozers, and the world will see terrible pictures - the same kind of pictures that our army tried to suppress and that caused a world-wide outcry against the "Jenin Massacre" during the 2002 "Defensive Shield" operation.

Nobody can know how this operation will develop. Perhaps the Palestinian resistance will collapse after all, and the predictions of numerous Israeli casualties will be proved false. But it is also possible that Gaza will turn into a Palestinian Massada, a kind of mini-Stalingrad. This week, in one of the "routine" incursions by the Israeli army, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) penetrated one of the renowned Israeli-produced Merkava Mark-3 tanks, and it was a miracle that the four crew members were not killed. In a big, bloody battle, such miracles cannot be relied on.

The nightmare does not end there. No doubt, the Israeli army will overcome the resistance, whatever the price on both sides, perhaps by demolishing whole neighborhoods and massive slaughter. But what then?

If the army leaves the strip quickly, the situation will revert to what it was before and the launching of the Qassam rockets will be resumed (if it stops at all). That would mean that the whole operation will have been in vain. If the army remains there - what alternative would it have? - it will be compelled to take on the full responsibility of an occupation regime: feeding the population, running the social services, establishing security. All this in a situation of a vigorous and ongoing guerilla war, which will turn the lives of both occupier and occupied into hell.

For an occupier, Gaza has always been problematic. The Israeli army has left it three times already, and each time the joy was great. "Gaza - goodbye and good riddance!" was always a popular slogan. When Israel made peace with the Egyptians, they adamantly refused to accept Gaza back at all.

It is no accident that both intifadas started in Gaza. (The first, exactly 20 years ago this week, broke out when an Israeli truck collided with two cars full of Palestinian workers, which Palestinians took to be a deliberate Israeli reprisal. The second exploded after Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount, when Israeli policemen shot and killed outraged Muslim protesters.)