The botched Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip on 12 November is delineating Tel Aviv’s failure to utilize its army as a tool to achieve Palestinian political concessions.
Now that Palestinian popular resistance has gone global through the exponential rise and growing success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement, the Israeli government is fighting two desperate wars.
Following the Gaza attack, Palestinians responded by showering the southern Israeli border with rockets and carried out a precise operation targeting an Israeli army bus. As Palestinians marched in celebration of pushing the Israeli army out of their besieged enclave, the fragile political order in Israel – long-managed by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – was quickly unravelling.
Two days after the Israeli attack on Gaza, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman quit in protest of Netanyahu’s ‘surrender’ to the Palestinian resistance. Israeli leaders are in a precarious situation. Untamed violence comes at a price of international condemnation and a Palestinian response that is bolder and more strategic every time. However, failing to teach Gaza its proverbial ‘lesson’ is viewed as an act of surrender by opportunistic Israeli politicians.
While Israel is experiencing such limitations on the traditional battlefield, which it once completely dominated, its war against the global BDS movement is surely a lost battle. Israel has a poor track record in confronting civil society-based mobilization. Despite the vulnerability of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, it took the Israeli government and military seven long years to pacify the Intifada, the popular uprising of 1987. Even on this, the jury is still out on what truly ended the popular revolt.
Of course, it should be accepted that a global Intifada is much more difficult to suppress, or even contain. Yet, when Israel began to sense the growing danger of BDS – which was officially launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005 – it responded with the same superfluous and predictable pattern: arrests, violence and a torrent of laws that criminalize dissent at home, while unleashing an international campaign of intimidation and smearing of boycott activists and organizations.