Israel, which is pre-occupied with Lebanon, pulled most of its forces from Gaza Tuesday morning, both Israel and the Palestinians said, without having achieved Israel’s two main goals:

  • The release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped three weeks ago by Hamas;
  • The silencing of Qassam rocket fire on Israel, which continues daily.

Palestinian leaders and media were not celebrating the occasion.

“There is no doubt that what is going on in Gaza and other Palestinian land and in fraternal Lebanon is an indication that there is a clear and recurrent Israeli policy that encompasses realizing goals far beyond the matter of the soldiers imprisoned in Lebanon or in Palestine,” declared Palestinian Prime Minister Ismai’l Hanniye.

” The goals [of Israeli policy] are the breaking the desire of these peoples, and defeating the expectations of this nation, and sowing the defeat of the Islamic peoples and the Arab peoples,” declared Prime Minister Hanniye in a briefing aired on Palestinian television Tuesday morning.

Both Hanniye’s Hamas movement and the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas have supported the attacks from Lebanon on Israel, and their respective media have applauded what they call “Lebanese resistance.”

For example, the Fatah-controlled Al-Ayyam newspaper ran a cartoon poking fun of Israel’s Lebanese experience, including the deaths last week of four soldiers in an Israeli tank trying to rescue two other soldiers abducted Hizballah.

The cartoon shows a tank stuck in the Lebanese mud as the Israeli soldiers inside vainly call for help:

“We’re here. Can you hear us?” Al-AYYAM July 13-14-06 www.al-ayyam.com/znews/site/template/caricature.aspx?cid=637

Leading Fatah officials have also excoriated Israel and supported Hizballah, including PA President Abbas, who has been trying to stress his own role in trying to free imprisoned Palestinian terrorists, as well as Dr. Nabil Sha’ath an aide to Abbas and late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.

“We call on the world to stand with Palestine and Lebanon and to stop the tyrannical Israeli aggression-Israeli state terrorism-to stop the destruction of infrastructure and national institutions,” declared Sha’ath, generally considered a Palestinian moderate.

“This is not the object of a party in Palestine or a party in Lebanon but rather the object of the Palestinian people and its future and the object of the Lebanese people and its future,” said Sha’ath, making a pun and a not-so-veiled reference to Hizballah-which, in Arabic, means “Party of God.”

PA Prime Minister Hanniye, whose Hamas movement abducted 21-year-old soldier Shalit, hardly seemed overjoyed at the turn of events in recent weeks, despite the apparent failure of the Israeli operation’s main goals, because of three factors:

.–More than 20 Palestinian terrorists were killed in the Beit Hanoun area alone, and millions in dollars in Palestinian infrastructure damage was inflicted;

.–The internal Palestinian political, economic and strategic situation is worse than ever;

.–And Palestinians and Israelis know that in the Israeli-Lebanese arena have momentarily taken precedence, but Israeli forces have not left Gaza permanently.

The Israeli withdrawal did not come from Palestinian pressure apparently but from an apparent Israeli decision to concentrate on three other fronts:

.–the immediate goal of silencing the even greater rocket fire from Iranian-controlled Hizballah terrorists in Lebanon, where 50-100 rockets have rained on a broad swathe of Israel for nearly a week, unlike the average of five to ten smaller Qassam rockets that land regularly in a relatively small section of southern Israel;

.–the longer-term goal of destroying or neutralizing the Iranian-controlled and Syrian-aided Hizballah militia in Lebanon, while also trying to prevent the spread of incipient Qassam rocket attacks from the West Bank to Israel;

.–and the long-term strategic goal of dealing with Iran and Syria, both of whom have essentially used an equipped Hizballah as a unit of their armed forces.

Dr. Michael Widlanski is a specialist in Arab politics and communication whose doctorate dealt with the Palestinian broadcast media. He is a former reporter, correspondent and editor, respectively, at The New York Times, The Cox Newspapers-Atlanta Constitution, and The Jerusalem Post.

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