Controlling the Terms of the War
"Our goal is not to reoccupy the Gaza Strip," said Israel's Foreign Minister. Asked if Israel was out to topple Gaza's Hamas rulers, she said, "Not now."
If not occupy, then control. And there is no better time than now.
Until the weekend, Hamas has determined the timing and intensity of its attacks against Israeli citizens. Israel adopted a generally defensive position, with occasional pinpoint strikes that left much of the Hamas/Iranian infrastructure intact. Now that Israel has launched a big, multipronged strike, a reasonable question is, "What does Israel have to accomplish to make this operation worthwhile?"
Israel has to make the attacks stop. How to do it is Israel's business and Israel's alone. But why assure the Hamas leadership that it will remain in power and Israel will stop short of occupying the territory from which terrorism is planned, organized and launched? To do so is to set up the future Hamas victory in precisely the way Israel inadvertently set up the Hezbollah victory in 2006. For Israel to "win," it has to achieve security for its people. For Hamas (like Hezbollah) to "win," it only has to remain viable after the battle. There should be no reason for Hamas to expect that it will.
Retaliation for the misery Hamas has inflicted on Israel is appropriate, if messy. But in the long run, Israel has to return to the principles that kept it safe in the past.
Facing enemies with larger populations and less sensitivity to civilian casualties (or, in fact, who find civilian casualties useful for propaganda purposes), the IDF had two principles: a) small country; short war and b) small country; fight on the enemy's battlefield and don't permit a war of attrition against your people to develop.
These principles were lost in the early days of the Second Intifada, when bombings and attacks inside Israel were met with bigger and better metal detectors. After the Passover Seder Massacre, however, the IDF went on the offensive. First in Jenin then elsewhere, the old Areas A, B and C of Oslo were abolished and the IDF began to root out the terrorist infrastructure. They took security control and made it nearly impossible for the Palestinians to organize and execute terrorist acts. Six years later, Palestinian security forces are beginning to take over the day-to-day police functions, but Israel remains in control of counter-terrorism.
To those who say, "There is no military solution" - horse hockey! There may be no military way to make Palestinians like Israelis, but who really cares? There certainly is a military way to make Palestinian terrorists and their leadership stop rocketing Israelis. Whoever has security control of the territory from which terrorism is launched has control of the terms of the war.
Israel painfully proved in the West Bank that it is possible to win a war against terrorists; in Lebanon, it painfully allowed the terrorists a victory by default. In Gaza, Israel has no choice but to ensure that control of territory is in Israel's hands - at a minimum by maintaining the ability to strike when and where necessary.
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