Israel mulls risky response to Hamas

By MICHAEL OREN

how he sees it

Israel mulls risky response to Hamas

Imagine waking up and discovering you are one of the Israeli leaders who must decide whether to attack Gaza. If you do not, Palestinian missiles will keep falling on the civilians of southern Israel. Half the country will be paralyzed and Israel’s deterrence power — vital to its survival in an implacably hostile region — will vanish. But if you do, sending Israeli forces to subdue the terrorists, great numbers of Palestinian civilians will probably be killed. The world will condemn Israel for a “disproportionate” display of power and other Middle Eastern countries are liable to join the fight. And the rocket fire will almost certainly continue.

How did Israel find itself in such a predicament? Is there any way out?

Israel, let’s recall, withdrew from Gaza in August 2005, dismantling its military bases and uprooting more than 8,000 civilian settlers. Though unilateral, Israel’s move gave the Palestinians their first chance at genuine sovereignty. But rather than grasp that opportunity, the Palestinians celebrated what they saw as the first stage in Israel’s defeat and fired 1,000 homemade Qassam rockets into Israeli territory. The Qassams were notoriously inaccurate and the Israelis, desperate to forget Gaza, simply ignored them. But Gaza would not be ignored.

Gaza had long been dominated by Hamas, an Islamic extremist group dedicated to Israel’s destruction, which bested al-Fatah in the Palestinian elections of January 2006. The Middle East had its first Sunni Jihadist state and Israel had a new Iranian ally on its southern border. Nevertheless, after several months of Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli retaliations, Hamas agreed to a “Hudna,” or limited truce. Just how limited became evident as Hamas gunmen dug a tunnel under the Gaza fence and used it that June to attack an Israeli base, killing two soldiers and kidnapping a third. The incident, which encouraged Hezbollah to ambush an Israeli patrol on the Lebanese border, helped trigger the Second Lebanon War. A year later, Hamas evicted the last of al-Fatah’s officials from Gaza, publicly shooting some and hurling others from rooftops.

Rockets from Iran

The missile fire from Gaza, meanwhile, never abated and was gradually augmented by more powerful rockets from Iran. Ashkelon, the ancient seaport and modern Israeli metropolis situated eight miles north of Gaza, soon came within range. By the beginning of 2008, more than 4,000 projectiles had been launched from Gaza into Israel. Eleven civilians were killed and dozens wounded, while a large swath of Israeli territory was rendered uninhabitable. The Israeli army did not remain idle, of course, but responded with aerial strikes and small-scale land incursions. These killed hundreds of Palestinians, most of them militiamen, but failed to stop the rocket fire. On the contrary, the barrages only intensified.

Faced with this deteriorating situation, you as an Israeli leader would have to choose between several policies, all of them perilous. You can restrict the supply of the electricity and basic commodities to Gaza in the hope that its hard-pressed population will demand a halt to Hamas aggression. But Israel has tried similar blockades in the past only to be condemned by the United Nations for collectively punishing the Palestinians. Alternatively, you could order Israeli troops to flush out Hamas cells in Gaza and destroy their rocket factories. Al-Fatah, perhaps under the aegis of NATO, could then re-assume responsibility. But such an operation would invariably result in numerous civilian deaths, leading to further U.N. denunciations and demands for an Israeli withdrawal. In the worse-case scenario, Hezbollah will once again join the fray, precipitating another round of Lebanon fighting which, this time, could escalate into a regional conflagration involving Syria and Iran. And having been reinstated at Israeli gunpoint, al-Fatah is unlikely to show moderation. The rockets will continue falling.

Which of these actions could you pursue without worsening this nightmare and possibly igniting a war?

Your solution may lie in adopting a combination of measures, military and diplomatic. While maintaining a partial blockade of Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force can ratchet up aerial strikes against Hamas officials. Ground operations can also be expanded to clear the border of launching sites and to keep Hamas forces off-balance. Israeli artillery might also shoot back at areas from which rockets are fired — a proposal now favored by some leftist politicians — after the civilian population is warned.

Yet, even this cocktail of policies may not eliminate or even reduce the rocket-fire. Ultimately, the Gaza crisis can only be resolved by addressing its sources — the smuggling of money and munitions across the Egyptian border and, above all, the financial support that Hamas receives from Iran. Progress in the peace talks with al-Fatah leaders would also contribute to a solution to Gaza, but at the price of excruciating Israeli concessions.

X Oren is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, an academic and research center in Jerusalem and the author of “Power Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present” (Norton 2008). Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.