A War Without Victory

This is a very different war from the one Israel waged in Lebanon during the summer of 2006; a war that Israel, by almost all measures, lost. Today Hezbollah is better armed, further entrenched, and has greater prestige in the Sunni world than before the campaign. But Hezbollah had the critical capacity to rearm — quickly. And it also had the capacity to orchestrate the rebuilding of Southern Lebanon. Gaza is as effectively isolated as an island. The majority of Hamas' weapons and rockets have transited into the territory via tunnels to Egypt, tunnels which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has entered Gaza with the intention of destroying.

But to think that this is a more winnable endeavor; to think that tunnels will not re-emerge; to think that a population of 1.4 million can be kept suffocating; to think that Israel can ever eradicate the threat posed by occupying territories, is the gravest mistake of this decades-old war.

I think there's a section of Israeli leadership — and a certainly a portion of foreign policy intellectuals — that quietly recognizes the current paradigm as preferable to the alternative. The current paradigm invokes the occasional strike in the night — like that against Iraq in 1981 or Syria in 2007 — and the occasional war, in which several hundred adversaries are killed, threats are marginally reduced, and several dozen young Israelis die honorably defending the homeland. That, one can argue, is less threatening to Israel than the alternative.

The alternative being a flourishing Palestinian state, armed both overtly and covertly by Arab neighbors, populated by the young and the worn, both with fresh memory of 50 years of incursion, humiliation, and loss. A population that almost certainly won't forget that it only holds a fraction — roughly 6 percent — of the land initially promised before 1967.

Israel would no longer have the privilege of disarmament at will. Nor would it be able to employ the tactic of stoic isolation it employs with many of its adversarial neighbors. A functional Palestine, with which Israel would likely have to share a capital city, would be too close to hold at arms length, and too sovereign to subdue at will.

But even if broader Israeli opinion were to quietly accept with this fomenting, unspoken thought, the reality would remain: It is vital to U.S.

interest that the conflict be solved, that Israel be at peace with all nations of the region, and that Palestine becomes a functioning state. It's not lost on anyone in the region that Israel's allies — Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — are more friends of the family, grudgingly linked to Israel via the U.S., than friends of natural affection.

So what if Israel completely crushes Hamas? What if it manages to destroy most of the tunnels that reach further into the Sinai toward Egypt? What if Israel at large comes to believe that there's no chance that Palestinians can run a functional state and that they're safer maintaining the past century's status quo?

A good deal of the dialogue alongside this war has centered upon the terror invoked by Hamas rockets. Many Israelis suggest the world at large does not know what it is like to live in Sderot, whose residents live in fear of being killed at any moment by rogue missiles fired blindly from Gaza. Those more inclined to the Palestinian persuasion suggest that rockets reap comparatively little damage — only five Israeli civilians having been killed thus far in the conflict — and serve as the only leverage Hamas has in dealing with Israel.

Neither opinion holds much consequence for the near future.

What matters is that Gazans, who the International Crisis Group has reported were overwhelmingly opposed to missile deployment during the cease-fire, now feel that the rockets aren't enough, that only suicide bombers can inspire fear comparable to their own in their Israeli counterparts — a fear they are desperate not to stomach alone.

Israel was not wrong to have invaded Gaza after coming under attack; it was wrong, however, to build a political and economic asphyxiation that guaranteed nothing else.

Thirty years ago Fatah was the Palestinian faction too militant for the international community to engage; in 20 years Hamas, or another incarnations of Hamas, will be the stable actor we break bread with while another faction, perhaps more Salafist in hue, bedevils notions of peace.

Even if Israel comes to terms with its willingness to maintain the status quo, the rest of the world cannot.

Brian Till, one of the nation's youngest syndicated columnists, is a research associate for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington. He can be contacted at till@newamerica.net. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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