Gaza
One of the sad things about the situation in Israel and the Territories is how easy it is to predict the course of events. After Hamas starting launching rockets into Southern Israel, the political and emotional logic of the situation basically necessitated that Israel would strike back in fantastic form. Especially considering that Hamas was just yearning to break out from their Egytpian negotiated detente with Israel, and that Israel is still desperate to undermine Hamas’ leadership in Gaza – not to mention the upcoming elections – it was all too obvious that Hamas would provoke Israel, Israel would strike back and collectively punish the Gazans (hoping to get them to abandon Hamas).
Of course, it would be totally naive to think that anything will be meaningfully improved from the Israeli perspective, or if there is some marginal security improvement, that it could possibly be justified in light of the long term security consequences or the widespread death in Gaza. To elaborate on the first point, in a few weeks, Hamas will gleefully display the bodies of the dead, and as the entire Arab world becomes enraged, Abbas’ position in the West Bank will be undermined as the Palestinian polity (not to mention the Arab one) turns in on itself and any cooperation with Israel from Syria (on which front there had been some promise) will be totally undermined, at least for a while. Considering that the long term security consequences for Israel of this action are surely negative, and yet it’s hard to imagine Israel doing anything else, it seems like there needs to be some external source of pressure to get Israel to do something else. I wonder who that could be?
