Can Israel Survive Its Assault on Gaza?
How to Deal with Hamas
The most immediate challenge facing Israel is that posed by Hamas. Gaza's tragedy has for days been playing out on the world's TV sets. By Jan. 7, more than 700 Palestinians, many of them noncombatants, had been killed. But there's something tragic, too, in Israel's predicament: in any confrontation with its enemies, it is damned if it does and doomed if it doesn't. Across Israel's political spectrum there seems to be a consensus that Hamas' provocative rocket barrages could not go unanswered — though whether Israel's response has been proportional to the threat is, at the least, questionable.
Perhaps more threatening than the rockets themselves was the doubt they cast over Israel's vaunted power of deterrence, which is key to keeping its hostile neighbors at bay. That power was badly eroded in 2006, when Hizballah was able to withstand the Israeli onslaught, force a cease-fire and claim victory in the process. That surely emboldened Hamas, which intermittently sent rockets into southern Israel and finally prompted Israel to respond in force. As respected Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, "A country that is afraid to deal with Hamas won't be able either to deter Iran or to safeguard its interests in dealing with Syria, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority."
But the cold reality is that eventually Israel may need to look not to "deal" with Hamas so much as do a deal with it. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he doesn't intend to topple Hamas; he knows Israel can't fill the vacuum of leadership that its elimination would produce in Gaza. Neither can Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's preferred Palestinian leader, who is fading into the background in the West Bank. So Israel has said it will be satisfied if Hamas stops shooting rockets and an international force polices the Egyptian border to keep the militants from re-arming themselves with weapons smuggled through tunnels.
Hamas says it will agree to a truce if Israel retreats from Gaza and loosens the economic choke hold that has strangled the 1.5 million Palestinians who live on the sliver of land along the Mediterranean. After weeks of global outrage over the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Gaza, any mediator — France, the European Union, Turkey and Egypt are all auditioning for the role — will insist that Israel end its 18-month blockade.
What then? Like Hizballah, Hamas will declare itself victorious: not only will it have survived a direct assault by a far superior military force, but it will also have freed Gazans from Israeli tyranny. As an added bonus, any economic revival of Gaza would put money into Hamas' coffers. But Israel would gain some breathing space and force Hamas to prove it can actually govern and maintain stability in Gaza rather than heap blame entirely on Israel.
The Specter of Iran
One indirect objective of the Gaza offensive might have been to warn off Israel's other nonstate militant foe: Hizballah. While the Lebanese group has been cheering on Hamas from the sidelines, it has refrained from entering the fray. Hizballah may have a stockpile of new rockets, but Israeli generals hope Gaza will serve as a cautionary example of what would happen if it used them. This is a reassuring thought, but it remains to be tested. After all, Hizballah's rockets have only one purpose, and that is to be used against Israel.
The broader aim of the Gaza war, Israeli security experts argue, was to send a message to Hamas' sponsor, Iran. It's certainly true that the assault has broken the Iranian pipeline that delivered weapons and funds to the militants. But by killing hundreds of Palestinians, Israel may have undermined its hopes of forming common cause with moderate Sunni Arab states against the nuclear ambitions of Shi'ite Iran.
The Gaza offensive has greatly weakened Israel's few Arab allies. Moderate Arab countries that were edging closer to recognition of the Jewish state are now recoiling from what they see as the slaughter of fellow Arabs in Gaza. In Egypt, pro-Gaza protests turned into thinly veiled attacks on President Hosni Mubarak's rule, which has helped maintain the blockade of Gaza. The pressure may force Mubarak to support a truce that entails opening the Egypt-Gaza border as Hamas demands, but he is unlikely to soften his position on the Palestinian group that maintains links with Egyptian Islamists as well as the Iranian regime.
But how far Arab states will be willing to go now to make peace with Israel is unclear. The Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Plan, which offered Israel peace with 22 Arab countries if it withdrew to its 1967 borders, will remain on the table for Israel's new PM to consider. Even Syria, a prime supporter of Hamas, spent part of 2008 in indirect peace talks with Israel mediated by Turkey. But Syria has broken off its talks for now, destroying any chance that Damascus, on behalf of Israel, might put pressure on the exiled Hamas leaders residing there.
Confronting the Danger Within
Even in a dangerous neighborhood, it is possible to imagine that, secure in its military power, Israel could continue for years in a state of neither all-out war nor true peace, always willing to fight bitter but limited conflicts of the kind it did in Lebanon and Gaza. But military might would be useless against the threat that looms within its borders. Israel's population of 7.1 million is today divided into 5.4 million Jews and 1.6 million Arabs. But if you include Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, they may already have a slender majority; and given their higher birthrate, the gap will widen quickly. This tectonic shift in demographics is what scared even hawkish Israelis like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into abandoning the biblical dreams of a Greater Israel stretching all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. As Olmert recently warned, "If we are determined to preserve the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel, we must inevitably relinquish, with great pain, parts of our homeland." In other words, if Israelis cling to the West Bank and Gaza, as many religious Zionists insist, Jews will find themselves a shrinking minority in their own state.
Not only would Israel cease to be a Jewish state, it would no longer be a democratic one either, unless Arabs are given a fair share of power. A few bold Arab intellectuals are saying Palestinians should abandon the idea of a two-state solution and just wait until they outnumber the Jews. That would take decades, and it may rest more on wishful thinking by Palestinians than a real calculation of political reality. But the population shift underscores a plain fact: for Israel, the status quo won't be good enough for much longer.
A Road Map for Survival
The path to a workable peace, one with a Palestinian state alongside Israel and both with internationally recognized borders, has long been well known. A succession of Israeli and Palestinian leaders have been reluctant to take it. Israelis have doubted that they had a partner who could deliver them peace; aside from being plagued by disunity, the Palestinians have been unwilling to modify their demands that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to their ancient homes inside Israel, which Israel will never accept. With a general election looming in Israel — polls suggest that the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to become the next Prime Minister — there is an opportunity to start talking again.
Israel's leaders need to recognize that if Hamas cannot be beaten militarily, then it must be engaged politically. That means accepting the idea of dealing with some kind of Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas. A coalition between Hamas and Abbas is essential for the future of a Palestinian state and for moderating Hamas' extremism. Hamas, which 18 months ago chased Abbas' men from Gaza, says it will pair up with Abbas if he, along with the international community, recognizes that the Islamic militants legitimately came to power in the January 2006 elections. Israelis rightly view such claims with skepticism, and yet all Palestinians and their Arab backers reject the current situation, where the meager land set aside for a future state is chopped into two, Gaza and the West Bank, ruled by rivals.
A new Administration in Washington has a chance to be both supportive of Israel and honest with it. Over the past three years, many Israelis have told me that President George W. Bush was too good a friend of theirs. He gave Israelis all they wanted but didn't rein them in when they needed it. Israel eventually will have to pull back to the 1967 borders and dismantle many of the settlements on the Palestinian side, no matter how loudly its ultra-religious parties protest. Only then will the Palestinians and the other Arab states agree to a durable peace. It's as simple as that. But for 60 years, in the Holy Land, there has been a yawning gap between what was simple and what could be achieved.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1870314-3,00.html
