Bibi’s Strategy, Ctd

Larison is unconvinced by Rich Lowry’s cheerleading for Israel in the Gaza war, which Lowry attributes entirely to Hamas’ “depraved indifference to the safety of Gazans”. If Lowry is right about Hamas’ aims, Larison argues, that actually illustrates why Israel going to war hurts its own interests in the long term:

The summary is misleading at best, but even if we accept all of it as true it doesn’t make Israel’s current military operation defensible. Hamas may want war and civilian casualties, and it is fully responsible for everything that it does, but that doesn’t justify Israel in giving them what they want. Nothing could better sum up the irrationality of defenders of the current operation than the argument Lowry is offering here. We’re supposed to accept that Israel’s government mustn’t be faulted for what it’s doing, because Israeli forces are inflicting death and destruction that predictably redounds to Hamas’ political benefit. According to this view, Hamas is the only one to be blamed for the consequences of the military overreaction that has stupidly given Hamas an unwelcome boost. This is little better than the foreign policy equivalent of saying “the devil made me do it,” as if it that made everything all right.

And Daniel Byman argues that Israel’s strategy of heavy-handed deterrence often ends up producing the opposite outcome:

Because Israel is arguably the most casualty-sensitive country in the world, deterrence is even harder. With nuclear weapons and carpet-bombing off the table, Israel needs to go in on the ground to achieve its objectives — but ground operations can lead to Israeli casualties that actually undermine its deterrence.

In 2011, it traded over 1,000 prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006. Israel has even traded high-level prisoners for the bodies of its dead soldiers. As a result, the body counts for successful deterrence are often staggering and highly disproportionate: In the 2008-2009 Cast Lead operation, Israel killed more than 1,200 Palestinians and suffered only 13 losses of its own — roughly a 100-1 ratio. This, of course, makes Israel look even more callous.

Brent Sasley doesn’t think much of Netanyahu’s stated goal of “sustainable quiet”:

As far as I can tell, “quiet” is defined as a number of rockets, preferably not by Hamas, so long as they don’t cause any damage, certainly don’t kill any Israelis, and there’s nothing else that requires a bigger Israeli response. That, I think, is the goal.

Now, my concern is that Israel doesn’t have a strategic agenda for the region as a whole, which means it doesn’t have a strategic goal in this operation. Not a Bibi problem, it’s an Israel problem. There’s a history to it — that’s how Israel developed, it’s been forced on the defensive, it thinks reactively instead of proactively, and so on. Those are all important explanations, but it goes beyond that. After a certain point, it becomes a cop-out to say “Israel just can’t think long-term.”

Now, some people say that there is a strategy — that horrible term “mowing the grass,” or I guess a “war of attrition” is a more sophisticated way of saying it. That’s a holding pattern, as far as I can see. Israel doesn’t have a national security strategy, it’s never really articulated one.

So what Hamas has to gain by firing rockets is more political than anything else:

Israeli officials say the system has intercepted more than 80 percent of the incoming rockets it targeted during this conflict, with most others missing their targets or landing in empty space. But Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says Hamas reaps benefits from showering Israel with missiles, even if they don’t hit their targets. “Their ability to disrupt life in Israel is big, because every time they fire a volley of rockets, sirens go off and everyone runs for shelter,” White says. “School gets closed, life gets disrupted, it puts people under a lot of strain.”

The strikes could have economic effects as well, as evidenced by this week’s decision from the Federal Aviation Authority to halt all flights into Israel after a long-range missile landed near Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv — a decision that White describes as “a huge development.” (The ban was lifted late Wednesday, after the FAA said it was satisfied with safety measures that Israel implemented.)

Goldblog, however, is more concerned about Hamas’s tunnels than its rockets:

Israelis appear adamant that any cease-fire agreement reached between the parties must eradicate the threat of these kidnapping tunnels, at a minimum. Anything short of this will fail to bring any stability to the region. Hamas, which is incapable of envisioning peace and reconciliation in the manner of advocates for a two-state solution, and which has already rejected multiple calls for cease-fires, is demanding that Israel and Egypt (which has Gaza’s southern border blockaded as well) reopen both Gaza’s borders and its ports.

This would be insanity. For years, Hamas leaders demanded that Israel allow them to import concrete in order to build homes for Gaza’s poor. We now know where so much of this concrete went — into the tunnels that run under Israel’s border, and into bunkers and bomb shelters for Gaza’s ruling elite. (The civilians of Gaza, the ones exposed to Israel’s bombardments, do not benefit from these exclusive bomb shelters).

Overall, Mitchell Plitnick contends, Hamas is sort of winning:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been working to help find a ceasefire formula. In the past, Hamas would disavow Abbas’ authority to negotiate for them, but they have not done so this time. That’s because Abbas is arguing for Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire. That makes Abbas, rather than any Egyptian or Turkish leader, the contact point between Hamas and Israel. It also symbolically demonstrates that the Palestinians have a unified government — Abbas is presenting himself as the leader of all of Palestine, including Gaza, without saying so or ruffling any of Hamas’ feathers.

Israel’s goal in starting this round of fighting was to destroy the unity deal between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Thus far, the opposite seems to have materialized. Abbas is in agreement with Hamas’ goals, and is apparently fully representing them. That represents a major failure for Netanyahu.

Previous Dish on Netanyahu’s political and military strategy in the Gaza war here.