Ben Buckman.net

I haven't had any brilliant insights to add about the Gaza situation, but a few points keep coming back to me. First, the Israeli-Arab conflict is a perpetual chicken and egg dilemna. Moral/moralistic outlooks on war assume an aggressor (bad) and defender (good), so "who started it?" is a vital question, but with Israel involved, boths sides can always plausibly claim to be the victim. Every argument I've engaged in or observed about the latest conflict went something like this: Israel is defending itself against rockets -- but Hamas is defending itself against the siege -- but Israel closed the borders to stop weapong smuggling -- but Hamas needs weapons to defend itself against Israeli raids -- and on and on.

The most recent fighting ended a relatively long hudna (cease-fire). Who ended it? Well, Israel did on November 5th (from the Guardian):

Israeli troops crossed into the Gaza Strip late last night near the town of Deir al-Balah. The Israeli military said the target of the raid was a tunnel that they said Hamas was planning to use to capture Israeli soldiers positioned on the border fence 250m away.

So that violation preempted an imminent Hamas violation. And Hamas fired rockets and mortars intermittently throughout the hudna, ostensibly all in response to Israeli raids which were themselves retaliation or preemption... so no one respected the hudna, and everyone was justified in breaking it. Both sides used the hudna to prepare for more fighting, which is not unusual for cease-fires anywhere, especially in the Middle East.

Another absurd factor in everything Palestine-related is that everyone knows what "needs" to happen. Obama was on ABC this morning and described it well: all the players know what needs to happen but it's "politically difficult." Precisely: Hamas needs to stop firing and stockpiling rockets. Then Israel needs to open up the borders. Then Hamas needs to accept Israel's existence and form a joint negotiating team with Fatah. Then they need to reach a "final status agreement." It's all so simple and yet so impossible. Because in reality Hamas wants to remain relevant, and that means continuing to fight Israel and opposing Fatah. (Jeffrey Goldberg writes about Hamas' ideological implacability - at its core Hamas is an Islamic-fundamentalist terrorist group devoted to Israel's God-ordained destruction - making most rational prescriptions irrelevant.)

It's worth noting what isn't happening: there aren't rockets flying out of the West Bank every day. In fact, Fatah seems to be actively preventing violence in the West Bank, so Israel has no cause for a large-scale invasion of Fatah-controlled territory. In other words, the Palestinian faction in charge does matter a great deal. The old argument that "the PA doesn't control anything anyway" has become irrelevant. A decisive shift of power in Gaza back to Fatah really would change the whole picture, and bringing that about should be an objective of international political efforts.

Of course it's possible that Hamas just gives Fatah cover for a phony good-cop-bad-cop game, but it seems more likely to me that the PA sees the obvious: Hamas' continued fighting serves no one's constructive ends. No matter how self-righteously oppressed the Palestinians feel, aimlessly firing rockets at civilians in southern Israel accomplishes nothing. It doesn't weaken Israel militarily; it doesn't encourage diplomacy; it doesn't bring the destruction of Israel, the creation of a Palestinian state, the Mahdi, or Peace on Earth a minute closer. So what's the point?

Hamas booby-trapped a school the other day, for no reason other than to blame Israel for the murder of innocent children when it exploded. (The IDF probably got local intel and neutralized the explosives. They don't get international applause for that, though, but you can bet they would have been condemned if it had gone off.) The extent of Israel's intelligence in Gaza is encouraging; the hope is that, when this fighting ends, public opinion in Gaza will shift against Hamas, but frankly I doubt that'll happen.

A slightly more realistic end-game for this round of fighting is an international monitoring force for the borders. If Israel can destroy enough weapons caches and tunnels and kill enough skilled operatives in these weeks, then the addition of UN-mandated monitors - bolstered by Egypt which harbors no love of Hamas - could have a real impact. I doubt rockets would drop to zero, but they'd be "manageable" like the West Bank.

The test for this operation, like Lebanon in 2006, will be its end result. The operation is morally justified in an abstract sense, but is only really justified, in my opinion, if it accomplishes something constructive. Israel failed that test in Lebanon. I hope it succeeds this time. Then the ball will be back in the Palestinians' split court.