Cross posted from my blog on the Times of Israel
We can invade Gaza, we can bomb it from the air, we can kill Gaza’s leaders, we can deprive Gazans of electricity and drinking water, we can control the sea around the territory and the air above it is clear that the one thing that we are unable to do is stop them shooting at us.
That’s a shame because it’s the only thing we actually want to do.
There are people who argue that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) hasn’t done enough, there are people who argue that it has done too much but in either case the debate is only about how much to punish Gaza and the people living there for the fact that there are projectiles being fired from their territory.
Victory lies in convincing Hamas to stop shooting, not in punishing them for shooting at us. At the time of writing sirens have just gone off in Tel Aviv and a four year old boy has died in the South of Israel. Testament to the failure of our political ad military leaders to stop Hamas. So far.
A part of me wishes to scream at the government, at the IDF and at the world entire “they are shooting at us, we must attack and we must not stop until the job is done!” But what job is this? We used to occupy Gaza and we ate rockets then too. We lost soldiers then also, to what end will we now invest our military might in Gaza when the motivation of Hamas to attack us will remain undiminished, even thrive?
Earlier in the week Israel scored a major tactical victory against Hamas with the targeted assassination of three major Hamas leaders. The Times of Israel reported that;
One, Muhammad Abu Shamala, was said to be the commander of the entire southern district of the Gaza Strip. Another, Raed al-Attar, was the commander of the Rafah region. The third, Muhammad Barhoun, like al-Attar, was deeply involved in the smuggling of arms from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula to Gaza. Shamala and Attar, as TOI’s Avi Issacharoff noted, were founding members of Hamas’s military wing.
Perhaps even more importantly it appears that the IDF has also managed to assassinate the nominal head of the Hamas military wing Muhammed Deif, a man whose name has become something of a buzz word over the last month and whom most of us had never heard of before hand. He has survived 5 assassination attempts in the past.
But all this has really done is show us the limits of the use of force. Killing these men served to increase the amount rockets and mortars being fired at Israel. Hamas has indeed been punished, but we did not achieve our goal of ensuring quiet for Israel. Indeed if the goal of assassinating these men was to gain quiet for Israel that goal was not achieved. If it was to punish Hamas one needs to ask whether it was worth it.
Everyone seems to think that there is an answer. That there is something Israel can do to end the madness. Be it more military action or less, appeasement or aggression. I’m not so sure that there is an answer. In the short term appeasement will gain us some quiet. In the long term aggression may manage to damp down the scale of attack against us. But it appears that we have no meaningful way of stopping the violence altogether.
And so perhaps we who live here are simply doomed to face the wrath of Hamas for the fact that we exist on the one hand and the wrath of the world for fighting Hamas on the other without any hope of achieving the only objective that makes any sense; Peace.
