A dispiriting yet accurate assessment of Israel’s options by Max Boot in today’s Wall Street Journal. His assessment coincides with a couple of conversations I’ve had with Israeli friends over the last few days. When it comes to Gaza, Israel could settle accounts completely with Hamas if it were willing to wage a WWII-style total war for complete victory. But being a liberal, humanitarian country, Israel will not fight a scorched-earth war against Hamas:
But Israel is not Russia — or Algeria or Burma or Syria or any other state that has taken a scorched-earth approach to counterinsurgency in recent decades. Israel is a liberal democracy in the modern age whose military operations are conducted under the intense scrutiny of lawyers, judges, opposition politicians, reporters and human-rights activists. And those are just its own internal watchdogs. To these must be added the “international community,” which monitors Israeli actions with a degree of interest and antipathy reserved for no other state in the world.
For all the accusations of brutality that are routinely flung at Israel’s armed forces, their conduct has been exemplary by historical standards. They have shown far less propensity for indiscriminate killing or torture than did European states in the 1950s when confronting insurgencies in such places as Kenya, Cyprus, Vietnam and Algeria, where the stakes for them were considerably less. The only comparable example of restraint is the conduct of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States, too, earns world-wide opprobrium for alleged brutality rather than approbation for its humanity.
Whether it gets credit or not, however, the U.S. has been right to use very limited firepower because in the kind of war it is fighting — a classic counterinsurgency — brutality can be counterproductive. Killing too many people, especially if they are the wrong people, risks jeopardizing popular support for elected governments that are likely to be important American allies in the future.
But the counterinsurgency that American is fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan is different from the situation confronting Israel in Gaza. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there are possible allies that can be cultivated to work against the insurgents. In Gaza, that is simply not a possibility:
The tragedy for Israel is that a strategy of bolstering indigenous allies is not an option in Gaza. Hamas is, for all of the flaws of the electoral process, the choice of the people. No matter how much of a beating it suffers, there is little reason to think that Fatah could or would come in and effectively administer the territory in a way that would safeguard Israel’s security. In the current, feverish atmosphere of Palestinian politics, those who would act with restraint toward the “Zionist entity” are branded as “collaborators” and liable to be killed.
So this means that Israel is compelled to fight an open-ended war without the possibility of total victory and only the prospect of relative equilibrium.
