Bare hours after lifting the food and media blackout just long enough to get some nice pictures of 90-some trucks of token food supplies rolling into Gaza — a mere drop in the bucket for the area’s needs — the Israeli government has now launched a brutal attack on, and invasion of, Gaza:
Well, so much for peace. Looks like Siun was right, and the deliveries yesterday were just a pathetic public relations ploy. Israel managed to assassinate the police chief, governor, and security chief. A first strike bombing like this can do a fair bit of damage, as it did, but Hamas will now disperse its people and assets, and future bombings will be less effective. Hamas missile counterattacks killed, oh, one person.
Air power, in the end, doesn’t do squat in a war like this. The leaders killed will be replaced, and not by moderates. The missile attacks (which are scary but essentially ineffective) will continue. Gazans will hate Israelis even more. To get anything “meaningful” accomplished Israel has to invade on foot—they have to search for the missiles and the missile production centers.
When they do, they put themselves at risk. Hamas has destroyed Israeli tanks in the past, and has spent the last couple years building up a small military force modeled on Hezbollah. If they can adopt Hezbollah’s open terrain tactics to city fighting they could inflict some reasonable damage. Because of the small size of Gaza, it’s unlikely that they can win tactically, but politically, the goal is just to show Israel that they can’t take Hamas out using military force and that they can’t slap Hamas around without taking enough casualties to notice.
This is the lesson Israel was taught by Hezbollah during their invasion—that their issues with Hezbollah cannot be solved with military force (which is why, in the end, the Israelis made the prisoner exchange they said they fought the war to avoid.)
But of course this is what opinion polls — of opinions driven by the hard-right Likud/Kadima neocons running the Jerusalem Post and other papers — show the Israelis want. They apparently think that their main mistake last time around was simply not butchering enough people. Just like a lot of our right-wingers think our main mistake in Vietnam was in not using nukes.
Charles adds: Fisk on the Gaza campaign. In eight years, 20 Israelis have been killed by Hamas’s rockets:
Yes, let’s remember Hamas’s cynicism, the cynicism of all armed Islamist groups. Their need for Muslim martyrs is as crucial to them as Israel’s need to create them. The lesson Israel thinks it is teaching – come to heel or we will crush you – is not the lesson Hamas is learning. Hamas needs violence to emphasise the oppression of the Palestinians – and relies on Israel to provide it. A few rockets into Israel and Israel obliges.