David Ignatius begins his latest column by asking, "What goal is Israel pursuing in its latest war in Gaza?" He then allows that "That has been a hard question to answer."
Yet the tail end of a NY Times story answers it with ease. It quotes Bassam Abu Jameh, whose Palestinian wife, two brothers and three children, ages 5, 3, and 1, had just been massacred in an Israeli airstrike as they huddled in their Gaza City apartment building: "I will marry again four times, and I will have 10 sons with each wife, and they will all be in the resistance."
The cultivation of another--and larger--generation of Palestinian hatred is not, of course, Netanyahu's strategic objective. It is, however, the practical outcome of Netanyahu's tactics.
Limited wars of low civilian casualties are sometimes near impossible. The fire bombings of German populations and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War are all too obvious examples. Such acts violated military ethics (ignoring for the moment that phrase's somewhat oxymoronic implications) in place since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia--the Magna Carta, so to speak, of international laws of war--which had put an end to a 30-year civilian slaughter in Europe.
But oppressed, blockaded Palestinians aren't Nazis or imperial Japanese, whose utter destruction proved the only way of removing their menace. What Netanyahu is doing resembles more what we and the French did in Vietnam: create rolling generations of heightened hostility.
"The only winning move is not to play" that game, as the computer WOPR--which went by the biblical Hebrew name of Joshua--so logically put it in Wargames. Indeed the only winning move is a comprehensive peace through a negotiated two-state construction.
Why do you think creating a new generation of Palestinian fighters is not Netanyahu's strategic objective? In some respects I believe it is. As long as they represent no existential threat to Israel they serve a useful purpose. And they don't represent much of a threat at all.
As long as they exist and continue their assaults Hamas will keep Netanyahu or someone like him in power. There is no way any government of Israel could not respond to aggression, even ineffective aggression, and stay in power.
Posted by: Peter G | July 22, 2014 at 03:54 PM