Editorial: On the Way to Defeat
Tevet 19, 5769, 15 January 09 03:06
by Israel National News(IsraelNN.com) Operation “Cast Lead” seems about to turn into a classic Israeli military experience: Victory on the battlefield, defeat in the war. Israel’s dailies sport headlines claiming “Ceasefire is Imminent” and “We’ve Won for Sure!” How ironic. This juvenile, premature celebration illustrates how little Israel’s elites—journalists, commentators and especially its political leaders—understand what defeating the enemy requires, or that it is necessary to defeat him at all.
The objective of the present military operation is to put an end to the flow of arms to Hamas. Israel is unlikely to realize this objective because nobody really wants Israel to achieve it—and that includes Israel itself. Ending the flow of arms to Hamas means, at the very least, permanently blockading the southern border of the Gaza Strip. If Israel lacks the will to do so, it’s unreasonable to expect some other country to risk a future confrontation with Hamas and volunteer to do the job in Israel’s place.
Of course, everyone is willing to promise Israel the earth just now, if only it agrees to cease fire and withdraw from Gaza. The Egyptians and the Turks will promise to block the flow of arms into Gaza across the Philadelphi corridor. Hamas will promise a long term “tahadiyya”—truce—before, concurrently with, or after Israel’s withdrawal, it matters little, so long as Israel goes. As soon as Israel agrees, it will, of course, cease shooting. The rest of the cease-fire package will promptly begin to unravel.
Hamas has been hurt badly by “Cast Lead”—but, it has survived. Its morale is beginning to recover, as demonstrated by Thursday morning’s coordinated rocket salvo against Israel—and Hamas’ morale is the key factor in this whole war. The IDF continues to operate in Gaza and to kill terrorists, but has not done anything during the past ten days to change the balance of power between the two sides. Hamas cannot be unaware of the signals coming out of Israel: The quarrels among its top leadership, united in nothing but a deep desire to end the Gaza operation and get out as soon as possible. Hamas’ objective now is to keep on surviving, to buy time and let time work in its favor. It can afford to hang tough; indeed, it has no other choice.
Here’s how things are likely to develop: While negotiations over an international monitoring regime for the Philadelphi corridor drag on inconclusively, tractors and tunnel excavating devices will emerge from Rafiah to reopen the tunnel mouths sealed by Israeli bombs. Hamas will reestablish uneasy control over the local population—after all, it still has weapons and is not about to hold free and fair elections by secret ballot. The Egyptians may hate and fear Hamas, but for that very reason they will once again turn a blind eye to weapons smuggling into Gaza once it is clear that Hamas has survived the war. Hamas and its allies within Egypt, the Moslem Brotherhood, can hurt the Egyptian regime far worse than Israel can. Once stationary, the IDF’s forces in Gaza will become the target of sniping and terror attacks, ceasefire notwithstanding.
Once the smuggling into Gaza resumes without the IDF being able to do anything about it (short of breaking the ceasefire and going back to war), time will begin to run out on the IDF’s presence in Gaza. Pressure will mount to withdraw the troops. Israeli public opinion will become Hamas’ ally, as it was in the run up to the skedaddle from Lebanon in 2000. Sooner or later, rockets will start falling on Israel again.
In his monumental work On War, the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote:
[T]he aim of warfare is to disarm the enemy . . . If the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of that situation must not of course be merely transient. Otherwise the enemy would not give in but would wait for things to improve.
Disarming the enemy in this war means, at the very least, establishing a permanent Israeli presence in the southern part of the Gaza Strip and establishing an airtight blockade of the Hamas terror regime. Decisive victory entails physically cutting off the smuggling routes for arms into Gaza, and preventing the entry of anything but the minimal food, fuel and medicine required by the population—nothing that might serve for the manufacture of weapons. Achieving this objective does not require the tactical virtuosity demonstrated by the IDF over the past three weeks so much as it requires a strong political will.
The underlying reason for Israel’s incipient defeat in Gaza lies in the unwillingness of Israel’s political leadership to fight and win. From the start, Israel’s objective has been to “restore deterrence”—to frighten the enemy rather than to prevent him physically from attacking us. The very fact that Israel’s leadership thinks in terms of “deterrence” rather than compulsion shows the large gap in political willpower between them and our adversaries in Gaza. If Hamas hangs tough, if it refuses to be deterred, it matters little that its fighting ability has been damaged for the present. It will be back.
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