EVEN RACHMAN CONCEDES JUST ONE ROCKET FROM GAZA WILL MEAN VICTORY FOR HAMAS

Gideon Rachman, the now notorious pro-world government Bilderberger at the FT, has conceded that just one rocket from Gaza means victory for Hamas.

Rachman, surprisingly, talks some sense this time, perhaps because there is very little history involved in his analysis. This leads me to think that if Rachman did learn some real, hard, true history instead of the spoon-fed history from Cambridge then he may come to the same conclusion that more and more are coming to every day; there is a global conspiracy to create a world government of microchipped people.

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From http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/34c5a426-db49-11dd-be53-000077b07658.html

Israel’s self-defeating Gaza offensive

By Gideon Rachman

Published: January 5 2009 19:04 | Last updated: January 5 2009 19:04

By sending ground troops into the Gaza Strip, Israel has crossed a line that brings it perilously close to strategic failure.

Just as with the Lebanon war of 2006, an air bombardment has failed to stop rocket fire into Israel – and has been followed by a ground invasion. The Israeli government says it has learnt the lessons of its stalemated war with Hizbollah, the Lebanese militia. Gaza is more hospitable terrain than southern Lebanon; Hamas is militarily weaker than Hizbollah; Israel is better prepared and is using new tactics.

Maybe so. But what are Israel’s strategic needs? The first is the protection of Israeli citizens; the second is the re-establishment of Israel’s deterrent power; the third is the preservation of international support; and the fourth some prospect of durable peace. Each one of these objectives is now in peril.

By sending the army into Gaza, Israel has probably ensured it will lose many more lives than the four killed by Hamas rockets in the year before the conflict started. It is, of course, the job of the military to take casualties to protect civilians. But Israel’s is a citizen army. The point has not been lost on the Israeli public. A poll taken early in the conflict found more than 70 per cent support for bombing Gaza – but just 20 per cent support for a ground invasion.

The Israeli government may feel that the loss of life, on both sides, is justified if it can stop the rockets and restore the deterrent power that was damaged in Lebanon. But this is a gamble that could easily backfire. As Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, put it a couple of days ago: “Let’s say we unilaterally stopped and four days from now a barrage fell on Ashkelon ... Do you understand the consequences for Israeli deterrence?” But that means that a battered Hamas just has to find a way to keep firing rockets into Israel to claim some sort of victory. And even if Israel succeeds in stopping the rockets for now, any future regional enemy now knows how best to taunt Israel and delight its enemies: rockets.

Then, there is international opinion. In the early stages of the campaign, Israel got a relatively easy ride. Among western governments there was widespread acceptance of the argument that no state can tolerate regular assaults of the sort that peppered southern Israel. And Hamas has few friends among Arab governments.

But international sympathy is predictably crumbling away as the death toll mounts. Arguments about what is a “proportional” response to Hamas’s rockets seem legalistic, next to the simple fact that more than 500 Palestinians have died so far, compared with five Israelis. The European Union is now demanding a ceasefire. Arab governments are responding to outrage at home.

Israel has so far been able to rely on the usual rock-solid support from the US government. But even that could eventually change. A recent opinion poll showed that Democratic party voters were opposed to the Israeli attack on Gaza by a margin of 22 per cent. It is not inevitable that Barack Obama, president-elect, will reflect the views of the rank and file of his party. But neither is it inevitable that he will ignore them.

Then there are the Palestinians – who will still be Israel’s neighbours after the bloodletting has stopped. Israeli official rhetoric suggests that the government hopes a massive attack on Gaza will turn the population against Hamas. But violence against Israelis has always made public opinion there more hawkish. Why should the Palestinians be any different? In their more reflective moments, even senior Israeli politicians recognise that more killing is likely further to radicalise the Palestinians. A columnist in Haaretz, a liberal Israeli paper, recalled this week that Ehud Barak, the defence minister, who is masterminding the attack on Gaza, once told him that if he were a Palestinian “I would join a terror organisation”.

The Israelis sometimes suggest that their ultimate goal is in fact to displace Hamas, which still refuses to recognise Israel, rather than simply to stop the rockets. But any new Palestinian government that rode to power on the back of Israeli tanks would be maimed from the start.

The Israeli government may acknowledge the force of some of these objections. But its response is that it had no alternative. Hamas is a terrorist organisation that forced Israel’s hand.

In fact, there was an alternative that was never tried: relax the blockade of Gaza in return for a renewal of the ceasefire that ran out in December. Israel appears to have done the opposite. In November the blockade became harsher, putting serious pressure on the supply of food and fuel into Gaza.

Ending the blockade of Gaza in return for a ceasefire remains the best option – for both humanitarian and strategic reasons.

But the longer the bloodshed goes on, the more both sides in the conflict will be sucked into a logic of revenge and retaliation. The last time that I visited the Israeli occupied territories, I got chatting to a Palestinian. He was a secular, educated man who had worked in the US, so I was astonished when he told me that he would vote for Hamas. Why, I asked.

“Because every day, the Israelis find a different way to say ‘fuck you’,” he told me. “By voting for Hamas, I’m saying ‘fuck you back’.” I laughed at the time. But – stripped of all the diplomatic and strategic rationales – that seems like a good summary of the tragic and self-defeating logic that lies behind the fighting in Gaza.

gideon.rachman@ft.com

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