Martin Kramer explains why Hamas cannot claim to have won its war with Israel:
When Israel launched its operation, Hamas announced a secondary objective: to inflict significant military casualties on the Israelis. For this purpose, it had built up a network of fortifications supposedly on the Lebanon model, which it promised to turn into a “graveyard” for Israeli forces. The military wing announced that “the Zionist enemy will see surprises and will regret carrying out such an operation and will pay a heavy price. Our militants are waiting with patience to confront the soldiers face to face.” This too never happened. The Hamas line quickly folded, its “fighters” shed their uniforms and melted into the civilian population. That Hamas failed to fight did surprise many Israeli soldiers, who had expected more. But there was no battle anywhere, and Israel suffered only 10 military fatalities, half of them from friendly fire. Hamas has taken to claiming that Israel has hidden its military casualties, and has thrown out various numbers – a rather precise measure of what it had hoped and failed to achieve.
There is something perverse in the notion that Hamas “won” by merely surviving. Robert Malley has said that “for Hamas, it was about showing that they could stay in place without giving way, and from this point of view it has achieved its main objective.” This was not its “main objective” by any stretch of the imagination. Rashid Khalidi has written that “like Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, all [Hamas] has to do in order to proclaim victory is remain standing.” But Hamas had a specific objective – lifting the “siege” – which was altogether different from the objective of Hizbullah. This objective Hamas manifestly failed to achieve. It also failed to achieve the secondary objective it shared with Hizbullah: inflicting Israeli military casualties. It defies logic to declare the mere survival of Hamas to be a triumph, given that Hamas openly declared a much larger objective, and Israel never made the military destruction of Hamas an objective.
In “What Israel gained in Gaza,” Michael Gerson gives a slightly shorter version:
Israeli forces, responding to an intolerable provocation, inflicted lopsided casualties on Hamas, which displayed a discrediting combination of cowardice and brutality. Hamas fighters used civilians as shields instead of shielding civilians — and some Palestinians seemed to resent it. Hamas leaders hid in the basements of hospitals while ordering public executions for Palestinian rivals, acting more like members of a criminal gang than a nationalist movement. Allies such as Iran, Syria and Hezbollah provided little practical help to Hamas, probably calculating that its rocket campaign against Israel was suicidal or at least foolishly premature. The international boycott against Hamas is holding. And the scale of missile attacks on Israeli citizens has been dramatically reduced.
And while Gerson concedes that Israel may not have achieved all of its goals, Hamas achieved none of its goals. But Gerson also argues against the prevailing attitude at the Washington Post: the war was not counterproductive from Israel’s standpoint.
According to Daniel Schueftan, a senior research fellow at the University of Haifa, Israel faces a “strategic challenge — a civilian population that lives a few miles from terrorists — for which we don’t have a strategic solution. But we have found some operational answers. In Defensive Shield [the building of Israel’s security wall], we brought down suicide bombings by 95 percent, exclusively with coercive force, not politics.”
“It is a fairy tale,” he says, “to say there are no answers through coercive force. The only things in life that have solutions are crossword puzzles. We have not solutions, but answers — operational answers that reduce terror to a tolerable level. It is what we do with crime. It is what we do with terrorism.”
This, of course, goes against the received wisdom of most of America’s foreign policy establishment and editorial boards and ivory towers. But as long as Israel’s enemies think they can get away with murder, there will be no peace in the Middle East.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
