Any sort of reasoning with Hamas or telling it not to be so naughty as to use its people as rocket fodder or human shields is a forlorn hope “Reasoning” implies capability for intelligence and the sort of basic joined up thinking that can sort out cause and effect. Hamas never had any of that.

Hamas is a cancer and the best treatment for a cancer is to remove it completely or it will grow back and kill its host. I hope that the IDF does its best to kill that cancer but unfortunately as is often the case with cancer, the treatment is as bad as the disease.

Hamas’s Strategy: The Rockets or the Media
By Barry Rubin
December 29, 2008

Nothing is clearer than Hamas’s strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media, and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, “We win or you lose.”

Option A: The Ceasefire

Hamas ends a ceasefire giving it the peace and quiet needed to build up its army and consolidate its rule over the Gaza Strip. Israel would deliver supplies as long as there weren’t attacks. From a Western-style pragmatic standpoint this is a great situation.

But Hamas isn’t a Western-style pragmatic organization. Peace and quiet is its enemy not only because of its ideology – the deity commands it to destroy Israel – or its self-image – as heroic martyrs – but also because battle is needed to recruit the masses for permanent war and unite the population around it.

Hamas has no program of improving the well-being of the people or educating children to be doctors, teachers, and engineers. Its platform has but one plank: war, war, endless war, sacrifice, heroism, and martyrdom until total victory is achieved.

Thus, it ends the ceasefire.

Option B: The Rockets

And so Hamas ends the ceasefire and rains rockets down on Israel, accompanied by mortars and the occasional attempt at a cross-border ground attack. Israel does nothing.

Hamas crows: you are weak, you are confused, you are helpless. Come, people, arise and destroy the paper tiger! And so more people are recruited, West Bank Palestinians look on with admiration at those fighting the enemy, and the Arabic-speaking world is impressed.

Remember 2006, they say. It is just like Hizbullah. Israel is helpless against the rockets. Why don’t our governments fight Israel? Let’s overthrow them and bring brave, fighting Islamist governments to power.

Option C: The Media

But then Israel does fight back. Its planes bomb military targets which have been deliberately put amidst civilians. If there is a high danger of hitting civilians, Israel doesn’t attack. But there is a line below which risk that will be taken, and rightly so.

The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media.

Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday – literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours – are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here.

And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.

Yet there is a problem here. Rockets and mortars may win wars; newspaper articles really don’t. Of course, too, material damage is inflicted that sets back Gaza’s material development.

Hamas doesn’t care about that, but by acting in a way to ensure the destruction of their material base, Hamas does weaken itself. Precisely because Israeli attacks are focused on military targets, Hamas is weakened.

Conclusion: The problem with no solution

Of course, Israel does not win a complete victory. Hamas does not fall. The problem is not gone. For Hamas will define survival as victory. Hamas, like the PLO before it, wins one “victory” after another and always ends up worse off.

The conflict will be back, however it ends this round, on whatever day it ends. Quiet will return, the supplies will flow back into Gaza. And so many months in the future the process will be repeated.

There is, however, an important difference. Israel uses its time not only for military preparations but to educate its children, build its infrastructure, raise its living standards. Hamas doesn’t.

“We believe in death,” Hamas says, “You believe in life.”

Be careful what you wish for, you will get it.

Although, once again, I am only going on what you’ve told me.

This was how my morning’s mail began. Well since then there have been some reasoned objections to Michael R’s point of view and there have been articles like the one by Eric Lee, which I endorse entirely. Michael is concerned with the ‘massacre’ and displacement of Palestinians, and his preoccupation is legitimate. He makes analogies with the fate of the native Indians in America, but these analogies could lead in all kinds of directions over the globe, including to that of the expulsion of Jews from their homeland, mainly in the 7th century. It would be hard not to admit that the state of Israel came into being in somewhat bizarre circumstances – I await contradiction – and that my defense of it may have an element of Realpolitik in it. The only thing that would be even worse than the fate of Palestinian refugees, would be the wholesale destruction of Israel. The massacre in all directions would be indescribable. I would, at this point follow Rosa Luxemburg’s policy that we should not worry about changing borders, but simply think in terms of making a better life for people wherever they live: I believe Israel would support such a policy, which, on the other hand, has no worse enemy than Islamic fundamentalism. Michael Rosen, in his self-critical Jewish ardour, thinks the rockets fired at Israel are legitimate self-defense, but the one thing he omits entirely from his considerations is the nature of Hamas, which is a threat not only to Israel but to civilisation itself. From this point of view, Israel, whatever its faults, is a bulwark against barbarism.

You were sticking on me a view (actually indistinguishable from your view, embedded as it was in a polemic of your own) I did not express, presumably because you thought (correctly, as it turned out), the more extraneous verbiage you swamp me with, the more difficulty I will have addressing it.

“How nice of maven to express it here at Harry’s Place just as nice zionists like Gene explain why poor little Israel is just doing what reasonable nation states have to do.”

I am not Maven, or Gene, or Fabian. In your last post (your imputing to me the views of Maven) you raised the issue of settlements. Well, that is indeed a problem, which merits discussion, but it is probably more detailed than my wrists can cope with now.

But, briefly, I think Jewish east Jerusalem should and will stay, the Jewish quarter of the old city retained by Israel. Ariel is the main problem. I have some sympathy with the view that the settlements post-’67 constituted ‘colonialism’, but, again, I do not think it ‘as simple as that’, for various reasons, not least of which I think it perfectly just for Jews to wish to settle in all parts of eretz yisroel and understandable that they did so when they had the chance. However, now, except for Jewish east Jerusalem, most should go.

The reasons I think the latter I will be happy to explain when my wrists are a little rested.

“”Z.: “I think he means that you only (allegedly) identify or assert your Jewish-ness negatively, in contradistinction to the Jewish state of Israel, Zionism or those sympathetic to either.”

“Rosen” Ah, Z., (or Fabian) you’ve become Gilad Atzmon.”

Well, given your ability to transmute me into Fabian or Gene, it comes as no surprise you may work your magic and transform me into Gilad Atzmon.

“Rosen: Excellent. This indeed is what Gilad has been patiently trying to explain to the likes of me. Good, glad that’s been sorted out.”

a) I didn’t say it of ‘you’, Michael, I said what I think Fabian meant by ‘asaJew’.

I gave the example of a Bolshevik Jew, and the hypothetical example of a Jew who only defines his Jewishness negatively. Analogous to a Christian Jewish convert, perhaps.

But, congratulations, the more your impute to me what I did not say, the more you exhaust my ability to address it.

b) since when does the (alleged) coincidence of some element of what one (allegedly) says make one into someone else allegedly saying it?

Even a stopped watch, as they say, is right twice a day. Could one not allege there is a coincidence of view between you, Atzmon and Israel Shamir? Does that make you either?

I can acknowledge that the Israeli state can, and does, commit crimes. When the dust settles after these attacks, I will be able to look dispassionately at what, and who, was targeted and make my own judgement on whether the Israeli actions were justified.

But my discussion with Michael Rosen above was not about who started it, or who was worse. It hinged on his total inability to condemn Hamas rocket attacks – and more generally, murder, when the murderer is someone he considers sufficiently oppressed.

He simply could not do it. We had twenty posts of hand-waving, talk of dispossession, resistance, fighting back against one’s oppressors. Not once could he condemn the targetting of civilian areas with rockets, or (again more generally) murder by an oppressed person.

It was all explained away with, as Josh says, abstractions.

Of course Michael Rosen thinks the alternative to his materialist explanation of violence is to label Hamas as “mad”.

BUt I don’t think Hamas are mad. They have quite clearly stated goals – principally, they don’t want the state of Israel to exist – and these rocket attacks are a logical step towards achieving those goals.

The sad part is that I’m sure they know a significant part of the global audience is all too eager to see them as freedom fighters.

Here’s the thing: it may well be that this wave of attacks have a dramatic effect for the better overall. They may permanently weaken Hamas, and force through further peace agreements. Or of course they may not. Time alone will tell. But even if things do get better, that doesn’t make these attacks good or every act of Hamas evil. Or indeed vice versa.

It sounds like I am perhaps stating the absolutely mind-numbingly obvious here – but looking at the howling babies bawling the odds on both sides of the debate, it just seems that maybe it’s NOT obvious. And it strikes me that every time someone posts a “you started it” “no you started it” flurry on the internet, they are doing their bit to prolong the situation just one infinatessimal bit more.