Stopping The Kassams

What is Israel to do about the Gaza Strip, from which Kassam rockets continue to be fired regularly at Israeli towns and villages (Twenty-three of them at the town of Sderot on one day alone last week)?Apart from the consensus that the current situation is intolerable, no one really seems to know. Five basic options have been put forth:1. Carry on as at present. Keep up the moderate military pressure being exerted on Gaza in the form of pinpoint air and ground attacks that have been taking their toll of the Islamic fighting groups shooting at Israel while the Hamas government turns a blind eye to them. Trust that these attacks will in the long run wear these groups down and get them to stop.2. Escalate the pressure. Attack Hamas installations, institutions, and leaders; respond to rocket and mortar attacks with air and artillery strikes that may result in larger numbers of civilian casualties on the Palestinian side; tighten the siege on Gaza by reducing or cutting off Israeli electricity to it, preventing the shipment into it of basic commodities and foodstuffs, etc.3. Reoccupy the Gaza Strip. Launch a full-scale Israeli ground attack, dismantle the Hamas government, and systematically clean out nests of terror.4. Stick with Policy 1 while at the same time investing heavily in shelters and on making Sderot and nearby Israeli settlements as rocket-proof as possible. Accept the fact that attacks on these settlements will continue and concentrate on minimizing the damage.5. Try negotiating a ceasefire with the Hamas government in Gaza.None of these options, unfortunately, can be guaranteed to succeed.Option 1 may be the easiest, if only because it calls for no fundamental changes in what is already being done, but if it hasn’t worked very well until now, why should it work any better in the future? The armed groups in Gaza may be hurting, but they’re not hurting bad enough to make them call it quits.Option 2 is a calculated risk. On the one hand, it might turn the Palestinian public against the armed groups and force the Hamas government to crack down on them, which it could do if it wanted to. Yet there is also the danger that large numbers of civilian casualties on the Palestinian side, or a humanitarian crisis, could play into Hamas’ hands by creating international sympathy for it while making Israel look callous and vengeful. The end result could be that Israel would be forced to de-escalate again while losing face and accomplishing nothing.Option 3 is an even greater risk. It has the most potential gains — and losses. If it succeeded militarily, Israel could put an end to Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip and thoroughly root out the terror infrastructure there, as it did in much of the West Bank in 2003-2004, when it sent its army back into areas that had been handed over to the Palestinians.But the specter would loom large of another Lebanon, in which Israeli forces would end up taking heavy casualties in Gaza’s refugee camps and urban warrens while unable to establish effective control. Moreover, even if Israel could subdue the Gaza Strip without paying too heavy a price for it, how would it ever get out again once it had gone back in? To whom would it turn the area over once it was pacified? To a corrupt and incompetent Palestinian Authority that probably would not want to take it for fear of being labeled Israeli collaborators? To an ineffective international force that, too, could not assert any real authority?Option 4 might well be the worst of them all. It would be enormously expensive, would be a public confession on Israel’s part of its helplessness to prevent a few thousand Palestinian irregulars next-door from attacking it on a daily basis, and would in any case be only a stop-gap measure.What happens when the Palestinians in Gaza acquire longer-range rockets and the ability to fire further into southern Israel at much larger cities like Ashkelon and Ashdod? Would every house in these places, too, have to be rocket-proofed? One couldn’t give the Islamist radicals a greater victory than the spectacle of an Israel living in bunkers because of them.Option 5 raises two questions. In the first place, how could Israel, after repeatedly calling on the international community — and with considerable success — to boycott the Hamas government in Gaza, then turn around and give Hamas, by negotiating with it, the legitimization that it has asked the governments of the world to withhold? And secondly, what do Israel and Hamas have to talk about anyway? What could Israel offer Hamas in return for putting a stop to armed attacks on it? Some form of mutual recognition?But Hamas has again and again made clear that it has no intention of ever recognizing Israel. You don’t negotiate with someone who says he wants you dead and buried.What do you do when faced with five bad options? You pick the least bad or dangerous one. That’s certainly isn’t Option 5. It’s not 4 or 3, either. And it isn’t 1.That leaves 2. And indeed, this is what we most likely will get in the months ahead: A slow and steady ratcheting up of military and economic pressure on the Gaza Strip with the prayer that nothing blows up too badly in Israel’s face while this is being done. Will it stop the Kassams? Probably not, but it’s worth a try. After that, it will be time to think of Option 6.Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

Stopping The Kassams

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