Essay
Hamas is central to Israeli security and Palestinian politics, yet the international community refuses to work with it. This is a mistake -- Israel, the United States, and others should exploit Hamas' vulnerabilities with a mix of coercion and concessions.
Israel's latest campaign in Gaza, which began on Wednesday with the killing of Hamas' military commander, Ahmed Jabari, and air strikes on the group's long-range rocket launchers, is a gamble -- and one that Israel might lose. Its goal is to compel Hamas to stop shooting rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip and to crack down on other groups who are also doing so. Hamas, however, will find it hard to bend to Israeli pressure. In turn, it will be up to outside states, particularly Egypt, to foster a deal to end the fighting.
After Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2008-2009 that resulted in over 1,000 Palestinian deaths and tremendous destruction, relations between Hamas and Israel wavered uneasily between hostility and tacit cooperation. True, Hamas' rhetoric toward Israel remained hostile, but the number of rockets that went over the border plunged and most of them were launched not by Hamas, but by more radical groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Hamas feared that launching large numbers of rockets would prompt Israel to again retaliate harshly and devastate Gaza, thus jeopardizing Hamas' political position there. At times, the group even tried to restrain its uncomfortable bedfellows. Indeed, although Hamas and Israel would both deny it, their interests were often aligned. As Aluf Benn, one of Israel's leading analysts, put it after Jabari's death, "Ahmed Jabari was a subcontractor, in charge of maintaining Israel's security in Gaza."
But Jabari's first allegiance, of course, was to Hamas. And, over time, Hamas became increasingly accepting of attacks on Israel. As the memory of Cast Lead faded, the number of attacks coming from Gaza began to rise once more. Israel claims that over 200 rockets struck the country in 2010. The number climbed to over 600 in 2011. And 2012 has seen even more -- over 800 before the current operation began. Most of these attacks came from other Palestinian groups, but more recently Hamas seemed to take a more active role in the violence, openly tolerating other groups' gambits and carrying out some strikes itself.
By this week, those attacks had "made normal life impossible for over one million Israelis," as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained on Thursday. And so he and his government are again pounding Hamas in an attempt to restore the post-Cast Lead status quo, in which Hamas polices both itself and the rest of the strip. So far, Operation Pillar of Defense, as Israel calls it, has resulted in the deaths of 18 Palestinians (of whom roughly half were civilians). Hamas' response has killed three Israelis.
No single attack forced Israel to respond. In theory, it could have chosen not to. But the steady increase in rocket fire over the last few years had become politically intolerable for the Netanyahu government. With national elections approaching in January, his administration seemed unable to carry out perhaps government's most basic function: protecting citizens from violence. In addition, although Israel's political and security leaders might recognize the difference, ordinary Israelis simply did not care whether Hamas launched attacks itself or simply did not stop others from doing so. In other words, it was time to take out Hamas or else risk being taken out of office.
By launching this operation, Israel has resorted to its time-honored strategy of holding the government (or in Hamas' case, de facto government) that hosts militants responsible for the actions of the militants themselves. The approach has had some successes: in Jordan in 1970, Israel pressured Amman to instigate a bloody civil war against the country's Palestinian militants, eventually crushing them. But in Lebanon later in the same decade, Israel tried the same thing, with much worse results. The Lebanese government was too weak to crack down on terrorist activity in its borders and the country descended into chaos. In 2006, the same logic drove Israel's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Although the war was initially seen widely as a Hezbollah victory, Israelis now see it as a win. The Israeli military performed poorly, but Hezbollah has grudgingly kept the peace since then, fearing that rocket attacks from Lebanon would again lead to a devastating Israeli response. Indeed, the last six years have been the quietest along the Lebanon-Israel border in decades.
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