Israel: a ceasefire with Hamas, or more militarism?

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer yesterday became the third member of the Israeli government– after Shaul Mofaz and Ami Ayalon– to support the idea of negotiations with Hamas over a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel. Ben-Eliezer also told Israel’s Army Radio that he thought Olmert might well be open to such a deal.
Like Mofaz, Ben-Eliezer is also a former high-ranking IDF officer and a former defense Minister. He was also, 2001-2002, leader of the Labour Party when it was in a coalition government led by Ariel Sharon. (Ayalon). For his part, Ayalon was the head of Israel’s naval forces and later head of the Shin Bet spy service. These men are notably not soft-‘n’-fuzzy peaceniks. Okay, well maybe Ayalon has become a bit of one over the ones. But neither Mofaz nor Ben-Eliezer is.
In an eery example of what the Indian peace mediator Dr. Ranabir Samaddar recently noted was a common pattern in negotiations between a government and a non-governmental group, several men in the IDF’s current leadership have been arguing that “Hamas is only open to negotiations because we have started hitting Gaza; therefore we should hit even harder!”
Mofaz is the only former-Likudnik Kadima Party person among the three pro-negotiations ministers; the other two are from Labour. Meanwhile the leader of the Labour Party, current defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Labour’s Methuselah-like State President (and former war-launching PM) Shimon Peres are reported to remain opposed to any negotiations with Hamas.
The question of whether there or are not ongoing ceasefire talks, and if so, whether they will lead anywhere, remains murky. From the Israeli side, the government has come under considerable pressure in recent months to “do something” about the primitive but occasionally damaging home-made rockets that (mainly non-Hamas) militants in Gaza have been launching against locations inside Israel– and about the 18-month holding by Gaza militants of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. But as PM Olmert and all of Israel’s military and political leadership learned in Lebanon in 2006, it is not easy to figure out what you can “do” against a determined, well organized population, to decisively and lastingly win you your desired political goals, if the only weapon you have is a bloated and mega-lethal military force.
Can Israel step up its air or naval attacks against Gaza? Not easily– and especially as long as Bush and Rice seem determined to keep alive the picture that they are “seriously engaged” in brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace.
Can Israel do more to impose economic collective punishment on the people of Gaza? Not easily.
Can Israel send in the ground forces to rapidly “root out” all the Palestinian militants, and rescue Shalit in some kind of heroic, Entebbe-like way? Clearly not. If they had had any confidence they could use ground forces for either of these missions, they certainly would have done so a long time ago… Instead, the repeated, relatively small-scale ground-force raids they have made into Gaza (1) have not succeeded in either silencing the rocketeers or rescuing Shalit, and (2) have apparently persuaded the IDF’s leaders that a bigger ground-force raid would not succeed, either.
Also, as the IDF and political leaders seem clearly to judge at this point, mounting a complete physical re-occupation of the whole of Gaza at ground level would be several bridges too far for the IDF (and the country.) So the options available to Olmert and Co. seem to be limited to two:

either (a) continued maintenance of the current “business as usual”– that is, the tight economic noose of collective punishment plus relatively small-scale (though still lethal and terrifying) military raids,
or (b) try to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas that would restore some calm to the Israeli communities around Gaza– and would necessarily involve allowing the people of Gaza to also have a more normal life.

Of course there are questions as to whether Hamas would be prepared to actually conclude, as opposed to talking about concluding, such an agreement, and also whether it would be capable of enforcing its side of any such deal.
On the latter question, the Crisis Group has recently published this very thorough report on one of the major issues in internal Gaza politics, that is the power-balance there between Hamas and the many local “families” or clans whose feuds and vendettas have often in recent years dominated the Strip’s (in-)security situation.
The inter-“family” violence remained particularly virulent in Gaza so long as those big clans there could try to maneuver between the Fateh and Hamas militias’ presence. (I wrote about this some here, in 2004.) Indeed, the ICG report also makes clear that Fateh played quite a large– if not always intentional– role in increasing the armament level of the families quite considerably. However, after the Hamas takeover in Gaza in June, Hamas moved quickly to try to contain and disarm the families. The report notes that these moves met with some resistance. But it also says, (p.16),

The stabilisation and pacification was widely welcomed by the public. The sight of clans receiving their come-uppance delighted many…

We could nlote the strong analogy here between Hamas’s anti-warlord activities in Gaza, and those launched by the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia in 2005-2006.
And now, we should also remember that it is almost exactly a year since the Bush administration worked actively with the Somali warlords and the government of neighboring Ethiopia to send in an Ethiopian military force to oust the ICU from power.
Since December 2006, the situation in Somalia, which had become somewhat stabilized under the ICU, has deteriorated catastrophically…
UN-OCHA reported yesterday that the number of people “displaced from Mogadishu since the end of October due to ongoing conflict between Ethiopian/Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces and anti-government elements” has now reached 265,000… Read the whole of that report
to learn more about the human costs suffered by some of the world’s most indigent and hardest-pressed communities when the US pursues its militarized (and warlord-supporting) form of anti-Islamism at their expense.