Israelis debate how (more than whether) to continue war

Brushing aside the many calls from the “international community” for an immediate and permanent ceasefire with Gaza, the Israeli government has vowed to continue its assault against the Strip, and some Israeli citizens are now openly debating whether the war effort should be continued more or less “as-is”, i.e. mainly an assault from the air force and other stand-off weapons platforms, or whether its should be expanded to include some form of a major ground incursion.
This debate is presumably being held all over the country. A Haaretz poll reported today that 52% of Israeli respondents favored continuing the war as-is, and 19% favored launching a ground push. Only 20% favored negotiating a truce as soon as possible. (Unclear from that poll: when it was taken exactly, and– even more importantly– whether it included the Israeli citizens who are of Palestinian-Arab ethnicity or was restricted, as many Israeli opinion polls are, only to Jewish Israelis. If the former, then they most likely occupied just about all the slots of those who favored a speedy truce.)
Also, in today’s Haaretz, Yossi Melman lays out seven possible courses of military action for Israel regarding Gaza, including the “as-is” and the two versions of the “introduce ground forces” option. Two of his other options (numbers 5 and 7) involve concluding a ceasefire with Hamas: one more limited, and the other more extensive; and he notes that both these options have significant advantages. But he also argues that they have the “disadvantage” that they would entrench Hamas’s power to a significant degree. Altogether, though, his is a fairly realistic and reasonable assessment.
Haaretz also, as always, opens its pages to several voices from the hard right. Among these are, today, Ari Shavit and the longtime settler activist Israel Harel.
Harel seems to be a big proponent of using ground forces, and much of what he writes is very informative. First, he simply assumes– as do, I suppose, most Israelis– that the main decisionmaking “brain” behind Israel’s Gaza policy since last spring has been that of defense Minister Ehud Barak. He strongly criticizes Barak’s decision to accept the tahdi’eh of last June, which he says allowed Hamas to regroup and strengthen its positions in Gaza. (The tahdi’eh also– though it has been Israeli writers other than Harel who have noted this– allowed Barak to complete his preparations for the present war.)
Harel writes this about the current war effort:

The declared goal of Operation Cast Lead (“the creation of a new security reality”) is minimalist and reveals Israel’s unwillingness to fight for a long-term resolution that will create a comprehensive new reality, not only a new security reality.
What is worse, the way the battle is being waged after the impressive air strikes raises concerns that the operation’s leaders do not intend to achieve even its modest aims, among other reasons because Israel once again blinked first.
The blinking did not begin on Tuesday with Barak’s announcement that Israel was considering a “humanitarian” 48-hour cease-fire. It began when the first air strikes were not immediately accompanied by a ground operation. Israel showed, as in Lebanon, that it does not want to reach a strategic resolution and does not have the will, determination or self-confidence to lead a military operation beyond reprisal and punitive action.
This is a major and painful operation, but despite its ambitious intentions it is not a military action that will end the eight-year nightmare of the people of the Negev.
The more days go by with the main component aerial bombardment, which, like in Lebanon, cannot stop the rockets, the public begins to feel (our leaders’ arguments show this) that the operation is losing momentum. A sense is growing that something has been missed, especially in the Negev communities.
The national mood, which rallied last Saturday, is beginning to sag, and disappointment is beginning to seep in. The pubic does not want to make do with a situation in which a sovereign country with significant military capabilities – certainly vis-a-vis Hamas – once again signals that it is willing to stop a battle at its height, before a real response to the problem that led the Israel Defense Forces into the fight in the first place…

Harel argues, though, that it is still not too late to launch the significant ground operation he favors. But he warns that this should not be “hesitant”, like the one launched in the last two days of the 2006 Lebanon. Instead, it should be just as decisive as “Operation Defensive Shield”, the large-scale infantry push into West Bank cities that Ariel Sharon launched in April 2002 which was, Harel argues, successful in meeting its goal of “rooting out terror.”
He adds:

Then, too, a loud media campaign opposed entering cities; then, too, military reporters and commentators, among them retired generals, frightened us that there would be masses of casualties; then, too, they said terror could not be beaten by military means. But the result even after eight years speaks for itself.
At the end of the operation Israel withdrew from big cities like Nablus, Ramallah and Jenin. But the destruction of terror infrastructure and the psychological shock the terror groups experienced made it possible for the IDF to sharply reduce its number of attacks to this day. This is mainly because the army can, if need be, enter the cities almost unhindered to stop anyone planning a suicide attack or making rockets intended for the Tel Aviv region’s population centers.

Harel’s argument here is more than a little disingenuous. First of all, “Defensive Shield” was deployed against targets in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank. But iut didn’t seem to “work” as well there as Harel claims it did in the West Bank, did it?
Secondly, it was not only Sharon’s horrible assault of 2002 that reduced the numbers of anti-Israeli armed actions emanating from the West Bank. It was also, most durably of all (until now), the Barrier/Wall that was built there thereafter and the extensive system of associated movement-control mechanisms that quadrillaged the whole West Bank into a series of easily isolatable, open-air prisons; and the rebuilding, under tight US-Israeli supervision, of a PA “security force” there that would work from inside Palestinian society to self-police it on behalf of the US and Israeli paymasters.
If an Israeli ground force went back into Gaza now, would it end up quadrillaging the whole Strip (once again) into smaller and more “manageable chunks of open-air prison? Would it end up trying to install a pro-Israeli (Dahlanist) quisling force there to self-police the Palestinian community? Neither of those strategies looks feasible in today’s Gaza. And regarding a Barrier/Wall– Israel already has a very high one that separates it completely from Gaza. It has prevented the infiltration of armed Palestinians. But its heights have, of course, been easily scaleable by the militant Palestinians’ rockets.
Meantime, Harel makes zero mention at all of the regional political reverberations of any continued– let alone expanded– Israeli action against Gaza. The costs that Israel’s assault is imposing on the stability of the US-dominated order throughout the Middle East continue to mount, inexorably, with every day the war continues.
Of course, as a longtime settler activist, Harel is quite accustomed to simply brushing aside the feeble objections he might from time to time hear from Washington to the kinds of (actually, internationally criminal) actions that he and his ilk take all the time, in the West Bank and formerly also in Gaza. But other Israelis– and even more so Americans– need to be a lot more attentive to the regional political dynamics of Israel’s actions than he is.
The Israeli hasbara people in the US have been working overtime to try to spread the notion that “the Arabs” as a whole, or at least “the Arab governments” secretly or perhaps not so secretly “really” want Israel to finish off Hamas for good and all at this time. That has also been linked to a hasbara campaign to say that these Arab governments were “fearful of Hamas’s close ties with Iran”, etc, etc.
In the first couple of days of the war, the hasbaristas were able to find some little shreds of evidence for their wishful-thinking type of claims. Now, even those shreds of evidence have evaporated. Read the UN’s account of the statements made by various Arab ambassadors at last night’s emergency session of the Security Council, and you will not find one of them who expresses any criticism of Hamas for the current crisis. Remember, too, that the SC session was held at the urgent request of the Arab League.
If these Arab governments– all of whose leaders would strongly prefer to be able to rest easy in their antecedent position of not antagonizing the US in any way at all– are already this “mobilized” by the mounting tide of pro-Gaza, pro-Hamas public opinion in their own countries… and Israel hasn’t even started launching a ground operation into Gaza yet… Imagine how much stronger the political positions of the Arab governments and of other governments around the world would become if an Israeli ground assault were to be launched!
But Israel Harel doesn’t care one whit about that. He and his colleagues in the settler movement have, after all, been defying international law and the “international community” with complete impunity for many decades now.
Of course, if we had a responsible, fair-minded government here in the US, it could cut off this debate right now, by throwing its whole weight behind the international calls for a ceasefire and taking the actions needed to get Israel into line with that.
But in Israel, too many commentators and analysts seem quite happy to continue their grisly public debate over the best way to inflict more death and suffering on their neighbors…