israeli-tanks.thumbnail.jpgIt’s looking like Israel is intending to invade Gaza.  This is a necessary escalation at this point.  Negotiations having failed, violence must be tried.  Either it will work to allow Israel to impose the peace it wants, or it won’t.  I’m going to bet, heavily, that it won’t.  However, as long as Israel thinks violence will get it what it wants, it will not seriously negotiate or be willing to make the necessary concessions, such as removing settlers from the West Bank and providing sufficient water to make Palestine a viable state (or, perhaps more realistically, ending the Jewish religious/ethnic state and moving to a one-state solution, since it is unlikely Palestine can be made viable anymore.)

Hamas has spent the last two years preparing for a ground incursion.  According to Ha’aretz, there are about 15,000 armed Palestinians in Gaza, not all under Hamas’s control, though most are, at least nominally.  The core of Hamas’s military is the 1,000 strong, Iz al-Din al-Qassam, which is trained in the Hezbollah fashion.  There is a bunker and tunnel network, though how extensive it is remains to be seen.  Because of Israeli snipers, Hamas has not been able to place as many open field defenses such as minefields and roadside bombs as it would doubtless like to.  Hamas also has a primitive missile industry, and does not require outside aid to make more missiles.

Israel is talking about a full scale invasion intended to destroy Hamas so they can make peace with someone (I have no idea who they think that will be) on terms Hamas will not agree with.  Because of the bombing, and in the event of the invasion, this will not be Fatah. It’s doubtful Fatah could enforce a peace in any case, but they will be forced to back Hamas against Israel, unless they want to be killed by their own population.  They will gain legitimacy in Palestinian eyes to the extent that they do back Hamas and other fighters against Israel, actually.  Israel is forcing Fatah to side with Hamas, which is an impressive bit of unintentional peacemaking, given how much Fatah and Hamas hate each other.

I had originally assumed they would do a limited incursion, intending to find and take out the missile manufacturing sites and to look for tunnels leading from Gaza to Egypt, which have been used for limited military resupply by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.  While I think that would be messy and success is uncertain, it’s at least remotely sane from a military standpoint.

Instead what we have is an eerie echo of the invasion of Lebanon, when Israel declared its victory condition was the destruction of Hezbollah.  Not only did that not happen, but Hezbollah proved it could go toe to toe with the Israeli army.  For all practical purposes it was Israel’s first major military loss in war since Israel’s creation.

Hamas is not Hezbollah, and Gaza is not Lebanon.   Hezbollah had its own communications infrastructure, a lot of space to move in, a deep logistical supply chain, and years to build up a network of defenses without any real interference.  Hamas has had none of those things.  At the same time, the lessons from the Lebanon war have been passed on to Hamas.  They know how to take out Israeli tanks.  Israeli soldiers note that Hamas’s fire discipline has tightened considerably in the last couple years.  These are no longer just militia forces, they are a small but professional military organization and they have reasonable light infantry equipment.

They cannot win a stand up fight with Israel, in the way that Hezbollah did.  There aren’t enough of them, they aren’t well enough equipped, and the area of Gaza is too small to allow for enough maneuver.

But they don’t need to.  What they need to do is to inflict enough casualties to make it clear that Israel can’t just slap Hamas around whenever it feels like.  Then, if Israel looks likely to occupy Gaza they need to go guerilla.  Fade into the population, and start harassing the Israeli military with roadside bombs, mortar attacks, kidnappings and all the sort of actions we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The job is to make the Israeli military bleed and for Hamas to accept high losses.  As with Hezbollah, Hamas has an advantage in this regard.  No one signs up to fight for Hamas with any illusions: they know it’s probably going to cost them their lives.  They are willing to die.  Despite years of idiocy about "your job is to make the other guy die for his side", in fact it’s often useful to be willing to die.  Some operations entail significant losses, Hamas can undertake them because its troops don’t have that much regard for their own lives.

The wild card in this is Hezbollah. Hezbollah has said it will take action, but not said what that action is.  To point out the obvious, Hezbollah cannot invade Israel, it has a defensive force, not an offensive military.  It could launch its missiles, and Israel would not be able to stop that from occurring (the missiles disarmed earlier this week were, I am informed, called in by Hezbollah itself).  It could supply Palestinian forces in the West bank with weaponry, intelligence or even some cadre forces.  It could strike at Israeli interests overseas through its extensive terror network (Hezbollah doesn’t do a lot of terrorism, but they may be the most capable terrorists in the world).

From an Israeli point of view the big fear has to be that they actually declare war and start raining missiles down on Israel.  While those missiles won’t do a great deal of damage absent fluking out and hitting a fuel storage depot or some such, they will put pressure on Israel to respond.  The operation in Gaza, to be done properly, requires a lot of troops.  Moving troops into Lebanon will weaken both efforts.  Air power alone, as was proved in the last war, won’t stop the missiles.  On the other hand, Israel’s response will surely be a widespread bombing campaign which will kill a lot of Lebanese and do a lot of infrastructure damage.  Hezbollah may not want to put the Lebanese through that again.

This is going to be a brutal war, and Gazans and Hamas are going to get the worse of it in terms of casualties.  But, harsh as it is to say, sometimes a war is necessary and this is one of those times.  The idea that Israel can impose a better peace through violence or starving Palestinians into submission needs to be defeated and the only way it will be defeated is, ironically, by trying and failing at violence.  If there is to be a peace, it will be dictated by facts on the ground, and those facts are about to be created.

At the end of the day, guerilla warfare is the war of the weak.  It is when a defeated people, lying bloody on the ground, say "it’s not over yet."

Israel just declared it’s going to kick the Palestinians in the ribs until they give up.  We’ll see how much blood Gazans are willing to spit up rather than give in.