Israel's Ticking Clock

I suspect Max Boot and Juan Cole don't agree on much, but reading their respective takes on Israel's war in Gaza does bring you to the same conclusion: Israel is in a deep bind, both in the short term but especially over the long term.

There has been talk lately that Israel was doing the incoming Obama administration a "favor" by taking Hamas out of the equation, thereby paving the road to a renewed peace process. It could be the exact opposite. By taking military action now, Israel may be demonstrating how untenable its long term prospects are and affirming in the minds of her enemies that time is on their side (see Cole on the demographic details).

Israel cannot extirpate every Hamas member in Gaza without, as Boot writes, resorting to tactics that it and the world would rightly find abhorrent. But they can cause enough damage to ensure that the residents of Gaza are even less amenable to a negotiated settlement than before - a settlement that everyone recognizes is the ultimate path toward security for Israel and statehood for the Palestinians. Gaza - the security problem for Israel and the governance problem for the 1.5 million Palestinians that reside there - does not go away when (or if) the IDF withdraws.