[See first portion at link]... Hamas isn’t
giving up this time: isn’t retreating behind a strategic ceasefire agreement
with one eye on the future. As I
wrote 10 days ago, Hamas is going for
broke. The Hamas leadership knows it has lost
importance in the post-Arab Spring environment. Too many alternatives are possible now:
scenarios in which there will be other ways for radical Islamists to come at
Israel besides supporting Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, or some combination of
them. Hamas needs to get something
started now, if the terrorist group
is to remain relevant.
So as ceasefire after ceasefire is proposed, Israel agrees to consider them and
Hamas does not. Critics of the Obama administration will
justifiably ask if the president also urged Hamas’s leaders to cease hostilities
today – or if his appeal was only to Israel. The critics would point out that Israel
has started a job that needs to be finished, if there is to be a basis for a
lasting truce of some kind.
And none of these criticisms is unfair. But there’s a bigger picture to
consider: one that may actually cause Netanyahu to seek a negotiated ceasefire
earlier, and after accomplishing less, than Israel’s well-wishers might
prefer.
That bigger picture can be outlined very simply. The whole reality of the Middle East has
changed in the last three years, and no one knows what comes next. Hamas can’t just be destroyed. That would create a vacuum in Gaza, and
there’s no one who is ready with a plan to fill it.
Each interested party knows two things: first, that
there is no plan ready to be implemented for any follow-on arrangement; and
second, that any obvious proposal would be unacceptable to other important
parties. Now isn’t the time to hash
this out: to try to implement a sustainable alternative to the rule of
Hamas.
Or, if this is the time, the process hasn’t
begun. There will have to be some
kind of interim arrangement made.
And just doing that implies cutting the cord with the Hamas era – and
thereby opening Pandora’s box anyway.
No one will accept being a bystander in that emerging dynamic. However you slice it, moving on from
“Hamas in Gaza” has the potential to create more problems for the region than it
would solve right now.
It’s possible that Pandora’s box is about to be
opened. My gut feeling, however, is
that almost everyone would rather than it weren’t. Not today. No one is prepared to launch a campaign
for his interests in the new, all-bets-off conditions – and no one wants anyone
else to. If Israel will cripple
Hamas just enough to restore a livable status quo for a while longer, without
creating that destabilizing vacuum in Gaza, Egypt and Jordan will sign on, and
the more distant parties won’t really stand in the way. (They will, of course, rail in a
perfunctory manner against whatever Israel does.)
The obvious potential partners in such an outcome are
Egypt and Fatah. And the basic
outline of the deal, which Israel should have some latitude to set the timing
for, could be what Obama’s negotiators will reportedly propose in Cairo this
week: the November 2012 ceasefire agreement.
That agreement does not give Hamas what it has asked
for as the conditions for a
truce. Making a mere return to the
status quo ante satisfactory to Israelis, moreover, who have had to supply the
manpower and the casualties for the current campaign, will probably require at
least another week of destroying Hamas infrastructure in Gaza. (Such an outcome will be unsatisfactory,
of course, to a significant portion of the Israeli population. But Israel would need to be more unified
behind a new national strategy to actually change the posture she has maintained
for the last 20-odd years, and I think most Israelis recognize that, viscerally
if not from explicit intellectual evaluation.)
My sense, in any case, is that Netanyahu has no
intention of letting this conflict turn into a complete game-changer for the
region – if he can help it. Letting
things spiral out that way would do Israel no good. I think he has allies, however
temporary, in al-Sisi in Egypt and King Abdullah in Jordan. The political leaders of Europe would
quietly support a restoration of the status quo, and there would be little that
the other leading Muslim nations – Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia – could do about
it, for the time being. Russia
would have no reason to weigh in if the status quo ante was to be the proposed
end state.
So it may well be that Obama is moving now to – in
effect – make the proposal that everyone except Hamas is prepared to accept
anyway. It remains to be seen
whether Hamas can be roped and tied.
That will be up to the IDF.
Hamas has seen a need to change its game. But for the very same reasons, no one
else wants to change the game right now.
With U.S. power gone, there’s suddenly no firm base to stand on – no
center that can be expected to hold – and all contexts for decision-making look
different.
J.E. Dyer
CDR, USN (Ret.)
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