New situations call for new tactics

In theory, the one good thing about the Hamas takeover in Gaza is that it has entirely changed the game board. This ain’t your grandmother’s Middle Eastern situation any more. That should mean that, at long last, Israel can break away from stale, failed tactics, and try out new approaches that may better serve her security needs over both the short and long runs.

Sadly, Israel is doing the same old, same old, which means financing the thugs who are currently in the underdog position — never mind that, if Fatah ever regains power, it will work just as zealously as Hamas to destroy Israel. It also means proposing land for peace exchanges, this time promising the Golan Heights to Syria, a rogue regime that has never met a promise that it wouldn’t break, especially if that means damaging or destroying Israel. How stupid can Israelis get? They used to win because they fought smart; they’re failing now because they’re playing stupid.

Anyway, that’s my loosey-goosey rundown. If you want an erudite, detailed, eminently readable article that actually relies on facts and not just conclusions, hustle yourself over to Richard Baehr’s American Thinker analysis of the current situation facing Israel. It’s depressing, but it’s also rewarding reading simply because you feel infinitely more informed after you read it than you did before.

Incidentally, one of the most depressing parts of the article is the political stagnation that’s feeding Israel’s current downward trend, a stagnation created by a coalition system, rather than a “winner take all” government:

During a short stay in Israel last week, one question I had for those I met was how the current Israeli government, with approval ratings hovering below the 5% level and a track record in governance that would make the hapless Jimmy Carter’s 4 years as President seem successful and accomplished by comparison, manages to stay in power.
The answer is with a broad coalition totaling 78 of 120 Knesset members, patched together with five parties contributing their members. There is a certain stability inherent in a first mover disadvantage in this particular coalition. No party wants to be the first to leave, since it would not bring down the government, but would instead result the end of the financial goodies that come to the party for being part of the governing coalition. For the current government to fall, parties with at least 19 seats in the Knesset among them would have to leave the government for a vote of no confidence to pass, assuming the members of the three Arab parties with ten Knesset members among them would support the no confidence vote. If the Arabs elected to support the government though not a part of it (fearing a right wing coalition would replace it), then parties with 29 seats combined would have to leave for the no confidence motion to pass and new elections be called.
That seems very unlikely. At this point, to each minor party in the Kadima-led coalition, the status quo for participation in the coalition, even with a ruddlerless leader in charge of the country, seems better then the uncertainty of new elections with a new governing coalition formed that may not need that party’s votes to patch together a majority of Knesset seats.

Such is the weakness of Israel’s parliamentary system, filled with many self-interested weak parties.

I think the point about a paralyzed government, which sees government members busily scrabbling for deck chairs on a sinking ship, hit me really hard because of a bumper sticker I saw today. It’s one that was very common in 2000/2001 and again in 2004/2005, but has sort of faded out: “George Bush is not my President.” The fact is, if you live in a winner take all Democracy, as we do, he is very much your President, whether you like him or not. And as the coalition process in Israel shows, we have every reason to be grateful that a winner takes all system at least allows forward movement in times of crisis.

I should note that Daniel Pipes does not believe that the new situation, Fatahland in the West Bank, and Hamastan in Gaza, really create any new options at all for Israel:

As for Israel, it faces the same existential threat as before. It gains from Hamas’s near isolation from the West, from the fractured Palestinian movement, and from its having a single address in Gaza. Also, it benefits from having an enemy, Hamas, overt in its intention to eliminate the Jewish state, rather than dissimulating, like Fatah. (Fatah talks to Jerusalem while killing Israelis, Hamas kills Israelis without negotiations; Fatah is not moderate, but crafty; Hamas is quite purely ideological.) But Israel loses when the fervor, discipline, and stern consistency of totalitarian Islam replace Fatah’s incoherent, Arafatian mish-mash.

The Fatah-Hamas differences concern personnel, approaches, and tactics. They share allies and goals. Tehran arms both Hamas and Fatah. The “moderate” terrorists of Fatah and the bad terrorists of Hamas equally inculcate children with a barbaric creed of “martyrdom.” Both agree on eliminating the Jewish state. Neither shows a map with Israel present, or even Tel Aviv.

Fatah’s willingness to play a fraudulent diplomatic game has lured woolly-minded and gullible Westerners, including Israelis, to invest in it. The most recent folly was Washington’s decision to listen to its security coordinator in the region, Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, and send Fatah $59 million in military aid to fight Hamas – a policy that proved even more bone-headed when Hamas promptly seized those shipments for its own use.

I always hope that someone, thinking outside of the box, will be able to effect a dramatic change that turns a situation around entirely, in a way no one could previously imagine.  Both Pipes and Baehr make it very clear that this is a hard box to escape, and Baehr explains that Israel is making no effort to do so.