Israel's Options
At Contentions, Noah Pollack poses the question: How should Israel respond to the relentless missile fire emanating from Gaza? Pollack believes there are no good options available, but commenters strongly disagree and come up with several. Commenter Dan Simon writes:
As long as there is a huge population in Gaza with absolutely no means of feeding itself apart from charity and war-for-hire, its residents will continue to rely on both. Were it not for truly staggering levels of international aid and Israeli military and humanitarian forebearance, most of Gaza’s population would have long ago decamped for someplace less hopeless. Instead, they stay to eat handouts and kill Jews–because that’s the best option available.
Military action targeting Gaza’s terrorists addresses only the symptom of this underlying problem. To solve the problem itself requires carefully dismantling the lifelines which keep Gazans alive, in place and fighting, so as to encourage civilian flight. The trick, of course, is to do so without creating enough of a “humanitarian catastrophe” to stir the rest of the world either to replace the existing lifelines or to pressure Israel into reconstituting them. It will therefore have to be a gradual but inevitable-seeming process, with Israel slowly choking off supplies and making it clear that conditions in Gaza will eventually become unliveable–long before they actually do.
Note that two steps that are widely considered to have been blunders–the withdrawal from Gaza and the withdrawal from the corridor separating Gaza from Egypt–are absolutely essential to the success of this process. If Israel were still occupying Gaza, then it would have much more trouble absolving itself of responsibility for feeding and sustaining its inhabitants. And if it controlled the Gaza-Egypt border, it would need to open the border to allow Gazans to leave–thus exposing itself to charges of intentionally forcing an exodus.
If, on the other hand, Israel sticks with a purely military approach to the problem, it will eventually find itself drawn deeper and deeper into Gaza–until it is once again a de facto occupying power, responsible for feeding and sustaining a hostile, destitute, dependent populace that will happily accept Israeli bread and reciprocate with bullets.
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