Much more good stuff if you watch the whole episode.

Israel announced a unilateral cease-fire, but no plan to withdraw troops from Gaza. Hamas counter-announced a one-week cease-fire to give Israel time to withdraw troops from Gaza. At the time of the expiration of the previous medium-term cease-fire, the sensible proposal was for the United States along with allies in Europe and the Arab world (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.) to press for a deal in which Israel was given enhanced assurances regarding rocket fire and border smuggle in exchange for Israel relaxing the blockade on Gaza. That didn’t happen, and neither Israel nor Hamas pursued that route on their own, and as a result all these people are dead. But it’s still the sensible way forward.

Common sense works here, too. It’s just clearly not the case that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is primarily a technical problem related to the difficulty of preventing smuggling. Implementation of a political solution would entail technical aspects, but the idea that a political solution needs to wait for a complete and total resolution of all the technical aspects of Israel’s security problems just ensures that neither the politicsl nor the security issues will ever be addressed.

Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, says:

Israel’s aim, he said, was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel.

The other aim was to prevent an Iranian takeover of Gaza and Iranian weapons from entering Gaza. He supported the idea of food being sent from Iran to Gaza, but not rockets or explosives.

“We have to stop the smuggling of arms, but someone else has to stop the provision of arms,” he said.

Most Arab states are even more worried than Israel about Iran, Peres asserted, because they don’t want to be governed by Iran.

Getting back to civilian suffering in Gaza, Peres said, “it gives us no pleasure to see people suffering.”

He says it gives him “no pleasure” to see people suffering, but he also says that the main point of the operation is to provide a strong blow to Gaza’s population to teach them a lesson. So that’s kind of a disingenuous protestation of displeasure. And of course in his remarks, Peres is echoing New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s explanation of Israeli strategy which, in turn, echoed Friedman’s own rationale for invading Iraq—that we needed to send a “suck on this” message to the Arab world. It also seems related to what Jonah Goldberg has termed the “Ledeen Doctrine”, the view that “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Israel being much smaller than the United States, it presumably needs to pick up a smaller and crappier place like the Gaza Strip.

Israeli officials are hardly alone in embracing this sort of morally hideous behavior. Indeed as noted there’s reason to believe they’ve imported these ideas from the hawkish camp in the United States. And of course policies oriented around collective punishment and reprisal targeting of civilian populations are hardly unheard of in human history. But they’re wrong and a substantial body of international humanitarian law is dedicated to making them illegal.

You often hear it said that the fact that Palestinian attacks emanated from Gaza at Israel even after Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza proves that Israel lacks a real partner in peace with which they can negotiate. Steven Walt observes that it’s hard to take this very seriously when Dov Weisglass, the architect of the disengagement policy when Ariel Sharon first articulated it, said at the time that the point of the policy was to create political breathing space so as to ensure that Israel wouldn’t need to concede the creation of an independent Palestine:

Is what you are saying, then, is that you exchanged the strategy of a long-term interim agreement for a strategy of long-term interim situation?

“The American term is to park conveniently. The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians. There is a decision here to do the minimum possible in order to maintain our political situation. The decision is proving itself. It is making it possible for the Americans to go to the seething and simmering international community and say to them, `What do you want.’ It also transfers the initiative to our hands. It compels the world to deal with our idea, with the scenario we wrote.

Now maybe you think this is a correct strategy. But the strategy is was what it was—an effort to give better talking points to an Israeli government that wasn’t serious about negotiating a two state solution. And in that it succeeded, as witnessed by how often the talking point surfaces. But people parroting those talking points are lying to themselves or lying to you.

Greg Sanders asks:

One thing I’m wondering about Gaza. If at some point in the future, Egypt goes more democratic and the Muslim Brotherhood gains a role in the government, does a substantially better relationship between Palestinians in Gaza and Egypt become possible?

As you’ve shown via links, the West Bank part of a three state solution is totally unworkable. However, the problems with perhaps getting some sort of protectorate status for Gaza seem to largely center around Mubarak (or any likely dictatorial successor).

A “three-state solution” would entail Gaza being incorporated into Egypt, Israel grabbing and annexing the parts of the West Bank it wants, and Jordan absorbing a rump West Bank and this seems to be the successor fantasy to the “Greater Israel” dreams of yore. With regard to the question, obviously this would depend on the state of the overall Israel-Palestine issue.

I can’t speak from a great wealth of personal experience, but I do think it’s a mistake to look at the Middle East as just a big ol’ sea of generic Arabs who can be shunted from one country to another. Egyptians are aware of Egypt’s distinctly Egyptian history and heritage and Palestinians have a feeling of common nationhood. That said, if you assume a future Palestinian state, it’s natural that Gaza will in some ways be more connected with Egypt (which it’s next to) than to the rest of Palestine. But think of Alaska. Notwithstanding the fact that Alaska shares a border with Canada along with a language and broadly speaking a “culture,” Alaskans are still Americans. And, indeed, as we’ve seen from Sarah Palin they’re capable of manifesting an ugly brand of American nationalism that’s totally incompatible with being Canadian.

An interesting related issue that can only be speculated about is to what degree would we see much closer political integration between Arab states if he had more political democracy. There are efforts, of course, to coordinate Arab policy through fora such as the Arab League. But in practice it’s extremely difficult for authoritarian states to cooperate in a deep way. Constituted as democracies, however, it would be much more plausible to imagine the Arab League turning into something more like an Arab version of an EU-style superstate.

Israel and the United States are trying to secure agreement on a deal brokered by Egypt that would mean a Hamas commitment to stop all rocket firing into Israel and an Egyptian commitment to block smuggling tunnels into Gaza, to stop the resupplying of Hamas with weaponry and cash. In return, Israel would agree to a cease-fire and the opening of its crossings into Gaza for goods and fuel and the opening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, with European Union supervision.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly the shape of a deal that the peace camp has been saying the United States ought to push for since before the fighting started. The Gaza ceasefire made neither side happy because Hamas felt Israel was violating its terms by continuing its blockade while Israel was unhappy that Hamas’ rocketfire never genuinely fell to zero. The win-win, positive-sum compromise was fairly obvious. But instead of going for it, we got this incursion which has killed hundreds of people and inflicted serious suffering on 1.5 million. And at the end, we’re getting a push for the deal that would be obvious all along. But if a deal gets done post-fighting, then Kadima and Labor get to count it as the fruits of military victory rather than if they’d shown weakness by trying to achieve the same result without the same volume of bloodshed.

This raises a question that every Israeli and its supporters now needs to ask. What is the strategic purpose behind the present fighting? After two weeks of combat Olmert, Livni, and Barak have still not said a word that indicates that Israel will gain strategic or grand strategic benefits, or tactical benefits much larger than the gains it made from selectively striking key Hamas facilities early in the war. In fact, their silence raises haunting questions about whether they will repeat the same massive failures made by Israel’s top political leadership during the Israeli-Hezbollah War in 2006. Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal or at least one it can credibly achieve? Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process?

To blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes. To paraphrase a comment about the British government’s management of the British Army in World War I, lions seem to be led by donkeys. If Israel has a credible ceasefire plan that could really secure Gaza, it is not apparent. If Israel has a plan that could credibly destroy and replace Hamas, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to help the Gazans and move them back towards peace, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to use US or other friendly influence productively, it not apparent.

I got that via the Jew-hater James Fallows. Of course it may seem unseemly to some for so many American writers to be sitting here safely on the far side of the oceans second-guessing Israeli decision-makers. And I sympathize with that. But one has to recall that we’ve involved ourselves intimately with the situation through our aid money and our diplomatic support for Israel at the UN over the years. Under the circumstances we have no choice but to second-guess when these kinds of things happen.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve heard references to the idea that Hamas is so dastardly that rockets kept getting fired at Israeli territory even while the cease-fire was on. And, you know, that’s true but the people putting the point that way are deliberately trying to deceive you:

A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory.

Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured. The violence represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June, yet both sides suggested they wanted to return to atmosphere of calm.

Point being, the cease-fire was imperfect and imperfectly observed for a variety of reasons. It was an inherently difficult situation since neither party to the agreement would recognize the other side’s legitimacy. But the problems with the cease-fire, and the violations of it, are in no sense reflections of some kind of inherent perfidy either of Arabs generally or Palestinians more specifically or Hamas in particular any more than Israeli incursions indicate a fundamental untrustworthiness of Jews or Israelis or the Kadima Party. It was a difficult situation and not one the United States chose to involve itself constructively with.

I would say, however, that what’s most relevant for both sides here are separate elements of just war theory — possession of “right intention” and “reasonable prospects for success.” First from the Hamas side. As Israel’s critics will happily let you know, Palestinians have just cause for fighting against Israel. But Hamas’ actual cause isn’t the just cause of Palestinian independence but an unjust cause of aggression against Israel. And even if Hamas were fighting for a just cause, their method of untargeted rocket fire has no reasonable prospects for success. If the way the world worked was that you should some rockets at Sderot, damage some buildings and hurt a few people, and then suddenly Israeli officials are ready to shake hands on a deal that ends the occupation forever you might be tempted to say that the loss of civilian life would be proportionate to the ends being pursued. But that’s not how the world works and it doesn’t characterize Hamas’ war aims.

A lot of commentators seem to want to believe that the situation on the Israeli side is very different from this. In fact, I think it’s only a little different. In terms of “right intention” this is where the settlements come into play. As long as Israel is occupying illegal settlements in Palestinian territory, restricting Palestinian movement in order to defend them, and indeed expanding the settlements it becomes difficult to view any Israeli activity as purely defensive in nature. And, again, if the way the world worked was that attacking Gaza and causing suffering there led Palestinians to say “you know, these Hamas guys are bloodthirsty maniacs — let’s put some non-violent moderates in charge” you could understand this campaign as having reasonable prospects of success at securing enduring safety from Hamas rocket fire. But that’s not how the world works. So asking what kinds of Israeli actions might or might not be “proportionate” to those war aims is really neither here nor there. Everyone understands that this round of fighting will stop some day soon, but that the halt in fighting won’t create a permanent end to rocket fire.

I thought I should recommend Jimmy Carter’s op-ed on Gaza. But of course as everyone knows Carter is a raging, Jew-hating, Israel-bashing bigot. And ultimately this illustrates what I think is the inconvenient truth about US involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict, namely that to do much good you need to be willing to take the hits. Near the end of my new TAP Online column I note the irony that Carter is the most-loathed of US Presidents among Israel hawks, but the Camp David accords he sponsored have done more to advance Israeli interests than anything any president’s done since Harry Truman recognized Israeli independence.

The issue is that peace is strongly in Israel’s best interests. But the most useful thing we can ever do to bring that about is offer a bit of a stiff arm and tough love to alter internal Israeli political incentives. But doing that earns you a lot of political enemies even if your work pays off.

I’ve been thinking back on some of the online disputes I’ve been having about Israel’s attack on Gaza, and it occurred to me that what’s missing from a lot of this is context. Not further context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but further context on the use of force in general. The main folks I’ve been arguing with — Jon Chait, Martin Peretz, Michael Goldfarb — are all guys who, I believe, think even in retrospect that support for the invasion of Iraq is nothing worth regretting. And certainly Peretz and Goldfarb were cheerleaders for the 2006 Israeli action in Lebanon, though I don’t remember what Chait thought.

For my part, I think having supported the Iraq invasion is very much worth regretting and over the past five years I’ve changed a lot of my thinking about national security policy and war and peace in general. I was skeptical of the merits of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, skeptical about Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia, skeptical about Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, and skeptical about Russia’s furious counter-attack on Georgia. Long story short, I’m strongly inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that the aggressive use of military force will accomplish their objectives, and also inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that bloodshed is morally justifiable.

But put in a different, more hawkish context, I’d say what Israel is doing in Gaza is certainly better-justified than what the United States did in Iraq. The threat of Hamas rocket fire wasn’t just a made-up pretext. And the operation seems a lot better-conceived than the one in Lebanon. So given our different prior commitments, I’m not sure I’m having any particularly seriously disagreements with those folks about the particulars of this armed clash or even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict writ large. Or, rather, I’m not sure that such disagreements are really the key drivers of disagreement about this specific thing.

Relatedly, something I’ve heard from fans of this attack is rhetorical questions along the lines of “what would the United States do if we were being attacked by rockets from Mexico or Canada?” Of course with such hypotheticals, it’s always hard to specify the issue correctly. I assume if someone shot a rocket across the Canadian border in the general direction of Seattle that the Canadian government would arrest the guy. But you actually don’t need to get very hypothetical to ask what the United States would do if people felt themselves threatened by foreign killers — we’d do exactly what we did in 2002-2003, namely engage in a panicky, counterproductive, and immoral overreaction driven more by emotion, ego, and politics than by sound thinking about the situation. So I don’t really find it surprising that Israel is reacting in this way.

By somewhat the same token, I do read in the comments section what I would regard as a disproportionate level of shock and appalledness from some quarters about Israeli activities as if this action is some kind of unprecedented outrage in human history. The real outrage is how common and banal, how unsurprising and thoroughly precedented it is.

And, when tens of thousands of pro-Israel American Jews are joining with statements made by J Street, Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek, Israel Policy Forum and others calling for a ceasefire – it is simply wrong to call these views out of touch with Jewish sentiment.

American Jews are, as Rabbi Yoffie says, by and large sensible and centrist, and they support Israel in her hour of need. But many of those same Jews – and their friends who want the best for Israel – are well within their rights and within the centrist mainstream to question the wisdom of the actions taken this week, to question where they will lead and to ask the US and others to help bring an end to the violence as quickly as possible.

They are also in line with many in Israel, where on Friday, 30 peace organizations (including the Peres Center for Peace, the Geneva Initiative and Peace Now) signed a public call for an immediate ceasefire, joining such pillars of the national conscience as David Grossman and Amos Oz.

There’s more at the link. In addition to whatever I’ve already said about Gaza, let me just say that I find it very troubling how frequently rabbis in the United States decide that adhering to a strong form of Israeli nationalist politics is or ought to be constitutive of being Jewish. You see this all the time in the domestic context, of course, when it’s a commonplace of crank rightwing discourse that failing to muster enthusiasm about any American military endeavor no matter how misguided makes you somehow less American than the proponents of bloodshed. But that really is a crank rightwing position. And Rabbi Yoffe isn’t a rightwing crank — or, indeed, any kind of rightwinger at all. But it’s really just the same situation.

And I think that if people want to be honest, they need to ask themselves how many of them were sitting around the day before Israel started this action not only feeling that it would be smart for Israel to start a massive military action in Gaza but feeling so strongly about it that one would question the Jewish credentials and basic intelligence of anyone who didn’t agree. Frankly, I didn’t hear a lot of Americans taking that position. Then the Israeli government changed its policy, and a lot of Americans decided to agree with the new Israeli policy. Which is fine as far as it goes. But people who didn’t regard the previous policy as unconscionable at the time have no business suddenly deciding that it’s unconscionable to disagree with the new policy.

Of course, Hamas running Gaza is a relatively recent phenomenon and it’s not as if Israel was completely unconcerned with Hamas back then. On the contrary.

But as I wrote back on the 29th, something you need to look at here is the risk that weakening Hamas will only lead to the rise of more extreme groups. The high level of power that Hamas had achieved as of last week was, after all, precisely the result of a deliberate Israeli campaign to weaken Fatah. The hope was that this would bring some more accommodationist Palestinians to the fore, but instead the reverse happened. And now that Israel is going about trying the same thing with Hamas, one needs to worry that Hamas will be displaced by Salafist groups who think Hamas is too weak-kneed. Matt Duss goes into detail on this but suffice it to say that the years of fighting in Iraq have seeded the Middle East with Salfists possessing battlefield experience who are looking for new causes that people will rally behind.

Israel and Hamas both must respect the prohibition under the laws of war against deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch expressed grave concern about Israeli bombings in Gaza that caused civilian deaths and Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilian areas in violation of international law.

Rocket attacks on Israeli towns by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets violate the laws of war, while a rising number of the hundreds of Israeli bombings in Gaza since December 27, 2008, appear to be unlawful attacks causing civilian casualties. Additionally, Israel’s severe limitations on the movement of non-military goods and people into and out of Gaza, including fuel and medical supplies, constitutes collective punishment, also in violation of the laws of war.

Neither the Israeli government nor Hamas is the first outfit to flaunt the laws of war and they obviously won’t be the last. But I think it’s still important to call these things out, and I think it’s a real problem that the fraught nature of these issues seems to have persuaded a lot of bloggers to basically say nothing about the fighting. At a minimum, duly noting that there are human rights abuses being committed by both sides and that human rights abuses are bad isn’t so hard.

Israel barred men younger than 50 from entering Jerusalem mosques for Friday prayers and closed West Bank border crossings in hopes of preventing protests or violence over its bombing campaign in Gaza. [...] Thousands of police officers patrolled the streets of the old city and east Jerusalem. Only Palestinian men over 50 who held Israeli-issued identity cards were allowed inside mosques to pray. No such restrictions applied to women.

Concern over potential attacks prompted Israel to close all entry points from the West Bank until Saturday night.

The Defense Ministry said it would consider allowing passage for “those in need of humanitarian or medical aid as well as other specific incidents.”

Such are the wages of life as a subject people. The Jerusalem Post writes about “a general curfew on the West Bank” being imposed, though they don’t go into detail about what exactly that means. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had no intention of killing any Israelis this morning, but everyone takes the hit. Meanwhile, I heard on NPR this morning that Hamas had specifically disclaimed any interest in a cease-fire — apparently their view is that if they can provoke Israeli into launching a bloody ground operation in Gaza that this will help their movement and nevermind the cost to people.

Israel has a problem with Hamas because Hamas believes Israel has no right to exist. If Hamas lay down all its weapons, Israel would lift its blockade. If Israel lay down all its weapons, Hamas would kill as many Israelis as it could.

One way to reply to this is à la Ezra Klein who observes that at some point you need to judge based on what’s actually happening. And what’s been happening is that whatever Hamas’ ambitions may or may not have been, they were scattering short-range inaccurate rocket fire on Israel that was causing little damage. Israel struck back with actions that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and pushed over a million more closer to the brink of starvation. And in general this is an important aspect of the conflict — irrespective of intentions, over the years you have many more dead Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians.

But another piece of the puzzle is that though American Jewish liberals tend to take a lot of comfort in the idea of Israel’s good intentions and good faith throughout this whole process, there’s a reason approximately no Arabs anywhere in the world see it that way. All throughout the “peace process” years — through the good ones and through the bad ones — Israel continued expanding both the geographical footprint of its settlements and the population living upon them. For most of this time, Israel has often appeared unwilling to enforce domestic Israeli law on the settler population, to say nothing of abiding by international law or agreements made. And while Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the “disengagement” from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation. Israel’s policy objectives in the West Bank appear to be first seizing the choice bits of it, and then withdrawing behind a wall with the residual West Bank treating like post-”disengagement” Gaza.

I’m not a believer in violence, and so I certainly don’t think that Hamas’ rocket attacks have been an appropriate, morally defensible, or effective means of protesting this one-sided bargain. But it’s important to understand that it’s simply not the case that Hamas is the only party to this conflict that’s working toward unreasonable goals.

Jonathan Zasloff offers the futility argument with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

All those who insist that the United States should “solve” the problem should explain how. And if they can’t do that, then maybe they should take some quiet time.

I think that would be an appealing solution to a lot of people who have no real desire to try to sit in delicate judgment weighing the moral balance between a Hamas movement that seems indifferent to human life, and an Israeli government that’s lashing out brutally as part of a domestic political drama. But as long as Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign assistance funds and by an even larger margin the largest per capita recipient of US foreign assistance funds, then I don’t see how “quiet time” is a realistic option. Israel is not a poor country; our financial backing for them is not a humanitarian gesture the way that funds spent on Malawi or Guatemala might be. Our aid to Israel is a strategic commitment to an allied country in a troubled region of the world and a region where, among other things, the United States is concerned about the low esteem in which we are held by the local population.

Under the circumstances, throwing up our hands and saying “it’s too hard!” isn’t an option. We can decide we don’t want to be involved, which would mean unwinding the ties of collaboration and assistance between the US and Israel, or we can try to play a constructive role in bringing an end to the conflict. I’m not personally sure of how you do that. But I’m quite certain that the first step would be pressing Israel — hard — to stop expanding settlements in the West Bank and start dismantling them. To show to Palestinians interested in a two-state solution (perhaps including some Hamas people or perhaps not) that there’s credibility on the other side. I think Israelis wouldn’t welcome such action by us, but ultimately it would be in their own best interests. On the other hand, those who really do think the best thing for the United States is to just wash our hands of the whole mess have an obligation to really stand behind that belief and urge us to wash our hands of the situation. But just proclaiming a pox on both houses while in practice heavily subsidizing one side isn’t a viable option.

Robert Farley writes about the strategic logic of the Gaza standoff:

The strategic aims seem clear; Hamas wished to provoke an Israeli attack in anticipation that the reaction will help Hamas seize control of the West Bank. Israel wants to damage Hamas’ state infrastructure, and thus apply enough pain to the Palestinians that they move back towards Abbas, and incidentally give Kadima a chance to win the upcoming elections. Although Egypt and Abbas seem to be on board with the Israeli plan, I know which way I’m betting; people rarely respond to bombing by picking the more moderate option. I’m guessing that Hamas comes out of this stronger than before, although of course the Egyptian reaction could change things a bit by affecting Hamas logistical situation. Even then, though, the policy of the Egyptian government can be quite different than the actual behavior of the Egyptian border guards and inspectors who monitor commerce with Gaza.

It’s important to recall that the rise of Hamas is, in part, the result of a very successful Israeli effort to undermine the authority and infrastructure of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Israel interpreted the collapse of the Camp David talks as indicating that Yasser Arafat and his movement were not reasonable negotiating partners and that the whole enterprise of trying to deal with them had been a mistake. So they spent years — with the support and at times encouragement of the Bush administration — trying to weaken their hold on the Palestinian people and the Palestinian territories in hopes that this would bring to power some kind of hazily defined quisling entity that would be more accommodating. And they succeeded in the undermining. Why, exactly, the Israeli and American governments thought the likely upshot of success would be a more accommodating alternative rather than Hamas I couldn’t quite say. But that’s what they thought and they were wrong.

Similarly, one has to contemplate the possibility that Israeli efforts at disempowering Hamas won’t so much fail as suffer “catastrophic success” as the area is taken over by a Palestinian branch of al-Qaeda. I’m not sure that would be worse for Israel (probably would) but it would definitely be worse for the United States of America.