Gaza

I am surprised that the vast majority of writers and commentators, when talking about the current Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, use the word civilian without even pausing to consider that in the context of the Israeli-Hamas war, it has become meaningless. After September 11th, many pointed out that the nature of war has fundamentally changed. Wars had once been fought between two or more identifiable political entities such as nation-states and their governments. Even civil wars more or less fit that definition – the fighting was between a government holding power and another believing that it should be holding it instead. Wars against terrorists do not fit that definition, as just about everyone who had anything to say about the topic has been pointing out for the past seven years. What most of them failed to recognize, or at least state, was that this change of the nature of war has an inescapable corollary. If you cannot identify a political entity capable of raising and maintaining an army, you can no longer distinguish between soldiers and civilians.

This is exactly the case in the Gaza Strip today. The Qassam rockets that Hamas is firing at Israel are launched from people's yards, as the rocket man's family cowers in fear inside the house, or, more chillingly, goes about their business. The rockets are built in the basements of shops even as regular Gazans are buying groceries or clothes upstairs. How do you distinguish between civilians and fighters in cases like this? How do you target the rocket launching operations without killing “civilians?” You don't.

So what is the solution? Absent Hamas's abandonment of the core principle on which it was founded – the refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, the abandonment that is obviously not forthcoming – I see two possibilities. One is a scorched earth policy on the part of Israel. Simply razing Gaza to the ground and killing all of its inhabitants will stop the rocket launches. For obvious reasons, Israel will not do this. This leaves only one other – Gazans themselves overthrowing Hamas. Hamas gained public support and eventually power by addressing people's basic needs – medical care, rule of law, a modicum of economic opportunity -- better than anyone else at the time could. However, they need not, and should not, continue to receive this support now that their mere existence has made Gaza a magnet for Israeli bombs and missiles. If enough houses are destroyed and enough people killed by the Israeli offensive, Gazans whose neighbor has a Qassam launcher in his yard need to walk over there and tell him stop immediately, or stop it for him. For their own good, they need to do this now, and in large numbers. It's not Tony Blair's babbling that will stop the war. It is only a grass-roots anti-Hamas revolution in Gaza that has even a remote chance of doing so.