Understanding Israel's Primary Objective

"The Confidence War"
A25 (Op-Ed), Tuesday 1/6/09
By David Brooks

NYT's commentator David Brooks makes some insightful remarks, as well as some surprising errors, in his op-ed on the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and current battle in Gaza.

As a key point, Brooks rightfully understands the exterminationist goals of Israel's radical Islamist enemies, along with Israel's reasoned response:

The extremists’ goal is to kill as many Jews as possible and wait for God (or Iran) to kill the rest. Israel’s goal is to restrain the brazenness of the extremists until their movement somehow burns itself out or is destroyed from within Arab society.

He can also understand the necessity for Israel's military operations in Gaza. He doesn't reflexively subscribe to the shallow notion that military force can never achieve any good. Instead he believes that "violence doesn’t necessarily beget violence. It sometimes prevents it."

Brooks also comprehends the psychological underpinnings of this conflict - "What is really important is how each episode [conflict] ends, because the ending defines the meaning — who mastered events and who was mastered by them." Israel must achieve victory in order to reestablish its deterrent capacity and Hamas must lose in order to show that the power of its resistance is hollow.

Nevertheless, Brooks somehow concludes, without any firm corroboration, that Israeli leaders and generals may be losing sight of the psychological victory in order to achieve such "old-fashioned" and failed objectives as the control over territory and the overthrow of Hamas. He finds support in this by saying that Israeli leaders "have listed an assortment of vague war aims." Vagueness though, does not mean that these leaders lack proper vision. Should Israel be putting all its cards on the table?

And despite all this vagueness, Israel does have a primary objective - the permanent cessation of rocket fire on its border with Gaza. If that were to happen, Israel would have little support to continue its operations, but if Hamas continues this aggression, it may find itself closer and closer to the abyss.