As Ryan is chewing on tinfoil as a result of his frustration and anger toward the state of Israel for their recent and present activities in the Gaza Strip, KK4 has volunteered to offer his own assessment of the current situation.
Emotionalism and indignation are easily evoked when discussing the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As I am not one for penis fencing or willing to engage in hours of discussion on the legitimacy of land claims, tacitcs or religious dogma, my assessment of the current situation will simply deal with the realities while not making any moral decisions, as they should be made by the reader on an individual basis. To those who may believe this is cowardly, my job is to coldly evaluate tactical situations, not to play favorites. Should I lose my cool, lives will be lost. I do not fuck around.
To put it bluntly, Israel has lost. Israel does not have the capacity to sustain the conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinian people indefinatley. Israel has lost the demographic game. The Palestinians will simply overwhelm them with numbers as they have a higher population growth rate; 3.422% in Gaza and 2.25% in the West Bank versus Israel’s population growth rate of 1.713%. In addition, the Palestinians have a much younger population than Israel. According to the CIA World fact book, in the Gaza Strip children age 14 and below account for 44.7% of the population of about 1.5 million. In a few years they will come to military service age; Israel simply cannot sustain its population, nor its military force, and they are keenly aware of it.
In addition to losing demographically, Israel cannot sustain it’s military activities without massive subsidies from the American and other friendly foreign governments in the form of arms and aide money. For that matter, in these economic conditions, America cannot sustain the amount of monetary and military aide to Israel; America simply does not have the capacity to support a state of near constant conflict any longer. Also, even though Israel have fine weapons systems of their own, using AK-47 rifles (Galil) and Chieftain tanks (Merkava) adapted to their own needs, they cannot sustain military production indefinitely; nor do they have the capacity to support this production economically. The Israeli economy cannot support the conflict without aide from the outside. This fact is also known to Israel.
In 2006, Hamas won the majority of the seats in the Palestinian government through legitimate elections challenging the established power of the PLO and the Fatah movement. Hamas is not simply a “terrorist organization,” but has legitimate democratic claims to power. However, their was a power struggle between Fatah and Hamas due to the former’s reluctance to abide by the election results and share power, leading to Hamas expelling Fatah from the seats of power they held illegitimately via force of arms. For months, Israel has closed the 51 km border with the Gaza Strip not allowing movement of peoples, food and other aide into or out of Gaza. Israel engaged in siege warfare against Gaza, attempting to weaken the Hamas government through denial of movements of people and resupply.
In my assessment, Israel, by acting in this manner and attacking Gaza, is taking a huge gamble in an attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Tactically, even with more advanced technologies and with a better trained army, attacking such a densely populated urban area is extremely difficult and risky. At the moment, Israeli forces have surrounded the largest urban areas and has engaged in artillery strikes and skirmishes. Israel has also attempted to decapitate the Hamas government with targeted assassinations, via air strikes, of Hamas political leaders and police. However, to enter the cities en mass would only lead to the Israeli army being drawn in to a battle that, in my humble opinion, they cannot win.
Leningrad in the USSR withstood Nazi siege for three years, Stalingrad turned the Nazi advance; combat in urban areas can decimate fighting strength and even siege cannot guarantee the enemy will surrender. The Israeli Army, should it enter the urban areas en mass, face the very real possibility of being decimated, reducing the overall combat effectiveness of the Israeli army. In addition, Iran, Syrian and Hezbollah, who I might add managed to repel the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006, have stated their intention to intervene.
Why would Israel risk weakening their army in the face of a diminishing capacity to sustain their state and war effort, and foreign Arab/Muslim intervention? My interpretation is that Israel is cold bloodedly attempting to overstretch and decimate their army in Gaza and to entice foreign intervention on the part of Syria, Hezbollah and Iran in an effort to guarantee near unlimited monetary and military aide by forcing US and other allied nation intervention into a wider conflict. As cynical as it may seem, an economy of total war would allow government control of the means of production toward the creation of war materiel, producing jobs, and sending men, and very likely women, off to war thus removing the glut of available labor. The massive deaths on each side, and contracts for rebuilding will fuel a post-war economy.
In the end, Israel cannot sustain the conflict and will lose unless they manage to evict Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza permanently, which does not seem to be a viable alternative. Continuation of the conflict is not a viable alternative. There is only one viable alternative, which Israel and her supporters does not want to hear.
