Economist-04/05/2007

TBC, (Economist)

"In the brouhaha over last summer's war against the Islamist guerrillas of Hizbullah in Lebanon, the campaign in the Gaza Strip that Israel had begun two weeks earlier in response to the kidnap of a soldier, and which killed over 400 Palestinians, has nearly been forgotten. But it was not long after the end of both clashes that some Israeli officials began prophesying a new one.

Such warnings took on more urgency last week after the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates the Palestinian Authority, launched a barrage of home-made rockets (known as Qassams) and mortars from Gaza at Israel. For nearly six months, Hamas has largely avoided firing the rockets and Israel has largely abstained from reacting, though it still goes after militants in the West Bank. Hamas, whose armed wing is anyway run separately, from Damascus, said its barrage was only responding to the killing of several Palestinians the previous weekend. As usual, it caused no casualties. Yet a rare direct hit-or, for that matter, a suicide-bomber in the heart of Israel or another kidnap-may leave the government, as the army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, said this week, with "no choice" but to hit back.

However, short of a full-scale military reinvasion similar to "Operation Defensive Shield" in the West Bank in 2002, it is hard to see what Israel could do. A senior security man notes that Hamas forces in the West Bank never recovered from that blow, but says "there has never been great enthusiasm" for such an attack on Gaza, not least because it would mean leaving the army there to police the strip once again-the last thing Israel wants after pulling its troops out in 2005. "There's no military solution to the Qassams," says a former general.

Yet the Qassams that may provoke Israeli politicians to order a big response are not what rattles their security chiefs. The crude rockets, says Anat Kurz, of the Institute of National Security Studies, are more "a statement of 'we are here' in the internal Palestinian power struggle between competing militias than serious 'resistance' to Israel". The real threat is that Hamas, Hizbullah and its helper, Syria, are all stockpiling heavier weapons but keeping what Israel's security men call "a deceptive quiet".

UN forces supervising the present ceasefire in Lebanon have failed to prevent fresh Iranian weapons reaching Hizbullah via Syria. Iran, Israeli officials have begun to say publicly, is smuggling arms and advisers to the militants in Gaza via Egypt; Hamas spokesmen say they already have longer-range rockets than the standard Qassams. So all sides have an interest in keeping things quiet-for now. Yet there is always a risk that Gaza may blow up again, perhaps after a lethal Qassam strike, drawing Hizbullah in again too. And if war breaks out again and if this week's Winograd report on the war in Lebanon is right, Israeli politicians look barely capable of handling it."

Daily Telegraph (4/5): "There are two things for which politicians deserve to be severely punished. The first is failure to achieve the goals of war. The second is the debauching of the currency. Tony Blair has felt the costs of the first over Iraq, the second afflicted John Major after he withdrew sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on "Black Wednesday" in 1992.

In Israel, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is at bay over his conduct of the war in Lebanon last summer. A commission chaired by Eliyahu Winograd, a retired judge, said that the "Northern Campaign" suffered from a weakness in strategic thinking which set over-ambitious goals without willing the means to achieve them.

It criticised Mr Olmert and the defence minister, Amir Peretz, for inadequate consultation, and Lt Gen Dan Halutz, the then chief of staff, for not alerting his political masters to the complexity of the situation.

These findings reflect the fact that Israel failed both to secure the release of the two soldiers whose kidnapping triggered the invasion, and to break the back of their Iranian-backed abductors, Hizbollah.

Gen Halutz resigned in January but Messrs Olmert and Peretz, despite forfeiting public confidence, remain in office. A call for the prime minister's resignation by Tzipi Livni has been vitiated by her own determination to continue as foreign minister, and there is now talk of Mr Olmert's staying on at least until the Winograd commission makes its recommendations in a few months' time.

It is a tribute to Israeli democracy that a report commissioned by the government could still deliver the coup de grâce to it. Less edifying is the spectacle of two ministers found gravely at fault on a matter of existential importance clinging to office in the probably vain hope that they can ride out the storm. A proper sense of responsibility would dictate that they should resign."

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