{"id":970,"date":"2014-08-01T13:09:56","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T12:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=970"},"modified":"2014-08-25T08:44:17","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T07:44:17","slug":"hamas-has-been-defeated-now-israel-must-seize-the-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/hamas-has-been-defeated-now-israel-must-seize-the-opportunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamas has been defeated – now Israel must seize the opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

That headline will seem premature to post people, but any strictly military analysis of what\u2019s happened in the last month confirms Hamas\u2019 defeat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was supposed to be a war that would see Tel Aviv go up in flames, and Israeli cities were to be flattened by thousands of Hamas rockets. That didn\u2019t happen. Israel\u2019s \u201cIron Dome\u201d missile defense system worked exceptionally well.<\/p>\n

And though Hamas started the war with its missile attacks, it soon lost the initiative to Israel, which attacked Gaza in force. The result was the destruction of hundreds of missiles, the capture of large numbers of Hamas fighters, and the killing of hundreds more.<\/p>\n

Hamas\u2019 \u201csecret weapon\u201d — the vast network of attack tunnels to allow its fighters to enter Israel — has been exposed and largely destroyed.<\/p>\n

If this had been any other war, at any other time, the results would be clear to all. Israel\u2019s military has won; Hamas has lost.<\/p>\n

But this is war in the age of Twitter — and politics has become the extension of war by other means.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Israeli forces have routed their Hamas opponents on the ground, in the battlefield of global public opinion, Hamas has the upper hand.<\/p>\n

This has happened largely because of Israel\u2019s failure to minimize the number of civilians killed on the Palestinian side.<\/p>\n

Israel has made huge efforts to do this, including dropping leaflets from the sky, sending text messages to Palestinian families, and even the practice of hitting buildings that are about to the struck with dud warheads, as a warning. No doubt this has reduced the number of civilian deaths. But it has not been good enough, and that\u2019s not me saying that, it\u2019s President Obama. \u00a0And he is right.<\/p>\n

There can be no more civilian deaths on either side; this has to stop now.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I believe that a ceasefire will happen, sooner or later, even if all the ceasefires so far have been failures. When that ceasefire does come, its terms will confirm what I have already said.<\/p>\n

The latest ceasefire (already broken) saw Hamas back down from all its preconditions, agreeing to quiet in exchange for quiet. It accepted that Israeli forces could remain in place, inside Gaza, during the ceasefire. \u00a0It agreed that they could continue to destroy tunnels, if those tunnels were behind Israeli lines.<\/p>\n

That was a massive capitulation by Hamas,\u00a0and\u00a0evidence of its military weakness.<\/p>\n

The question now is, what next? What happens after a ceasefire?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is where the Israeli leadership needs to show courage, and to take some risks. Because in the immediate aftermath of the eventual ceasefire we\u2019re going to get, we have an historic opportunity to break the deadlock.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu and the Israeli right are not going to like this, but this will be the perfect moment for Israel to make some big changes to its policies.<\/p>\n