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Monday, January 5, 2009 12:00 AM

Why Israelis support the Gaza offensive

Israel's post-traumatic war is not just about stopping Hamas rockets, but about repairing reputations -- and erasing the stain of failure.

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  • Monday, January 5, 2009 09:26 AM

    Hamas' Intent

    If the point of this slaughter is simply to make Israelis feel better about themselves, I suspect they are in for a severe disappointment. There is simply no way that they can stop Hamas from firing rockets, and Hamas will keep on firing the rockets.

    They can't stop the rockets, because Hamas is getting a good chunk of the components, and the RPGs, not through tunnels to Egypt, but from the Israeli mafia, which is pilfering them from the IDF. But the IDF has had precious little success with stopping that.

    And Hamas isn't going to stop, because the rockets give them legitimacy as the only group doing something, anything, against Israel, and every wounded or killed Palestinian just gives Hamas another 4 or 5 Palestinian votes.

    They also aren't going to stop firing the rockets because the rockets are working; as long as Israel continues to feel insecure and dangerous, it is going to have trouble attracting new immigrants, and more importantly, retaining the ones they already have. Sderot has a lot of new immigrants from Russian, and the emigration rates of those Russian-Israelis is high and growing-- ie, Hamas is successfully accelerating the demographic time bomb.

    In this light, the Israeli attack is pretty much a Hamas wet-dream. And for sure, it isn't likely, in the long term, to make Israel feel better. Indeed, it is going to make Israel feel worse, which is Hamas' whole intent.

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