Gali Tibbon / AFP / Getty
World leaders, especially President-elect Obama, need to step in immediately with a courageous and creative solution to Israel’s war.
Israel and Hamas have dug themselves and each other a trap of dire consequences by escalating in Gaza without a defined purpose or exit strategy. They now need help. Otherwise, their recklessness will cost further innocent lives and will cause uncontrollable wars that could be disastrous—and should be unacceptable.
Neither Israel nor Hamas can be victorious in this war; the losers are the women and children of Gaza and other innocent civilians on both sides of the conflict. Hamas has taken the Palestinians to war without authorization or preparation. Israel’s leaders have lost their bearings once again by launching a war they will be unable to conclude without massacring hundreds more of civilians.
The flare-up in Gaza could become the most polarizing development in the Middle East and could threaten the stability of Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon and beyond.
Hamas would welcome a ground invasion of Gaza so that Israeli soldiers are hunted down in the familiar landscape of Hamas fighters. But Hamas leaders also know too well that such an outcome would be the end of Hamas as a political organization and that Israel’s revenge will be costly to all Palestinians. Therefore, the bravado is being curtailed, so far.
Israel neither wants to take back Gaza nor is it confident it can defeat Hamas, either by airstrikes or a ground invasion. In reality, Israel is already stuck in a war it rushed into and is looking for an exit strategy.
Both the leaders of Israel and Hamas had elections and power in mind when they called on each another to escalate, acting as interlocutors for each other’s political ambitions. Both may have wanted to change the rules of the game and the situation on the ground before US President-elect Barack Obama takes office January 20.
If world leaders do not embark immediately on a courageous and creative comprehensive plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only will the situation in Gaza lead to the total collapse of the two-state solution but also to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and a chaotic state of affairs where all bets are off.
One stark scenario predicts an all-out escalation that could become a pretext for Israel to force a mass expulsion of Palestinian Israeli citizens in a strategic move to resolve Israel’s demographic dilemma of a million Palestinian citizens in the Jewish state. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni recently broke the code and spoke publicly of a Jewish state without Palestinian citizens. Hamas’ actions would serve to justify such an unimaginable move. A redrawing of the map would seal and force Gaza onto Egypt, so that Hamas would no longer be an Israeli problem but an Egyptian one. A chaotic West Bank would then become the excuse for reviving what is called the Jordanian Option, which claims that Jordan is the substitute home of the Palestinians.
Tracy Quan's latest novel is Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, set in Provence and praised in The Nation as a "deft account of occupational rigors and anxieties before the crash." Tracy's debut, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, and the sequel, Diary of a Married Call Girl, are international bestsellers. A regular columnist for The Guardian, she has written for many publications including Cosmopolitan, The Financial Times, and The New York Times.
Joe Mathews is a journalist, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and a contributing writer at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as Justice Department reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as a city desk reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy.
Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism (www.posner.com). Posner lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
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Amanda Fortini has written for The New Yorker, Slate, Elle, and New York, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
Raghida Dergham is columnist and senior diplomatic correspondent for the London-based Al Hayat, the leading independent Arabic daily, since 1989. She writes a regular weekly strategic column on international political affairs.
Raghida Dergham is columnist and senior diplomatic correspondent for the London-based Al Hayat, the leading independent Arabic daily, since 1989. She writes a regular weekly strategic column on international political affairs.
This is the silliest and longest opinion piece I've ever read. In fact, this is a collection of opinions, that go all over the place, some contradicting each other, offering nothing useful to the reader. What makes the writer think she can tell everybody what they should or should not do? Or does she think every country and leader should abandon their national interests to satisfy her wishful thinking? I'm sorry, but this op-ed is simply stupid, unbefitting the great DB.
Thank you.
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