Hamas-Israel Truce Ends. War Looms.

Maybe it's all bluster. Posturing. Pretending. Maybe Israel and Hamas really don't want war. Maybe those are just imaginary rockets falling again on areas around the Gaza Strip. Maybe the hotheads in the Knesset and in Israel's defense ministry are just blowing steam, warming up for the election in November, and all that talk of going to all-out war against Hamas is just an act. But those aren't phantom tanks mobilizing. That's not phantom hysteria stoking the fires of fanatics on both sides. Last Friday, the six-month truce between Hamas and Israel expired. Hamas is proposing an extension. But enough people in Israel seem to be itching for a fight, calling the drizzle of rockets, which so far have caused no injuries, unacceptable and reason enough for war.

"You hear war cries from people who don't live in the range of Hamas rockets," Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus writes, "and you don't understand on what basis they're suddenly strutting their macho stuff. Have they forgotten the Second Lebanon War and its devastating results caused by hasty and poor judgment?"

Ehud Barak is the defense minister. He wants to be prime minister. He can't afford to sound "weak on Hamas" because his competition to the right is the Likud Party's trigger-happy Benjamin Netanyahu, who's hoping to make a comeback to the prime ministership on the strength of swords plowed into any suggestion of accommodation with Palestinians. There's Kadima's Tzipi Livni to the left, possibly the last hope for some kind of peace in the region, but she seems unable to make a coalition gel around her centrist alternative to the other two candidates' calculated fury.

The end result is gathering folly by default. Not that the warnings aren't out there. Anyone who thinks it is possible to topple the Hamas regime - if this is at all possible without occupying Gaza - either does not want to listen to the IDF's assessments or is deluding himself," Marcus writes. "Have the Americans already succeeded in uprooting the Taliban? Anyone who believes that going into Gaza for a limited operation is a trivial matter is deceiving himself and the public. Especially in light of Hamas' long-range rockets, which are capable of reaching Yavneh and the outskirts of Be'er Sheva. However, there are many degrees on Israel's scale of responses, and in my opinion the decision to act has already been taken."

See Also:

• Background and Primers on the Hamas-Israel Conflict
• Hamas-Israel Truce: Background and Terms
• Hamas' Teasing Recognition of Israel
• Israel and Gaza: A Withdrawal That Did Not End Israel's Occupation of Gaza
• What Is Hamas?
• Profile: Hamas' Khaled Mashaal
• Hamas Attacks and Israeli Retaliation: Causes and Solutions