Thinking About the Thinkable in the Mideast

Ninety-year old Henry Kissinger is in the hospital for heart surgery. Herman Kahn—author of “Thinking About the Unthinkable” and an influence on Kissinger (along with Count Metternich and Bismarck)—is long dead.
The contours of the unthinkable in the Mideast—Israel vs. Iranian nukes—are already clear.

The question now is the thinkable in the short and intermediate term for geopolitics as well as human rights and wrongs.

Those who compare today’s Hamas to Hitler are of course widely exaggerating, which will remain the case unless or until the ayatollahs share and internationalize their nukes.

Hamas’ goals in the current Gaza war are clear and, from their perspective, limited. Hamas’ goals also have the virtue of being consonant with Clauswitz’s dictum that “war is an extension of politics by other means.”
Hamas is a shrewd practitioner of international terror politics.

Safely ensconced in Cairo, Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, spurned Mahmoud Abbas’ pleas regarding a ceasefire because “what are 200 martyrs compared with lifting the siege” of Gaza? Hamas has two goals: getting Egypt to reopen the Gaza border crossings to its arms suppliers led by Iran, and getting Israel to make concessions—maximally, by ending its naval blockade, minimally, by release more Hamas terrorists.

Israel may not in in a mood for such concessions, but Egypt’s General Sissi—though no sissy—is only human and capable of resisting just so much pressure. When in addition to Arab opinion, western governments—with the U.S. “leading from behind”—pressure him enough to give in to Hamas, the odds are that he will eventually do so.

The Mideast is like Rick’s casino in the movie “Casablanca”: the bad guys, who have the fix in, can always walk away from the table with their winnings. The good guys lose: unless they double down—and then overturn the crooked roulette wheel.

Israeli soldiers are dying at this moment to keep down the death toll of innocent Gazans during Israel’s defensive campaign in Gaza. Civilian lives matter to Israel for reasons of the ethics of compassion as well as calculations of public opinion. Unfortunately, compassion is the Mideast is perceived as weakness. Hamas knows this in making its own calculation that the more dead ordinary Palestinians—i.e., not Hamas’ leaders and their families—the better. Two hundred dead for Hamas just amounts to anteing up.

Israel’s choice is to raise the stakes by crushing Hamas militarily as well as politically or else sit back and see Hamas declare victory as Egypt capitulates while Iran arms Hamastan for the next round in which the international community will get its barely-disguised wish that Israeli civilians suffer proportional—and more than proportional—casualties.

There will be no two states, with a Palestinian nation in the West Bank, as long as there are three states including the Hamas’ terror regime in Gaza. Leaving Hamas in charge of a state while praying for peace is the equivalent of building greenhouses and then leaving Hamas’ horticultural nihilists to tend them—the mistake the Israelis made in Gaza in 2005.