The lessons of Gaza

THE ISRAELI military action in Gaza raises both moral questions and strategic ones. The moral issues are more complex than partisans on either side are prepared to admit. Not so the strategic issues: here the verdict is clear. Israel's return to Gaza constitutes a tacit admission of strategic failure now stretching back four decades. As Barack Obama prepares to take office, that record of failure deserves careful consideration.

However deeply the Israeli army penetrates into Gaza and however long it stays, this much is certain: Operation Cast Lead will not put an end to violence between Israelis and Palestinians. No matter what this particular round of fighting may achieve, the conflict will continue. Indeed, the punishment inflicted on the residents of Gaza all but ensures its perpetuation.

Ever since it seized Gaza and the West Bank at the time of the 1967 War, Israel has assumed that allowing Palestinians to freely exercise their right of self-determination is incompatible with Israeli security. With expulsion infeasible and absorption unacceptable, a succession of Israeli governments set out to dictate the conditions under which Palestinians would live. This effort provoked intense resistance, manifested in a bloody chronicle of uprisings, incursions, invasions, and tit-for-tat retaliation. As the costs of occupation mounted, Israel began searching for ways to shed its Palestinian problem altogether, either through negotiation (the so-called peace process) or through unilateral action (partition). Here again, success proved elusive.

Rather than enhancing Israeli security, occupation has produced a never-ending war of attrition. Although the Israeli army seldom loses an engagement in that war, the conflict is one in which Israel cannot realistically expect to achieve definitive victory. However great the Israeli edge in tanks and fighter-bombers, demography rather than weaponry is likely to determine the conflict's ultimate outcome: That the Palestinian and Arab Israeli birthrate far exceeds the birthrate among Jewish Israelis is a fact with enormous strategic implications.

In the short term, the Israeli inclination is to ignore those implications. A prominent feature of Israel's military tradition is the idea of ein breira - Hebrew for "no choice." Since the founding of the Jewish state, Israelis have felt that in order to survive they have had no choice but to fight.

Given the events related to Israel's birth, which involved the displacement of Palestinians and left Israel surrounded by adversaries vowing to destroy it, one can understand this conviction. Perhaps even today in Gaza, given the intransigence of Hamas, Israelis have no choice - or at least none promising any escape from the predicament in which they find themselves. So they fight on, despite the growing sense that the entire Zionist enterprise is inexorably headed toward some tragic denouement.

For the United States, engaged in a struggle against radical Islamists that mirrors Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, the implications of this story are several. Israeli troubles in the West Bank and Gaza over the past 40 years suggest the following:

First, getting in may be easy; getting out is the hard part. Once embraced, a tar baby becomes impossible to release. For this reason, the notion that intervention offers a handy problem solver is an illusion.

Second, occupation by outsiders produces alienation, resistance, and radicalization, nowhere more so than in the Islamic world. The longer the stay, the more severe the reaction.

Third, as instruments of pacification, conventional armies possess modest utility. Rather than facilitating political solutions, coercion only exacerbates the underlying problem.

This approach hasn't worked for Israel and won't work for the United States. Yet this approach describes US policy in the global war on terror, which has been based on expectations of intervention, occupation, and superior military power enabling the United States to dictate the conditions in which Muslims in places as remote as Iraq and Afghanistan should live.

Even if Israel seemingly has no choice, the United States does. To exercise that choice by replicating the errors Israel has made in its relations with the Palestinians would be the height of folly.

If Obama fails to grasp this essential point, the nation's own bloody chronicle of uprisings, incursions, invasions, and tit-for-tat retaliation will continue. Iraq and Afghanistan will be only the first in a long line of tar babies on which the United States will exhaust itself. And in the end, it will simply replicate Israel's failures on an even larger and more tragic scale.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."