Another factor is that until the Palis have a state, there is no entity to crush in the final battle. You can't just root them out from among the Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians with "surgical" strikes.
Mubarak can't be happy about this as he will now be forced back into the fray. The Palestinians, and the terrorist organizations who control them, are now an Arab issue again. Sharon knows what he's doing.
The Palis with their own state - I notice VDH takes for granted that they will be given the west bank next, unilaterally - will not cease attacks on Israel. VDH says a fence will let Israel "wait for a responsible government". But long before than hellfrost, Islamic extremists will upgrade the weaponry being fired from their new Afghanistan into Israel. So he says -
"Israel can strike back at an aggressor...a critical first step of turning the struggle from an asymmetrical war of terror back into a conventional standoff"
But why would it be a stand-off? The fact is, the terrorists will attack from Pali territory. If the Israel army wants to do something about it conventionally, they will have to invade conventionally. When they instantly succeed in that, they will have the same ungovernable populace under their same conventional military control. The difference will just be, this time all the terrorists will know to a certainty the Israelis don't want to be there and can be chased away again with a few kamikazes.
Perhaps VDH means to imply it would give the Palis something to lose. But they lose things to retaliation all the time anyway, and have for decades. It doesn't remotely stop them. Because (1) any nutjob can nominate himself the new foreign minister, and no government is going to stop him when his platform ("death to the Jews") is so popular, (2) killing Jews is a pretty good business that brings in billions in tribute from the west and billions in subsidies from the oil states. And nothing will have changed on this points.
No, the paradox people are confronting is the inability of conventional military power to change political realities on the ground, when it is used with such kid gloves that the ruled do not fear any lasting consequences, and wielded so relunctantly that everyone involved knows the wearer wielders would rather run away.
In ancient times the conquerer eagerly sought new subjects either to tax, or if too stiff necked to rule, to sell as slaves. Cities were depopulated as a matter of course. These practices were hellish for the world, but did ensure that the possession of conventional military power and political realities on the ground remained in line with each other. A people without a state was very careful not to upset a state with an army.
To the lasting benefit of the world, this eventually softened into civilized treatment of the conquered, in return for their genuine submission. The reality standing behind it was the threat of fire and sword, never all that suspended, menacing enough because occasionally exercised through hot temper or indiscipline. Submission became theater, in which the parties understood the motions and avoided the worst outcomes of collision.
There were parts of the world where that development basically never happened. And wars there were as bloody things as those in ancient times, as a result. When first world armies fought in those places, they were ready enough to act on local norms rather than their own, and wars decided things as a direct result.
In the 20th century that changed. The cold war was an essential part of the new environment, as war by proxy became the norm. The superpowers competed for sub-state groupings and did not submit to governments aligned with the hostile superpower. Such ideological polarizations were known in the past, and when they occurred they resulted in massacre and decade long wars. They did this time, too.
Now the cold war environment has largely but not entirely dissolved. There are still hostile powers who play the game of stoking up trouble for their rivals, but they are less open about it and ideological differences are local rather than system-wide polarized. They reason for restraint by occupiers, however, has shifted from fear of escalation by a rival superpower, to domestic political restraints and to implicit norms.
The behavior the Palis have engaged in for the last decade fully merits their dispossession, entire destruction of all political entities associated with their cause, an end to all funding or aid reaching their people, annexation of their territories, deprivation of all political and many civil rights, mass expulsions, and a generation of young hotheads either executed or rotting in jail. That this has not happened has everything to do with Israelis and westerners just being wimps, and nothing to do with strategy.
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This is the historian I mentioned who shared your views on Gaza.
If VDH was a Kashmiri Pandit living in the slums of Delhi because Muslim jihadis from across the ME *had* paid him attention he would know how wrong he is.
That Europe and the UN has not paid any attention to Kashmir means nothing. Both are useless and have never paid attention.
VDH thinks another Kashmir acceptable?? He knows better...
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