The ground invasion
Israel faces agonising choices in the battle for Gaza
But with Hamas in charge there can be no peace process
Armies can struggle to pursue a single war aim without being blown off course.
Israel is pursuing four of them, and they are in tension with each other.
Its forces have begun what on October 28th the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, called the second stage of the war—the ground invasion of Gaza.
He warned that this phase will be “difficult and long” and he is right.
Israel’s leaders will continuously have to balance those four competing objectives.
Striving harder for one may frustrate all the others.
The first war aim is to destroy Hamas.
Over the past three weeks that has come to mean eradicating the group’s military infrastructure and killing its leadership and as many of its foot soldiers as possible.
Because Hamas undertook a mass-attack to kill Jews, Israelis can no longer tolerate the old stand-off in which Hamas violence was supposed to have been kept at a tolerable level by a combination of financial rewards and the threat of Israeli attack.
One reason for this is practical.
For as long as Hamas is in power, Israelis will not feel secure.
Many of the thousands who were evacuated from the south will not return home.
Another reason is tactical.
Hamas humiliated Israeli intelligence and the Israeli army.
To lower the chances of similar attacks by other groups, the country needs to re-establish deterrence.
The last reason is strategic.
With Hamas in charge, there can be no peace process.
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will remain stuck.
It is a harsh truth for people being bombed, but Gazans, too, will remain in misery for as long as they live under Hamas’s dictatorship and the suffocating Israeli security that it entails.
Israel’s second goal is to free more than 220 people who have been taken back to Gaza as hostages.
This aim is likely to hamper the fighting.
Hamas appears to have been using the promise of hostage releases to delay the start of the ground offensive.
It is likely to try to influence Israeli tactics now that troops are inside Gaza, in the hope that the invading forces will hold back.
The government in Jerusalem does not have a free hand with the hostages.
Their importance looms large in Israeli politics because their friends and families fear that, without public pressure, Israeli leaders will strike a trade-off that favours eradicating Hamas.
On October 28th, the morning after the biggest incursion into Gaza yet, the families complained about the risks the fighting poses to the hostages’ survival.
The third goal is to minimise casualties—of both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians.
If many Israeli troops die, it could threaten the entire operation.
As civilian casualties mount, so will international pressure for humanitarian pauses and an outright ceasefire.
In the past such factors have led Israel to go in hard and fast, in the knowledge that time for fighting is limited.
Today, however, the aim is to wreck Hamas’s tunnel network.
That will take many months.
Yet the clock is already ticking fast.
Even as civilians are killed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, they are also caught up in its siege tactics, especially over supplies of energy.
Israel is trying to create bargaining power for the release of the hostages by stopping any fuel from getting into the strip.
It faces a dilemma because it believes that hospital generators also provide the electricity needed to ventilate and light Hamas’s labyrinth of tunnels, where its fighters lurk.
And Israel has encouraged the mass movement of civilians to the south of the strip where the bombardment is less intense.
The terrible conditions that all these things are creating within the strip pose a grave threat to civilian lives.
Israeli officials acknowledge that the ground offensive, which they describe with the sanitised word “manoeuvre”, must operate under international law and that this law requires them to facilitate supplies of essential aid.
For the war to be sustained, Israel will therefore have to find ways to help, even if that makes it harder to eliminate Hamas and get the hostages released.
The last goal is to lay the foundations for restarting work in the Middle East on an eventual peace, a process that has been stalled for years.
Just now the idea of a post-war arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza and on the West Bank is unthinkable for many on both sides, but hard-headed Israeli strategists believe that the prospect of genuine peace will be needed to create lasting stability.
This will require the backing of at least some Arab governments, most likely those that have drawn closer to Israel under the Abraham accords.
America will lend its weight, by pressing them to give cash and diplomatic support.
Some even imagine Arab states also providing security in Gaza after Israel moves out.
In some ways many Arab governments are on Israel’s side, though they would never admit it publicly.
They loathe Hamas and its sponsor, Iran, and would be happy to see it fail.
But civilian deaths stir up trouble among their citizens.
Western governments are also jittery.
More than half of the hostages carry foreign passports and they worry about the radicalisation of their own Muslim populations.
Israel’s ground operation is trying to accomplish a lot—too much, probably.
At the moment, the country’s generals look as if they are trying to square all the circles by going slowly and hitting as hard as they dare.
They deserve to win. They have the firepower to win.
But they will struggle to accomplish everything that is being asked of them.
Israel may yet have to choose what it wants most.
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