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08 Jan 2009 08:40 am

The Best Bad Option?

Ross wades back into the Gaza muck:

In the face of such a calculus, what's Israel to do? The answer is simultaneously simple and impossible: In the midst of a hotly-contested domestic political scene, they need to balance their short-term security concerns (all those rockets flying out of Gaza, in this case) against a twofold long-term goal - the need to incentivize Palestinians to stay within hailing distance of the negotiating table (which is awfully hard to do when you're smashing through their cities in pursuit of Hamas rocketeers), and the need to act unilaterally, in the absence of a plausible negotiating partner, to preserve their state's long-term viability in the face of the looming demographic time bomb (which is awfully hard to do, as Israel has discovered in the wake of the Gaza pull-out, without compromising your short-term security). And it's the Kobayashi Maru-style impossibility of all this that makes something like the Gaza incursion so hard to analyze: It seems like a bad idea, but within the constraints that Israeli leaders operate under it's possible that it's the worst option except for all the others.

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