CAN ISRAEL WIN?

Can Israel win this war, in the end? Certainly they can militarily defeat any foe or combination of foes in their region, as they have shown time and time again. But can a small nation of European Jews, plunked down in the middle of the Arab Middle East, really survive? Richard Cohen, writing in today's Washington Post, tells Israelis that they should be mindful of their history. In fact, he calls Israel "a mistake", a land of Jews who came back to their Biblical home, from which they had been expelled by the Romans almost 2000 years ago, mainly because they were running for their lives from the Europeans who were trying to massacre them. While the Palestinian Arabs who lived there never really had a state of their own (almost all the Arab states are really the creation of European politicians who drew the lines in their competition for colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries), they are part of a larger Arab-Muslim nation that had expanded out from their desert homes over the centuries to dominate the region. In terms of numbers, they still do. This fact will not change with the defeat of any given Arab state or terrorist group. Demographically, the Arabs will continue to grow more numerous, and many of them will continue to hold the view that the Jews are an alien presence who must be driven out. As long as there are new recruits, how can movements like Hezbollah and Hamas ever be defeated?

I expect that the Israelis will mount a ground offensive in Lebanon to try and finish off Hezbollah, or so weaken it that it can be effectively shut out of Lebanese politics and its armed wing can be prevented from returning to South Lebanon either by Lebanese Army troops or some U.N. sponsored peacekeeping force. This, at least, will keep them from being able to launch short-range missiles into Israeli or mounting any further cross border incursions. Hamas, which has been overshadowed by the action in Lebanon, is another and far more difficult story. I do not think the Israelis really want to go into the Gaza strip and fight them house-to-house and block-by-block. Even if they did, eventually they would have to leave, or resume the occupation at great cost. The Palestinians have shown that even a fence cannot stop their ability to make war against Israel. They will merely tunnel under it or shoot rockets over it, or both (as we saw from Hamas a few weeks ago). So, the war will go on. I am at a loss as to how it can ever end, except with the eventual surrender or annihilation of the Jews in Israel, unless the Arabs finally decide that they can live with this Jewish state in their midst.