Is Gaza Strip air assault 'unlikely' to empower Hamas?

The last time Israel went to war, its enemy stood stronger after the dust settled.
But last weekend's air assault on the Gaza Strip, roundly expected to be followed by additional military operations this week, is unlikely to empower Hamas in the same way Israel's much-criticized 2006 operations in Lebanon did for Hezbollah.
That's the assessment of University of Utah law professor and former Israel Defense Force officer Amos Guiora, in an interview from his family home near Jerusalem.
"There is a sense that an adult is in control this time," Guiora said of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the country's former prime minister and its most decorated soldier.
Retaliating for rocket fire from Gaza, which has increased dramatically since a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas broke down, Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on dozens of Hamas security compounds, killing and wounding hundreds in the single bloodiest day of fighting in years.
Guiora said the success of the Israeli operation against Hamas would be largely reliant upon public perception of the proportionality of its response. He said the air strikes appear to have been precisely targeted at Hamas leadership while conceding that some civilians would be killed in the attack, "but that needs to be limited, as much as possible," he said. He noted that a 1996 operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon was.
Ten years later, Israel's fate in Lebanon was also flawed when it conducted similar air strikes, followed by a ground assault, but failed to unseat Hezbollah fighters, who took on Israeli forces using guerilla-style warfare.
With such failures as background, Barak spoke in Utah last year of the need to find alternative solutions to violence. Simply killing people, Barak said, is like swatting "individual mosquitoes" to stop malaria. While making "us all inhabitants of a true global village" is like "draining the swamp."
Guiora, who has been critical of Barak in the past, said the defense minister appears to have the overwhelming support of Israelis, who felt "the time had come" to respond to Hamas.
Guiora said that dislodging Hamas from power in Gaza "is a fantasy" but said the air strikes and future operations appear targeted to destroy, as much as possible, the organization's ability to operate.
He hopes that some of Israel's Arab neighbors -- and perhaps even some Palestinians, who elected Hamas to a legislative leadership in 2006 -- will recognize that "Hamas has done incredible damage to their cause."
However, he said, "There is an understanding in Israel that Hamas will respond."
(E-mail Matthew D. LaPlante at mlaplante(at)sltrib.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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