Gaza could be his downfall

When a sensible minister like Meir Sheetrit calls on the government to pick a neighborhood in Gaza and reduce it to rubble, it sounds like he's gone off the deep end. When the author David Grossman writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that now we know the army may not always be able to save us, he is sowing despair. When Minister Yaakov Edri says we should bump off Ismail Haniyeh, and all the rest of the leaders of Hamas for good measure, doesn't he realize that the immediate outcome of such an act could spell the end for Gilad Shalit?

The news that 8-year-old Osher Twito had lost his leg in a rocket attack on Sderot sent shock waves around the country. Soon after the attack, a retired general, one of our heroes of old, called me up and gave vent to what all Israel was feeling that night. Why don't we go in there and blast them to kingdom come? What else has to happen for us to bomb their neighborhoods and blow them to bits?

Sderot has been under fire for seven years. Most of the time - in the early years, at least - the shelling was clumsy and off the mark. The residents of Ramat Aviv don't know the feeling, but even so, it is not exactly fun to go to sleep or leave for work day after day, year after year, with your stomach in knots. There is always a risk of tragedy, such as a kindergarten taking a direct hit, and that, according to military criteria, is grounds for massive retaliation.

The army's basic mistake from the start was to view Qassams through the lens of statistics. Even when they miss the target, the damage inflicted on a whole city by the constant threat of attack can be just as great. It's strange that Ariel Sharon, who never passed up an opportunity to get rid of a few Arabs, ignored the Qassams when he evacuated Gush Katif. Maybe, as time went on, he had hopes that Israeli withdrawal would whet the Gazans' appetite for a normal life.

When the first intifada erupted in 1987, then-chief of staff Dan Shomron handed out copies of Alistair Horne's book "A Savage War for Peace" to all his generals. The moral of this book, which explores the struggle of the FLN against French rule in Algeria, is that you can't beat a guerilla movement. Like the French, who quit Algeria in the end, Israel left Gaza. But Gaza, as part of a future Palestinian state, must also be committed to Bush's vision of two states for two peoples.

Quite a few voices nowadays are clamoring for the army to go in there and fix their hides. When Gaza was under Israeli control, before we handed it over to Arafat, the army "put things in order," widening the narrow lanes of the refugee camps. Today, things are different. Gaza is in the hands of a fanatic Muslim terrorist organization whose blood boils with hate for the Jews. These people don't want two states for two peoples. They want the whole country. Not only that, but they want a country governed by fundamentalist Islam.

Israel cannot go into Gaza today unless it knows how to get out, when to get out, what it plans to achieve, and how many soldiers it may cost us. After one bloody trap in Lebanon, Israel must beware of a sequel. In the year and a half that the Winograd Committee spent poking and probing and jabbering, the IDF reached its own conclusions and is rehabilitating itself. It is not going to make the same mistakes in Gaza that it made against Hezbollah. But tanks and planes, as high-tech and sophisticated as they come, cannot wipe out blazing national-religious hatred.

So what is the point of a massive Israeli offensive in Gaza, you ask? To reach a hudna? Hamas is apparently ready for that even without a pounding. The trouble is that we aren't. Our fear is that the Palestinians will use the time to build up strength and stockpile arms. Ever since the discovery of our Achilles' heel - the homefront - Hamas, like Hezbollah and Syria, has been snatching up every ballistic missile it can get its hands on. If we go in there to knock them out, we need to be sure of success with a minimum of losses.

After the Lebanon fiasco and the problems in Gaza, there is only one way for Ehud Olmert to get the country out of the mess he's dragged us into. He needs to make a serious effort to get back on the Annapolis track and move toward a peace agreement with the Palestinians while U.S. President George W. Bush is still in power. Mahmoud Abbas is weak? So strengthen him with a multi-national force in Gaza, before Hamas gets its claws on the West Bank, masterminding terror attacks and grabbing the reins of the Palestinian Authority.

Olmert may have risen to power with a message of peace, but Gaza could be his downfall.