Israel just doesn't get Fourth Generation War.  It's been 35 years since the vaunted Israeli military won a military contest. In 2006, Hezbollah chased the Israelis out of Lebanon for the second time and has emerged politically and militarily stronger than before the invasion.

Once again, predictably and as predicted, Israel failed to achieve any of its war aims in the Gaza Offensive and emerges both internally and internationally weaker than before it launched its offensive

 

Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009

After Israel's Election, Palestinians Weigh New Intifadeh

By Tony Karon

Israel's election and the Gaza conflict have revealed the scale of the challenge facing U.S. President Barack Obama in jump-starting Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Israeli voters tacked to the right, and the government that results from Tuesday's poll will be, if anything, even less inclined to conclude a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinian leadership than the current government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been. (Of course, the year of talks-about-talks between Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas failed to yield any progress.) Meanwhile, the Gaza war cemented the stature of Hamas as the dominant political force among Palestinians.

Fatah leaders see the Israeli election as confirming what they already knew: there's nothing to be gained by continuing the charade of U.S.-sponsored talks-about-talks with the Israelis. They could not get what they needed from Olmert, and they know that his successors will take even more of a hard line. From the Palestinian perspective, the past eight years of waiting for negotiations with Israel have left Abbas empty-handed, while the latest Gaza conflict has put Hamas in a stronger position than ever in the court of Palestinian public opinion. Despite the violence by Hamas gunmen against Fatah activists in Gaza since the Israeli offensive, many in Fatah view their movement's only hope of re-establishing a leading role in Palestinian politics as joining a unity government with Hamas -- and beginning to directly challenge the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.