| The Confidence War |
| Tuesday, January 06, 2009 |
By DAVID BROOKS
NYTimes.com
In this new game, both sides seek the destruction of the other, but neither has the power to achieve it. They are engaged in a struggle that has no near-term practical end. The extremists’ goal is to kill as many Jews as possible and wait for God (or Iran) to kill the rest. Israel’s goal is to restrain the brazenness of the extremists until their movement somehow burns itself out or is destroyed from within Arab society. Israel’s realistic immediate goal is not to achieve some permanent resolution, but to merely suppress terrorism week by week and month by month.
The writer Michael Oakeshott captured Israel’s quandary in this game in a famous passage: “In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.”
By trial and error, Israel is learning to keep an even keel. For while Hamas and the extremists are dogmatic about ends, they are pragmatic about timing and means. On several occasions, Israelis have managed to temporarily suppress violence. The assassinations of Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Ahmed Yassin in 2004 temporarily suppressed Hamas suicide bombings. The destruction of Hezbollah’s command and control structure in Beirut’s Dahiya district in 2006 seems to have shocked the leadership and reduced terror activity in the north.
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