Season's Greetings from the IDF!

Upon unleashing a deadly wave of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip in its biggest operation in the region since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Jewish state's Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared ominously: "Now is the time for fighting." The Israeli action, which may soon be expanded to involve ground troops, is being justified as a response to rocket attacks launched by Hamas-affiliated Palestinian militants from Gaza into southern Israel. Whatever the rationale, this is yet another case of Israel's commitment to using violence as its primary means of political negotiation. Surely, there are some unsavory characters who lurk in the shadows of Gaza's slums waiting to kill innocent Israelis in order to inflict pain on their enemy. Yet none of these rocket attacks can compare in magnitude to the fury of the Israeli Defense Force's firepower which has so far killed at least 200 Palestinians over the course of a few hours. The international community, while calling for Hamas to halt its rocket attacks, is outraged by Israel's latest attempt to prove that "might makes right."

The timing of these airstrikes is also rather suspicious, as one gets the sense that leaders in Israel are uncertain about Obama's agenda for the Middle East--despite how much he tries to reassure AIPAC--and are thus now scrambling to achieve their military objectives in the region before the official end of the Bush-Cheney era. There are also upcoming elections in Israel, and this latest round of violence would appear to play right into the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard line Likud leader whose racially-tinged hawkishness towards the Arab world is both well-known and (to many observers) very frightening. If Netanyahu returns to the Prime Minister's office after the next round of voting on Feb. 10 2009, there will be virtually no doubt in which direction Israeli policy will be headed. Thus while it appears that Israel has failed in its mission to cajole the lame-duck Republican administration into starting one more war in the Middle East before riding off into the sunset, today's events indicate that leaders in Tel Aviv may be willing to follow Bush's lead and "go it alone." Thus with Gaza in flames and the world up-in-arms, it might be worth asking what seems in some ways like a ludicrous question: will Iran be next?