Israel's leaders must move beyond their defensive frame of mind

WASHINGTON — The heart-wrenching events taking place in Gaza confirm what has been apparent since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 — the mediocrity of Israel's political leadership. By mediocrity, I mean the supremacy of knee-jerk reaction over groundbreaking initiative, of petty politics over vision.

On paper, Israel's logic is unassailable: Hamas, a terrorist organization determined to destroy the Jewish state, periodically fires rockets across the border; Israel, as any other state would do, is exercising self-defense by attempting to annihilate Hamas' offensive capability.

That logic is self-defeating. Only a permanent occupation of Gaza could ensure the absence of rockets in southern Israel. But Israel's occupation of Gaza proved to be politically and practically unsustainable — and the Israelis withdrew in 2005.

Suppose Israel tried again. Hamas or some other organization, helped by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, would harass the occupiers from across the border. By Israel's logic, its army would then have to push into Egypt.

In 1982, Israel went into Lebanon in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organization using the same arguments it is using in the case of Gaza today. It eventually withdrew, and the invasion did not prevent Hezbollah, another terrorist organization, from using Lebanese territory to attack Israeli civilians years later.

Anything less than a permanent occupation of Gaza will guarantee Hamas' resurgence. A permanent occupation, on the other hand, will put the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank — Israel's moderate interlocutor — in the impossible position of either betraying the Palestinian cause or playing second fiddle to Hamas, something we are already beginning to see. The extremists will have a broader popular base in the West Bank, and rockets will soon be fired across the border into eastern Israel.

The Israeli security logic would then force a full occupation of the West Bank, pushing Palestinian terrorists into Jordan. And if rockets started to fly into an Israeli-controlled West Bank from Jordan, would the security logic dictate an Israeli invasion of the Hashemite kingdom?