As the whirlwind of hypocritical emoting about Israel’s campaign in Gaza grows ever larger, it leaves space for a reasoned and political critique of Israel’s actions. Ramez Maluf makes a contribution to occupying that space with this article in the Irish Times.

He believes that Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza is unlikely to produce serious improvements to its security situation and his reasons for believing this are three.

The first is that come what may, Hamas will portray this last round of fighting as a victory. From his exile in Damascus, the Islamic group’s leader, Khaled Meshal, has been touting the success of his fighters’ resistance every day. Despite the human tragedy, he remains unwilling to compromise. His tone is defiant and unyielding. Almost incomprehensibly, many of his and Hizbullah’s supporters are convinced that the tide has changed. When he speaks about fighting for Palestine, he means all of Palestine, and not just land lost in 1948.

He’s right about all this and especially so in the last sentence.  Meshal’s pronouncements, at least those that reach the Western media, sound ever more deranged.   It looks like a ceasefire is coming soon and regardless of the human and material losses suffered by Hamas, it seems certain that Meshal will be joined by the chorus of antisemitic parrots in the international media in announcing another great victory for the Islamic resistance and Palestinian people. There’s not much Israel can do about this. The rest of us should pity the poor people who win such victories.

Furthermore, some will say, “Ah, but while Israel can win militarily it can never eradicate the ideals and goals of its enemies. Its military victory will, in fact, amount to a political defeat. Until Israel reaches a political deal with its enemies, it will continue to win military victories and suffer political defeats.”

It’s perfectly true that armed force can’t destroy political ideas and ambitions but its equally true that, intelligently applied, it can prevent them from ever being brought to fruition.  Also, considering the nature of the ideals and ambitions of Hamas, can anyone be surprised if Israel decides to settle for messy military victories rather that its own orderly disappearance?

The second reason is the ability of Hamas and Hizbullah to secure weaponry. Unless the Israeli incursion results in the destruction of all artisan tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, Hamas will continue to have access to armament and material needed to manufacture their rockets.

While Israel is currently in the midst of restructuring its anti-rocket defence systems, even the more favourable assessments recognise that its options are limited and will ensure only partial results. Matters may improve after 2010 when the Jewish state begins to take delivery of its high-speed anti-rocket Iron Dome defence system, and more so after 2013 when it will start putting in place its long-range Magic Wand systems. Nevertheless, Israel’s vulnerability to rocket attacks will be diminished but not considerably removed.

The Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis reported on January 14th that Palestinians in Gaza have recently started to manufacture a 122mm-calibre Grad version of the Katyusha that is about 30 per cent lighter than the most advanced Qassam rockets they previously used, with an improved range of 18-30km. According to the report, the Palestinians may be “on the verge of improving their range capability and placing the larger Katyusha rocket as the mainstay of their inventory in place of the Qassam, which carries a lighter explosive load and has a range of no more than 9km”.

Though the forthcoming ceasefire ought to sharply limit Hamas’s ability to acquire new weapons Maluf is basically right about this too. Israel certainly can’t stop Hezbollah - an organization lodged within a sovereign state - from acquiring ever greater stocks of weapons.

The fundamental question here is that of rockets. Repeated defeats of their conventional forces has taught Israel’s enemies that their only effective way of threatening it is to shower it with unguided or poorly guided missiles which can be easily concealed, quickly launched and are impossible to destroy with a preemptive strike. As Maluf says, Israel is developing defensive systems to deal with  the threat but they are unlikely ever to offer a complete answer to the problem. The attacking side, if it has stockpiled sufficient weapons, will always be able to attempt swamp defensive systems with mass rocket launches. Also, rockets are dirt cheap while the systems being designed to deal with them are ruinously expensive.

Absent a technical solution to the threat of rockets and given the nature of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel doesn’t have much option but to rely on a policy of deterrence. Its enemies must know that while Israel can’t hope to prevent rockets from being launched into its territory - though the Gaza campaign ought to limit Hamas’s possibilities of doing so - it has the means and, equally important, the will to wreak destruction on the organizations and leaders who dare to do so.

Deterrence is a horrible notion. It offers none of the comfort of ideas like dialogue and reconciliation. When it breaks down a lot of blood will be spilt. For the moment  though, it offers Israel the only possible guarantee of its survival.

The third reason is that the appeal of Islamic organisations among Palestinians, as well as other Arab militants, is likely to grow rather than diminish in the years to come. It is naïve to expect that the impoverished Palestinian and Arab populations surrounding Israel will choose to confront Israel as secular liberal democrats, when the West in all of its wisdom, wants to support, arm, and, in the case of the United States, finance a Jewish state in the Middle East, albeit dressed in the garb of modernity. Those who want to support a religious state must be ready to fight a religious war. The muezzin in the mosque nearby has learned that lesson, and his crowd grows larger every week.

Maluf is on weaker ground here. Israel is much more a state for Jews that than it is a Jewish state and what he describes as its “garb of modernity” has proved sufficiently effective to allow it to survive and prosper in spite of the hatred and enmity of many of its neighbors.

Free elections, free speech,  a multiplicity of political parties, fractious cabinet  meetings, a rowdy civil society and the like all appear  terribly tedious and inefficient when compared to the system employed by most of Israel’s enemies, a system known to political science as “one guy decides everything for everybody until he dies when another guy takes over and does the same. “

Modernity and democracy, however imperfectly realized, have served Israel well since its foundation and it would do well to preserve and strengthen them, in the face of mystical and authoritarian temptations.