Recommended: John Kerry’s Big Blunder

David Ignatius has a thoughtful piece today: John Kerry’s Big Blunder. He argues that Kerry, in his haste to stop the bloodshed in Gaza, is actually making the long-term problem worse. By dealing directly with the supporters of Hamas, and bypassing the supporters of the more moderate Palestine Authority, he is enhancing the status of Hamas at the expense of more moderate forces. It is an interesting perspective.

There is no question that the Palestinian problem will remain intractable as long as Hamas controls the Gaza strip. Israel is right – only a demilitarized Gaza strip, with international peacekeepers to really keep it demilitarized, is ever going to stop the deadly Hamas attacks, and Hamas will never voluntarily accept those conditions because it would lose power that way.

The world (including apparently many Palestinians in Gaza) seems to have forgotten that when Hamas took over the Gaza strip in 2007 they promptly murdered hundreds of members of the Palestinian Authority. However good they are at portraying themselves in the media as “freedom fighters”, they are really just thugs more interested in maintaining their power than in representing the people of Gaza, a point that ought to be obvious as they continue to use those people as human shields.

Whether Israel’s current military approach to achieving a Hamas-free Gaza strip will be effective is a debatable point, but no one has yet offered a viable alternative. The UN, as usual, just wants a short-term fix; an end to the current war. But without an effective process that removes Hamas as a threat to Israel, any cease fire will just be another interlude to allow both sides to regroup and rearm before beginning yet again.

Hamas is holding out for a lifting of the embargo on Gaza, but all sides know perfectly well that if the embargo is lifted the first thing Hamas will do is rearm with new and probably more deadly weapons from its sponsors in places like Turkey, Iran and Qatar. Moreover, it is equally clear that any international aid that is sent to Gaza while Hamas rules will simply be diverted to building more rockets and tunnels, just as previous aid has been diverted. Clearly this problem will not go away until Hamas is eliminated from Gaza and the more moderate Palestinian Authority again rules the area. But how to do this without more bloodshed is not clear to anyone.