Dan Diker is Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs in Jerusalem and a Middle East Affairs Analyst for Israel’s’ Channel One English News. I met him this summer during my trip to Israel as a guest of America's Voices in Israel. Diker has forwarded us this important post on the problem Israel is confronting in Gaza:

More than 200 Kassam rockets and mortars have assaulted Israel’s southern town of Sderot over the past week. Rockets hit the local Sapir College campus, killing a father of four and wounding a body guard of Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who was visiting the city. More than 2000 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel over the past year.

The Iranian backed Hamastan government in Gaza upped the ante against Israel this past week as Gaza based jihadi groups including the Iranian commanded Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired a number of Iranian manufactured 122 MM Grad rockets into the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. The Ashkelon attacks appear to be an upgraded strategic threat against Israel. State power grids are located in that city of 120,000 people, as are other strategic installations such as oil and gas pipelines.

Several former senior IDF officials I have spoken to privately admit that a large IDF ground invasion followed by an IDF occupation of Gaza, and the destruction of the Hamas terror infrastructure and its governmental control, is the only way to stop the Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel.

But Jerusalem’s skittishness to invade Gaza stems from fears of:

1. Getting bogged down in the strip for months or years, like the US is in Iraq, and like Israel was in Lebanon from 1982 until 2000.

2. Burying the post Annapolis peace talks with the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank leadership.

3. Absorbing large numbers of IDF casualties. Two soldiers were already killed over the weekend.

4. Facing condemnation by the international community for inadvertently causing Palestinian casualties in Gaza. Nearly 15 Palestinians were already killed in this weekend’s escalation.

From Hamas’s point of view, its current terror escalation from Gaza does not seem to make sense. Hamas has already created a balance of strategic deterrence with Israel by keeping Israel off balance with short range rocket attacks for more than two years s without striking deeper in to Israel which it could have done long ago.

Hamas has also been saying publicly that its strategy has been to “bomb Israel into a truce.” But this week’s strategic Palestinian rocket assault on Ashkelon has all but sealed the probability of a broad Israeli ground attack and military reoccupation of at least part of the strip. Why would Hamas continue to taunt Israel into invading Gaza which would almost certainly destroy Hamas’ terror infrastructure, and uproot Hamas political control of Gaza?

Part of the answer may line in the fact that strategic interests here are not local. As in the Second Lebanon war, the road to war against Israel and the West began in Tehran, even at the immediate expense of its proxies; Hizbullah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008.

Similar to its objectives in the 2006 Second Lebanon War and its subsequent subversive behavior there via a rebuilt Hizbullah, Iran’s goal today is the continued destabilization of the region. Iran’s strategy is to exploit Gaza as an Iranian platform to attack Israel and subvert Egypt while simultaneously extending its hand in cooperation to its fellow Muslim power.

Iran’s strategic fingerprints over the past month can be detected. According to news reports, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on January 21 to “express Iran’s concern over the worsening situation in Gaza.” The phone call came 48 hours before Iran’s Hamas proxy destroyed the Gaza-Egyptian border fence, allowing tons of terror weaponry and thousands of terror operatives free passage in and out of Gaza to Egyptian Sinai, where al Qaeda is known to maintain a rear base. Two weeks earlier, Iranian senior official Ali Larijani visited his Egyptian counterpart to discuss nuclear cooperation. Interesting timing. It was the first time since the 1979 Iranian revolution that Iran “reached out” to Egypt. Remember that Egypt had given asylum to the Iranian Shah, while Tehran named a boulevard after the assassin of Anwar Sadat.

Since the January 23, 2008 Hamas detonation of the Egyptian Gaza border, Mubarak has failed to seal or rebuild the barrier, has agreed to negotiate with Hamas (the Palestinian Branch of the Egyptian based Muslim Brotherhood) and to allow it to play a central role in the future of any Egyptian-Hamas border regime.

Ironically, Egypt, that wants to keep Jihadist Gaza at arm's length, has just announced that it will work to supply Gaza with power and fuel. According to Izzat Ibrahim of Sinai's National Electricity Power Company, the new deal would provide some 250 megawatts of power to Gaza’s Hamas government.

Egypt now faces an Iranian armed, funded, and trained Hamas controlled Islamic Emirate as its northern neighbor. . While Shiite/Sunni cooperation may seem bizarre, Iran’s past cooperation with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Sunni militias against US forces in Iraq are precedents.

And Iran’s Hamas proxy is now enticing Israel into a major ground invasion of Gaza. This means a further destabilization of Gaza, greater uncertainty for Israel and the US brokered peace talks with the Palestinians. It also threatens Egypt.

Iran seems to be girding for another “Lebanon war” in the Gaza Strip. There is also the potential of a two front assault against Israel, if Iran’s Hezbollah proxy or Syrian ally join the fray from Israel’s North.

The West must understand that the ongoing rocket war Hamas has been waging against Israel and a possible major escalation now appears to be the Gaza chapter of Iran’s ongoing war against the West.

Unfortunately, the United States and European countries have already voiced their opposition to a possible Israeli ground offensive in Gaza. Teheran can be counted on to use this additional leverage wisely in its deadly chess game against the US and Europe.

The Iranian strategy of destabilizing Egypt and Gaza while attacking Israel and threatening vital US interests serves the Iranian leadership. Igniting Gaza focuses international attention away from Iran’s nuclear program at a critical time. Tehran can now buy many valuable months as it races to complete its atomic program while the international community led by the UN will be busy trying to broker an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians at a minimum. We can expect much of the world’s attention to be focused on Israel’s counter offensive in Gaza, while the affair could take many months.

Israel’s decision at this juncture to avoid a major ground invasion of Gaza has already landed Hamas and its Iranian patron a victory against the West. Images of thousands of Israelis running for cover nearly every day since Israel’s unilateral retreat from Gaza in 2005 while IAF and IDF operations failed to stop Palestinian rocket assaults has energized radical Islamists from Shiite and Sunni militias in Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan to Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon..

If Hamas is allowed to survive an Israeli counteroffensive militarily or politically, the results will be far reaching for US led war on terror both in and beyond the region in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan , Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia for starters. It will also impact the recent trend, particularly since the NIE’s release, of frightened Sunni regimes cutting deals with Iran-- today the region’s winning horse.

The United Stated and the Western Alliance would be best served by lending full support to Israel as it may now be forced to send its mostly reserve army into battle to defeat Iranian proxies Hamas and Palestinian Jihad, and other Gaza based Jihadi groups, while attempting to slow Iran’s march to regional supremacy and its stated goal of defeating the West.

Posted by Scott at 5:24 PM  |    |