Is Hamas Copying Hezbollah?

In more ways than one, the current fighting between Israel and Hamas is taking place in the shadow of Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon against Hezbollah. In fact, it can be said with a large measure of truth that it is taking place in the way and at the time it is taking place in because of the war against Hezbollah.

On the one hand, Hamas has clearly been inspired both by Hezbollah's tactics and by its successes. Its mobile Kassam and Grad rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza Strip, based on small units that quickly assemble their weapons, fire them, disassemble them, and disappear, is a copy of Hezbollah's methods in 2006, as its awareness that the effectiveness of these rockets lies not in the actual damage they cause, but in their psychological impact. By making Israelis feel that their government and army are helpless to protect them, they demoralize the entire country.

And at the same time, Hamas believes both that Israel's 2006 experience in Lebanon will deter it from launching a full-scale military invasion of Gaza, and is convinced that, if such an invasion is launched, it will stand up to it as well as Hezbollah did. It would never run the risk of provoking Israel so flagrantly if it thought it would have to pay an overly heavy a price for it.

So far, it has proved right. It is only because of the war against Hezbollah that Israel has not launched a major military operation in Gaza until now and has preferred to rely on air strikes and relatively small incursions on the ground.

Had Hamas behaved as it is now behaving before the summer of 2006, Israel would have gone into Gaza in force long ago, just as it went into Jenin and other places on the West Bank after a major outbreak of Palestinian terror in April 2002. The only reason it has not done so is its fear of a repeat of 2006, when over 130 Israeli soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon without Hezbollah's being forced to leave the area.

The Israel facing Hamas today is an Israel that has lost its confidence. This itself is a bad thing. But the consequence of this loss — the decision to refrain from an all-out invasion of Gaza — is not a bad thing at all. There is very little to be gained by such a step and much to be lost by it, starting with the lives of young Israelis.

No one knows how many casualties a military reoccupation of the Gaza Strip would cost Israel. Estimates run from several dozen to many hundreds. But assuming even that it could be done with the lower figure, what then? Once Israel is back in Gaza full-force, has put an end to the rocket attacks, dismantled the Hamas leadership, hunted down and rooted out as much of the local military infrastructure as it can, and restored some semblance of order, what does it do next?

Pull out, mission accomplished? But this would be mission unaccomplished, because as soon as it pulled out, Hamas would be back again and the situation would revert to what it had been. All the expenditure of human life would have been for nothing.

Remain indefinitely? The prospect of a resumption of full Israeli control of the Gaza Strip, which it relinquished to the Palestinian Authority in 1993, is nightmarish. To have to be responsible for the lives of one-and-a-half million impoverished and hostile Palestinians is the last thing Israel could possibly want.

Hand the Gaza Strip over to a third party? An excellent idea, but to whom?

The Egyptians, who ruled Gaza between 1949 and 1967, have made it clear that that was quite enough for them. And indeed, why should they want to relieve Israel of a big headache by inflicting it on themselves? Egyptian policy consistently has been to maintain a cool peace with Israel while doing everything to weaken it, and helping to get it out of a mess in Gaza would hardly be consistent with that.

To the Palestinian Authority, then? But the Fatah-run PA was swiftly routed by Hamas in the civil war fought in the Gaza Strip a year ago and could hardly reestablish itself now on the tips of Israeli rifles. President of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, has enough problems without being accused by his fellow Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world of being an Israeli quisling, and he isn't going to volunteer for the role of one.

An international force or organization, such as the United Nations or NATO? The first might be willing to take Gaza but would be incapable of policing it, with the result that Israel would still be hit by rockets but would be unable to strike back. The second might be capable of policing Gaza but not of taking it; NATO is already overextended in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan and is not looking for new commitments — especially not in a hornet's nest like the Gaza Strip.

No, a full-scale Israeli invasion would not be a good idea. The less Israeli soldiers' lives are lost in Gaza, the better, because losing more of them will not accomplish more. The only two sensible alternatives for stopping the Kassam attacks are, as I have said before in this column, either to bludgeon the Hamas into submission with massive air and artillery strikes or to sit down and talk with it — or both together. To be lured by it into house-to-house fighting in all the crowded slums of Gaza would be a big and counter-productive mistake.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.