A few comments to add to JustPlanDave's thoughtful analysis.

No question that Israel did not "lose" this war in the way that it was perceived to have lost the 2006 Lebanon war (although Tom Friedman thinks that Israel won both wars), but of course the rest of the world takes into account that, as noted, Hezbollah was well armed and organized and not locked up in a virtual open air prison. Israel, therefore, comes across as an even greater bully in Gaza than in Lebanon.

While Hamas does not have the same constituent support that Hezbollah does, and Hamas' religious extremism is not reflected in the Palestinian population, it seems to me that Hamas at least benefits from having been the only local force to provide some measure of social welfare to otherwise destitute Palestinians and stand up to Israel. Fatah not only leaves a trail of corruption going back to Arafat but also seems to be perceived increasingly as Israel's collaborator. Outside of a few splinter groups even more violent than Hamas, I'm not aware of any other contenders for leadership in Gaza, and it would seem to me that the best way for Hamas to become either more moderate or marginalized is to remove its excuses for extremism and give it a genuine chance to govern.

It's interesting that, after cultivating religious extremists to counter the supposedly more dangerous PLO nationalists, Israel is now facing the same monster we did in Afghanistan. Regardless of how much the star of religious fundamentalism fades, I especially fear what the next generation will bring (given the traumatized, hardened youth of Gaza today) if Israel, the US, and the rest of the world do not do everything possible toward a truly viable Palestinian state.

...HAMAS is for it to govern and not pursue the extremist projects - however, it is very unclear to me whether this is what is going to happen. Internal vs. external leadership dynamics are, I suspect, going to figure prominently here and it's unclear to me what current status is in this regard. Having pounded the hell out of the internal leadership, have they [the Israelis] left a sufficient moderate power base to put a more benign strategy into play, or have they empowered the external leadership commonly thought to be more hard-line? Does any element of HAMAS leadership still want to be more moderate? What challenges to their legitimacy are they seeing right now? Many more questions than answers at this point, I would say. Quite apart from all that, it's very much an open question whether external actors (i.e., Israel, the US, Europe, surrounding Arab regimes, etc.) would allow HAMAS to govern effectively under any circumstances - many seem implicitly to view HAMAS through a Matt Levitt lens.

The analogue between the Taliban and HAMAS is interesting - as an aside, I would suggest that it [currently] is a better analogue on the Pakistani side of the line than it is on the Afghani side, though it may well be getting better there. There is a very significant component of the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan that comes from the Pakistani side of the line and many of these guys fight far more for pay than they do for conviction (i.e., they're not diehards); similarly, there's a lot of simple brigandage that gets subsumed under the Taliban label. Though I hear lots of Islam as a rallying cry on the Pakistani side of the border where they're making significant progress, the message on the Afghani side of the border seems to be [or have been] a more moderate one, emphasizing that they are a newer, kinder Taliban.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

Unless Hamas takes the "realist" position that its continued extremist actions are as self-defeating as Israel's reliance on force, it seems likely that the more bellicose elements within Hamas will prevail. Similarly, for the very reasons I noted relative to our media's story line and our well-enforced Congressional consensus, Hamas is likely to retain the image it has of an evil secret society out of a James Bond movie.

JPD. I never thought one could compare Hez and Hamas as far as capability goes. But Hamas held out with a small loss of fighters lives while being attacked by a modern army without a conscience. Israel may have bought breathing room but I don't see how they won anything. Hamas still has the capability to launch rockets and whether we like it and whether the press continues to ignore it they were democratically elected in an election that was forced upon them. I think the biggest loser of all this was Abbas, his followers and the Gazans.

A question: If Hezbollah takes a majority of seats in the Lebanon elections in June, do you think Israel will attack?

There's pretty much no military way of achieving that without razing Gaza utterly and killing all its inhabitants. However, it has been quite clearly demonstrated that launching rockets has a steep price - a price that is borne mainly by the populace. Not sure about the degree to which HAMAS is going to be able to convince the populace that that price is worth paying for the limited gains.

I quite concur that Abbas is the biggest loser out of all of this and it is very unclear to me how one can possibly produce a leader that has sufficient credibility to negotiate for peace on behalf of the Palestinians. I very much fear that the Israelis have decided that a policy of endless reprisal and punition is the way to go (think imperial British strategy into the Afghani-Pakistani frontier - don't hold territory, periodically go in and pound the crap out of the locals to remind them who's boss). As strategies go, I can't say that I think much of this one.

I don't believe Israel will attack if Hezbollah does well in the election. I think Hezbollah would have to miscalculate very badly for that to happen, particularly now.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

was smart they would moderate their stances to win more Palestinian support, now would be their best opportunity to do this. The Palestinians had to have noticed the Arab world was too busy jockeying for position to do anything constructive to stop the bloodshed and know their will be no help from them. I guess the $64,000 question is will the Gazans blame hamas or the indiscriminate violence used by Israel?

Becuase Hamas cannot loose until the Isrealis exterminate every person in Gaza. Any modern army can run over lightly armed civilains. Any modern army cannot occupy. Wrong skill set.

The ojective of any army to to make the enemy's economy collapse and the enemy surrender. In the Plaestine case the Israeli Army becomes an army of occupation, or a set of prison guards.

Occupation or prison, the inmates harrass the guards or occupyer until it's too expensive to occupy.

It's all about objectives, economics, or cost & expense. In this invasion of Gaza the tactical objective was to kill Gazans, and this was met. The strategic objective, a secure Isreal, was not met.

The world looses becuase Isreal, in its current form, is feeding a cancer, the unrest in the Muslim world. Remove the cancer. Replace it with a just and secular state with equality. Call it Isreal, declare victory, and that Isreal has the right to exist.

Continue with this "apartheid state", and the cancer will continue to spread.

...in modern conflicts, which trend towards limited conflict and limited goals. This isn't total war and if one applies the metrics of total war one ends up with quite erroneous conclusions.

Call me crazy, but HAMAS' base of support is a little bit more difficult to satisfy than you imply - showing that they are able to continue to impotently launch rockets while sitting on top of a pile of rubble is not going to suffice - Gazans aren't a group of bumpkins and hollow rhetoric of resistance does not have infinite power over them, particularly given that they've been the ones taking much of the damage. HAMAS is going to have to deliver on many initiatives, over a range of domains and over an extended period - and this is going to be difficult.

I would disagree that the tactical objective was to kill Gazans. The objective (and I would argue that it is probably best thought of as an operational objective - though it has significant strategic implications) was, as stated, to stop rocket fire from Gaza and to be seen to be willing to invest massive resources to do so. Killing Gazans was simply what was required to achieve this; that it is believed to have secondary deterrent effect is a "bonus" for the IDF. The strategic objective, IMHO, had much more to do with Iran and feared foreign supply of HAMAS. IDF high command have seen this movie before in Southern Lebanon - an analogous buildup of sophisticated weapons systems, in their eyes, simply could not be tolerated.

My view, the Israelis do not believe that it is possible to achieve a secure Israel through any military operation. They believe that a truly secure Israel is something of an illusion, in the sense that they do not truly believe that comprehensive co-operative security arrangements with neighbouring powers are possible over any reasonable time frame (or without quite painful realignments in local resources) - instead they rely on deterrence.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

Becuase deploying an army has only a few outcomes:
One is turing the army into police (Northern Ireland),
The second is destruction (Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon)

The US Army command structure appears not subtle enough to achieve the Northern Ireland example.

that Israel's use of white phosphorous and experimental (tungsten-based) weapons that inflict injuries hospitals have no idea how to treat raises the issue of war crimes far beyond excessive force.

...is pretty much such that they are in the clear, particularly given the nature of the threat that they were apparently attempting to counter (ATGMs) [unless they can be shown to have been trying to burn out civilian areas, which I think would be pretty tough]. Similarly, I don't think DIME is going to end up being contested because it flays flesh from the bones and can make internal bleeding damned near impossible to stop. There's lots of stuff on the battlefield that does this to to one degree or another. If one wants to take down DIME, I think one should look to the carcinogenic properties - there, I think one could perhaps make a reasonable case that the weapon causes undue suffering.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable weapons is a thin line (after all, shrapnel can cause horrific injuries), and when Israel claims it's using WP within international law, it may be technically correct. I think it's more the question of using these weapons in densely populated civilian areas. The idea of either a substances that burns without being subject to normal remedies or a substance that otherwise causes undue suffering is itself a serious problem when it comes to a place like Gaza. Proof notwithstanding (since journalists are not allowed in Gaza), it's hard to imagine that civilians don't bear most of the brunt of these weapons.

In Palestine from 1942 to 1948 reached that conclusion, along with most of the British Forces in Palestine, in about 1944. Well before I was born.

There were the British, fighting Hitler's Germany, and the Zionists were simultaneously attacking the British in Palestine.

but not out of keeping with the convoluted, intrigue-ridden history of this conflict, the Zionists initially allied themselves with the British (much of the Zionists' military capability, later used in the 1948 war, benefited from that relationship) as long as Britain supported their aims (starting with the Balfour Declaration, etc.). The Zionists then turned on them when it became clear that the British, who were double dealing throughout their mandate, had to pay some attention to the self-determination of Arab Palestinians and limited the flood of Jewish refugees into Palestine. It was during this period that the terrorist Irgun and Stern Gang were most active. While disavowed by the more mainstream Jewish authorities, their tactics played a major role in getting the British out of the picture.

Not how the British saw it, nor the palestinians, and the Balfour Declaration did not specify Isreal as the new "Promised land".

And in my home, Haganar, Ergun Zvai Leumi, and Stern gang were interchangeable.

that the Balfour Declaration only provided for a Jewish "homeland" rather than a separate state or "promised land," but there's no question that the British made mutually contradictory promises to opposing sides in the early history of the Mandate (see the McMahon controversy, for example) and manipulated the situation in Palestine to its own ends depending on which way politics were leaning. While the British were supposedly appointed as fair minded stewards of Palestine transitioning out of colonialism, I think that history shows that the British and French, among others, followed a self-serving divide and conquer strategy in carving up the entire region that helped create the inevitability of internal conflict. Wading through that history is like watching 10 David Mamet movies at the same time.

This was really a nifty writeup published in 1920 by Anstruther Mackay who was apparently part of the British colonial government.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/zionism/mackay.htm

hat tip as always to Pat Lang - its described as something like an Agatha Christie story.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/01/anstruther-mackay-on-palestine-in-1920.html

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Hongpong.com

Israel has overhead imagery. They can track one Mercedes through light mid-town traffic and blast it with an anti-tank missile, and they can drop Mk82s directly on every well-trafficked tunnel in the city-state, but they can't detect the unavoidably unmistakable footprint of a rocket launch site?

Firing mortars from rooftops, sure, that's a tricky one. So the US Army came up with a little box the size of a mid-tower CPU on a tripod that you can set up on any handy flat surface, has a little computer built in, by the time the second shell explodes and the third is in the air it'll give you range and bearing and you can call it right in without leaving the comfort of your fighting position.

What ails these people that they can't figure out Newton and trigonometry? Can't they find an Eagle Scout with a rocketry badge to explain the difficult parts? Hint: unlike rifle recoil, rocket exhaust needs to be handled very carefully by engineers, and unlike shoring up a tunnel through sand, you MUST be able to look straight down at the whole enchilada or IT DOESN'T WORK.

I was pro-Israel most of my life but I came to the same conclusions you have but about 10 years ago.