Can hostilities be eased under intermittent fire?

I went to bed last night with news that an Israeli soldier had been killed by a roadside bomb near the Gaza border. I woke up this morning to find that Israel had retaliated with strikes on three smuggling tunnels used by Hamas, and a strike directly against one of the Palestinians responsible. That, apparently, is not all:

"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said late on Tuesday that the killing of the man on the motorcycle was only an initial reaction and that Israel's full response was still to come. "

Whether the bombing of tunnels constitutes the "full response" I don't think anyone -- perhaps even Olmert himself -- knows. As usual, Israel has more power than plan. But I can hardly fault them; I don't know myself what the proper decisions are.

Will Israel be able to ease the blockade on Gaza while it is still under occasional fire? (In addition to the attack on the soldiers, one Qassam landed in an unpopulated region of the Negev.) I've been harping on the political implications of violence against Israelis in the south for awhile, and my boilerplate has become that unless Israel can put a stop to that violence, the nation as a whole will never stop trending to the far right. Consequence: settlement expansion and militarism will continue to be the order of the day in Israel.

I still believe that, but I tempered my expectations when I allowed for a certain number of rockets to continue to fall during any ceasefire. The idea was that, since Hamas would likely remain divided over negotiations with Israel no matter what, it would be counterproductive to expect total quiet. And since a lifting of the blockade is in Israel's long-term interests, it's worth absorbing a little pain now to get the benefits later.

Now I'm beginning to worry that the government here has not seen things in the same light. True, when a soldier is killed, the response is almost always going to be more harsh -- part of the price of living with a mandatory draft is that the government must send a clear signal that it cares deeply for the life of every enlisted soldier.

But the rhetoric coming from Olmert and his cabinet sounds to me like a message to Hamas that reads two words: 'new day.' They have perhaps decided that overwhelming force will now be not a one-time event, a but a daily occurrence. I fear that they have accepted the right-wing conventional wisdom circulating the country today, which is that if Israel had only responded harshly to every single attack, "Cast Lead" would not have been necessary in the first place.

It's not that I don't see any logic to that belief. But that worldview is concerned only with history up to now -- it does not look to the future. It may be true that if Israel responded to every rocket, a large-scale op like "Cast Lead" would not have been needed (although I suspect that embracing the one to avoid the other would not have resulted in significantly less loss of life.) But there's no future in that path, not then, and not if Olmert chooses to adopt it now.

When I talk to American Jews about Israel (something I used to do much more often before I got so tired of it) I always make a point to ask them where they see Israel in five years, or ten, or fifty. Israel itself is an news-obsessed culture (at the market, in a cab, on a bus, wherever, every hour when the news update broadcasts, everybody turns it up and tunes in), and most foreigners invested in the conflict are the same. It makes focusing on the future difficult.

That's a question Israelis, from the Prime Minister down, need to be asking themselves today. It may make sense from the perspective of the news bulletin to strike Hamas every day. But is there a future in that? Is Israel tomorrow better off with a reoccupied, more-radicalized Gaza? I don't think so.