The seduction of blind force

FROM JERUSALEM — A sewage reservoir in the northern Gaza Strip was in danger of bursting, my morning paper reported last week. The sewage couldn't be pumped to new filtration ponds because of power shortages caused by Israeli restrictions on fuel supplies to the Hamas-ruled territory. If heavy rain -- or a stray rocket -- cracked the reservoir's earthen sides, a flood of filth would threaten lives and poison the surrounding land. The Haaretz reporter got the story by phone. For security reasons, Israel doesn't let its journalists enter Gaza.

Today, that story seems like a memory from another age, when one could still worry about merely potential disasters. Since then, a different kind of dam has collapsed completely, one that held back fury and fire. As I write, the death toll in Gaza from Israeli bombardment has topped 300. Palestinian rocket fire, intended indiscriminately for civilians, is reaching wider areas of Israel than in the past. Rumors say a ground invasion of Gaza is near. Friends whose sons have received reserve call-ups talk in worried whispers.

Yet that week-old report from Gaza is a clue to how we reached the current crisis. It hints, obliquely, at the blind trust that leaders on both sides put in force, and at their inability to imagine correctly how their enemies will respond to their actions.

Israelis see little of life in Gaza. A story on a dangerously weak reservoir was a rare and fragmentary glimpse. Israeli journalists can report on the far side of the Earth more easily than on that slice of territory 40 miles from Tel Aviv. Besides that, each side in a conflict is concerned with its own suffering. The other's pain is at the very edge of peripheral vision.

During the six-month "calm," or cease-fire, between Israel and Hamas, we knew that rockets were still being fired sporadically from Gaza into southern Israel, violating the agreement. Yet for Gazans, what mattered was that they continued to live under siege conditions, with the supply of goods into the territory tightly controlled. As far as Hamas was concerned, Israel's clampdown on Gaza's borders was also breaking the deal. Because the cease-fire was based on unwritten "understandings," which each side understood differently, it's difficult to judge that claim.

After six months -- on Dec. 19 -- Hamas declared that the cease-fire had expired. It concluded that Israelis only understood force. With intensive rocket fire, the organization's leaders apparently believed, they would push Israel to agree to improved conditions -- lifting the blockade, extending the cease-fire to the West Bank.