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There’s a rather disturbing subtext to Griff Witte’s report on the Israeli election campaign, Israel’s key election issue: did the war end too soon?:

Just over a week before Israel holds elections to choose a new government, the outcome of the war in the Gaza Strip has emerged as a central issue in the campaign, with the candidates sparring over whether the massive military operation went far enough.

The argument reflects the reality that elections here often turn on a single question: Who looks tougher on national security?

But reducing whether the war was effective into a contest as to whom looks “tougher” Witte trivializes the war against Hamas.

The war, initiated to stop Hamas rocket fire that has persisted for years, was viewed by many here as motivated at least in part by electoral politics. Two of the three Israeli architects of the war, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, are candidates to become the nation’s next prime minister.

The implication here is that the missiles from Gaza had gone on for a long time, so the only reason that Israel finally fought back was because of the war. Of course, what other country would have been so reluctant to go to war given the growing threat? That’s left unanswered. And of course:

The operation in Gaza drew condemnation abroad for the high Palestinian death toll, and praise at home for the relatively low number of Israelis killed. But it has not done much to elevate Barak’s or Livni’s prospects of winning the top job. Now their even-more-hawkish opposition is on the offensive.

So to the Israeli electorate, which is out of step with world opinion, were happy to see many more Palestinians killed than Israelis. Of course the idea that the government was praised for belatedly responded to a growing threat , isn’t even considered by Witte.

In recent days, former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who according to polls appears poised to reclaim his old job, has argued in speeches and interviews that his political rivals ended the war prematurely. Israel, he says, should have destroyed Hamas — which he views as an outpost of Iranian power on Israel’s southern border — rather than withdrawing amid a shaky cease-fire. He has left little doubt over what he would do if elected.

“The next government will have no choice but to finish the work and remove the Iranian terror base for good,” he said in a radio interview last week.

Nothing wrong with those two paragraphs except for the insinuation that it is only Netanyahu who believes that Hamas is a proxy for Iran. It’s been established that Iran provided rockets to Hamas, and that the IDF wiped out a special unit of Hamas that was trained in Iran. (That unit didn’t exactly perform up to expectations.)

In Israel’s fractious political culture, left and right are generally determined by a party’s relative willingness to cede land to the Palestinians in exchange for a peace deal, as well as by its criteria for going to war.

Netanyahu’s Likud has generally been critical of U.S.-backed negotiations between Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which are aimed at creating a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has also advocated an uncompromising stand against Iran, particularly when it comes to that country’s nuclear ambitions. But during his tenure as prime minister in the late 1990s, he demonstrated a willingness to govern more pragmatically than he had campaigned, agreeing to a limited peace accord with the Palestinians on control of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Well, yes, Likud has generally been more cautious when it comes to ceding territory for the chimera of peace. But why not at least acknowledge that, for example, the Likud was right about not trusting Arafat? Instead Israeli political positions are reduced to positions that are strictly ideological.

Approximately 1,300 Palestinians died in the operation, about half of them civilians, according to Gazan medical officials. Thirteen Israelis were killed, three of them civilians.

This should have been followed up with:

According to the Israeli army, though, of the 1300 killed, only about 250 were civilians. The cause of the discrepancy is the tactic of Hamas fighters to hide among civilians and fail to wear distinctive uniforms as dictated by international law.

(h/t Israel Matzav)

But that would be asking too much.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in launching the war that the intent was to stop the persistent rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel and to end the smuggling of weapons into Gaza from Egypt.

But when the dust cleared, Hamas declared victory and quickly reasserted its control over the strip. In the two weeks since the cease-fire took effect, the smuggling has resumed, scattered rocket fire has continued and an Israeli soldier was killed last week in an attack carried out by a radical splinter group of Hamas that does not support the cease-fire. Hamas itself denied involvement but praised the killing.

Witte wants it both ways here. He advertises that Hamas “reasserted its control” over Gaza, but that it denied involvement in the breaches of the ceasefire. Well Hamas, despite its declaration, didn’t win and if it had control of Gaza, the attacks on Israel were carried out with its permission, if not active support.

Although Israel won the war by almost any military standard, Hamas’s resilience has provided a political opening for Netanyahu. For more than a year before the government launched the operation, he had agitated for war from his seat as leader of the opposition. During the operation, he was a vocal supporter.

But since it ended, he and his party have gone into attack mode, accusing the government of weakness for not killing top Hamas leaders or reclaiming the strategically important Philadelphi corridor, which runs along the Gazan-Egyptian border and is dotted with smugglers’ tunnels. Netanyahu and his allies have tried to paint the decision to halt the operation as just another failure of the ruling Kadima party, which also spearheaded Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

So a legitimate criticism is delivered in “attack mode.” Everything Witte has reported until now basically supports Netanyahu’s criticism – that Hamas was re-arming and still attacking – and yet somehow when Netanyahu campaigns on these failures Witte describes him in cynical terms.

The argument seems to be working: Netanyahu has consolidated his position as the election’s front-runner in recent weeks, despite his opponents’ orchestration of a popular war.

“If Likud was in power, the operation would not have ended. It started well, but it ended too soon,” said Leon Amoyal, a 59-year-old retiree who traveled to Jerusalem from the northern city of Haifa this week to cheer Netanyahu. “We could have eradicated Hamas.”

Netanyahu got a boost last week when one of the operation’s key commanders, reserve Brig. Gen. Zvika Fogel, publicly declared that Israel had missed “a historic opportunity” to crush Hamas’s military capabilities.

“Hamas was really at a breaking point,” said Fogel, who commanded artillery and other units. “We should have turned up the pressure.”

Nothing wrong with this, but in the context of the rest of the article, an effective campaign is being treated as cynical.

But backers of Livni and Barak say the war ended at just the right moment. In 22 days of fighting, they say, Israel achieved its goals without being drawn into a quagmire. Throughout the war, military planners worried that Israel would sustain high casualty rates if it sent large numbers of ground forces into Gaza’s densely packed cities and refugee camps in search of Hamas leaders. They also fretted over what would come next if they really did destroy Hamas: The relatively moderate Fatah movement has little organized presence in Gaza, and a power vacuum in the strip could lead to an even more dangerous situation for Israel.

Livni’s and Barak’s argument are fine, but didn’t Witte just quote a general involved in the operation who considered the defeat of Hamas paramount?

But in case we didn’t get Witte’s insinuation, he spells it out for us with a final man-in-the-street opinion:

“They’re two faces of the same coin,” said Hanaa Mahamid, 24, a student and an Arab citizen of Israel. “All of them are war criminals.”

For the most part the article reads like an attempt to portray Netanyahu’s campaign as cynical and ideological. A part of that is to demonstrate a disconnect between Israeli public opinion and the more reasonable view of Israel’s Left and Center. Taking this position, Witte portrays the situations as if nothing was gained by the war except killing civilians. He takes this tack even though much of what he reports supports Netanyahu’s approach. There is a disturbing cynicism at play here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.