Just to clarify – it wasn’t me who wrote about Israel’s intention to cripple Hamas’ military capacity, it was the New York Times (footnotes for the article are forthcoming).

But your observation is basically correct. Most case studies of international relations rarely display a singular driving factor (though some factors may carry more strategic weight than others). This is also true with Israel’s assault on Gaza. A number of convergent factors reveal why this massacre took place when it did, and in the manner it did.

Firstly, the timing seems somewhat random – have rockets not been falling on Israel for the last 8 years? Then why now and why so severely?

The ascendance of Barak Obama most likely pushed the Israeli military to take what it probably perceived as its last ‘green light’ to pound those who disobey.

It was also hoped that a barbaric display of machismo might help Livni and Barak in the recent elections. Unfortunately for them, this did not happen.

Did the Israeli leadership really think they could knock out Hamas’ capacity for rocket attacks? Probably not. The Israeli Foreign Affairs website carried a description of events during last summer’s ceasefire. Among its findings was the fact that Hamas, while observing the truce, proved relatively incapable of stopping other autonomous militant groups from disregarding the ceasefire. If Israeli leaders knew this, then they surely knew that even by removing Hamas in its totality they would not be able to halt all rocket attacks. So yes, this pre-text is fairly transparent; thus Israel’s “acknowledgement” on day-20 that such an objective is unachievable.

But ultimately, it is not Palestinians per se that Israel has a problem with. If it were, the West Bank would be looking like Gaza right now. The problem is that, at least before the assault, the majority of Palestinians (at least in Gaza) had turned away from Fatah and towards what seemed like the only credible challenge to Israel’s never-ending occupation. The lesson Israel was trying to teach the Palestinians (from the blockade to the recent assault) was that making the wrong electoral choice would bring with it a heavy penalty. As Chomsky rightly points out, by “crushing the civilian society”, Israel hoped that the Palestinians might come to see the error of their ways. Like most Israeli policy, the exact opposite has occurred. (On this last point, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/middleeast/15fatah.html?partner=rss&emc=rss)

However, there is to me one error of analysis. You state: “Israeli officials acknowledge that the 20-day offensive has not permanently crippled Hamas’s military wing or ended its ability to launch rocket attacks. It is unlikely that Israel can achieve those aims militarily any time soon.”

This implies that Israel’s aims were genuinely to cripple Hamas’s military wing.

But it rather appears that the aim of the onslaught was to cripple the governance of Gaza per se. As Ben White notes in the New Statesman: “you don’t weaken a socio-religious political movement with F-16s and drones (although apparently in the best colonial tradition, you may ‘teach them a lesson’, according to Shimon Peres)” and it looks like Israel was simply and “deliberately targeting infrastructure necessary for the governance of Gaza,” even according to UN representatives. (http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2009/01/israel-targets-gaza-hamas)

And Noam Chomsky notes that Israel’s “mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee”, which was “meticulously planned”, was understood by Israel’s military commanders to be “crushing the civilian society” — and would it not make sense, therefore, to consider this the intention?
(http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20090119.htm)

You are correct in stating that Hamas aroused the ire of Israel by refusing to buckle to its every whim, but if one looks at the pattern of events — the blockade, the starvation, the military onslaught — it rather looks like the problem (as evident in Israel’s entire history) is the Palestinians, because they exist.