Israel is invading northern Gaza with thousands of ground troops. Zimbabwe stands unmolested by any neighbor but faces another year of injustice, lawlessness, and poverty. Mugabe will pack his cabinet with cronies and criminalize his opponents further.
In both cases, the state has stopped responding to the clamor and desires of the populace. In both cases, the state can no longer afford to pay (Poli-Sci professor Robert Bates) "specialists in violence" and have ceded too much power to them. In both places, the state has made the law the enemy.
The result: there is no lever to manipulate to pressure the (Gaza or Zimbabwe) state to behave different, because — in peace or war — the state has already disassociated its fortunes from its people, which is where pressure is always applied.
2009 OFF TO A TERRIBLE START
Just like ZANU in Zimbabwe, Hamas has therefore been willing to engage in strategies that alienated Gaza's people in the process — like firing forty or fifty home-made rockets per day into Israel, unpopular actions likely to lead to further suffering in Gaza . . . while ZANU is accustomed to wielding force against segments of its people, attacking them in the street and crippling the agricultural economy and favoring close supporters and cronies. Neither government is responsive to bottom-up pressure and so neither government should be invaded or attacked with force.
There are further correlations briefly to consider. Gaza is a place filled up with people, a giant warehouse. Israel, over the border, is all fields of green and brown, with a few small settlements, pristine. The resemblance to a gigantic "location" or "township" (reserved for "the Bantu") in South Africa is undeniable.
Both Hamas and ZANU-PF are buoyed by their core constituents who have genuine, horrible, remediable grievances.
Dealing with similar matters, "internally," i.e. to remedy Gaza/African type urban squalor, Zimbabwe proceeds with land-reform without the rule of law. Seeking a trans-border, regional transformation, given that "Gaza" cannot be constructed as self-sufficient, Hamas chooses force outside of the law as its weak-state option, too.
Hamas also wants to change the society that saw it to power, like the Muslim Brotherhood does generally. The state in Zimbabwe wished similarly, first supporting the peasant transformation of the country, then signing that desire away at "independence," and then trying but failing to "transform" its citizens in the horrible repression of the mid 1980s without land reform — into patriotic Shona-song singing perennial revolutionaries. In Gaza and Zimbabwe weak-state violence fails to transform but only destroys.
Hamas unlike ZANU would not only "liberate" people from the colonial master — Palestine from settler Jews; peasants from landlord whites — but also "liberate" Palestinians from the secular, market-based, urban freedoms that rile its Fundamentalist, misogynistic sheykhs. Israel's legitimacy and Gaza's cross-border ambitions against it is of course why Hamas is a terrorist organization and ZANU-PF, which was considered a terrorist organization in the imperial and white-settler world in the past, is only a delinquent government.
THE BETTER YEARS AHEAD
In Gaza, when reprisals do come, massive reprisals, like right now, the situation shifts, the collective suffering of Gaza's populace at the hands of the Israeli military make Hamas's emphasis on the struggle seem . . . wise and predictive. The world is all about blood and fire after all! Hamas' preoccupation, its reason for being, is conflict. Look at the conflict! How can Hamas be wrong?
ZANU-PF can only dream about such reprisals, which, if withstood, would bring it back to a position of unchallenged power.
Give neither state what it wants.
War is not only "not the answer," it is more of the problem.
Mount a serious, all-in international effort to remedy the real injustices that lie at the root of these faux-states' problem: penning workers and surplus migrant laborers in giant prisons, denying them land and a future while claiming to offer same.
Pressure Israel and South Africa, which have responsive states. Do not worry that this is "unfair." Use what levers might actually be attached to something . . .
Do nothing to intervene directly unless there exists the will to occupy and administer conquered territory, which is not the case.
Change will take many years and have no immediate payoff, or come from the people unassisted by external force.