While Hamas and Israel learn lessons of conflict, civilians are caught in middle

That Hamas continues to operate out of civilian areas and, when these are hit with collateral civilian casualties, observers are quick to accuse Israel of acting “disproportionately” in response, as though the concept of proportionality ever applied to warfare.

That Hamas has become ever more radicalised, spurred on by a fundamentaist ideoogy and ensuring that no alternative form of grass roots leadership within the Gaza Strip can challenge it for power.

And that Israel, while it has abysmally failed over four elections in two years to put a new government together, knows how to get its act together in situations of warfare — echoing the famous David Ben-Gurion statement made during the Second World War: “We will fight Hamas as though there is no government crisis, and we will continue to conduct coalition negotiations as though there is no war with Hamas”.

To begin with, all of Israel’s wars (except the war of Independence in 1948) were fought in the territory of the neighbouring countries. They did not immediately threaten the daily life of the civilian population in central Israel.

But this has radically changed since the firing of missiles from Iraq into Israel by Sadam Hussein in the early 1990s, and the subsequent wars and conflagrations, be they the firing of missiles from Gaza or South Lebanon into Israeli population centres or the Intifadas, which have taken place largely inside Israeli-controlled territory in the West Bank. It was after the firing of missiles from Iraq that Israel expanded the newly-named Home Front Command, something which had never been deemed necessary in previous wars.

War has become increasingly technological. Ground troops are used as a last resort, with no Israeli government of the past decade prepared to send troops into Gaza for fear of the daily count of body bags which would result, or the taking of soldiers as prisoners and hostages. The reserve troops, our children and our siblings, may have been called up last week, they may have been amassed along the Gaza border as though they were preparing for a ground operation, but few believed that this was more than a ploy to bring the Hamas out into the open and then take them out with the missile and aircraft technology.

We don’t have the stomach for that sort of warfare anymore, if only because we don’t see ourselves fighting for the continued existence of Israel. Certainly when one sees the effectiveness of the Iron Dome system (out of some 4,000 rockets and missiles, only a few succeeded in landing in built-up areas), there is a feeling of collective invincibility, even if there are individual casualties.

We have learned that there is no watertight way of dealing with these sort of threats, and that when weighing up the costs and benefits of alternative military and diplomatic strategies, we have achieved as much as we could have hoped to, knowing that as of tomorrow the re-arming process and the re-stocking of missiles will recommence until, a few years down the road, we will have a repeat performance. While we don’t see this in any way as constituting a victory, Hamas does. It has taken on mighty Israel and succeeded in disrupting our lives for 10 days. Its leaders undertake, through Arab intermediaries such as Egypt, high level negotiations with Israel’s leaders as equals.

Where do we go from here? It seems blythe to roll out the oft-repeated phrase used by most of the international community, that the only way to resolve the problem is to address the root causes, namely an end to occupation, the establishment of a Palestinian state and our immediate neighbours accepting that Israel has the right to exist within secure borders as a Jewish state.

It is a mantra which has lost much of its substance, but there doesn’t appear to be any other strategy other than that of violence and warfare.

The Oslo Accords in the 1990s and the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 have not proved a success (if I am allowed British understatement) and few Israelis — including those who have always supported such moves and have been opposed to West Bank settlement activity or attempts to move into East Jerusalem — are really prepared to give it another chance. They detest the far-right but equally are fearful of those neighbours who, they say, they would like to live at peace with.

The events in Lod and Acco, with riots, lynchings, burning of shops and restaurants and the disruption of safe road travel in the south of the country by some local Bedouin residents, has only served to raise the fear levels even more. For many, the current situation of a strong Israel, a thriving economy, a technologically and globally vibrant society, along with what many see as the occasional hiccup along the way, appears to be the best of all the bad options. Few now fall for the delusion that a complete eradication of Hamas (and Hezbollah) or a real peace agreement is anywhere on the horizon.

We hope for a quiet summer, a return to post-Covid and post-Gaza normality, in this fascinating, exciting, vibrant, frustrating country.

Those of us old enough are recalling the famous Naomi Shemer song from the days of the Yom Kippur War, Lu Yehu (‘If Only’). If only this would be the last war we had to experience. But we are all too realistic and seasoned to believe that. Meanwhile, we just get on with our lives.

Professor David Newman holds the Chair of Geopolitics in the Dept of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University