You keep using that word….I do not think it means what you think it means

Sonny writes,

…yeah, sure. And, I think Israel actually is trying to achieve certain strategic gains.

So our disagreement is really one of policy, rather than worldview. However, he later declares that whatever our disagreement,

no sovereign nation should be forced to withstand constant bombardment/missile attacks from a neighbor on its border that wants to see it destroyed and its people pushed into the sea.

As Jack Black would say in High Fidelity, “there’s that should…” In other words, despite the caveat, it’s not actually about strategy; there’s a point at which strategy ceases to operate, and normative rules apply. Israel’s undesirable strategic situation can only lead to one policy prescription.

I would have more faith in certain neoconservatives’ beliefs in the importance of strategy in theory, if they did not so often reduce it in practice to General Westmoreland’s phrase: “Firepower.”

Halevi and Oren’s article is a case in point. Was there ever a military action of Israel’s that they have not supported? Their arguments for the war in Lebanon in 2006 read much the same as this one. Their worldview is inescapably formed by the events of the period stretching from 1948-73, during which a) the IDF was one of the most effective militaries in modern history and b) it was fighting against conventional militaries whereby Israel’s superiority in the field needed to be conclusively demonstrated.

Such is not the case today. While in some sense the belief that they are ultimately stronger than the Israelis is a crucial (and lamentable) feature of Palestinian nationalism, there is no evidence that they believe themselves stronger militarily, or that they are merely one demonstration of Israeli power away from ceding their goals.

As for the belief that the IDF can effectively excise Hamas from the Gazan body politic like a tumor, this has little basis in reality. Neither Israel nor any other nation has much of a track record in coercing foreign peoples into constituting their governments in a manner desirable to the coercers. Usually, quite the opposite is the case.

While it is possible to use military force to achieve certain material outcomes, it is exceedingly rare for punitive strikes to change an enemy at the political level; people are not that malleable.

I am more inclined to side with Diodotus, who Thucydides records as declaring that

Either then some means of terror more terrible than this must be discovered, or it must be admitted that this restraint is useless; and that as long as poverty gives men the courage of necessity, or plenty fills them with the ambition which belongs to insolence and pride, and each of the other conditions of life remains subjugated to some fatal and master passion, so long will the impulse never be wanting to drive men into danger… In short, it is impossible to prevent human nature doing what it has set its mind upon, by force of law or by any other deterrent force whatsoever.

Partisans of the alternative might do well to make clear what level of suffering the Gazan Palestinians would need to undergo before they comply, and what specific policies Israel should enact to bring such conditions about.