Beyond just ‘not ok’, Israel’s response is playing out exactly how the terrorist’s playbook says the terrorized country should respond: terrorist launches a terrorist attack, terrorized country responds with forced, civilians hit in the crossfire blame the terrorized country and move towards the terrorists.
In the past few days, we have been hering Israeli officials refer to this as their 9/11. What they do not seem to appreciate with their comparison is that the emotion ladden responce the US engaged in after 9/11 proved to be one of the greatest military blunders in the countries history.
If they want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they should address the immediate military threat, fix the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to be so successful (such as diverting soldiers away from the Gaza border; and (allegedly) ignoring warnings that Hamas was planning an attack). Once the immediate concerns are addressed, they should back off and allow time for cooler heads to think through what a strategically effective response would look like and implement that.
Unfortunately, such a response is politically difficult in the best of circumstances. Given that the current ruling coalition is almost the definition of hotter heads, built itself up on the promise of “security”, and was already on shaky ground domestically, I don’t think they have many options other than a rash response.
Hopefully they constrain themselves to just responding in Gaza. If they decide to respond by going after Hamas’s supporters in, say Iran, we are looking at a major regional war.
Beyond just ‘not ok’, Israel’s response is playing out exactly how the terrorist’s playbook says the terrorized country should respond: terrorist launches a terrorist attack, terrorized country responds with forced, civilians hit in the crossfire blame the terrorized country and move towards the terrorists.
In the past few days, we have been hering Israeli officials refer to this as their 9/11. What they do not seem to appreciate with their comparison is that the emotion ladden responce the US engaged in after 9/11 proved to be one of the greatest military blunders in the countries history.
If they want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they should address the immediate military threat, fix the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to be so successful (such as diverting soldiers away from the Gaza border; and (allegedly) ignoring warnings that Hamas was planning an attack). Once the immediate concerns are addressed, they should back off and allow time for cooler heads to think through what a strategically effective response would look like and implement that.
Unfortunately, such a response is politically difficult in the best of circumstances. Given that the current ruling coalition is almost the definition of hotter heads, built itself up on the promise of “security”, and was already on shaky ground domestically, I don’t think they have many options other than a rash response.
Hopefully they constrain themselves to just responding in Gaza. If they decide to respond by going after Hamas’s supporters in, say Iran, we are looking at a major regional war.