'We won this round, and we will win the next round too. What other option do we have?'
Photo: Reuters
The reality of Israel's victories
Op-ed: While Israelis have turned deterrence into a national flag, Hamas persists and Hezbollah may well be stockpiling tens of thousands of missiles and biding their time.
The results of a war cannot be measured by the standards of a soccer match. In post-war speeches, people usually say that in a war there are no winners and losers – everyone loses.
How miserable will the lives of many of Gaza's residents be? How low can they still go? The Gazans always lose. On second thought, aren't they the ones who elected Hamas to rule them?
But after this hollow cliché, they rush to measure the war according to who won and who lost. This is certainly true in the case of Operation Protective Edge.
The Gazans lost. A population of 1.8 million residents lost a lot in dead people, in ruins, in the even more shameful poverty they will be hit with in the coming years.
Limitations of Force
Ariana Melamed
Op-ed: The IDF can destroy every house in Gaza and kill any terrorist emerging from a tunnel, but in the 21st century war is won in the negotiating room.
And we? We must admit, honestly, that we’re unmoved by the tears of Gaza. They're the ones who started it. We only care about the State of Israel. The only thing that is important, and rightfully so, is the IDF, on whose broad shoulders we lean our heads.
It's the same IDF that has pampered the citizens of the State of Israel many times over the past few generations. We had great victories in wars and remarkable military operations. We always win.
Even when we thought that "the missile bent the plane's wing," as Ezer Weizman had said after the War of Attrition, or that we were deceived in the first Lebanon War, or that we were alarmed by the extent of confusion in the IDF following the Second Lebanon War – we always knew how to turn lemons into lemonade.
We flatters ourselves frequently, and we like to lie to ourselves just as often. We turned the foolishness in deploying regular defense forces on the banks of the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition (which ended 44 years ago last week) into spine-tingling heroic stories about the canal strongholds during the Yom Kippur War. We replace the difficult stories about the national management of the first Lebanon War with tales of the unprofessional conduct of the army's commanders in the Second Lebanon War.
Now, as we speak, we are taking comfort in the results of that miserable war: For eight years we have not been fired on from the north, and that's a fact. Hezbollah is afraid of us. We deter it. Long live us.
No one is asking how is it possible that Hezbollah, with its 170,000 rockets and missiles (according to the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate's Research Department), is trembling with fear and refraining from firing at us, while the Hamas men in Gaza, with fewer weapons, dared to fire at us with all their might
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It's true that we have not been fired on from the north for eight years now, and the government and IDF should be praised for bringing us to this point, but our experience with Hamas may show that the people sitting in Lebanon are not stupid, and they are not firing now because they are stockpiling tens of thousands of missiles in their storehouses - and just waiting for their opportunity. We're the only ones who have turned deterrence into a national flag. Hamas persists, and so does Hezbollah.Let there be no doubt about it: We won Operation Protective Edge. In Gaza, people are still digging through the wreckage with their hands and looking for available land to bury their dead.
The problem of war graduates like us is that we remember very well the ruins and the dead of the Sinai war, the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition (in the deserted cities of the Suez Canal), the burial of thousands of Egyptian soldiers in the desert in the Yom Kippur War, the multi-story buildings which collapsed in Beirut in the Lebanon War. And we mainly remember how we always win.
In Operation Protective Edge, a terror gang – and let's be generous – of 2,000 Hamas fighters succeeded (I'm sorry, but that's the word) in driving an entire country crazy, creating waves of anxiety, driving thousands of people away from their homes in the southern communities, and getting thousands of IDF fighters and tens of thousands of reserve soldiers to operate against it using tanks, warplanes in countless sorties and technologies that cannot be found anywhere else in the world (the Iron Dome system is just one of them) – and despite all that, they are still firing rockets from Gaza and making cheeky demands in the talks in Egypt.
And even if they stop firing, it will likely be a short or long break until the next time. These are the lives of winners in this country.
Let there be no doubt about it: We won this round, and we will win the next round too. What other option do we have?
I am told that this is true, but that we must not make the enemy happy with this kind of writing. My response is: I am writing these things so that we will win the next round and the next round and the next round too. Because on Yom Kippur of 1973 I was sitting in front of the military intelligence director, Major-General Eli Zeira, when a sudden siren ripped through the air. I have been traumatized ever since.
