Senior Israeli officials have said Hamas will achieve nothing with violent protests on Israel's border with the Gaza Strip. Some 120 Palestinians have been killed in the riots, and for what?
Beyond earning the sympathies of liberal commentators in mainstream American and European media, the riots have provided a kind of legitimacy for the recent barrage of rockets fired at Israel. As far as one can tell, no one in the world was very impressed with the news that Arabs were launching rockets at Jews, which did not penetrate the headlines or the public consciousness. This is the suicidal achievement of the anti-Semitic Palestinian terrorist movement.
Conversely, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are bringing violence and destruction to Gaza in a twisted effort to address their failures there. The IDF's greatest success has been that, ever since 2014's Operation Protective Edge, it has continuously worked to create additional layers of deterrence. In the past two years, these efforts have accelerated. Every rocket launch or attempted terrorist attack has been met with a much more forceful response than in the past, which also includes a new dimension: the destruction of terror tunnels. It seems there is always some attack tunnel waiting to be destroyed in response to provocations from the other side. If Gaza's terrorist groups were planning to use these tunnels to deter Israel, they have failed. The IDF has hit Hamas and Islamic Jihad hard, without any real response from those groups. So although Israeli deterrence is not hermetic, it is greater than in the past.
There are two alternatives to this current policy: There are those who argue that any military operation should be accompanied by new policies toward Gaza, to possibly include rebuilding Gaza or constructing a port somewhere for Gaza's population. But this policy is dangerous. Hamas is not about to abandon its strategy of popular warfare aimed at Israel's destruction. It would present Israel's adoption of such a policy as a huge achievement and proof that the terrorist group succeeded in both preserving its weapon of resistance and bringing prosperity to the people of Gaza.
The second option is to embark on a large-scale operation to conquer Gaza and eradicate Hamas. We know that despite the virulent media coverage of IDF operations, this is feasible from an operational perspective. But ever since the 1967 Six-Day War, experience has shown that deterrence is limited and a decisive victory in the battlefield can have unforeseeable results and possibly even backfire. See, for example, the War of Attrition Israel fought against Egypt, Jordan, PLO and their allies from 1967 to 1970, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as well as the regenerative efforts of Palestinian terrorism following the First Lebanon War and Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005. A decisive operation is desirable only if it creates deterrence once completed. Since this effect is very much in doubt, the only thing that can be done is to adhere to a simpler strategy of deterrence and completely avoid any compromises and agreements with the other side.
