Israel’s Changing Strategic Calculus

As someone whose views once fit the description of the Oslo-and-beyond era Israeli security establishment view, I found this analysis, from Nahum Kaplan, compelling:

For much of the period after the 1993 Oslo Accords, a powerful current within Israel’s political and security establishment rested upon several interconnected propositions.

The lists includes: that Palestinian institutions could gradually become responsible governing partners, economic prosperity would reduce enthusiasm for violence, technological superiority and superior intelligence could contain threats that could not be eliminated, limited military operations could reduce enemy capabilities while avoiding the political cost of decisive confrontation, and international diplomacy, though frequently frustrating, remained indispensable to long-term security.

None of these ideas was entirely absurd. That is precisely why they were so influential….

Besides breaching the border, Hamas breached an entire conceptual architecture. The massacres, hostage-taking, and temporary collapse of Israel’s local defences shattered public faith in the proposition that a genocidal movement could be indefinitely managed through surveillance, economic concessions, and occasional bombardment. A sophisticated intelligence apparatus had produced an unsophisticated conclusion: The enemy did not really mean what it repeatedly said.

This is one of the West’s more persistent strategic pathologies. It interprets ideological conviction as theatrical language, then expresses astonishment when zealots proceed to act upon it. Western governments frequently assume that everybody ultimately wants what Western officials want: stability, prosperity, recognition, improved trade, and a favourable paragraph in the communiqué.

Some people want victory, domination, and to kill you for who you are. The inability to comprehend this does not make one humane. It makes one vulnerable.

As they say, read the whole thing.