The world will soon know the shape and scale of Israel’s response to Hezbollah for Saturday’s rocket attack on a Druze town in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 children. But it’s not too soon to ask what purpose the expected retaliation will serve in the context of Israel’s five wars.
Five wars? Yes. And they are more about ideas than they are about geography.
The first war — the war Israel is now waging against Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Iran itself — is about security. Israelis want to be able to live safely in their homes without fearing they could be rocketed, pillaged, killed or kidnapped with barely a moment’s warning. The threat of a major escalation on Israel’s northern border has turned entire cities into ghost towns and displaced more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes.
That’s the proportional equivalent of roughly 2 million Americans forced out of their homes by the threat of terrorism. Those who condemn Israel now for its allegedly disproportionate response to the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah would be a little more intellectually honest if they asked themselves what they would demand of their own governments if they were in the same situation.
The second war fuels and explains the first. It’s about existence. Israel’s most strident critics insist that the current conflict is about Palestinian existence, about Israel’s alleged refusal to grant a Palestinian homeland. But that’s a historically ignorant claim — and a dishonest one. Israel agreed to a Palestinian Authority in 1993, offered a Palestinian state in 2000 and vacated the Gaza Strip in 2005.