Israeli deterrence has been significantly bolstered by its assault on Hamas. But that was only half the battle...
It's a safe bet that there will be no Winograd-style, open savaging of the political and military leadership. But Iran, as The Jerusalem Post reported earlier this week, is conducting an urgent probe into Hamas's failures in Operation Cast Lead.
Hamas has acknowledged some of them and Israeli security officials have detailed many more: Hamas did not expect Israel to respond to its escalated rocket attacks with a major offensive - not with general elections looming, and the scars of the Second Lebanon War still raw. It certainly didn't believe the air strikes of week one would be followed by the ground operation of weeks two and three - Israel was deemed to be too wary of international criticism and too cowardly to risk its young soldiers. Hamas anticipated more practical assistance from the Arab world. And it fully intended to kill and maim more Israelis.
It planned to fire more rockets, more deeply, into more Israeli towns and villages and moshavim and kibbutzim, to murder more civilians. It hoped its booby-trapped buildings and tunnels and roadside bombs would fell more Israeli soldiers, and that its familiarity with Gaza's camps and alleys would yield it greater success in close combat with the IDF.
Unfortunately for Israel, however, Iran and Hamas are not chastened by these failures. The operative conclusions they are drawing are designed solely to pave the way to more effective conflict further down the road. Israel's challenge now is to minimize the consequence of its own failures in this reluctant resort to force... or risk facilitating that process.
THE IDF fought efficiently and effectively in Gaza, with mercifully fewer losses than had been feared. It fought, as a sovereign state's army must fight, with the paramount emphasis on protecting its civilians and its soldiers from the enemy - a particularly cynical enemy.
It went to war because Israel's civilians had been exposed to year after year of unrelenting rocket attack. And when it was eventually ordered by Israel's political leaders to fight back, it found Hamas thoroughly intertwined with Gaza's civilians.
With Hamas operating close to schools and in apartment blocks and mosques, and fighting out of uniform - rendering specious the Palestinian "civilian" casualty figures dutifully parroted by uncritical journalists, politicians, activists and protesters the world over - the IDF commanders' first priority was to protect their troops.
When sniper fire emanated from a residential building, or it was booby-trapped, an IDF commander explained in a briefing last week, the army did not send 10 soldiers inside to risk their lives tackling the danger. This marked a clear departure from 2002's Operation Defensive Shield, where 23 soldiers lost their lives in just such circumstances in the Jenin refugee camp suicide-bomber capital. Instead, the ground troops called in the air force to blow up the building. "If a Palestinian family wanted to keep their home," the officer said flatly, "they shouldn't have let it be booby-trapped."
That kind of blunt, soldierly comment ignores a complex Gaza reality in which some Palestinian civilians, at least, may have had no sympathy whatsoever for Hamas, but also no means whatsoever to prevent the extremists taking over their homes and transforming them into military positions.
But the fact is that most Gaza Palestinians demonstrated the most clearly quantified support for Hamas when, in 2006, most of them voted for it in their parliamentary elections. Whereas, in decades past, it was often said that extremists had hijacked the Palestinian cause, in Gaza, over the last few years, the Palestinians gave the hijackers the plane.
THE GOVERNMENT'S decision to send in the IDF, and the tactics adopted over the three weeks of fighting, have unquestionably reasserted Israeli deterrence. Hamas, it would appear, will not lightly goad Israel into war again.
But securing the declared goal of the operation - restoring long-term security to the South - required and requires more than deterrence. It necessitates a new reality in which Hamas is incapable of gradually accruing the military capability to do more harm in the future.
Israel could have made greater military progress toward that second goal if the operation had continued, and the IDF had destroyed more weapons factories and killed more key Hamas terror chiefs and arms experts.
It might have been furthered had the IDF, as at least some voices in the military command were urging, retaken the Philadelphi Corridor, and held it until a credible mechanism was in place to prevent the resumption of weapons smuggling across the border.
It would certainly have been achieved if the IDF had escalated the ground offensive and retaken Gaza, preventing Hamas from emerging to govern again.
But those avenues were not pursued. It should be restated here that, whatever its post-war criticisms, the opposition Likud did not demand that they should be. And amid the unilateral cease-fires mutually declared by Israel and then by Hamas, and the anti-smuggling arrangements trumpeted by Israel, the US and various European partners, there would seem to be no decisive impediment to the military revival of Hamas.
Egypt's professed commitment to really trying, this time, to block the Philadelphi tunnels must be measured against bitter experience, against its refusal to countenance practical international assistance at the border, and against a reality in which Cairo would far prefer any weapons in the Sinai to be smuggled into Gaza for use against Israel than kept in Egypt for use against the Mubarak regime.
And well-intentioned rhetoric aside, it is hard to see how the great Western powers are going to stop those Iranian and Syrian arms supplies before they get to the Sinai. No intelligence effort can intercept each and every Grad needle in the vast haystacks of international trade.
