Factoring in the Israeli psyche when rockets stop falling from Gaza - analysis

But still, these will be the calls from abroad, including from friends and the well-meaning: just create a Palestinian state and put an end to all this already.

By HERB KEINON
Updated: MAY 15, 2021 22:35
A long exposure picture shows iron dome anti-missile system fires interception missiles as rockets fired from the Gaza Strip to Israel, as it seen from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, May 10, 2021. (photo credit: EDI ISRAEL/FLASH90)
A long exposure picture shows iron dome anti-missile system fires interception missiles as rockets fired from the Gaza Strip to Israel, as it seen from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, May 10, 2021.
(photo credit: EDI ISRAEL/FLASH90)
When the rockets stop falling from Gaza, as they will, and the physical toll is tallied inside the battered Strip, there will be renewed calls for a two-state solution as the only way to solve this intractable problem.
Most of those calls will be coming from abroad, since most Israelis – even those who would like to see a two-state solution – do not view it as remotely possible, at least not for the foreseeable future.
But still, these will be the calls from abroad, including from friends and the well-meaning: “Just create a Palestinian state and put an end to all this already.”
Beyond the naive simplicity of it all (as if Hamas will be satisfied with a reality in which Israel exists at all), it also overlooks the Israeli psyche.
Much too often Israel’s friends look at the country as some textbook case: move this pawn here, that bishop there, and – hocus pocus – you have a deal.
What they miss is an understanding of the Israeli psyche, and how events that traumatize the country – such as the ones the country is currently experiencing – are not simply erased or forgotten when they end.
It’s not as if when this all stops, that Israelis will just be able to forget everything – the tension, the anxiety, the screaming kids, the red alerts – and go back to how things were beforehand. This all has an impact. It will impact how they look at the world, the region, ways of managing the conflict. And, yes, the political map.
People just don’t forget missile alert sirens every few minutes sending them scurrying to shelters, they don’t forget the insecurity felt when running to get their kids into a safe room, they don’t forget the sense of helplessness that accompanies it all. Nor do they forget that some of their neighbors sided with their enemies and turned on them in a paroxysm of anger.
Two watershed moments come to mind watching and feeling everything that is going on, from the rockets over Tel Aviv, to the riots in the streets, to the fear of an eruption in Judea and Samaria.
The first was the 1991 Gulf War. Anyone who was in the country at that time could not escape a sense of deja vu this week watching missiles fly toward Tel Aviv. The Iraqi Scud attacks during the First Gulf War were a traumatic experience, and one that significantly jolted strategic thinking in the country.
From that moment onward, war here changed. It was no longer Israeli tanks against Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights, or Israeli tanks against Egyptian tanks in the Sinai Desert. Whenever there was a conflict from then onward it was enemy missiles/rockets against our population centers. Scuds against preschools, Katyushas against synagogues, Kassams against housing complexes.
And that forced a change in thinking; it led to the Herculean effort to develop a three-tiered anti-missile umbrella over the country – Arrow, David’s Sling, Iron Dome – so that if the enemy fires for your soft underbelly – your civilian population – you can protect it to a large degree, though not hermetically.
As of this writing, Hamas has fired more than 2,000 rockets indiscriminately at Israel, causing 11 deaths, injuring dozens and causing substantial harm to property. But imagine what things would look like if there were no Iron Dome.
Hamas has tried to bypass the Iron Dome by overwhelming it, by firing multiple missiles at the same target. To some extent they succeeded. But be assured, Israel has now learned that lesson and will strive to make the necessary adjustments in time for the next round.
George Bush initiated a war against Saddam Husein in 1991, Hussein retaliated by firing on Israel, and that trauma had a huge influence on the strategic thinking of the country.
Fast forward to the Second Intifada that began in September 2000. The five years of the intifada’s mind-numbing terrorism impacted everyone, and the country that emerged from that experience was not the same.
The nation that to a large extent embraced the Oslo process and its two-state solution during the 1990s, all of a sudden had huge second thoughts.
After five years of non-stop violence that erupted just as many thought that the country was on the verge of accommodation with the Palestinians, it was impossible to just turn around and say “let’s wipe the slate clean, go back to step one, forget any of this happened.”
You can’t do that. Actions matter, actions have an impact, actions have significance.
Some abroad who bewail the rightward lurch of Israeli politics over the last two decades – Israel has not had a left-wing prime minister since Ehud Barak in 1999 – wonder what happened to the Israel that they remembered and idealized, the Israel of the kibbutzim, Gold Meir, Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin.
How did we get from there, to here? From left-wing governments, to right-wing ones.
How? Reality intervened. A tough and often brutal reality that forced people to adjust their view of reality, to reassess what they thought was and was not possible. Ideologues do not adjust their way of thinking in the face of changing reality. Israelis, the last three decades have shown, do.
That tough and brutal reality is hitting again now with unusual intensity and force, and it – too – will have an impact; it too will influence how people think; it too will resonate in ways that we cannot yet foresee. Events like these will shape the psyche of the nation for years to come.