The Lebanon and Gaza Campaigns: Operational and Ethical-Legal Lessons

The recent campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza compelled Israel to conduct a serious self-examination and take a wide ranging look at the strategic developments of the past decade. In this period, which began with the second intifada and ended with Operation Cast Lead, Israel found itself facing qualitatively different threats from those it had faced in the first fifty years of its existence. The threat began to change with the awareness on the part of Israel’s enemies that they were unable to achieve significant gains against Israel through classical military means. The Egyptian decision to initiate a classical military move – the Yom Kippur War – gained Egypt sovereignty over the Sinai Peninsula at the cost of recognizing Israel and signing a peace treaty with it. However, Egypt’s removal from the circle of countries in a state of war with Israel intensified the imbalance in military power between Israel and its adversaries in the region. This imbalance led both states and non-state players to seek alternatives to the classical military confrontation between states, which requires extensive national resources.