When the current war ends, when the reservists return to their homes and workplaces, when life slowly begins to return to normal and the various inquiries begin investigating what happened, one central question that will need to be asked is why Israel did not act sooner.
Why did Israel let Hamas build up a terrorist empire within spitting distance of Sderot and Kibbutz Kfar Aza? And not only in Gaza. Why did Israel allow Hezbollah to build up an arsenal of some 130,000 missiles in Lebanon since the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and why did Israel allow Hezbollah terrorists to sit right on the border and peer into Metulla?
Why did Israel delay before taking action? Why did Jerusalem allow this maniacal buildup?
And when that question is asked, it will not take dozens of witnesses, from prime ministers and defense ministers past and present, down through chiefs of staff and heads of military intelligence to answer. The answer, or a major component of an answer, is simple: The fear of casualties; the dread of losing soldiers.
Wednesday was a particularly dark day in this war, which has already gone on now for more than 26 days, as the IDF informed the nation that 15 soldiers were killed the day before during the ground incursion into the Gaza Strip.
A nation sensitive to loss
Israel has a tremendous sensitivity to fallen soldiers. Their smiling faces are featured on the front pages of newspapers, their funerals are broadcast in the television news, and their friends and relatives are interviewed on the radio.
Most everyone can empathize because most everyone can put themselves in the shoes of the families of the fallen. A large percentage of this country’s Jewish and Druze population has loved ones somewhere in harm’s way.
Decades of war aversion
Israel avoided going into Gaza at full throttle in the past to avoid casualties. It avoided going into Lebanon and pushing Hezbollah far beyond the border to avoid casualties.
In fact, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and from southern Lebanon in 2000 to prevent IDF casualties, which in Lebanon numbered between 16 and 22 annually from 1985-2000.
There is an irony here, because in both cases, as a result of what is known as “casualty sensitivity,” Israel withdrew soldiers from buffer zones it had created to defend civilians, only to find that as a result of these withdrawals, civilians in the South and the North were left horribly exposed.
The day before the October 7 Simchat Torah massacre marked 50 years since the Yom Kippur War. This was an anniversary that had been discussed in the media and in academia for months. What were the lessons of that war? What was its impact on Israeli society?
One oft-repeated refrain was that the Yom Kippur War made a generation of Israeli leaders both risk-averse and war-averse. The war traumatized the nation both because the political and military echelons were caught terribly by surprise, and because of the casualties – 2,688 killed in 19 days of fighting.
The Yom Kippur War was not a war of choice, but rather a war of necessity, and when attacked, the nation fought bravely. After the war, however, the questions propped up. On the Left, the question was could those lives have been saved had Golda Meir entertained peace overtures from Anwar Sadat? On the Right, the argument was whether those lives could have been saved had the government not listened to the United States and had taken preemptive action as in 1967?
After the war, the focus of the trauma was on the high number of casualties, and – according to Udi Lebel, a researcher of civil-military relations at Bar-Ilan University’s School of Communication and at its BESA Center for Strategic Studies – it made a generation of Israeli political leaders very wary of deciding to go to war and willing to do whatever it would take to avoid having to commit troops into battle because of an understanding that Israeli society cannot bear the losses.
The First Lebanon War from 1982-1985 only reinforced this feeling.
When the IDF tanks first rolled into Lebanon on June 6, 1982, soon after the attempted assassination of Israeli ambassador to London Shlomo Argov, the country stood firmly behind the IDF and its leaders. For years, the North had been pounded by Katyusha rockets from PLO terrorists in Lebanon. It was only when the IDF pushed beyond the 40-kilometer zone that the government originally stated as the war’s objectives and moved toward Beirut that deep divisions within Israeli society emerged over the war.
The problems at home began when the objectives of the war went from protecting the civilian population to then-defense minister Ariel Sharon’s attempt to engineer a new Middle East order through an agreement with Lebanon’s Bashir Gemayel. Then a war of no choice began looking like a war of choice and every casualty as unnecessary. Bereaved families stood with pictures of their fallen sons in front of the Prime Minister’s Office. The casualties became too much for the country to bear.
But now, with Israel fully engaged inside Gaza and fighting Hamas there, will the public be more ready to accept the inevitable casualties?
According to Lebel, things are different this time for several reasons.
The first is that this is very much seen as a war of necessity, a war of no choice.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have initiated an action into Gaza two months ago to dismantle Hamas, there would have been rigorous protests both in Israel and abroad, with critics saying that war was unnecessary and that Hamas could be contained. Then each fallen soldier would have been the subject of political debate over whether his death was necessary.
But once Hamas carried out its barbarous attack, once this war was foisted on Israel, once it became clear that the soldiers were fighting to literally protect their homes, it made it easier for the country to absorb the losses because there was a purpose to them.
Another parameter has to do with the significance of the sacrifice. The public, Lebel said, has a greater ability to absorb military casualties if they see it is leading to something tangible and if it moves toward achieving a stated goal.
During the First Lebanon War, Lebel said, one of the frequent criticisms was that Israel was stuck in the Lebanese “mud,” meaning the IDF wasn’t moving, and there were no achievements.
For society to be able to accept casualties, he said, it needs to know that these casualties are moving the goal forward.
Casualties are more readily “tolerated if there is an understanding that today, something better is happening than yesterday or the day before. The challenge will be to show that there is meaning to these sacrifices; that they are leading somewhere. Otherwise, people will say there is certainly justification to fight, but the IDF is not delivering the goods.”
For this, he said, it is important for the country’s leaders to engage in “discourse management” and continuously provide the public with a sense that the alternative to this type of military action, even if it extracts a high price in terms of fallen soldiers, is civilian deaths.
So far, at least, this message is getting across.•