THE OCCUPATION EATS ITS OWN:

Beyond the obvious intelligence failure, one reason is that a good portion of the troops in the enlarged division that was meant to be guarding the Gaza border had been redeployed to keep order and protect an ever-expanding archipelago of tiny, often unauthorized West Bank settlements and roads leading to them. The sole purpose of these outposts was to establish a de facto Jewish presence in the West Bank and hence restrict the actions available to future Israeli governments. Objections and warnings by the defence establishment that the military and security services were overstretched, that the army no longer had the requisite forces or the time to train soldiers properly, were dismissed as the defeatism of an old and tired secular elite, by a growing chorus of hyper-patriotic, right-wing zealots, people often with little or no practical military experience. 

For more than a generation, defence policy and much else has been increasingly determined by the dictates of Israel's religious settler lobby and its Messianic visions. Though not numerous, parties representing the settlers exploited Israel's system of proportional representation, which magnifies the influence of small, well-organized pressure groups, to effectively capture an entire state. A careful programme of entryism allowed the Likud, too, to become heavily influenced by MKs and party members from the settlements that in no way reflected the party's broader voter base. 

It is not just the tactical decision-making power of this group over troop deployments that has now collapsed, but their larger strategic vision. This was a belief that by dispersing a population of Jews around the West Bank we could gradually annex it, all the while pretending that we could ignore the presence of three million hostile Palestinians, and the demographic consequences their incorporation would entail. It is in this context that the settlers, and their secular avatar Benyamin Netanyahu, came to view Hamas as a strategic asset, because its radicalism made any efforts to find a compromise, or even merely to contain the conflict, impossible. Suitcases of cash, supplied by Hamas' Qatari allies no less, could be relied upon to keep Hamas in power but restrained. What better proof was needed that God was on our side?

Yet beyond the failure of both tactics and strategy, it is the cultural effects of this way of thinking--which bred arrogance, complacency, and above all wishful thinking--that has created the greatest threat to Israel in at least fifty years.

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