For all the killing, destruction and displacement wrought upon Gaza over the past 10 months, Israel is likely to be less safe when military operations end than when they began. Nobody denies that Israel had a right to defend itself in response to Hamas’s own terrorist bloodletting against Israeli civilians, but vengeance is not a strategy. And too much of the Netanyahu government’s decision-making has been driven by a short-term desire for vengeance rather than a long-term need to provide for Israel’s future security.

At present, Israel is militarily engaged on multiple fronts, and has shown that it has excellent regional intelligence capabilities and the technical means to exploit that intelligence to achieve tactical victories. But those short-term tactical victories have disguised, and in some cases increased, the strategic threat Israel will face in the future.

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system fires interceptors at rockets launched from the Gaza Strip,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald