Since the so-called stabbing intifada began in late 2015, Palestinian violence against Israel and Israelis has increased. But Israel’s response has remained, in the words of the retired IDF colonel Eran Lerman, “moderate and well-calibrated.”
It is true that perpetrators and would-be perpetrators are apprehended and sometimes killed. But the attitude toward the population at large, and toward the economy of the West Bank, is deliberately geared to avoid collective punishment and give the peaceful majority a stake in stability.
This strategy is not “a matter of leftist leanings in the IDF high command, misguided moral musings, undue respect for the opinion pages of Haaretz, or an inordinate fear of the International Criminal Court,” writes Lerman. Rather, it’s an effective cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the counter-terrorism lessons learned by both Americans and Israelis in the first decade of the 21st century:
Many of the senior officers are themselves veterans—as younger officers—of the intensive clashes of 2000-04 (mistakenly referred to by many as “the second intifada,” though this was not a popular uprising but a campaign of violence conducted from above—“Mister Arafat’s War,” as Thomas Friedman called it back then). They well remember the lessons learned during that period. Some have also internalized aspects of American field manuals on counterinsurgency, which bear the marks of what David Petraeus and others learned in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some surprising recent comments from Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah seem to support such a strategy, Lerman observes. At a meeting with Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, Hamdallah “offered uncharacteristic praise of Israel’s measured response to the wave of violence that began in October 2015,” feeling “obliged to take note—in public!—of Israel’s moderate and well-calibrated response.”
Read more on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/rami-hamdallah-idf-policy/