Since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Arab enemies have given up on achieving a conventional military victory and switched entirely to a strategy of demoralizing the Jewish state through terror and limited warfare. This shift, Uzi Rubin explains, creates a dilemma for Israel:
The limited campaigns of the past decade, all of which featured standoff attacks against Israeli population centers, have generally met a fairly high level of civilian resilience, expressed in the readiness to suffer casualties, damage, and the disruption of Israelis’ daily lives, and in rapid recovery at the end of each campaign.
[But] these campaigns did not significantly impair the national economy beyond local damages, the cost of which was quickly paid by the state. There is no certainty that this will be the case in the future: the lethality and accuracy of current Hizballah (and perhaps also Hamas) rockets and missiles could wreak havoc on national infrastructures such as the electricity grid, the water system, and land, sea, and air transportation systems, which could cause significant and long-term damage to the national economy.
Experience has shown that the main motive for emigration from Israel is not the security situation but the economic situation. Israel’s burgeoning economy, which greatly enhances its wealth and stature, is also a source of vulnerability to any disruption of its infrastructure. This is well known to Israel’s foes. Thus, their expectation that economic decline due to the continued rounds of limited campaigns would lead to the collapse of national resilience and significant emigration from Israel is not unreasonable, at least from their point of view. . . .
What is needed [therefore] is not a classic military “decision” of a state army, but rather [the ability to conduct] limited campaigns while minimizing damage and losses among the home population. This outcome requires a change in force build-up and allocation of resources, including significant investment in the survivability of the national infrastructure against missile attacks. . . .
The problem, as Rubin puts it, is that to focus on preparations of this kind Israel would have to draw on limited resources that would otherwise be used to build up conventional military strength. Thus Jerusalem must choose either to prepare simultaneously for both conventional and low-intensity war—and thereby to risk being prepared for neither—or to focus on one at the expense of the other.
Read more on Jerusalem Institute for Security Studies: http://jiss.org.il/en/war-prepare/