On an inflection point – Amos Harel in Haaretz:

‘"In the north and the south," Bazak elaborates, "we didn't have an order of battle that could cope with a short-range surprise attack. As Guy's father, it perturbs me that intelligence didn't reach the arena itself at 2 A.M., when Military Intelligence received initial signs, and afterward when first consultations were held in the General Staff and in the Shin Bet [security service].
"The most important thing in a case like that," Bazak explains, "is for whoever is on the front line to raise the preparedness level. Either the forces would have disrupted the attack, or Hamas would have noticed the deployment and canceled the attack. The thinking of the decision makers was to send in a small Shin Bet force and thwart a specific abduction attempt. The approach was: We have time, we'll wait for more information, we'll preserve the secrecy of our intelligence sources. We are in control and the enemy can't pose a challenge to us. The present generation grew up in a situation in which the enemy was weak, and that allowed us to take chances.’

(…)

‘"Emotions prevailed over rational thought," he adds. "A basic principle in war against guerrillas is to differentiate between them and the population. The latter is the support system the organization is nourished by. When you say that there are no noncombatants in Gaza, you explicitly turn them all into Hamas and create a process that's the opposite of what's desirable. Severing the Palestinian population from Hamas and making it dependent on the Israeli system would have acted as a lever of pressure on the Hamas leadership. The fact that we didn't do that is one of our most serious failures.’

(…)

‘"In recent years," he notes "the extremist voices were dominant, while Israel took part in feeding the monster, in strengthening the extremist forces, such as by transferring that money to the Hamas government in the Strip. The counter-reaction to the rise of extremism on the other side is the rise of extremism among us. And the more dominant the extreme voices on both sides become, the more certain war becomes, with the result that it's guided by hatred and anger, and impels cycles of endless killing and destruction."’

(…)

‘"In general, we need to put on historical glasses at this time. We are in the midst of a struggle for hegemony and for the world order. We were all born into an order that we see as natural, but it's important to remember that it could collapse in a short time. I always give the example of my grandmother. She was born in Jerusalem in 1903, into a Middle East that had been shaped for 400 years by the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire.
"Before she was 14," he continues, "she saw how the empire was falling apart, and no less, how the Christian powers were returning after nearly a thousand years. My father was born in Jerusalem in 1933 into a British Empire on which the sun never set. But before he was 15, the empire had disappeared from the map of the Middle East. Today we're again at an inflection point. The Middle East we knew may exist on maps, but no longer in reality. The Arab Spring marked the end of an order that was shaped in the Sykes-Picot Agreement [of 1916, between France and England] and opened the door to promoting Iran's strategy in the region.’

(…)

‘I feel anger that my son paid with his life. But on the other hand – and there is another hand – my understanding from the start was: When you fight, there is no insurance. In the end, that is the cruel deal.’

Read the article here.

The Ottoman empire. Gone.

The British empire. Gone.

Empires come and go, but I’m not so sure if the Arab spring marked the end of a period. The American empire and the American century have been declared dead many times already. It’s possible that the decay is slow and it’s very well possible that we are at an inflection point.

When you fight there is no insurance, when you live there is little insurance either.

The endless cycle of killing and destruction has not come to an end yet. So much is for sure.