There clearly exist sufficient preconditions for obligatory war: not only do Edomites threaten Jews, but they demand Jewish land. Halacha unconditionally requires us to fight, even if the enemy demands only straw and hay, and under no circumstances are we allowed to relinquish Eretz Yisrael. On that, we have the precedent of Judge Yiphtah, who led Hebrews into battle when our enemies offered a land-for-peace deal. In obligatory wars, Jewish lives are subordinated to Jewish values.

But the State of Israel is not fighting an obligatory war. In such a war, everyone goes out, including newlywed husbands and—according to some opinions—wives, young and old, laypersons and Torah scholars. When Rabbi Akiva authorized obligatory war against the Romans who sought to extinguish Jewishness, he sent all his students to fight in Bar Kochba’s ranks. That is rabbinical responsibility: you authorize it, you fight in it.

The Torah prescribes a code of obligatory war: no enemy should be left alive, women and babies included. They attacked the commandments, they attempted to conquer the cities of our God, and they rebelled against His people; the only fitting punishment is death. If we left babies alive, they would grow up and avenge their slain parents; that we cannot afford.

The commandment to accept their surrender only applies to expansionary, rather than obligatory wars: if they gave up when we besieged their town, and accepted on themselves tribute and servitude, we allow them to stay in our land. But once they took up arms, there was no mercy. Actually, there was: what the rabbis called, “the mercy of fools,” mercy to the merciless. Likewise, the commandment to spare their women only applies in expansionary wars, those we started outside Eretz Yisrael.

God cares about Jews. When he sends us to fight over trivial issues, be it hay or desert, he protects us. Not only through his direct involvement, but also by releasing us of constraints. When he sends us to fight, surely he does not endanger us beyond necessity. God does not tie our hands with politically correct rules of engagement, nor would he make us leave our enemies alive to resume fighting as soon as the shock is over. Hebrews defeated Amalek in the first encounter, but were still told to extinguish him.

When the rabbis tell their students about obligatory war, the rabbis also have an obligation: to tell them how to fight it.

“Not take prisoners,” Prince Andrew continued: “That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war—that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kind-hearted that she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people’s houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same sufferings…

If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous.”

-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Economists would call the Israeli position on prisoners a problem of excessive discount rate. Elected politicians have a very short time horizon, and simply do not care what flood comes after them. Acting in self-interest, they trade the country’s long-term benefits for personal benefit in public relations, however meager. This is the logic of prisoner exchanges.

In principle, prisoner exchanges are wrong even if they are equal because they violate the most important principle of justice, its unavoidability. This can be likened to prosecutors telling petty criminals that it is not feasible to punish them, and so they are free to go. Expedient? You bet, especially because it allows the police to devote precious resources to more important criminals. But simplicity comes with consequences: the absence of punishment invites more crime of the unpunished kind, and justice is destroyed. Think about it: justice is inherently cruel and wasteful. It is a promise to would-be criminals that society will find and punish them. What for? To restore the status quo antedelictum, the normal situation which was distorted by the criminal act. To remove the ripples from the idyllic surface of the society. To restore the divinely ordained order of things, which has been distorted by criminals. And why postulate that criminals distort society rather than reflecting its natural order? That is the definition of crime: an unacceptable violation of societal order. The pagans who proclaimed that justice must triumph even at the cost of the fall of Rome confirm that as much as possible, justice is not about costs.

And just what costs are involved in prisoner exchanges? A half-dozen soldiers one time, a drug dealer in other instance, a hapless corporal who flaunted his orders, some bodies. Is this cost, honestly, too high to pay? Not at all. No one other than their families and their immediate circles of friends would care in the least if any particular Israeli hostages were killed. No one really cares about the dozens of soldiers who die every year even in the most peaceful times. No one remembers the exact figures of Israeli casualties in wars. Face it, other people’s deaths do not bother us excessively, nor do they endanger society.

Let’s test this assumption. It is possible to increase our soldiers’ protection indefinitely: by better weapons, armor, and medical care. But we refuse to expend unlimited resources in order to save a few more lives. Or take another example: the death toll from auto accidents in much worse than in wars, but we neither ban Arab drivers from Israeli roads nor pay bad Jewish drivers to use taxis instead. There is a limit to what we are prepared to pay to save lives. Prisoner exchanges long ago passed that low limit.

Only the government’s cowardice precludes it from acknowledging alternatives to prisoner exchanges. If we place such tremendous importance on bringing an unimportant number of our soldiers back, that importance must justify unorthodox measures. If we are prepared to break the law’s fundamental principle of unavoidability, why not break it in the less drastic respects? De-escalation, by such means as prisoner exchange, is one way of resolving conflicts; the other way is escalation. Instead of releasing enemy prisoners, we can apply pressure to them: we can stop releasing those who have served their sentences, transfer them from comfortable jails into pits, or even start shooting them. A violation of Israeli law? Perhaps, but not a greater violation than rescinding sentences in prisoner exchanges.

And possibly not a violation at all. Israel mistakenly insists on treating terrorists individually rather than collectively. They are enemy soldiers, not criminals. The fact that those soldiers resorted to terrorist warfare allows them to be punished more harshly and collectively, not given individual treatment. During WWII, saboteurs were shot rather than interned because in theory they were treated as criminals bereft of POW protection. Everyone understood that that was a flimsy legalistic disguise, universally tolerated it because of the general understanding that relatively lenient accommodation in POW camps does not deter terrorists sufficiently. Treating the Arabs as soldiers allows Israel to intern them until the end of hostilities instead of releasing them when their sentences expire. As for keeping security prisoners in pits rather than jails, that has nothing to do with legal justice. States can maintain different prisons for different inmates, and many states keep heinous prisoners in worse-than-pit conditions.

Treating the Arabs like enemies rather than lawbreakers would greatly simplify antiterrorist operations. IDF would be able to kill the terrorists on approach unless they succeeded in throwing a white flag promptly enough. Houses—enemy positions—could be then demolished by air strikes rather than stormed, with great risk to the soldiers.

Given such overwhelming reasons for treating terrorists as soldiers, why does Israel not do so? The answer has to do with power sharing. The Supreme Court has little authority in military matters as they belong to foreign policy. So, in an effort to establish the leftist court’s jurisdiction over the sensitive matter of our Palestinian peace partners, left-and-center governments insist on recognizing Palestinian freedom fighters as criminals. In fact, the Arabs get the best of two worlds: they are tried and released as criminals, but allowed Red Cross visits as POWs. Overall, Israel treats them as POWs in the foreign-policy arena and as criminals domestically. This dichotomy confirms that the real reason for bestowing on the guerrillas the status of criminals is bringing them under the Supreme Court’s authority.

In prisoner exchange schemes, the Israeli government gives in to foreign colleagues and domestic media, not to public opinion. The world over, people are flabbergasted by Israel’s disproportional exchanges; even leftist comedies (You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, for example) indicate the American public’s surprise over prisoner swaps. The attitude is far worse in Russia.

Consider this: when a bad Israeli movie depicted our soldiers killing Egyptian POWs in 1973 (yes, this happened), the Egyptians screamed murder and the Israeli government embarked on damage control, denouncing the story as false. No attempt has been made to tell the other side of the story: Egyptians shooting our POWs when they surrendered, murdering them in droves in the camps. The assimilationist government, forever ashamed of its members’ Jewishness, is concerned with foreign POWs more than its own.

In so doing, the government fails to admit what our enemies trumpet: that a single Jewish POW is worth a thousand Arab inmates. Hamas threatened to kill Shalit over Israel’s refusal to release 1,400 terrorists, big and small. The threat was very credible, but the world did not react. Why don’t we start killing those 1,400 on the Hamas list, one by one, until Shalit is released? If bringing him back justifies the release of a thousand terrorists, does not it justify the suffering of unfavorable media coverage of us executing jailed Arab murderers? Unthinkable? Not at all. Forget about Russia, where jailed terrorists have no chance of surviving until their release. In West Germany, terrorists killed a trade union boss (not a bad idea, per se) whom the government refused to exchange for their jailed comrades; in response, those jailed comrades “committed suicide.” In Israel, the shooting of Arab POWs was once a common occurrence; venerable Raful often delegated this unpleasant task to a certain right-wing Jew, later an ardent Kahanist, under whose guard the Arabs were always reportedly trying to escape.

What is the moral position of a government that sends its soldiers to arrest terrorists in risky confrontations instead of shooting them on sight or bombing their nests, and releases those terrorists in lopsided exchanges? We risked tens of thousands of soldiers to arrest the 1,400 terrorists earmarked for Shalit. And now the government exchanges this bunch—worth the lives of many Jewish soldiers according to the government’s own orders—for a single soldier. How moral is it to endanger tens of thousands of Jews, and for some of them to be killed, to extricate a single soldier blessed with a media-savvy family? Tens of thousands of soldiers suffered wounds and risked death in arrest operations; hundreds of families lost loved ones to those 1,400 terrorists; dozens more families stand to lose their dear ones to those terrorists once they are released—all for a single soldier. Or for six to twelve soldiers in earlier exchanges.

By agreeing to these exchanges, the government not only discounts prior suffering, but future suffering as well. Saving one Jew kills many. Media love hostages more than victims because a hostage story plays longer and has a human face on it; victims are too painful for the public to remember or even to look upon.
The Rabbis were right to ban the ransom of Jews kidnapped for political reasons: such ransom endangers more than saves.

We are used to fighting huge but immobile Arab armies. In 1973, the Egyptian advance stalled a few dozen miles from Suez, not so much because of Israeli defense, but because the Egyptians utterly lacked mobility. Syria did not march half a million soldiers over the Golan Heights apparently out of concern that they would run away under Israeli fire. We have missed that the situation has changed drastically: Arab armies have become large, mobile, and motivated.

Israel’s luck in her major war was that the common Arabs did not want to fight. It was simply not their war. An Egyptian saying went that the Syrians wanted to fight Israel to the last Egyptian soldier. Everyone disliked Israel, but no one cared about the Palestinians; in fact, other Arabs hated Palestinians more than they hated Jews. But it is very different today. Europeans have passed the age of religious wars, and perhaps the age of nationalist wars is over, too. Who knows what they will be fighting over next time: Chinese knockoffs, football teams, or human rights. Arabs have just entered the cultural age of nationalist wars. Common Syrians might be mildly negative toward Israel in the way that Germans disliked Poles in the early 1930s; moderation of their beliefs is not the point. The problem is that nationalist feelings exist now which were nearly absent forty years ago, and such feelings can be quickly inflated and mobilized. Worse, nationalist sentiment is decreasing in post-Zionist Israel. The kind of patriotism that motivates people to fight is hard to find in a country whose population is one quarter Arab, 10% anti-Zionist haredim, a similar number of ultra-left peaceniks, and a few Russian anti-Semites with Jewish great-grandfathers. Still fewer people retain their fighting spirit amid the twenty-year-long peace talks and coexistence propaganda.

Arab armies have become huge, if not in their actual size then in their ability to conscript. In 1973, Syria amassed 150,000 troops. With its current population, Syria could probably conscript twenty times that number. In Israel, less than half of all males join the army.

Arabs have achieved mobility not by traditional means of jets, tanks, and APCs (though in every such category they vastly outnumber Israel). Instead, they have achieved the ultimate unmanned mobility, with rockets. A defenseless Israel faces crude Palestinian projectiles, the decent tactical arsenals of Hezbollah, mid-range Syrian SCUDs, and Iranian ballistic missiles. And yes, Israel is defenseless. Patriot and Arrow anti-missile batteries cannot be activated promptly enough in the event of a Syrian strike. Our arsenal of antimissiles is in any case far too small to prevail against the huge number of enemy missiles. The Iron Dome is too expensive, with too few installations to intercept a coordinated strike across the Lebanese border. Israeli cities, fuel depots, even military runways are completely unprotected against a surprise or massive strike. Such a strike would probably not come from Hamas, of whose territory we have good intelligence, but from Syria and Hezbollah, who can certainly mount an overwhelming missile strike against us. Would they be afraid of Israeli retaliation? Of course not. Those days are long gone. Israel lost her ability to deter Syria when we did not bomb Damascus in 1973. A country that shied away from carpet-bombing Lebanese and Gazan villages in 2006 and 2009; who would expect it to nuke Damascus?

The famous US-Indian air force games showed decisively, if indeed it was not self-evident, that quantity is more important than quality. IDF’s excellent training and IAF’s excellent capabilities can overcome the Arab numerical advantage only to a point. And the Arab quantitative edge could immediately be augmented by qualitative superiority if Saudi Arabia were to turn its weaponry against Israel. In the last twenty years, the Saudis have procured from the United States about ten times more weaponry than Israel.

Quality allows for theoretically spectacular strikes, which are not so spectacular in practice. Entebbe? Think Germany and Mogadishu: hostage rescues deep in foreign territory are not unusual. Entebbe was not tremendously more difficult. 1967? It was luck, pure and simple, that the Arabs left their airfields undefended—exactly the way IAF’s air bases lie open now. We created the myth of our military prowess, but the enemy may not believe it.

Back to F-35. Wars are not won by spectacular strikes any more than by public relations shows. Bombing the Syrian reactor was nice, and it was great PR, but it did not change the military equation. In the next war between Israel and Syria, neither side will use its nuclear weapons. Our problem is with Syria’s thousand mid-range missiles. If we preempt and destroy them, well and good, but what if Syria takes us by surprise, as it did in 1973? No amount of cutting-edge weaponry would solve that problem.

What can be done? The unpalatable answer has been well known since the Cold War. When the enemy has more weaponry than you can feasibly defend against, deterrence is the only answer. And to nationalistically-minded Arab crowds and apocalyptically-minded Muslim leaders, the only credible deterrent is mutual assured destruction. Far from humane and liberal, Israel must be mad: mad enough that the Arabs would expect us to nuke them if they launched a saturated missile attack or marched three million Syrians over the Golan Heights. Short of that, we are inviting their first strike.

Israel is simply too small to defend in modern mobile warfare. In 1948 that was less of an issue since we fought against Arab militia, but in 1967 and 1973 Israel was invaded by regular Arab armies. Even the most incapable, battered army can gather enough strength for the forty-mile advance that would allow Syria to wipe out the Jewish state.

Lacking tanks and aircraft after the first battles, Syria could still march its 200,000-strong infantry and mammoth conscripted reserves into Israel, and no realistically available amount of Jewish firepower would have helped in a trench war.

Hamas and Hezbollah can easily bring Jewish society to screams by consistent attacks at Israel’s soft underbelly, the foreign Jews. Daily stabbing of Jews throughout the world is a slam-dunk affair, and it wouldn’t even alienate European governments from the terrorists. Faced with such major unrest, the Europeans would press Israel to give in rather than pressing the terrorists to abstain.

Terror bombings are likewise underutilized. The Iraqi insurgency has shown that cargo and van bombs are superior to suicide bombers, but Hamas refrains from using them. Plenty of other options exist to make the confrontation deadlier. Despite the great job done by Israeli intelligence, the current bomber-interception rate of 100 percent reveals that the war is a fiction.

Hezbollah has no reason to hold its rocket fire. It knows Israel won’t dare to occupy Lebanon again and risk exposing her troops to Hezbollah’s guerrilla attacks, as we did two decades ago. Short of occupation, Israeli bombing raids will be promptly quenched by the UN. Iran will cover whatever damage is done there.

For her part, Israel also plays softball. While the American pressure is responsible for Israel’s failure to employ the nuclear option in 1973 to annihilate the surrounded Egyptian Third Army, there was no comparable pressure regarding Syria—yet, IDF did not enter Damascus. Every Israeli politician understands the basic fact that we can get peace with Syria by ending the bombardment of Damascus rather than ceding the Golan Heights; yet, no one suggests bombing Damascus into a peace agreement.

Terrorist targets are well known. Israel can easily destroy Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV station or assassinate Mashaal with a missile strike. Haniye routinely appears before crowds, open to Israeli drones.

The Shalit debacle underscored the problem of mutual restraint. Israel could bring about the corporal’s release by systematic assassination of Hamas and Dughmush leaders or by wholesale killing of Palestinian prisoners. If you think that killing jailed terrorists is unthinkable, the democratic Germans did just that: its jailed RAF terrorists committed suicide. Hamas, for its part, did not retaliate against foreign Jewish targets.

Palestinian grassroots terrorism breaks mutual complacency. Individual, unaffiliated terrorists do not trade mutual safety promises with Jews. Almost all the terrorist attacks in Israel in the last two years were carried out by lone Arabs without support from a terrorist group. Sure, such terror is statistically insignificant, but the media help the terrorists out by trumpeting their deeds.

Syria, Egypt, Hezbollah, and Hamas bolstered their arsenals while they were safe from Israeli preventive strikes. Taken over by reckless—as opposed to radical—Islamists, any group could pull the region into a significant war. Such a war would be larger and more painful than a series of mini-wars; it would consist essentially of mutual strikes aimed at depleting the enemy’s arsenals, and most importantly, eradicating his will to fight. The escalation scenario is likely because everything is set for it: a demagogic Sunni leader might use all the missiles that the Syrian Alawite dynasty accumulated for the sake of bragging. In Egypt, reasonable presidents can run the country for decades, but the Muslim Brotherhood needs just a year in the office to launch a war on Israel.

In the Middle East’s warehouse of powder kegs, someone eventually will break the safety rules.

Few policies are inherently malicious. Most carry a kernel of goodness which is not allowed enough time to develop. The short time-horizon of democratically elected governments coupled with the typical impatience of consumerist societies produces horrible results. The consumers’ demand for “everything and now” is usually scaled down to “something now,” which correlates well with the government’s policies: do a little, then use media to exaggerate the achievements. Democracies hate when nothing happens.

Peacekeeping is a very long, careful process, often without visible results. Breaking a thing or a society is easy: a few months of propaganda can cause a society to erupt in ethnic violence. Restoring a semblance of order with summary punishments is also easy. But silly governments embark on an immensely more problematic, perhaps impossible mission: building states where hostile groups coexist in neighborly fashion. Even when the militias are brought under control and effectively dismantled, pacification takes years—longer than a peacekeeping government’s time-horizon, enough to give its opponents the opportunity to criticize it.

Two viable options exist. One is for peacekeeping operations to be handled exclusively by an international body. That gives them credibility; the international organization has no designs on the pacified territory and clearly has the sole purpose of restoring peace. Two, conduct peacekeeping missions as short violence-quenching raids: brutally bomb all the militias and their supporters to drive into their brains the notion of basic human rights.

In places such as Somalia, the first approach offers a considerable chance of success. Instead of the US Army, which is normally associated with wars and colonial-style expeditions, a peacekeeping force would be more acceptable to local militants. Ostensibly, that was the case in Somalia; American troops participated as a part of the UN force. Locals, however, do not care about the legal small print: Americans dominated the UN peacekeepers. Worse, the UN force employed both of the outlined approaches simultaneously and half-heartedly. Pakistani peacekeepers were quite brutal, often unnecessarily so, but insufficiently brutal to quench the guerrillas. The Americans brought aid as if to excuse themselves for something.

In reality, neither approach works, nor should it. Violence is indispensable to human relations. In order to be credible and efficient, violence is often ugly, directed against civilians. No sane person can like it, but none can decry it either, for we do not decry natural calamities.

When some Chechens rose up against the Russian occupation, whom should the peacekeepers have supported, the attacked Russians or the repressed Chechens? When Palestinian terrorists wage a war against Israel, whom does the international force protect: the attacked Israelis or the Arabs denied a state of their own? Quenching violence is not an option, as it stalls national movements and entrenches outdated regimes.

Peacekeeping, accordingly, becomes hectic, and the affected locals decry its arbitrariness. Of all the nations who conduct mass murders in our time, the Somalis were singled out for prosecution, and they felt themselves to be righteous for fighting back.

The only viable approach is to limit peacekeeping to cases of gross civilian death-tolls that are clearly irrelevant to the professed political objectives. In such cases the militants on one or both sides have to be attacked harshly, and afterwards things have to be left to their own development. Peacekeeping must send a single message to all nations: when fighting, avoid excessive atrocities—and if you don’t heed the message, we’ll bomb you into compliance.

When the Allies respected German human shields, the results were devastating. Though Allied bombers had destroyed much of Germany’s military industry by late 1943, Nazis continued to receive military supplies from factories in Belgium, France, and other occupied territories, which the Allies mostly refrained from bombing, thus endangering their own soldiers and prolonging war and its suffering.

Criticism of Hamas’ use of human shields is hypocritical. Every army does this, often on a much larger scale. In 1940, France hid behind Belgium and thus prompted a German attack on that neutral country. Likewise, British provocations against Norway forced Germany to occupy that country. Britain used Malta to launch intercept attacks on German and Italian convoys to Africa, thus subjecting that island nation to devastating German aerial attacks. By the very act of fighting the war, British generals subjected London to terror bombing campaigns. Military factories were located in London rather than in open-air military bases―a classic case of using a human shield. Any country’s military uses human shields in the sense that they willingly endanger their civilian populations.

Those who condemn Dresden bombing usually do not know that terror bombings were at the time an accepted part of military campaigns. The Germans let the djinn out of the bottle by bombing Guernica, Spain, then Warsaw and Rotterdam. After ten German planes bombed London by mistake instead of military factories there, Britain was free to bomb Berlin. Dresden and Hiroshima were not isolated incidents, but typical military strategy.

This is a wolf’s world: Czechoslovakia stood by while Germany occupied Austria, though the move almost encircled them. When Germany later threatened Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland joined the fray on the Nazi side and made territorial demands on Czechoslovakia; Poland deployed its troops at the border. Britain signed a secret protocol to its defense treaty with Poland which allowed it to declare war only on Germany when the Soviet Union, too, invaded Poland. The Soviet Union offered Britain a pact against Germany in 1937, signed a pact with Germany in 1939, switched back to Britain in 1941, and went back against it in 1946. The Russians were ready to “defend” Czechoslovakia: such an occasion would have allowed them to occupy both Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Hitler’s father unexpectedly took an interest in him and sent him to school. He was not degraded in Vienna during his years as vagabond there. Bravery in WWI did not get him killed. Early riots did not get him jailed, and the beer hall putsch did not get him extradited to Austria. German politicians, a remarkably rational crowd, quarreled among themselves as if to clear the road for the Nazis. The small force of SS troops prevailed over the leadership of SA, a militia twenty-five times the size of the German army, during the Night of Long Knives. The League of Nations which slapped Italy with sanctions over Abyssinia, chose not to react to German breaches of the Versailles Treaty. France did not crush the German army upon the remilitarization of the Rhineland, though France possessed a hundred times more troops at the border. Italy became estranged from France and England, its natural allies, over irrelevant Ethiopia, and did not intervene during the German annexation of Austria, as Mussolini had originally promised to do. Hitler dismissed scores of top commanders who were planning a putsch against him shortly before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, though he did not know about their plans. France disregarded its mutual defense pact with Czechoslovakia. The world stood ready to defeat Germany over Czechoslovakia: France and Czechoslovakia mobilized twice the number of German divisions, the US was ready to support Britain, Britain mobilized its fleet against Germany, Yugoslavia and Romania threatened Hungary with war if it joined Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the USSR offered to defend Czechoslovakia from Germany, German generals were prepared to oust Hitler to avoid war, and the German population was strongly anti-war. In 1938–39, Russia twice offered Britain and France immediate help with joint military action against Germany―which the anti-communists refused. Hitler wouldn’t have been able to attack Poland in 1939 if Stalin had continued his slow-paced negotiations with Germany; by 1940, Britain would probably have signed a treaty with the USSR, making a German attack on Poland impossible. The Polish government made the incredibly stupid position to reject military assistance from Moscow just days before the war. Hitler’s top generals had planned to topple him since 1938, but they backed off every time. The simple step of mining the fjords and territorial waters would have delayed the German invasion of Norway and left the Nazis without Swedish ore. The Nazis could not invade Britain only because radar gave the British a decisive advantage: RAF concentrated its meager number of planes according to the threat. For all their interest in science, the Nazis showed no interest in nuclear development, and by the time they developed fighter jets they did not have fuel for them. More than dozen attempts on Hitler’s life failed: bombs did not explode, suicide bombers could not get close to him, and he sometimes changed his schedule for no reason. Hitler held power despite considerable opposition from his generals, a number of whom actively plotted against him. He survived a bombing attempt in 1944 because someone pushed the briefcase containing the bomb to the other side of the table. In 1945, Hitler ordered an increase in the height of the ventilation pipe which Speer had planned to use to poison his bunker. The list goes on and on, and at every step the Nazi regime could have been dealt a crushing blow.

But there were coincidences on the other side, too. Britain had no reason whatsoever to declare war on Germany, yet it did. America had no reason to enter the war, but was dragged into it by Roosevelt. The Soviet government did not capitulate despite the terrible odds. The Nazis did not stop in France, where they could very well have ended the war, but invaded Russia. Because of the revolt in Yugoslavia and the German attack on that country, the Barbarossa plan was delayed for one month―exactly the month the Germans needed before Russian winter descended on their troops. On the other hand, the month’s delay allowed the Germans to destroy all the weapons the USSR had amassed on its border. The British lost to the Germans in all foreign battles, but survived Rommel’s assault on Palestine because Hitler delayed the airborne invasion of Malta, and the Allies intercepted Rommel’s reinforcements from there.

God does not do miracles by violating the laws of nature. Instead, he twists the odds. And all odds were twisted toward Holocaust.

In the next war, Hamas cannot be so stupid as to let Gazans evacuate their buildings after a “knock on the roof,” when IAF drops a dummy charge as a warning to tell the inhabitants to flee so that only a worthless building will be destroyed, perhaps along with some cheap arsenals. Instead, upon seeing the warning, Hamas will rush many more people into the buildings, expecting correctly that Jews won’t bomb a human shield.

The Goldstone report will be Hamas’ war manual; it will show the guerrillas what Israel will not do. Goldstone condemned the alleged use of human shields by IDF? Hamas will use such shields ever more extensively. After seeing that IDF never shells a civilian crowd, Gazans will flock to provide human shields for their guerrillas: a patriotic and completely safe action. Human shields will protect houses with arsenals and sniper positions. Even the mad Israeli policy of sending her soldiers into urban battles rather than risking the lives of Arab civilians won’t work: regular troops cannot storm houses full of civilian human shields. Fifty such houses with two snipers each would block the army’s advance. Jews might opt to stay in APCs, however humiliating that is for an allegedly victorious army, but that won’t help, either, as active defense does not protect well at so close distance.

Once a regular army accepts responsibility for enemy civilians, it is doomed. Palestinians send their children to Jewish soldiers with imitation guns and shahid belts. What if one child in a hundred gets a real gun or explosives?

A war is a life and death matter on the national level. There is no intermediate solution, only to kill or be killed. Until an enemy population surrenders, every one of its citizens is fair game unless he demonstrates his neutrality beyond doubt. War is prosecuted under the presumption of guilt: even small children are enemies unless proven otherwise.

All that changes with surrender: an occupying army acts as a police force, usually through its MPs, or relegates police matters to a collaborationist government. At that point, civilian rules become applicable again: locals are innocent until proven guilty. For such a situation to stand, the occupier must enjoy unhindered freedom of operation, consistent with surrender, and full cooperation by local authorities in investigating incidents and arresting the culprits―who are now regarded as criminals rather than POWs because they act against a party whom their elected government no longer recognizes as an enemy.

Dissidents exist. It is the collaborationist government’s responsibility to expel or arrest them, just as it is a government’s duty generally to extirpate local criminals. If, as is the case in the West Bank, the local authority cannot eliminate the dissidents who resist the occupier, then it ceases to be an authority, the surrender is nullified, and war resumes.

Generals always prepare for the last war. $10 million tanks can be destroyed with a $2,000 RPG-29 rocket. $60 million planes can be shot down with a $100,000 rocket. One would think that this is the age of rockets, but a million-dollar ballistic missile can be intercepted with a shot from laser cannon―which now costs $200 million dollars, but the cost could quickly be brought down to around $30 million. Commandos can find and destroy the expensive lasers before a missile strike, but cheap lasers would be too numerous to be targeted by commandos.

Losses to Israel’s GDP from conscription exceed $10 billion annually. People of the most productive age spend three senseless years chasing Jewish villagers and Arab criminals. Large armies are no longer useful when a nuclear bomb can evaporate the masses and nerve gases act through the tiniest holes in protective cover. Every weapon made has been used on a grand scale, and nuclear and chemical weapons will be no exception. It is wrong to keep a large standing army; buy weapons instead. Massive armies are immoral: they only exist because generals do not factor in the value of life. If soldiers were officially valued at $10 million a head, a typical life insurance amount, infantry combat would become prohibitively expensive. In mass warfare Israel is doomed, anyway: how many soldiers can we put up against seven-million-strong Egyptian and Syrian forces? Conscription won’t help us against thousands of Syrian SCAD missiles―and neither would Patriots at a million dollars apiece. We need our own lasers and inexpensive Russian S-400. Yes, the Arabs would then receive them, too, but a few ABMs we can always neutralize with commando operations. The Arabs have reasoned, wisely enough, that they can neutralize our expensive planes with cheap missiles; a cheap ABM levels the field. Israel must not play the Arab game of numbers: we cannot amass more infantry, planes, or rockets than they do.

The world is coming back to low-level combat, a sort of terrorist warfare―but this time terrorists have nukes.