In seeking truce, Israel learns lesson from Lebanon

The Lebanon campaign, Israel’s first against a non-state entity, is a useful lens through which to examine the Gaza conflict in the gruesome summer of 2014.

In June 1982, after Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Shlomo Argov, was gunned down in central London, the Israeli government, sick of the terror empire that the PLO had established in Lebanon, decided to deal the organization a mortal blow. On June 6, 1982, at 11 in the morning, Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee. Four divisions streaked north through Lebanon. But in the following days, the remainder of Israel’s alleged plan collapsed.

The Gaza war, which reached a temporary end yesterday, after 50 days, is everything Lebanon was not: Rather than a forceful push headlong into Gaza, paid for with the lives of hundreds of soldiers, Netanyahu and the IDF brass seem to prefer tentative advances in the pursuit of attainable goals — the eradication of the tunnel threat, for example.

Rather than seeking a radical shift in the status quo, Israel seeks merely to return to it. And rather than pursue a plan of anointing a friendly government in a previously hostile seat of power, Israel, under Netanyahu, remains wary of PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his ability to stay afloat — both in the West Bank and all the more so in Gaza — amid the crashing waves of jihadism across the region.

— Mitch Ginsburg