It is hard to see past the shock of Hamas’s bloodthirsty assault on Israel. That is because it involved thousands of rockets, and fighters attacking the south of the country by land, sea and air.
And because it was completely unforeseen despite its scale, inflicting a humiliating blow against Israel’s vaunted intelligence services.
But most of all because of the killing of hundreds of innocent people and the taking of scores of hostages by Hamas. As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ponder how to respond, the world’s attention will be caught up in their desperate plight.
It is too soon to know how the next few weeks will unfold. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has vowed to exact “a huge price” and he is right: Hamas must be made to pay for its atrocities, which include the massacre of more than 250 young Israelis at a festival in the south.
But Israel’s response comes with grave risks.
Sending IDF ground troops into Gaza could draw them into bloody urban fighting — and endanger the hostages, too. The longer the fighting drags on, the greater the chance that violence spreads to the West Bank or Lebanon.
The death of many civilians in Gaza, especially if seen as wanton, would harm Israel’s standing in the world as well as being profoundly wrong in its own terms.
However, it is not too soon to be clear that this attack marks the end of a decades-old belief in Israel that Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty could be indefinitely put aside while the rest of the Middle East forged ahead.
Whatever else emerges from this conflict, one thing will be a new search for answers to the question of how Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace.
Mr. Netanyahu’s policy of sidelining the Palestinians depended on three calculations, each of which has been thrown up into the air by the Hamas assault.
The first is that, even if the Palestinian question was left to rot, Israelis could remain safe. As a result of the terrible casualties of the second intifada, which finished in 2005, Israel shut Palestinian populations away behind security walls. Superior intelligence and overwhelming firepower, including the Iron Dome anti-rocket system, meant that the armed threat from Palestinian fighters was manageable.
That notion now looks broken.
One reason the intelligence services may have been distracted from Gaza is that the West Bank has been thrown into disarray by the expansionist aims of Israel’s far right.
In southern Lebanon Hezbollah has a fearsome arsenal, much of it supplied by Iran. No doubt, Israel will be able to re-establish its military dominance over the Palestinians. But even if its soldiers and spies believe that this ensures Israeli citizens are protected, voters themselves are unlikely to conclude that a return to the status quo is good enough.
The second assumption was that the existence of Hamas helps Israel deal with Fatah, the Palestinian party that runs the West Bank. It was assumed that divide-and-rule kept the Palestinians weak and that the influence of radical factions would undermine the credibility of moderates as partners for peace — all of which suited Mr. Netanyahu just fine.
