IF YOU READ ONE ARTICLE ON THE SITUATION IN ISRAEL, MAKE IT THIS ONE: Haviv Retig Gur: A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one.

Two main points:

(1) “Here lies a part of Palestinian thinking and discourse that many of Palestine’s Western defenders ignore, both because it’s a hard sell to Western audiences and because they don’t really understand it themselves. Palestinian ‘resistance,’ as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work…. This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely-ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.”

(2) “The Israel that emerged from Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Deluge” operation was different from the one that went into it. A tectonic shift had occurred in the country’s psyche. The horrors inflicted by Hamas sparked rage and an intense feeling of vulnerability. Where Hamas had always seemed an implacable but ultimately containable enemy, it had now proven it could bring the danger into Israeli homes, could slaughter children and kidnap grandmothers while all the vaunted power of the Israel Defense Forces was helpless to stop it…. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel. Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.”

Read the whole thing.