Our Gaza front is like a door -- both a fire door and a revolving door. It's the refrain of a song that goes like this: Missiles are launched at Israel, or the IDF thwarts an attack, followed by a missile barrage that brings the lives of about a million citizens to a standstill for three or four days. And then quiet is restored once again, for a short while, until it begins again. The public is not willing to spend a significant chunk of their lives hiding in secure rooms and bomb shelters, and no government should give in to such a state of affairs. On Tuesday, Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz laid out a different scenario. No more revolving fire doors, he said. Speaking to members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he said a military offensive in Gaza is in the cards, and given this, we ought not to allow ourselves to get dragged into a retaliatory battle. Israel, he said, must take the initiative. Obviously, any such offensive is the product of an Israeli reaction to the challenge of terrorism that continues in short, provocative spurts, but in Gantz's view, we need to change the fundamentals of how we respond to such conditions. Since the Second Intifada in 2000, the IDF has embarked on three anomalous offensives. The first was Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, under the command of Moshe (Bogey) Ya'alon. That operation lowered the flame on terrorism coming out of the territories. Next, in 2006, Israel was swept into the Second Lebanon War with unprecedented abandon. The war's outcome was a manifest failure, and there is no greater fallacy than the notion that it restored any sort of quiet to our northern border. After all, Hassan Nasrallah offered us a cease-fire the day after hostilities began, but did not get a positive response then. The most recent offensive was Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, commanded by then Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. It ended in disappointment, frustration and internal divisiveness. Ashkenazi and Defense Minister Ehud Barak tried to end the operation almost after the very first air strike, while Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wanted to press on beyond the initial agreement. The outcome remains controversial: Did Israel improve its deterrent power or did we become a pariah nation, as evidenced by the report issued by the committee headed by Judge Richard Goldstone? There remains no clear-cut answer. In any case, Gantz's remarks on Tuesday show us that the IDF has acquired some sense. It's clear that we can't ever again allow ourselves to be dragged capriciously into war, as in Lebanon in 2006, or even in Cast Lead, a worthwhile operation in which the goals were not sufficiently crystallized. Cynics will say that Gantz, as part of his battle to fend off cuts to the defense budget, is trying to to maintain IDF readiness and act as if the next war will be tomorrow. Perhaps this is a factor. Either way, the position he laid out is more grown up and mature than those we witnessed in operations three and five years ago.
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