Who Won?

The temptation to declare victory in Operation Guardian of the Walls must be resisted for two reasons. The first is that a great deal depends on the aftermath. At the conclusion of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, it was generally judged to be Israel’s greatest ever military failure, and a national commission of inquiry was appointed to investigate that failure. The war ended prime minister Ehud Olmert’s political career, even before he went to jail on corruption charges.

For a month, residents of Israel’s north either lived underground or fled southward to live with relatives or even complete strangers. And on the last day of the conflict, Hezbollah was still able to fire as many missiles as it had throughout the fighting. Worse still, Hezbollah’s fighters pretty much fought Israeli troops to a standstill for an entire month, and killed over 33 Israeli soldiers in the last two days of combat, in what former chief of staff Boogie Yaalon labeled a “spin operation.”

Yet in retrospect, it appears that the heavy Israeli bombing, including of the major electrical generator in Beirut, exacted a high enough price that Hezbollah has not fired any comparable fusillades over the past 16 years. The aerial damage also generated significant hostility to Hezbollah among the Lebanese population, which is not something that the terror group had counted on and of which it remains mindful.

The second difficulty in assessing winners and losers is that the two sides do not play according to the same scorecards. The civilian casualties suffered by Gazans would have been viewed as a catastrophe by Israel. But for Hamas, dead civilians are an asset — the key to their strategy of delegitimizing Israel and whipping up anti-Semitic hatred around the globe. No matter how many times Colonel Richard Kemp informs the world that “Israel does more to minimize civilian casualties than any country in the history of warfare,’’ all Hamas has to do is display a few dead women and children and all that is negated.