Nimrod Novik on the false premises and failure of vision that led to the Hamas attacks

FOLLOWING HAMAS’S Islamic-State-like terror assault, emotions are difficult to contain. They will be heightened by heart-breaking images of hundreds of funerals of the babies, children, women and men who were brutally slaughtered. Turning to analysis, then, is challenging. But it is essential.

Any assessment of how Israel ended up facing such a national trauma has to take account of two false premises of the Israeli leadership, both of which have proved damaging. First, for the past 14 years, all but one-and-a-half of them under his premiership, Binyamin Netanyahu has pursued—and instructed Israel’s defence establishment to implement—a strategy on the Palestinian issue dubbed “separation”. It rested on two legs: in the Gaza Strip it sought to avoid undermining the control of the Islamist, militant Hamas. On the West Bank it acted to undermine the moderate, violence-averting Palestinian Authority (PA).