I really try not to quote this much, but Publius wrote one of those posts where I wanted to excerpt the first graf, then couldn't leave out the next, and wouldn't think of depriving you of the third, and so on, and now there are five:
Generally speaking, I think people (like me) who came of age post-Cold War see the Israel-Palestine dispute in a fundamentally different way than older people. For instance, I've never known any of the Middle Eastern countries surrounding Israel to be anything but jokes, militarily speaking. For that reason, they've never scared me. Even today, no one has even the slightest fear that these countries might begin mobilizing troops for a real war. Just rockets and proxies because Israel is so overwhelmingly superior to all of them — combined.
But that's not the way older people seem to view this dispute. During the Cold War, these countries were legitimate threats to all, and particularly to Israel. After all, Syria had Soviet backing. Egypt seemed like it was at least a military equivalent to Israel. And the countries combined posed a truly existential threat to Israel. Even the PLO, I hear, was once taken seriously as a military threat. But then they all got their asses kicked and the Soviet Union collapsed. And now they're all jokes.
Unfortunately, though, I think part of Israel's problem is the lingering perception that these countries aren't jokes, but existential threats. Now, in a sense, they are (which I'll explain in a minute). But they are not currently existential threats in the conventional military sense. And given their robust diversified economies and education rates (even among the part of the population not forced to wear beekeeper outfits all day), I doubt they're going to be a threat anytime soon in this conventional military sense.
I'm far from an expert, but it seems to me that the failure to grasp the current non-threat from these countries is at the heart of Israel's failing strategy. And it also explains the precise nature of the disproportionality of Israel's response. When Israel responds to a kidnapped soldier and a few rocket attacks (that have no military significance in a macro-sense) by a mass bombing of Beirut's infrastructure or a Gaza civilian power plant, that's a disproportionate response — not merely because of the difference in magnitude of the bombings, but because of the difference in the nature of the attacks. Israel is responding as if it's 1967 all over again and as if armies are massing on the borders. In other words, it's fighting with conventional military means as if there is an existential military threat.
But the conventional military threat of the Cold War era is no longer the threat to Israel's existence — at least not for the time being. The true threat is a demographic one. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out the implications of the relevant population growth of Jewish and non-Jewish populations (both inside and outside Israel). Maybe in 25 years, maybe in 100 years, but at some point Israel is going to have to come to terms with its neighbors. Otherwise, it loses this game in the end.
There is, amazingly, more, so folks should take a look. I'll say, too, that this roughly tracks with my perceptions of the situation, which tend to register at a much lower urgency level than folks with a couple decades on me. I worry about the region's powder keg qualities, but not Israel's actual survival. That said, I also long ago extracted myself from the conflict, believing it far too polarized and intractable to effect positively. I used to justify that by saying nothing could be done until Sharon and Arafat were no longer leading their countries -- which was partially true, although I meant nothing could be done in the direction of peace, and it turns out their presences were really staving off war.
Update: As some point out, a nuclear Iran really would pose an existential threat to Israel. This post is about the mindset of folks who grew up during a period when Israel was the unquestionably dominant power in the region, not whether anyone can actually harm their survival.
