Israel's political and military elites are not ruthless enough, hence not wise enough, to win the war against Israel's most ruthless Arab enemies. I say "not ruthless enough" because Israel’s Arab enemies are animated by such hatred of Jews that they use their own children as human bombs to kill Jewish "infidels."
I say Israel's political and military elites are "not wise enough" because they do not heed what King David said in Psalm 139 of what Israel must do against her enemies—who are also the enemies of God—"crush them so that they are not able to rise."
Israel is confronted not only by a 1,400 year-old culture whose children are weaned on hatred of Jews, but the leaders of this culture have perfected an evil art of deception called taqiyya—an art that has dumbfounded Israeli leaders and the naive media of the liberal democratic world, a world that prides itself on candor.
So let’s be candid. Americans, having suffered great human and material losses in the Second World War, have since then sought to win wars on the cheap: minimal deployment of ground forces and maximum use of air power—where the later was manifested as "gradual escalation" in Vietnam and "shock and awe" in Iraq. The consequences? Protracted war, hence, for Americans and enemies alike, protracted bloodshed.
Even worse can be said of Israel, with its pious "purity of arms doctrine," a doctrine pursued by weak Israeli prime ministers who like to wage war by means of "targeted assassinations," one-sided cease fires, and futile negotiations. And this is not all.
In Israel, as well as in America, the media foster puerile pacifism and national self-loathing. The mandarins of the media are dominated by soft-headed Leftists whose mentality has been shaped by academia’s emasculating doctrine of moral relativism. This doctrine, which extinguishes moral outrage, is symptomatic of the end stage of democracy. Its academic poltroons, one may guess, have not had their wives or daughters raped or strangled.
Of course, it's not easy to wage war or raise the manpower to win a war when the mentors of a nation are milk-and-toast liberals or bleeding heart humanists. Alas, this pretty much describes those elected nowadays to democracy's highest offices. It was not always this way. Sober men take war seriously: they are not won on the cheap—not by bourgeois economists, not by "conflict resolution theorists," and not by academic "game theorists."
Let's consider the war against Nazi Germany—although we ought to bear in mind that the Nazis, unlike Muslims, did not use their children as human bombs to kill non-Aryans. America is blissfully ignorant about the pernicious theological nature of its current enemy. But it knew enough about the evil nature of its enemy back in World War II—enough to take it seriously. Ponder Mark Helprin's report in the Claremont Review of Books (Fall 2011):
On the day of Germany's surrender, General Eisenhower had 3 million Americans under his command—61 divisions, battle hardened. And then there were the Russians, who poured 2.5 million troops in the Berlin sector alone. Almost 10 million soldiers had converged on a demoralized German population of 70 million that had suffered 4 million dead and ten million wounded, captured and missing. No sympathizers existed across friendly borders. The cities had been razed. Germany had been broken, but even after this was clear, more than 700,000 occupation troops remained, with millions close by. The situation in Japan was much the same….
Helprin goes on to say: "To succeed, a paradigm of 'invade, reconstruct, and transform' requires the decisive defeat, disarmament, and political isolation of the enemy; the demoralization of its population; the destruction of its political ethos; and the presence, at the end of hostilities, of overwhelming force."
Bear in mind that this is a paradigm. As Helprin indicates, this paradigm was grievously ignored by the United States in Iraq—and the cost is not over.
What about Israel? Israel had no war strategy before the Six-Day War of 1967. Its political echelon was so shocked by the IDF's stunning victory that it didn't know what to do with the land Israel repossessed in that war.
What about Israel's "Operation Cast Lead" against Hamas in Gaza? Again, no serious war strategy—to utterly crush the enemy—hence no post-war strategy—to repossess Gaza and purge Gaza of its Islamo-Nazi rulers. As for Judea and Samaria—the only concern of .
But don't get me wrong. It's obvious that Israel cannot field armies and occupy extensive territory as can the United States. But much of Helprin's paradigm applies to Gaza as well as Judea and Samaria. Only lacking in Israel are the necessary leaders.