On Monday, Israel marked 10 years to the end of Operation Protective Edge, the 51-day war that the IDF fought against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014.
The 2014 war was supposed to deliver a decisive blow to Hamas. It was supposed to cripple its military capabilities and secure long-term quiet for Israel. Yet, a decade later, the threats are more existential, the challenges are more daunting, and the strategy of what Israel wants remains elusive. Tragically, what Israel did back in 2014, planted the seed for October 7. As a result, it is imperative to look back and learn the lessons to ensure that the mistakes from then do not repeat themselves once again.
Like the October 7 attack which caught Israel by surprise, Protective Edge was also not initiated out of strategic foresight but rather as a reactive measure. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in office at the time, had no intention of engaging in a full-scale conflict. The operation was sparked by the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, leading to a surge of violence that then spiralled, without either side seemingly wanting it to, into a war.
At first, Netanyahu refused to send in ground forces agreeing only to airstrikes. But, when Hamas terrorists started popping out of tunnels, Netanyahu came under pressure from within the security cabinet to do something and finally agreed to a limited incursion. Over the course of weeks, the IDF advanced just a few kilometers from the border with the primary objective of destroying the cross-border tunnels, all while grappling with deep concerns over the potential loss of soldiers’ lives in the ensuing battles.
But cross-border tunnels were only one threat in Gaza. There was much more – arms caches, thousands of rockets, battalions, tunnels that crisscrossed all of Gaza. All of that was not touched.
Netanyahu later explained that he opposed an operation since he wanted the IDF focused on bigger threats. “Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front?” Netanyahu wrote in his book Bibi which came out in 2022. “The answer was categorically no. I had bigger fish to fry.”
This might have made some sense, but Hamas interpreted Israel’s limited ground operation as a sign of weakness. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his men believed that Israel would never venture deep into Gaza – keep in mind that in 2012 Israel also only attacked Gaza from the air - and that the chance that the IDF would once again reoccupy Gaza was almost non-existent, mostly due to an Israeli fear of casualties among soldiers and civilians.
Multiple investigations, including by the state comptroller, showed how the government went into the 2014 war without a strategy and without a plan, and how when that happens, there is one obvious result: a failure to find an ending that secures Israel’s future.
The hesitancy to go deep into Gaza emboldened Hamas, prompting Sinwar to upgrade his attack plans and to take even greater risks in what he thought was possible against Israel.
Could Israel have used Protective Edge to go all the way against Hamas and topple its regime? Of course. At the time though, Netanyahu, wanted Israel focused on Iran, and Gaza was viewed just as a distraction. This type of thinking is exactly what gave birth to the containment policy and the Qatari funding mechanism. It was part of a thinking that a “distraction” can be contained and paid off. It does not have to be dealt with at the root.
Lessons for today should be obvious. On the one hand, to prevent another war, Israel has to continue degrading Hamas’s capabilities while denying it from returning to rule the Gaza Strip when the hostilities are over. Anything short of that, will almost definitely lead to another conflict, either in two years, five years or 10 years.
But it also needs to think strategically about the day after. There is no vacuum in Gaza and there is no organic actor that will simply replace Hamas. Israel must help facilitate the change at the top to ensure that Hamas cannot reconstitute itself in just a few years. The anniversary of Protective Edge is an opportunity to look back, just as much as it is an opportunity to look to the future. We can only do abetter when we learn from our mistakes.
