The Middle East’s deadly doom loop

And through it all, uncompromising combatants have resorted to vengeful, violent tactics, fearing anything else would show weakness, invite further attack and leave them in an even worse position — even if that’s meant exploiting civilians as human shields like Hamas. A ruthless hardline Islamist organization that’s never shied away from spilling civilian blood, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Hamas wants massive Israeli retaliation — that’s the strategy.  

But for a brief period, it had looked like the time loop might break. Hope came with the Camp David Accords and talk of a two-state solution, but the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s by an Israeli ultranationalist doomed the peace process. And now, encouraged by Hamas’ Oct. 7 rampage, the spirit of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — of retaliation — has Israel firmly in its grip once more.

Sharon himself wasn’t the author of the “respond to any attack with massive retaliation” tactic — that was Israeli General Moshe Dayan and the country’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. He was, however, appointed to command a special forces group tasked with mounting reprisals in response to Palestinian fedayeen attacks. The unit’s first raid took place on the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza in August 1953 and, a few months later, it conducted what became known as the Qibya massacre — a reprisal for a fedayeen attack that left a Jewish woman and her two children dead. Around 70 Palestinian civilians were killed at Qibya — half of them women and children.

Later Sharon defended the attack, saying: “Now people could feel that the terrorist gangs would think twice before striking, now that they knew for sure they would be hit back.” He embraced the “always escalate” philosophy through most of his time in the military and, subsequently, as a politician.

Sharon was also the one who launched Operation Peace for Galilee, the 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon in response to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) attacks on Israel. The invasion was successful in that it eventually forced the PLO out of Lebanon, but it also prolonged the Lebanese civil war, came at enormous human cost and led to an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. 

And in the end, the PLO was just replaced by another foe in Lebanon: Hezbollah.