[...]In some sense, what we are just now witnessing in the Middle East is the emergence of a strategic version of what the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart once labeled "the indirect approach." After five bloody wars (1947,1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982), no Arab army dares any more to confront the Israeli Defense Forces head-on. In the past half-century, too many Arab conscripts have died trying. There is no longer a Soviet Union to bail out failed offensives as they were about to degenerate into abject routs. The technological revolution of the last 20 years — drones, GPS-guided bombs, new breakthroughs in armor and smart rockets — has only widened the gulf between Israel and its opponents. I wish I could attribute the absence of any conventional Arab offensive in the last 20 years to a change of political climate or a willingness to abide by past accords. But unfortunately it is more likely that the Egyptians or Syrians concluded that the next time their tanks headed to Tel Aviv, there was nothing stopping the counterassaults from ending up in downtown Cairo or Damascus.

Nevertheless, tactical victory and military dominance have not yet led to strategic victory. Israel, it is true, is relatively safe from conventional enemies, but not from suicide bombers, assorted terrorists, and the exhausting Intifada. Its enemies wisely turned to an asymmetrical, postmodern struggle in which the Arab world and Europe — thanks to the global media, political calculation, Western postcolonial guilt, fear of terror, oil worries, and old-fashioned anti-Semitism — would reinvent killers into freedom fighters. Meanwhile, the Palestinian street adopted a sort of nihilism that their own ongoing wretchedness was worth it if at least a modicum of the same misery might be imparted to the Jews.[...]