Israel: wedded to war?

Far from learning the lessons of past conflict, the country's military seem ever more willing to resort to brute force

Using brute force to "sear" certain truths into the consciousness of Arabs of varying descriptions has a certain heritage in Israeli and Zionist thought, going all the way back to Jabotinsky's theory of the "iron wall". In the 1920s he wrote candidly that "every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement". The need then was for an "iron wall" of force to bring the Palestinians to the point of giving up "all hope".