Just under 25 years ago, while spending the year teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan, I was at a café with some Swedish NGO workers. Both BBC and Al Jazeera were on television showing much the same footage: Israeli tanks had encroached several dozen meters into Gaza. Commentators hyperventilated about Israeli intentions and demanded UN Security Council action, but omitted context about Gaza-based terror.

If the international community were to its maximum ability willing to punish Israel for a limited but necessary incursion, Israeli strategists would have been right to calculate, in for a penny, in for a pound, and ask why they should not go further.

For decades subsequently, Israeli policymakers — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — nevertheless restrained and limited Israeli actions. In April 2002, 23 Israeli soldiers died in Jenin raiding a bomb-making factory and rolling up a terror cell. The Israelis attacked on the ground because of Jenin’s density and the purposeful Palestinian strategy to station terrorists and bomb-making factories in civilian areas. Had the Israel........

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