Weekly Commentary: Warning: Last Round Iron Dome Can Protect Civilians if
Goal Quiet for Quiet

Dr. Aaron Lerner Date: 9 July 2014

A warning for the consideration of Israeli policymakers:

Operation Protective Edge will be the last round Iron Dome can protect
civilians if the goal now is only a restoration of "quiet for quiet".

That's because it is expected that under a restoration "quiet for quiet", in
the absence of a significant reduction in the Gaza weapons stores and
weapons making capabilities, there will be ten times as many rockets in the
Gaza Strip in the next round as there are today.

And that's a critical increase.

Today Israel is launching Iron Dome interceptors to shoot down literally
every rocket that is projected to hit an urban area.

If we were to follow the same approach in the next round we would literally
exhaust the inventory of Iron Dome interceptors in a very few days.

But that's not what would happen.

The inventory of interceptors would be reduced so dramatically in the first
few hours of the next round that decision makers would have no choice but to
restrict interceptor launches to defending the most strategic of Israeli
locations.

We are talking about a very short list of civilian and military locations.

Everything else won't be protected.

And the public will be absolutely furious.

After all, the public will know that Israel has technology that can protect
it from attack and that the decision makers have decided not to protect
them.

The above is not necessarily a serious concern of COS Gantz since he
probably won't be COS in the next round.

But Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ya'alon have no
plans to retire anytime soon.

All other things being equal, if Operation Protective Edge ends with only
"quiet for quiet"then Netanyahu and Ya'alon will go down in history after
the next round as the PM and DM who ordered the IDF not to protect millions
of Israeli civilians from a nightmare of rocket attacks.

Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
(Mail POB 982 Kfar Sava)
Tel 972-9-7604719/Fax 972-3-7255730
INTERNET ADDRESS: imra@netvision.net.il Website: http://www.imra.org.il
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