The Unique Features of the Second Intifada

Over a decade has passed since the eruption of the second intifada, a grueling period for Israel with the long, sustained, and intensive series of terrorist attacks launched by terrorist organizations against civilians and soldiers of the State of Israel. Most dif cult were the suicide attacks, generally carried out in urban centers and causing large numbers of casualties – dead and wounded – among the civilian population. Predictably, therefore, the terrorism phenomenon became a dominant issue on Israel’s national and popular agenda. It reshaped the walk of Israeli civilian life, affected politics, and to a signi cant extent damaged the country’s economy. In addition, for many years the intifada was accompanied by the Israeli public’s sense that the defense establishment had no response that would put an end to terrorism, or at least drastically reduce it. Those times have not receded from the nation’s collective memory and still affect how Israeli society formulates its positions on current political and security issues. Against the background of explosions and the stream of suicide bombings, the dominant argument within Israel touched on whether the IDF was capable of defeating suicide terrorism, and more generally, whether a regular army was at all capable of defeating a guerilla or terrorist organization. This question is an underlying element in the essay that follows, which argues that the intifada was one of the most severe military campaigns Israel fought since attaining its independence.