A similar fate may befall our present war against terrorism. Despite some great tactical achievements, Israel is not winning this war because it is failing – yet again – to articulate a winning strategy. Israel, with its powerful fighting forces, finds itself at the mercy of even relatively small groups such as the Hizbullah, allowing them to seize the initiative and to dictate the terms of engagement. Even against Palestinian terrorism, Israel mostly acts haphazardly and defensively.

The lack of a determined and cohesive military strategy that would seriously damage terrorist organizations by eliminating most of their leadership in one fell swoop (rather than in drips and drabs, inviting continual condemnations and reaction) is hardly surprising. Lack of concerted action, acting only in response to near catastrophes, is the typical modus operandi of all Israeli governments in all spheres of their activity.

More than in most countries, most of the energies of Israeli politicians are devoted to the jostling for power and to the distribution of the considerable spoils offered by an extremely centralized, government-controlled economy. Little energy remains for what is supposed to be the chief business of government, the provision of security or other public goods.

In the case of the military, the problem is confounded not only by the innate difficulties of all huge bureaucratic organizations to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, but by a no-win ethos. Like other Israeli institutions, the Israeli military too was subjected – since the formation of the Hagganah as a popular militia of leftist political parties – to a high degree of politicization. Many army leaders, like many in the Israeli elites generally, are left of center. They have embraced the utopian assumptions of the peace camp. Many Israeli generals are convinced that terrorism cannot be vanquished by force. They do not bother to explain, to themselves and to others what is the justification for the enormous outlays Israel spends on its military if it cannot solve military problems; or how their ideological position squares with the many instances where terrorist groups -from the eleventh century Assassins to the armed bands of the 1936-9 Great Arab Revolt – were totally vanquished by military force alone.

Israel’s failure to curb terrorism is what makes an exhausted Israeli public grasp at any straw offered by its confused leadership that believes apparently that a defensive tactic, a wall, is a “solution” to terrorism. Walls have been, and will continue to be breached (even the notorious island prison of Alcatrez was not immune). So while a wall may significantly reduce the number of terrorist incidents, and this is good, it cannot prevent – as its most fervent supporters will admit – all terrorist attacks. Worse, it cannot assure that any attack will not be a mega-attack inflicting enormous damage and many casualties, as the recent single attack in Spain attests. So strategically, the wall has a very limited usefulness. More disturbingly, it may come at great cost and some unforeseeable consequences, and it might actually reduce Israel’s ability to fight terrorism effectively.

For the wall to function it must not only be properly, namely expensively, constructed, with sophisticated and costly monitoring device, it must be maintained, even defended, by mobile quick-response units, again a costly proposition. Perhaps instead of investing heavily in a wall, it would be cheaper and more effective to construct a light fence, and invest the savings in more mobile response units, probably achieving better results. A temporary fence would also reduce the objections raised against the wall that can be seen as a precursor of a permanent border.

Walls have a peculiar negative dynamic. The Bar Lev Line was first conceived as a series of outposts meant to serve as “trip wires” along the Suez Canal, alerting mobile units to repulse an Egyptian crossing. Heavy Egyptian shelling forced the Israelis to turn them into heavily fortified strongholds, whose protection required the creation of “a line” and a defensive strategy that soon overshadowed the concept of a mobile defense, an important factor in the disastrous beginning of the Yom Kippur War.

But the greatest drawback is that the wall punishes – like the closures Israel was sometimes too hasty in imposing – the innocent along with the guilty. This is counterproductive, even stupid. The wall will exacerbate the miserable conditions on which terrorist organizations thrive. It will assign the Palestinian Arab population to the mercy of a corrupt irredentist leadership that has already proven its ability to transform the desperation it creates to terrorist acts against Israel.

Extolling unilateral withdrawal and the separation wall, the writer A. B. Yehoshua explained: “from the moment we withdraw I don’t want to know their names. I do not want any personal relations with them. I am not going to perpetrate war crimes for their own sake, but I will use all my force against them (if they attack us).” Apparently even this great liberal does not understand that you cannot lock terror behind a wall, threaten brutal responses and expect quiet.

Peace will only come when a new Palestinian leadership, emerging from a civil society, will replace the criminal Palestinian Authority and its terrorist leadership imposed by Oslo. Only then will the Palestinians be able to make some concessions for peace the way Israel is ready to make.

A total separation between Israel and the Palestinians that will perpetuate Arafat’s terrorist regime (as envisaged by those promoting the wall or the Geneva accords) will not allow the development of a thriving Palestinian economy and the emergence of a civil society. It will only exacerbate strife.

Therefore Israel’s failure to eliminate terrorism by destroying its organizations and its leadership (resulting in part from destructive hypocritical American interventions – that will not allow Israel to do what America does) is a major obstacle to peace. It causes unnecessary massive loss of life and suffering, not only for Israelis but for the Palestinian Arabs too.

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