The serially repeating cycles of violence and ceasefires have produced bloodshed without end in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The line between war and peace is often blurry, with few wars ending cleanly. A year since the historical hinge-event of 7 October, the region is on the brink of a wider war. Absent those barbaric attacks, Israel’s military would not today be in Gaza or southern Lebanon nor poised to strike Iranian targets. There were three circles of failures on 7 October of intelligence, physical barriers and the tardy response time by the Israeli Defense Forces to come to the defence of the communities under attack in southern Israel. The biggest failure was the breakdown of deterrence on which peace, or at least the absence of war, rests.

Deterrence too involves many circles. First, the potential enemy must be convinced, at the point that he is contemplating an attack on Israel, of the certainty of retaliation. If he believes that an attack can be controlled at the threshold below retaliation, the strategy of death by bleeding from a thousand cuts will be pursued. This is what Hezbollah has been doing by raining down rockets on northern Israel. It is also the strategy that Iran has deployed in relying on proxies to launch unremitting ‘pinprick’ attacks that cumulatively cause significant damage but any one attack is thought to be too small to provoke a major retaliation. This was not Hamas’s strategy last October. Since then, Hezbollah has launched over 9,000 rockets at Israeli targets across the border from Lebanon. Up to 80,000 Israelis have had to be evacuated to safety further south. A counsel of restraint on Israel without effective pressure on Hezbollah to cease and desist its missile attacks amounted to the demand that Israel permanently accept a significant portion of its people being internally displaced from the north. Such counsel is neither defensible in principle nor one that can be heeded indefinitely by any Israeli government. It mocks the very basis on which Israel was founded, as the one homeland where the Jews of the world can feel safe from murderous attacks on them for no other reason than because they are Jews. It ignores the geographic reality of Israel being a tiny territory hemmed in by hostile neighbours on all sides.

Second, the enemy must be convinced that the retaliation will be massive and brutal. Condemnations of Israeli military actions in Gaza and Lebanon as disproportionate are disconnected from the demographic reality. Confronted by cross-border terrorism and provocations, India’s population weight ensures that ‘proportionate’ and limited military strikes on targets and on dates of its choosing will cause disproportionate damage on the attacker. By contrast, not only does geography rob Israel of any chance of strategic depth to absorb successful surprise attacks. The thinness of population further robs it of demographic depth to absorb the human toll of repeated attacks. Instead, if the enemy is to be successfully deterred, he must know in advance that Israel will not just hit back, but hit back hard. Those who exulted on our streets at Hamas’s mass slaughter success last October were a tad premature in their celebrations. They should have known Hamas would soon reap the whirlwind. Even so, Israel does try to limit the choice of targets to fighters, militants and commanders and minimise civilian casualties as much as possible under the exceptionally challenging conditions of urban warfare in densely populated neighbourhoods. Civilians entrapped as human shields is the strategy of choice for Hamas, not Israel.

Third, the military action must be sustained until the core objectives have been attained. This is the big change from previous cycles of attack and retaliate. Equivocation, denialism and sophistry by critics of Israel have been met with Israeli defiance of calls for ceasefire, restraint and de-escalation. Demonstrating a rare combination of clarity of vision, courage of conviction and firmness of resolve, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demolished the delusions of Western leaders and critics with a spectacular demonstration of military, intelligence and technical prowess. Targeted assassinations and exploding pagers and walkie-talkies have killed seven of the top eight Hezbollah leaders and seriously degraded the group’s combat capabilities to complement the destruction visited on Hamas in Gaza over the past year. This may not be sufficient to ensure a durable peace on Israel’s borders but was necessary to recreate an armed truce on terms more favourable to Israel’s security.

Perhaps Hamas was pleasantly surprised by the scale of its success in killing and kidnapping Israelis on 7 October. By now it must be unpleasantly surprised by Israel’s ability and determination to have sustained the operations for a year and counting. The economic costs are high but have been met. The military costs have been surprisingly modest. The domestic political costs of social unrest and demands for prioritising the release of hostages through compromising negotiations have been manageable. The international political costs of street protests in Western democracies and demands from previously supportive governments, including Australia, have been unexpectedly high but not sufficient to dent Israeli determination to do whatever it takes to create the more hardened layer of deterrence that is now deemed necessary. But this also raises a question for the Western democracies: did their counsel of restraint on Israel and constant refrains of ‘ceasefire now’ actually prolong the conflict and the humanitarian suffering by encouraging intransigence on the part of Hamas? What if united and intense pressure had been maintained on Hamas and its regional backers instead to release all the hostages, immediately and unconditionally?

The final circle is escalation dominance. Escalation can be vertical, an intensification of the fighting between the existing conflict parties in volume of engagement, using weaponry of increasing lethality, or expanding the choice of targets. Or it can be horizontal, spreading geographically to entangle additional actors. The enemy must know and internalise the conviction that if Israeli retaliation is met by further escalation, then Israel has the capabilities and will to dominate the process and the relative casualty toll through every threshold of escalation.

Anthony Albanese holds that Israel has the right to defend itself, but not to retaliate against attacks. Senior cabinet ministers call for ceasefire and de-escalation. But platitudinous slogans are no substitute for sound policy. No country can win a war if restricted to playing defence. Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at mainly civilian targets in Tel Aviv. Most were destroyed mid-air but some got through to cause minor damage. Israel’s military chief Herzi Halevi says they know how to locate important targets, ‘have the capabilities to reach and strike any point in the Middle East’ with ‘precision and power’, and Israel’s enemies yet to grasp this truth will soon do so.

Israel is demonstrating to its own citizens, to local enemies and to the world its intent and capacity to re-establish both vertical and horizontal escalation dominance. The combined message of the four-level deterrence capabilities to adversaries is simple: don’t even think about it.