So while it is true that Israel does not wish to reoccupy Gaza, and cannot hope to negotiate peace with Iran's stalking horse, Hamas, there are other reasons to think that a forceful response to the missiles lobbed from Gaza is necessary.
The mindset of Israel's enemies is not like Israel's. Israelis think like Americans and Europeans. They believe in democracy and individual dignity. They respect rights and want nothing more than to be left alone. Their enemies believe in a struggle to the death. As Ze'ev Maghen has noted in Commentary magazine, the mullahs in Iran have interpreted Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and then from Gaza in 2005 not as goodwill gestures, but as signs of weakness and decrepitude. The Iranian daily Hamshahri was gleeful as Israel vacated Gaza: " The willingness of the Zionists to leave behind their synagogues in Gaza demonstrates conclusively that they have no God and therefore no religious connection to the Holy Land; they will now be easily ejected from all of occupied Palestine." By Palestine, the paper of course refers to all of Israel. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, congratulated Hamas, declaring, "We, too, drove out the Israeli cowards." Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, interpreted Israel's withdrawal from Gaza as proof of the "justness of the Islamic struggle" and urged that if Muslims put their faith in Allah, "victory will be certain." Ahmadinejad himself has declared, based on Israel's willingness to hand over territory it had won in bloody conflicts, that "The Zionist entity has reached a dead end and is in a process of precipitous decline. ... All of the conditions are ripe for its removal" by means of an "explosion of Muslim rage."
For the past decade, beginning with the Oslo process, Israel has been unwittingly signaling to her enemies that she was exhausted and unwilling to fight for her life. That posture has given Iran and its proxies an intoxicating sense of possibility. Just as Osama bin Laden believed that the United States was profoundly weak and could be toppled by a good hard shove, so the Islamofascists believe that Israel is weakened and vulnerable. The current war in Gaza, if it is conducted wisely, can disabuse Israel's enemies of that pernicious suspicion.