Why Israel is united

The Gaza military operation has created a curious phenomenon in Israel. The country, at least for the first days of the attack, was united in a consensus that there was no choice. Even the most liberal among us felt Hamas had put Israel in a situation that no sovereign country could tolerate.

This was not just because of the rocket attacks. Hamas's stated long-term goal is a war of attrition with the explicit objective of destroying Israel. Peace is not within Hamas's vocabulary, which is characterised by the rabid antisemitism of its charter. It makes use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - one of the most notorious antisemitic forgeries of the last century - continues with the incantations that turn jihad against the Zionists into every Muslim's duty, and ends with suicide terrorism. True, some Hamas members argue that the charter does not reflect their worldview, but I have heard of no efforts to change it.

Israelis are united in the conviction that Hamas's hopes to vanquish Israel must be shattered. Israel must destroy the illusion that it can be wiped off the earth. This was one of the goals of the attack on Gaza. Israel proved that it has precise intelligence about the location of Hamas leaders, and even warned Hamas leaders by phone to leave their houses before they were bombed.

Israel also showed that it has precise intelligence about where explosives are stored. This is where the consensus became problematic: many of the explosives are stored below mosques, in schools and residential buildings. Bombing them results in what is euphemistically called "collateral damage".

Here is where Israeli opinion is no longer unanimous. There are those who say "Hamas can stop this - all they need to do is stop firing. They are responsible for the deaths of their children." They feel that Israel cannot be expected to accept this aggression.

Then there are those of us who feel that the price for being a civilised state is that you cannot fire at schools, even if an inhuman enemy fires from within. We feel that the ground incursion should have been avoided because we believe that the inhumanity of your enemy must not dictate your own deeds. No one can help but be horrified by the pictures of killed, maimed and terrified Palestinian children. And even though we despise an enemy that is not bound by any rules of recognisable civilisation, we must not let them dictate the terms of engagement.

Along with many other Israelis, I am enraged and disappointed by Israel's failure to restrict the use of force according to basic humanitarian values, and by its insufficient use of international help. We feel that Israel should have defined attainable objectives, such as a more durable ceasefire under international auspices and enforcement, and that this could have been achieved after the first few days of air strikes. And we feel horrified by the human price of the escalation of the ground incursion.

Israel is united by disdain for Hamas because it does not value the lives of its own children enough to avoid sacrificing them for political gain. But Israelis are divided on the extent to which we can let an enemy dictate the amount of human damage we inflict on them.

I will never stop criticising Israeli policies that I take to be wrong-headed, short-sighted or immoral. But I have no sympathy for the critics of Israel who refuse to see that there are ideologies who put destruction above human life and wellbeing. Hamas has changed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from something that can be solved, to a clash defined by the principle that only one side can survive - critics cannot expect Israel to accept this simply because it is the stronger side.

Carlo Strenger, a professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University.