Introduction

The Palestinian demonstrations that broke out in late September 2000 were, from the point of view of the IDF, an opportunity to restore the deterrent capacity they felt they had lost facing the Hezbollah in the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon that May. As Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon claimed, “[In this war,] we renewed our deterrent capacity by making up for the results of the withdrawal from Lebanon” (Barnea, 2003). In other words, there was no existential threat, as military leaders had claimed at the beginning, but a war of atonement over the transgressions by the Israeli government and civil society whose “faith was weak” in the war against Hezbollah. The army’s failures in Lebanon were thus attributed to the public’s lack of faith that that war was necessary, but in September 2000 conditions were ripe to carry out a “successful war,” one that had popular support. The blurring of the borders between Israel and the territories created the historical juncture in which Israeli society was ready to adopt the narrative of a “no-choice war” that unifies “us” in the face of the enemy. The IDF won public support for the use of force to close political space for dialogue with the Palestinians and their weakened political actors.