Q&A: Why Don’t the Leaders of the People Act Rationally?
Why Don’t the Leaders of the People Act Rationally?
Question
We were just informed that “with regard to the policy of responding to future rocket launches from Gaza toward Israeli territory, the Chief of Staff is seeking to change the equation. Kochavi presented the IDF General Staff commanders with an approach according to which it is absolutely forbidden to respond as in the past, and the achievements of the operation should be used to begin changing the response pattern. In his view, for every rocket launch it will be necessary to evacuate a building in the Gaza Strip that contains terror infrastructure, and destroy it—even at the price of dragging the IDF and the region into a day of battle.”
Why on earth does it take five rounds in Gaza and twenty years of missiles to understand what any child could say just by force of simple logic?!
Of course, one could say that the leaders are stupid (that may perhaps be true of Regev and Ohana), but that surely isn’t true of all the defense ministers and the prime minister.
Maybe the Rabbi has an informed explanation for this phenomenon? Maybe they don’t place enough trust in the simple conclusions that arise from logic?! And therefore prefer short-term quiet. To me this is really a mystery.
Answer
That’s what I too have asked more than once. By the way, I’ll repeat what I wrote in the previous column: without the carrot, it won’t work. You need a strong stick and a healthy carrot, and certainly not to give the carrot as a reward for riots and rounds of shooting, but rather for a long period of quiet.
The policy of the governments and the security establishment is to buy short-term quiet. That is partly because no one there really devotes serious thought to the matter (the day-to-day overshadows everything), and partly because what interests them is the short term and not getting entangled. Until the next elections. That is an illness of democracies, which replace governments every few years (and here, every few months). The governing horizon is the next elections, and steps whose payoff is farther off simply won’t be taken.