I first heard air raid sirens during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and I heard them most recently in August, during Operation Protective Edge. In 1948, an Egyptian plane dropped bombs on the center of Rishon Lezion, where I then lived; more recently the threat took the familiar form of rockets launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip and intercepted by the Iron Dome system far above my head in another town near Tel Aviv.

During the 1948 air raid, I saw my father, at the time an officer in a northern infantry brigade, treating a wounded female soldier, who died soon thereafter. She was the first casualty of war that I personally witnessed. Recently, my 17-year-old granddaughter Ahiraz encountered her first casualty when a soldier who had been a member of her neighborhood scout troop fell in the present operation.

Our lives in Israel are marked by the wars through which we have lived. In addition to living through the many wars, actions, and operations of the last 66 years as both a civilian and a soldier, I have also spent a great deal of time thinking about the ethics of fighting them, both in official capacities—when, for example, I led the writing of and co-authored the IDF’s code of ethics in the 1990s—and in an unofficial one, as a commentator.

In the “new” wars of recent decades, victory has been replaced by the ideal of successfully accomplishing given missions. The missions of Operation Protective Edge were defined in the course of the fighting as the elimination of the threat to Israel created by the Hamas offensive tunnels and the reduction if not elimination of the threat that Hamas’ rockets pose to most parts of Israel. Iron Dome batteries have intercepted over 90 percent of the rockets, but that means that one in 10 rockets remains a mortal danger to the targeted populations (not to speak of the literal terror that all rockets cause). This makes it necessary to destroy the makeshift factories in Gaza that produced the rockets, the magazines that stored them, and the batteries that fired them. The comprehensiveness of this response, it must be hoped, will deter Hamas from future attacks, but only as a by-product of the operation, not one of its military ends. Neither Israeli troops nor Palestinian civilians should be further endangered merely for the sake of deterrence.

Read the article in full at Jewish Review of Books.