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After Gaza, Israel sees new type of war, diplomacy

A changing Middle East reality confronts the Israel Defense Forces with new fighting methods and targets while diplomatic opportunities have emerged with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.
An Israeli policeman surveys a building damaged from a Palestinian mortar salvo in a community outside the central Gaza Strip August 21, 2014. Israel killed three senior Hamas commanders in an air strike on the Gaza Strip on Thursday, the clearest signal yet that Israel is intent on eliminating the group's military leadership after a failed attempt on the life of its top commander this week. After six weeks of conflict in which more than 2,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, Israeli a
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”Our generation of officers who were mobilized to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] after the [1973] Yom Kippur War, now experienced the dramatic change in the map of the Middle East that leads to no less a dramatic change in the map of threats.” This statement was conveyed to Al-Monitor by a very high-level Israeli officer, a member of the IDF’s General Staff, who took part in building up the army’s forces and in directing Operation Protective Edge.

“Everything has to be changed,” he said, “including the very language we speak. Even when we talk about tilting the balance, we have to redefine what that means. Any military intelligence branch director who observed the Middle East five, 10, 20 years ago, saw flags. For every state, a flag. Under each flag, an army, a regime, a government or a ruler who made all the decisions. Today, when an Israeli intelligence branch director looks at the Middle East, he sees dozens of flags. Today, one could plant a lot of flags on the Syrian map alone.

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