“Our security policy has not changed at all, not one iota,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at the start of the Nov. 17 Cabinet meeting in summing up the latest round of fighting with the Gaza Strip. “The goals of the operation were fully met,” he emphasized. Presumably, the son of historian Benzion Netanyahu is familiar with the famous insight provided by Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz, one of the fathers of the modern warfare doctrine: “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” Netanyahu’s policy — on both national security and his personal security — can be summed up in one word: “survival.”

To advance his goal, the prime minister uses the good old-fashioned “divide and rule” tactic, with which the Jewish people are familiar from the days of the Roman Empire. In order to crush Jewish national unity, which empowered the rebels seeking to overthrow Roman rule, Gov. Aulus Gabinius dismantled the Kingdom of Judea and divided it into five separate districts (57 B.C.). Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name is synonymous with manipulation and immorality, wrote in his book “The Art of War” that a leader must do all he can to divide the forces of the enemy.

A Nov. 12 Al-Monitor article described the limitations of Israeli efforts to divide the forces of the Palestinian enemy, otherwise known as the “policy of isolation.” Netanyahu aims at preventing the West Bank and Gaza from being considered as one Palestinian entity, and advances splits between the different Palestinian factions in order to weaken Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ rule. The split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip and between Hamas and Fatah and Islamic Jihad serve Netanyahu’s status quo policy in the West Bank as well as his attempts to engineer a “security arrangement” with Gaza. Every rocket that lands in the southern border town of Sderot is turned by the propagandists of the political right into a missile against the Oslo peace accord with the Palestinians and alleged proof that ceding territories to the Palestinians begets terrorism. But is the “divide and rule” policy an appropriate recipe for dealing with a complex conflict such as the Israeli-Palestinian one?

In an October 2017 article, then-Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai and his Palestinian affairs adviser Col. Michael Milstein analyzed the lessons of Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge against Hamas. They wrote that while an arrangement in the spirit of a “hudna” or “tahadiye” — a temporary pause between military operations — could provide Israel with a respite on the Gaza front, it could also help entrench Hamas rule in the long term. Their insights were published in Maarachot, a publication of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), not in a left-wing newspaper such as Haaretz.