Once again, about a million Israelis are being held hostage in the country’s south by the terror groups in Gaza. In 2006 it was the north, and soon it may be the residents of the center. For now, the Palestinians in Gaza don’t even have to fire a single rocket today, and still tens of thousands of Israeli parents have kept their kids at home today and didn’t send them to school, for fear that a rocket might hit. So the kids stay at home. The teachers stay at home. Many parents stay at home because they can’t go to work if the kids are at home and many can’t afford babysitters. So their businesses suffer. The economy of the South suffers. The education system suffers, and, by extension, our kids get a poorer education, and so their futures suffer. Who can count the potential cost to the country of this? This is strategic terror, this is the balance sheet of terror. By the way, many educational institutions in the South are still not properly reinforced against rockets. Oh, and when they are reinforced against Kassams, the Palestinians start firing Grad rockets. And once the schools are reinforced against Grads, the Palestinians will start firing Grads with heavier warheads, and so the equation goes. The thicker our cement, the heavier they make their warheads. It’s impossible to reinforce every building in the country. We can’t afford it, and the Palestinians will just build heavier rockets. We’ve got to get out of this equation: it’s not cost-effective, and it’s demeaning. One Iron-Dome anti-rocket missile costs about $40,000. We shoot these at rockets that cost $1,000. So that’s not cost-effective too, and we can’t shoot down all of them, and we can’t carry on building Iron Dome batteries, at a cost of some $45million each. So this is not cost-effective either, as the Palestinians have tens of thousands of rockets they can fire at us, and so does the Hezbollah. In the past few days, Israeli defense officials have been speaking in terms of cost: yes, it’s heartbreaking that an Israeli was killed, but the Islamic Jihad paid a heavy price, with 10 of its militants killed, said Ehud Barak. “They’re paying a much heavier price in Gaza,” says his deputy Matan Vilnai. Israel seems to need to change the equation regarding rocket violence: every rocket fired by a Palestinian group at Israel will cost them severely in terms of blood and damaged infrastructure. It’s not enough to chase rocket squads all day and all night [although this should obviously still be done]. Deterrence must be restored, and this can’t be done with defense, which costs a lot more than offense. In a climate of serious defense budget cuts, expect the IDF to drop heavier bombs, and drop some heavier terror chiefs. Also, all talk of a major ground offensive to take down Hamas in Gaza is now passe. The new situation in Egypt won’t allow a too-aggressive Israeli action in Gaza [the new regime in Cairo is trying hard to be friends with the Muslim Brotherhood], and Israel definitely does not want to re-occupy the Gaza Strip and pay the daily wages of that occupation [in the absence of Hamas and UNRWA, Israel will have to fund everything from food to sewage in the Gaza Strip for the 1.3 million Palestinians there].

So where does this leave the Israeli government? My sense is it will not want to break the china in this, and next rounds of violence, but it will instruct the army to exact an ever-escalating price in blood for rocket attacks.