Israel's wars of choice push its politics further to the right

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/israel-palestinianconflictgazawarpoliticsnetanyahu.html

Israel's wars of choice push its politics further to the right

Each time it starts a war for reasons short of existential necessity, its jingoistic right wing is strengthened

July 22, 2014 

by Helena Cobban

In the late 1980s, when I started applying a strategic-studies approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel’s own numerous smart scholars in the field would refer sagely to the fact that their still-young country had fought in two wars of choice. Their argument was that the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973 were all somehow forced on Israel. But, they argued, Israel’s participation in the 1956 war against Egypt and its initiation of the 1982 war against the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon were much more clearly wars of choice, that is, wars that Israel’s leaders chose to enter rather than were forced to fight. Back then — remember, in the late 1980s Israel’s continued occupation of much of Lebanon was looking increasingly like a quagmire — there was a broad consensus in Israel that such wars were bad for Israel.
How times have changed.http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/israel-palestinianconflictgazawarpoliticsnetanyahu.html