by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:

The ongoing Israel/Gaza conflict just passed the six month mark, an astonishing development that almost no one would have imagined at the time it first began.

The length of the fighting is without precedent across the last seventy-five years of Israeli military history. In 1956, Israel allied itself with Britain and France and suddenly attacked Egypt, conquering the Sinai in a war that lasted little more than a week. Israel’s 1967 surprise attack against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan achieved complete military victory in just six days. Then Egypt and Syria returned the favor in 1973 and came close to overrunning Israel until an unprecedented American military resupply airlift allowed Israel to turn the tide and win a decisive military victory in less than three weeks. The main fighting in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon only took a couple of weeks, while its 2006 invasion of that same country lasted about a month and its 2008 assault on Gaza was even shorter. Most of these previous half-dozen campaigns were fought against heavily-equipped conventional armies but their combined length totaled considerably less than the time Israel has now spent trying to defeat Gaza’s lightly-armed Hamas militants.