For many Israelis, Gaza carnage is a necessary evil

By Dan Williams - Analysis

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The asymmetry is searing. A modern military unleashed on ragtag guerrillas defending slums. Nine troops killed versus some 100 times the toll on the other side, many of them civilians whose lives had been shaped by deep privation and belief the world never cared to intervene.

From afar, Israel's two-week-old Gaza offensive may seem tough to defend. The starkness mounts when Israel's past peace diplomacy and Western democratic credentials is considered.

Yet polls show an overwhelming majority of Israelis support the armed forces as they lash the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of undermining its Islamist rulers Hamas and stopping Palestinians from firing rockets across the border.

"This is the time to back the commanders, soldiers and pilots working day and night to conduct a difficult, complex and entirely just war," said Ari Shavit of the leftist Haaretz daily, sentiments matched across Israel's political fissures.

A poll on Friday in Maariv newspaper found only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis opposed the war and 91 percent were in favour. (Few in Israel's 20-percent Arab minority share that view.)

Bemoaning the spiralling human crisis in Gaza, Shavit nonetheless echoed widely held views among liberal Israelis in praising the Jewish state for "finally behaving as a mature nation protecting itself with wisdom and restraint."

Israeli views on the bloodshed, which has provoked public outrage in world capitals and frenzied truce mediation by the Jewish state's allies, tend to sluice between the plain logic of self-defence and more general jitters over long-term threats.

Gaza's Hamas leadership declared a six-month truce dead on December 19 and escalated rocket salvoes that never entirely ceased, so many Israelis consider striking Gaza a moral duty. Hamas complaints that Israel had broken the truce by its raids and a blockade on the enclave carry little weight with them.