KEY POINTS:
An equation has to be created in which it is not worth it for the Palestinians to fire, says Eli Moyal, mayor of Sderot.
He gave his view after rockets fired from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday killed a 57-year-old woman and severely injured two young men - one of whom lost both legs - in the southern Israeli town.
The logic is impeccable - hurt the Palestinians enough and they will have to stop launching those rockets.
But the Israeli Defence Force hurt the Palestinians very badly indeed at the beginning of November in Beit Hanoun, the town nearest to the launch sites of Wednesday's rockets.
The operation lasted for a week and killed 60 Palestinians. One Israeli soldier was killed. If that kill ratio doesn't stop the rockets, what will?
Since the hopelessly inaccurate homemade Qassams first began to fall on Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza Strip in 2000, they have killed only nine Israelis. In just the four weeks from June 26, Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip to stop the Qassam rockets killed 126 Palestinians. The Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem said 63 were not fighters and 29 were minors.
The Israeli military says it never deliberately targets civilians, but it cannot be unaware that a high Palestinian death toll is a necessary part of the equation "in which it is not worth it for the Palestinians to fire". So its operations are less careful than they would be if the civilians in question were Israelis. Consider the Israeli artillery fire that killed 19 members of the Athamna family in Beit Hanoun a few days after the armoured operation.
"A technical failure," said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and he was no doubt technically correct. But more than 350 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since mid-summer compared with two Israelis - one soldier and one civilian.
Yet no amount of pain seems to deter the Palestinians and now the rockets are getting accurate enough to hurt Israelis.
They are not as accurate as the modified Katyushas that Hizbollah fired at northern Israel but the ranges are a great deal shorter.
Moreover, this is not taking place in the context of a war of limited duration, like the one last summer that was triggered by Hizbollah's seizure of two Israeli soldiers and then escalated by Israeli air-raids on Lebanon. That lasted a month; this is an everyday affair of local people making and launching short-range missiles at nearby Israeli targets, and it could go on for years.
Israel could go on shelling and bombing the Gaza Strip and making occasional armoured incursions like that at Beit Hanoun for years, and no doubt it can still count on killing 20 or 50 Palestinian fighters and civilians for every Israeli soldier or civilian who dies. But the Palestinians just don't care any more. That is not literally true. Of course they care when their children, or parents or sisters or brothers are killed. But in the larger sense most Palestinians, at least in the Gaza Strip, no longer care how high the price is - they have lost their fear.
This poses a deadly danger for Israel because it means that the traditional strategy of terrorising the Palestinians into submission no longer works.
Turning points do not normally announce themselves with great fanfares and you only realise you have passed them some time later. But this year, for the first time, Israel failed to win a war (in Lebanon). For the first time in 39 years, Israel has really lost control of the Palestinians. And now the United States is on its way out of the Middle East. Their withdrawal from Iraq is a year or two away, but the retreat will not stop there.
We are probably still 20, even 50 years away from the day when Israel faces a real war for survival. Avoiding that is a high priority even for Israel's enemies, for a defeated Israel would destroy the Arab world with nuclear weapons before it went under, and - if you believe the threats of some Israeli leaders - much of Europe as well.
That outcome is still far from inevitable, but this is the year when the clock started ticking.
* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
