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Israel's massive assault on the militant Hamas organization in the Gaza Strip shook the Middle East this weekend. Few people expected Israel to deal such a blow, with such carnage, against a group whose repeated rocket attacks posed no existential threat to the powerful country.

“What's happening here is capital punishment,” said a stunned Sabri Saidam, a former Fatah minister of communications, and no friend of Hamas. This was “the fastest massacre in the shortest time span” he had ever heard of.

It should come as no surprise. Since before the founding of the state in 1948, Israel's military doctrine has been about deterrence, about striking fear in the hearts of its enemies whenever possible. Israel's weekend attacks were as much about instilling awe in future enemies as they were about shocking the country's current nemesis.

Now, that power of deterrence is in doubt. A poll released Sunday night in Israel showed that 81 per cent of Israelis favoured the action being taken against Hamas, but only 39 per cent thought it was likely to be effective. Even Israelis appear to have lost faith.

“A country that is afraid to deal with Hamas won't be able either to deter Iran or to safeguard its interests in dealing with Syria, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority,” wrote Nahum Barnea in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's most popular newspaper.

“The problem is: Nobody's afraid of us today, the way they used to be,” said Mark Heller, principal research associate of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “A big reason for this operation” isn't to wipe out Hamas or even to instill “quiet” in southern Israel, “it's to restore credibility in Israel's ability to deter enemies,” he said.

That credibility was largely lost 21/2 years ago when Israel tangled with another militant Islamic group, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon.

Then, too, Israel was plagued with cross-border rockets and raids; then too it launched a massive shock-and-awe display of aerial firepower to intimidate the enemy. But that's where, Israel hopes, the similarity ends. In 2006, Israel would go on to effectively lose that war by limping out of Lebanon without coming close to meeting its declared objective of wiping out Hezbollah.

The outcome emboldened the Shia militia and other regional groups, such as Hamas.

They no longer cower before the power of Israel.

So, this time, Israel is trying to leave nothing to chance.

For weeks, it worked to minimize the fallout from the assault by preparing the international community, and the Israeli people for the attack. No other country would have sustained as many rockets as this without responding, said Israeli diplomat after diplomat.

It prepared for declaring victory by setting a much more modest goal than Israel declared when it attacked Hezbollah two years ago. Israeli leaders said they only sought to restore “quiet” in the south of the country where rockets fired from Gaza have rained down daily – no mention of eradicating Hamas, or even of eliminating all the rockets.

Unlike the 2006 war, this time Israel was prepared to evacuate the regions within reach of the enemy's rockets, thereby reducing Israelis' own aversion to a drawn-out fight.

Already, however, Israeli leaders may be making one of the same mistakes they made in Lebanon: fooling themselves into thinking that the civilians in the place being bombed will turn against the militant Islamic group in their midst.

Saturday night, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the people of Gaza: “You the citizens of Gaza are not our enemies. Hamas, [Islamic] Jihad and the other terrorist organizations are your enemies as they are our enemies.”

And Sunday, Israeli Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog told interviewers that Israeli “intelligence” already was reporting the people of Gaza were turning against Hamas.

Don't bet on it, advises Rami Khouri, a Palestinian, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

As happened in Lebanon in 2006, Israeli attacks on targets in Lebanon had the effect of bringing Lebanese closer together. Even opponents of Hezbollah found common cause in the face of the bombings.

So too, in Gaza: “The massive suffering Israel inflicts on ordinary Palestinians transforms a largely docile population into a recruiting pool for militants, resistance fighters, suicide bombers, terrorists and other warriors,” Mr. Khouri wrote Sunday in his syndicated column.

Israel's insistence on military dominance “results in fewer friends and more enemies,” he said.

It also underestimates the determination of an enemy that is not afraid to die.

“Hamas may be shaken, but they still have some capacity” to strike back, Mr. Heller warned. And dealing with non-state actors such as Hamas or Hezbollah is much harder than dealing with a state, he said. “We've been trying for decades to come to grips with this.”

“The rules of the game by which we must operate [international sanctions, human-rights arguments, political pressure] make it difficult to bring to bear the kind of force Israel has at its disposal.”

Israel should have realized that a long time ago. On a hill, just outside Gaza's eastern perimeter there's a monument to Unit 101, an Israeli special forces band assembled in the mid-1950s by a young army officer named Ariel Sharon who went on to become prime minister. Its task was to conduct special reprisals for attacks launched against Israel by Arab militants. If they hit at us, Major Sharon used to say, we hit back at them 10 times as hard.

When militants stole in from Egyptian-controlled Gaza one day and killed a cyclist, Operation Black Arrow was launched in response. Major Sharon and his group entered Gaza one night, attacked and destroyed the Egyptian army headquarters on the outskirts of Gaza City, killing 37. The ferocity of the attack was justified by then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion as necessary for the morale of Israelis. It would be cited by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser as the reason why he would never reconcile with Israel.

More than 50 years later, Israel's policy endures, but an end to the fighting seems as far away as ever.