ANALYSIS – What the Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, what the Soviet Union learned in Afghanistan, what Israel should have learned in its war with Hezbollah it is now learning in this its latest war against the Palestinians of Gaza – that you can not conquer a people that don’t want to be conquered. Since its creation in 1948, the Israeli state was assured of one thing – that the people they had driven out of historic Palestine would never be able to fight back, after all how could an ant crush a tank?  Technological superiority failed the Germans in the second world war, it did so the Americans in its many battles with the third world, as well as the Soviet Union. Those Goliaths inflicted horrendous damage on the enemy killing millions of people – but eventually they left the lands they tried to bend to their will. Israel’s mighty army is finding that what ever it throws from its deep armour, the enemy is still able to fight back. The doctrine of the harder you hit them the less likely they are to come back, may have succeeded in Chechnya for Putin’s Russia, but that success remains a temporary one and will not help the Israelis in Gaza. The Palestinians are more united than before, and whats more Hamas’ actions have scored some spectacular successes especially when the fighting is man on man before retreating into tunnels, as well as downing a F16 plane and forcing the cancellation of flights to Tel Aviv from an outside world still reeling from the downing of flight MH17 over the skies of war torn Ukraine. What  this all means is that Tel Aviv will be unable to achieve its stated aim – to crush Hamas, which like Hezbollah did in the Lebanon war of 2006, is able to meet a vastly superior hitech army with low tech asymmetric resistance. Israel will feel less secure after this war – for it knows that the Palestinians are no longer the defenseless people it could once push around. And will find as the French did in Algeria, that the court of world opinion will never forget the biblical scenes it is witnessing in this war against the Palestinians of Gaza.