Well, let that be a lesson to me. I wanted to type a quick question asking why the Israeli-Palestinian issue was not included and whether we should consider that a small war or something else.

Regarding the phrase in question, for clarification, it would have been better to state that Israel could have (and, with their nat'l security interests in mind, probably should have) stomped the Palestinian resistance/terrorists/insurgents into submission long ago. Kind of like how I was gloating last week that the Patriots slaughtered every team that they've faced this season, but those teams are all very much alive. In hindsight, neither the wording above nor in the hyperbole in my original post were necessary for the question.

The decades-long ###-for-tat conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, though it experiences lengthy ceasefires in lethal/kinetic terms, seems like a pretty good example of a poorly funded and underequipped force effectively drawing a powerful opponent into a seemingly endless small war. The bulk of the warfare takes place in the information domain and the lethal actions taken by the Palestinians all appear to be timed and located purely for effects in the information and cognitive domains, with no regard to any expectation of militarily defeating the Israelis or of whittling away at their population.

Small war or not a small war?