New Delhi, Aug. 11 -- JERUSALEM - On a Sunday morning radio broadcast, retired Israeli general Giora Eiland said the quiet part aloud. Gaza, he told listeners of Israel's 103FM, should not be rebuilt. "It is better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come," he said.

The statement was not a slip. It was a policy prescription from one of Israel's most influential security thinkers, a former head of the National Security Council who has spent the past two years publicly advocating for what he calls strategic clarity on Gaza's postwar status. That clarity, in Eiland's framing, demands permanent devastation.

Eiland has been framing this since before the ceasefire. But the Sunday broadcast crystallized his position. "The greater th...