This is the final in a series of guests posts by Doug Lieb of the American Jewish Committee reflecting on his recent visit to Israel as part of an AJC solidarity mission. Doug’s previous posts can be read here and here.

An emergency medical technician and a hospital administrator. A municipal administrator and the foreign minister. An enthusiastic young soldier and a hardened senior spy.

We heard from all of them in Israel, and they all shared at least two beliefs. One, a certainty that Israel is not merely justified in striking Hamas, but fulfilling its most basic obligations to itself. Two, a determination to avoid, learn from, and repair the errors of the summer 2006 conflict with Hezbollah.

“The lessons of 2006″-organizing principle, motivational slogan, sobering reminder, article of faith.

It’s not as if the 2006 Lebanon War was a total disaster for Israel, which sustained neither territorial losses nor exceedingly high casualties. But there were poor decisions, chaos in northern cities, seemingly purposeless last-minute deaths, and a semi-plausible claim of Hezbollah victory. The result? A loss of public confidence in Israel’s public institutions, and perhaps some wavering faith in the character of its society.

Many of the lessons are unremarkable. Appoint a defense minister with defense expertise. Coordinate better between the home front command and emergency service providers. Clearly define limited war aims.

What’s really remarkable is the lesson of “the lessons of 2006″-that an open society, driven by its citizens, can right itself.

Several senior Israeli defense officials all made one point. Hamas read Israel’s newspapers, saw its public opinion polls, and observed its fractious governing coalition. They assumed that all this disagreement would make Israel paralyzed and unable to act. For a totalitarian gang, and perhaps especially for one that takes its orders from God, public criticism looks a lot like weakness.

Maybe Hamas figured that Israel would react to public discontent the way it would. Hamas is a closed, centralized, rigid institution, one expert told us, with no more than 10 to 15 people whose opinions actually count. Many of them have never left Gaza, and when Ismail Haniyeh became prime minister of the short-lived Palestinian unity government in 2006, his first trip to Cairo was his first time on a plane.

But open societies have a unique moral strength: self-betterment through self-scrutiny. We saw it in the profound Israeli commitment to repair the breach of 2006.

And later that day, when the news broke of an impending order to close the prison camp at Guantanamo, we saw it in another open society, too.