Wednesday, February 28, 2024
From Ian:
The General Who Believes in Winning Wars
The General Who Believes in Winning Wars
Hacohen is not a believer in peace with the Palestinians, but he does not think violence alone can solve Israel’s strategic dilemmas. Two days before I met him, the MEF group had been in the north of Israel, looking through binoculars into the dread stillness of communities that had been ghost towns since early October. The naked eye could spot a white building on a far ridge, a U.N. post 80 meters inside of Lebanese territory where Hezbollah staged a military demonstration in April of 2023. The evacuation of 60,000 Israelis from 43 towns within 5 kilometers of the border had created a free-fire zone for the Shiite jihadists, who have blown up over 500 Israeli houses since October, and severely wounded a 15-year-old in Kiryat Shmona earlier that same day. Without an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, Iran-backed militants seemed unlikely to withdraw to the Litani River, their farthest permitted position under the worthless U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 Lebanon war.Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: The Origin of Hamas's Human Shields Strategy in Gaza
Hacohen does not think such an invasion will be easy. “First of all it is a mountainous area,” he said. “We must learn from the Allied forces, the United States and the British in their march under the command of Patton from Sicily to Monte Casino. It took them too much time. … The Germans succeeded to stop them for nine months in Monte Casino.” Southern Lebanon “is a land, a very specific infrastructure, and a terrain giving all conditions for a small army to stand against a huge army,” he said.
Even if Hezbollah were chased back to the Litani, Hacohen thinks that peace would be unlikely to dawn over northern Israel, or any other part of the country for that matter, because so much of the Jewish state would still be within range of Hezbollah’s surviving arsenal. “They intentionally build themselves so that they can fight even by losing that southern part of Lebanon. They have depth,” Hacohen warned. Hezbollah would be able to bombard the center of Israel even if the IDF made it all the way to Beirut. “The idea that [Hezbollah] can go ahead with warfare, even though they are defeated in the battlefield, it is one of the [things] explaining the difference between the 1967 war and now,” he said.
There was one more crucial layer of complication: The Lebanese army, like the Palestinian Authority security forces, is a project of the United States, meaning Israel’s closest ally is now supporting two regional military forces who see their paramount foe as Israel, and provide practical support and political cover for Iranian-backed terror militias. “We must admit that there is huge strategic embarrassment for Israel,” Hacohen said.
“The first solution is to be aware about the dilemma,” he explained. The way out of the morass might involve careful diplomacy with the U.S., clever war-planning, and a high national threshold for chaos—above all, it means steeling the Israeli public for a second unprecedented national crisis in six months.
If Hacohen is optimistic about anything, it is the Israelis themselves, who “decided to fight for the honor of the Jewish people” after Oct. 7. Hacohen, who says he has 50 family members on active IDF duty, credits the army’s successes in Gaza to the rank-and-file rather than their commanders. The IDF had spent three decades avoiding massive face-to-face combat. Its soldiers have now dismantled three-quarters of Hamas’ brigades and chased its terrorists through hundreds of miles of cramped and booby-trapped tunnels without any sag in morale.
Hacohen used an unlikely example to illustrate how this fight for survival might change Israel. During World War II, Marlene Dietrich’s “Lili Marleen” became a favorite of both Allied and Axis soldiers. Dietrich, who as Hacohen noted performed in Israel in 1960, knew that she was the last female voice that thousands of young men would ever hear. In light of her significance to the deadliest event in human history, a postwar career in Hollywood proved unsatisfying to Dietrich, who opened a club that veterans from across America flocked to. The German actress, like the soldiers who had heard her over the radio and who now came to hear her sing in person, realized that the war had been more than just an episode, and that it had become a defining aspect of her own identity.
The point of Dietrich’s story is that “if you are a real warrior, a real general, participating in a war that is almost like independence warfare, it is just the highlight of your life,” Hacohen said almost wistfully. “After that, just to be something else, it is not really to respect what happened in that huge challenge that you overcame.”
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have fought in such a war for their national existence since Oct. 7. How they understand what they’ve fought for and why could determine the country’s future as much as any geopolitical event. Against a sometimes-bleak horizon of official failure and looming conflict, the strength of Israel’s people is perhaps the most important remaining unknown.
Hamas believed that as a people's militia and a righteous religious resistance group against the Israeli occupation, it had a moral right to operate amongst the population from which it derived its strength, legitimacy, and fighters.Noah Rothman: Hamas’s Death Cult Comes to America
Unfortunately, and horrendously, this strategy ultimately failed and brought unspeakable death and suffering upon the people of Gaza. Over time, and in past and current wars, the IDF became less risk-averse and more willing to tolerate civilian casualties in pursuit of high-value targets and military infrastructure. Israeli airstrikes and bombardment would regularly hit and destroy entire neighborhoods, commercial areas, schools, mosques and hospitals.
While it is true that Hamas would use these places for its activities, it unfortunately became exceptionally easy for the IDF to justify civilian casualties, wrongful deaths, and questionable actions by blaming Hamas for embedding itself amongst civilian populations and infrastructure.
Hamas's immoral decision to normalize the self-described "human shields" strategy has not only been incredibly destructive for Gaza's civilian population. It has also proved ineffective as the IDF loosened its rules of engagement to allow for more risky and deadly strikes on Hamas targets.
Multiple things are true simultaneously: The Israeli military kills civilians in its pursuit of militants and subsequently attempts to absolve itself of moral and operational responsibility by blaming Hamas's use of Gazans as human shields. And Hamas absolutely disregards the safety and well-being of Gazans by deliberately and nefariously placing its infrastructure and armaments among civilians and crowded neighborhoods and cities throughout the Gaza Strip. The group gives itself the right to be anywhere it deems necessary in Gaza because the interests of the "resistance" far outweigh any harm done to innocent civilians in pursuit of the supposed "greater good" and the "liberation of Palestine."
What began as Nizar Rayan's human shields strategy to protect militants' houses from Israeli bombing has sadly and ironically ended up with Hamas turning innocent and uninvolved Gaza civilians into its own "collateral damage."
‘We love death like our enemies love life.” That chilling mantra, expressed a decade ago by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, has since become the terrorist outfit’s unofficial motto. “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves,” Hamas official Ali Baraka told a Russian interviewer less than a week after the October 7 massacre. “The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah.”
Neither Haniyeh nor Baraka, who respectively reside in Qatar and Lebanon, were speaking for themselves. Both are sufficiently removed from the war to which they’ve consigned Gaza’s people that they have little reason to anticipate their own glorious martyrdom. They are, however, happy to see their charges massacred in furtherance of the death cult Hamas has erected around itself. That cult extends well beyond the borders of the Gaza Strip, as the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell sadly illustrates.
Bushnell announced himself as an active-duty U.S. airman when he approached the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday. There, he declared his opposition to “genocide,” dowsed himself in a flammable liquid, and set himself alight. He died of his wounds shortly thereafter. Bushnell seems to have captured the hearts of Americans who are predisposed to share Bushnell’s outlook on Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and the Biden administration’s support for it. Their praise for his act of violence is evidence of both the depravity cultivated by Hamas’s obsessive bloodlust and an unspoken but apparently widespread desire to see more violence follow it.
“Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice!” declared Cornel West, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and an independent candidate for the presidency in 2024. Indeed, the outright support (bordering on advocacy) for Bushnell’s suicide seems most common among Ph.Ds. Prolonged exposure to post-colonial agitprop explains a statement attributed to Biden “administration staff.” In an open letter, the fifth column in the White House explained that Bushnell’s “act of protest” represents “a stark warning for our nation” — a “haunting reminder for those who refuse to change course,” namely Joe Biden.
What is this sort of advocacy meant to achieve other than to convince other naïve, blinkered radicals to commit similar acts of violence — acts that may not be limited to self-harm? We’re left with no other conclusion, particularly given the strained efforts to maintain that Bushnell was of entirely sound mind when he committed this atrocity.
