Friday, November 01, 2024
From Ian:
Israel’s Mistake Was Viewing Hamas as a Minor Nuisance
Israel’s Mistake Was Viewing Hamas as a Minor Nuisance
Thirty years ago, Netanyahu warned that the Oslo Accords would turn Gaza into a launching pad for rockets, and Yitzhak Rabin accused him of abetting Hamas. That was the first articulation of the now common—and slanderous—claim that “Netanyahu has supported Hamas.” The truth was that Netanyahu was proved right in the summer of 2007, shortly after the terrorist group seized control of Gaza, when its first rocket barrages fell on Sderot. The late military analyst for Haaretz, Ze’ev Schiff, at the time wrote a biting column titled “Israeli Defeat in Sderot,” in which he called what had happened a national disgrace. And it was: Israel had no response to a heavily armed organization at its doorstep that went on to build a vast subterranean fortress beneath its territory and to amass missiles that could reach Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion airport. In an article for Israel Hayom, I described Gaza as a “mini-North Korea” and argued that Israel couldn’t live with this sort of hostile statelet on its southern border.The Iranian Period Is Finished
Only a handful of individuals believed that Israel should have done then what it is doing now at a much greater cost, that is, reoccupy Gaza and eliminate Hamas: the former head of the Shin Bet Avi Dichter (now minister of agriculture), the erstwhile finance and energy minister Yuval Steinitz, the late former defense minister Moshe Arens, and perhaps one or two others. The IDF, meanwhile, formulated various plans for conducting retaliatory strikes and restoring deterrence, but not for achieving a decisive victory, let alone reoccupying the Strip.
For the past fifteen years Israel has had several governing coalitions and a parade of defense ministers who were prepared to go no further than carrying out limited ground incursions into Gaza. Gadi Eisenkot, who was chief of staff of the IDF from 2015 to 2019, said not too long ago that Hamas was Israel’s weakest foe in the region, and that fighting against it weakens the army. Only a few days before the October 7 attacks, the security services, headed by the Shin Bet, formally recommended that the government continue strengthening Gaza’s economy to ensure continued calm. Shouldn’t a PM be able to trust the army to secure a 42-km border?
If there were political considerations that shaped Israeli policy in Gaza, they were those of left-wing leaders and high-ranking IDF officers who didn’t want to re-enter, let alone reoccupy, the territory, since doing so would be an admission of the massive failure of the policies they had long supported.
To identify the flawed concepts behind the intelligence failures of October 7, we should look at the inability of technocratic military leaders to understand the psychology of the enemy. A large section of the media, the intelligence services, and the IDF saw Gaza as a hostile territory only in a technical sense, instead of realizing that it was governed by bloodthirsty Islamist fanatics. And the problem goes further still: if you are alienated from your identity as a Jew, it becomes harder to understand an enemy that wants to murder you merely because you are Jewish.
This fundamental failure of imagination manifested itself concretely in the behavior of the IDF on October 7 of last year. Unlike the surprise attack of October 1973, when Golda Meir and members of her cabinet were informed of the threat but told to ignore it by the head of military intelligence, in October 2023 the military didn’t communicate the warnings it received to the prime minister or defense minister at all. The chief of military intelligence went back to sleep on the night before the attack. The IDF didn’t even order the units defending the border to go on high alert.
Even then, as Brigadier General Guy Hazot has written, the army is supposed to abide by the motto, “Even if we are surprised, we won’t be defeated.” That is, even when confronted with a surprise attack, it should be able to muster an effective defense immediately. Instead, what ensued on that awful day was a systemic failure of the security apparatus. It’s only thanks to the extraordinary heroism and grit of the Israeli people that the state regained control of the Western Negev after only three-and-a-half days.
October 7 saw a complete breakdown from the IDF top brass on down. In seeking to identify modes of thinking that led to disaster, we should begin with the conceptual error that caused a heavily armed and fanatical enemy to be perceived as a minor nuisance.
Two months of war have transformed Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that seemed almost invincible, is now crippled, its top commanders dead or in hiding. The scale of this change is hard for outsiders to grasp. Hezbollah is not just a militia but almost a state of its own, more powerful than the weak and divided Lebanese government, and certainly more powerful than the Lebanese army. Formed under the tutelage of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it has long been the leading edge of Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance,” alongside Hamas, the Shiite militias of Iraq, and the Houthi movement in Yemen. Hezbollah is also the patron and bodyguard of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, with a duly elected bloc in the national parliament (Christians and Muslims are allocated an equal share of seats). Hezbollah smuggles in not just weapons, but billions of dollars from Iran. It runs banks, hospitals, a welfare system, and a parallel economy of tax-free imports and drug trafficking that has enriched and empowered the once-downtrodden Shiite community.The UN’s Kosher Stamp for Terror
Hezbollah has long justified reckless wars against Israel with appeals to pan-Arab pride: The liberation of Palestine was worth any sacrifice. But the devastation of this conflict extends far beyond Hezbollah and cannot be brushed off so easily. Almost a quarter of Lebanon’s people have fled their homes, and many are now sleeping in town squares, on roads, on beaches. Burned-out ambulances and heaps of garbage testify to the state’s long absence. Many people are traumatized or in mourning; others talk manically about dethroning Hezbollah, and perhaps with it, Lebanon’s centuries-old system of sectarian power-sharing. There is a millenarian energy in the air, a wild hope for change that veers easily into the fear of civil war.
A few stark facts stand out. First, Israel is no longer willing to tolerate Hezbollah’s arsenal on its border, and will continue its campaign of air strikes and ground war until it is forced to stop—whether from exhaustion or, more likely, by an American-sponsored cease-fire that is very unlikely before the next U.S. president is sworn in. Second, no one is offering to rebuild the blasted towns and villages of southern Lebanon when this is over, the way the oil-rich Gulf States did after the last major war with Israel, in 2006. Nor will Iran be able to replenish the group’s arsenal or its coffers. Hezbollah may or may not survive, but it will not be the entity it was.
I heard the same questions every day during two weeks in Lebanon in September and October, from old friends and total strangers. When will the war stop? Will they bomb us too—we who are not with Hezbollah? Will there be a civil war? And most poignant of all, from an artist whose Beirut apartment was a haven for me during the years I lived in Lebanon: Should I send my daughter out of this country?
Having a U.N. agency of multinational toy soldiers in white armored personnel carriers backed by the U.S. and ostensibly representing the “international community,” whose actual function is to shelter military positions inhabited by Iran’s chief terror army, presents a real threat to Israel’s national security. Given its function and purpose, UNIFIL will always necessarily be enmeshed with Hezbollah and with its “social support base”—employing them, relying on their goodwill, and servicing them. Because this partnership with a terror group serves U.S. objectives, and because UNIFIL’s ability to appear to fulfill its mandate requires it to whitewash and buy off Hezbollah, Israel will find itself having to compromise its security to appease its superpower ally, while the latter will utilize its U.N. instrument to place constraints on Israel’s sovereign decision-making.
By its nature, this dance with a terror army is obscene. Letting that army entrench itself on Israel’s northern border for the past two decades under U.N. protection is a joint act of madness by American policymakers of both parties and especially by Israel’s leaders, who can only thank some form of divine protection for the fact that the attack tunnels that UNIFIL helped shelter were never used to massacre Israeli civilians in the north, on a scale much larger than the attacks that UNRWA helped to support and perpetrate in the south.
Yet it’s no surprise, on the eve of the election, that the Biden administration is tripping over itself to resuscitate the UNIFIL-LAF arrangement in Lebanon and impose it again on Israel—which is what the U.S. peace proposal for Lebanon, leaked by an Israeli TV channel this week, is all about. In addition to beefing up UNIFIL, the administration wants to enlarge the LAF, and underwrite legions of new recruits—many of whom will no doubt come from Hezbollah’s support base, if not Hezbollah itself.
The added twist in the proposal is the formation of a so-called monitoring mechanism which would include the U.S.—an outgrowth of the 2022 maritime deal brokered by special envoy Amos Hochstein, which introduced the idea of Washington as a direct arbiter between Israel and Hezbollah. Now, Hochstein wants to formalize this role. As a bonus, his proposal also calls for picking up where he left off with his maritime deal to initiate a land border demarcation process. Inserting the U.S. in this so-called monitoring mechanism as an official arbiter reaffirms the status of Lebanon as a special province under U.S. protection, where Israeli security interests would need to pass through Washington. If Israel has intel about new Hezbollah tunnels, it can pass it along to the CENTCOM security coordinator who will then share the intel with the LAF—which is controlled by Hezbollah—or with a “strengthened” UNIFIL, whose role as Hezbollah’s protector in the south has been well established for the past decades, and at the same time has never been more urgent.
Luckily, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to understand the stakes much better than American politicians do. In an address on Thursday, Netanyahu had this to say about the American plan: “The agreements, documents, proposals and numbers—[UNSCR] 1701, 1559—with all due respect, are not the main point. The main point is our ability and determination to enforce security, thwart attacks against us, and act against the arming of our enemies, as necessary and despite any pressure and constraints. This is the main point.”
In the event Donald Trump wins Tuesday’s election, Israel will likely have a wider margin vis-à-vis Iran and its proxies. However, Jerusalem should not underestimate how similar Republican impulses toward Lebanon are to those of Team Obama, even if their ostensible motives are different. On the right, the growing, poisonous sectarianism that’s been infused into Lebanon policy in Washington—a toxicity that the Lebanese (and Lebanese American) lobbyists have consciously encouraged and exploited—fantastically views Lebanon as an arena for “empowering Middle Eastern Christians.” Another, related variant draws on cliches about Lebanon as the “Paris” or “Switzerland” of the Middle East—a naturally pro-Western society that’s just waiting for the proper amount of U.S. political and financial investment, the same way Iraq was a natural democracy waiting for U.S. liberation in order to fulfill the reality-free fantasies of Freedom Agenda ideologues. In reality, Lebanon is a bankrupt terror haven controlled by Iran whose fake “state institutions” are run by sectarian jackals who are unable to supply basic services like electricity to their supporters. Yet that hardly stops Republican lawmakers in Congress from being among the most ardent supporters of the disastrous Obama policy of underwriting the LAF.
None of these deranged fantasies—whether of an American partnership with the mullahs in Tehran that runs through Beirut, or of a “Lebanese state” built on infusions of U.S. dollars into “institutions” controlled by Hezbollah—can alter reality, however. Washington can entertain itself by pumping billions into the UNIFIL-LAF charade to maintain the appearance of running its own special Levantine province. For Israel, such Napoleonic parade ground antics will remain detached from the reality on the ground. Only by preserving its freedom to act independently and at will to remove threats from its northern border will Israel be able to live in peace.
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