Shlomo Ben-Ami, ASPI, 10 Oct 2023 (a former Israeli foreign
minister)
Sooner or later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
destructive political magic, which has kept him in power for 15
years, was bound to usher in a major tragedy. A year ago, he
formed the most radical and incompetent government in Israel’s
history. Not to worry, he assured his critics, ‘I’ll have two
hands firmly on the steering wheel.’
But by ruling out any political process in Palestine and boldly
asserting, in his government’s binding guidelines, that ‘the
Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts
of the Land of Israel’, Netanyahu’s fanatical government made
bloodshed inevitable.
Admittedly, blood flowed in Palestine even when peace-seekers such
as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were in office. But Netanyahu
recklessly invited violence by paying his coalition partners any
price for their support. He let them grab Palestinian lands,
expand illegal settlements, scorn Muslim sensibilities regarding
the sacred mosques on the Temple Mount, and promote suicidal
delusions about the reconstruction of the biblical Temple in
Jerusalem (in itself a recipe for what could be the mother of all
Muslim jihads). Meanwhile, he also sidelined the more moderate
Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank,
effectively beefing up the radical Hamas in Gaza.
According to Netanyahu’s twisted logic, strong Islamist rule in
Gaza would be the ultimate argument against a political solution
in Palestine. By rewarding the extremists and castigating the
moderates, Netanyahu believed that he, unlike the soft leftists,
had finally found the solution to the Palestine conflict. The
Abraham Accords, which normalised Israel’s relations with four
Arab states (and will probably soon include Saudi Arabia), blinded
him to the Palestinian volcano beneath his feet.
But, in the ruthless, barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians in
the villages surrounding Gaza, Netanyahu’s hubris met its nemesis
in the form of Hamas’s savagery. Fifty years and a day after Egypt
and Syria launched their surprise attack in what became known as
the Yom Kippur War, Hamas stormed Gaza’s borders with Israel and
slaughtered hundreds of defenceless civilians. Scenes of young
women raped next to the bodies of their friends were recorded on
social networks. About a hundred people—among them whole families,
elderly women and toddlers—have been abducted and taken to Gaza.
Many have expressed surprise that Hamas so easily penetrated
Israel’s defences along the border with Gaza. But there were no
such defences. When Hamas began slaughtering hundreds of
defenceless civilians, Israel’s glorious army was mostly deployed
elsewhere. Many were assigned to the West Bank to protect
religious settlers in clashes (sometimes initiated by the settlers
themselves) with local Palestinians, and in festivals around
invented holy shrines. For long hours, desperate men and women
cried for help, and the strongest army in the Middle East was
nowhere to be seen.
The assumption was always that Gaza was not a vital priority. The
underground wall of sensors and fortified concrete that Israel has
built around the enclave was supposed to block the tunnels through
which Hamas tried in the past to penetrate Israeli border
villages. It was of no use. Hamas militias simply stormed the
fences on the surface.
There was no intelligence about Hamas’s intentions, either. The
‘start-up nation’, whose sophisticated cyber units can detect the
movement of a leaf in a tree in an Iranian base in Syria, knew
nothing of Hamas’s plans. Israel’s obsession with Iran’s possible
nuclear breakout and its internal security services’ focus on the
occupied West Bank partly explain this negligence.
The attack by Hamas was not just a tactical surprise, but also a
strategic bombshell. This was apparent in the group’s calculated
decision not to participate in any of the clashes of the past two
years between Israel and Islamic Jihad, another militant group in
Gaza. Hamas was creating the impression that it was becoming a
government more interested in meeting its people’s material needs
than in presumably ineffective armed resistance. And the Israelis
believed what they wanted to believe: that subsidies from Qatar
and their own gestures would dissuade Hamas from future military
adventures.
And now what? Restore deterrence? How, exactly? Self-punishment in
the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? A land invasion is
difficult to imagine. The atrocious level of destruction and
casualties that would entail is one reason, with the many Israeli
hostages now in Gaza providing additional insurance. The risk of
Hezbollah opening an additional front from Lebanon in the north is
another. Hezbollah’s capabilities dwarf those of Hamas, and a
two-front war, with Iran possibly backing Israel’s foes, is an
apocalyptic scenario.
This is exactly why US President Joe Biden warned Israel’s enemies
‘not to exploit the crisis’. To drive home the point, Biden has
ordered the US Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier to
the eastern Mediterranean.
But then when has the Israel–Palestine conflict ever responded to
Cartesian logic?
We learned from Clausewitz that war is supposed to make sense in
the context of a political objective. Hamas’s current war has such
objectives: securing its hegemony in the Palestinian national
movement, freeing its men from Israeli prisons by trading hostages
for them, and preventing Palestine’s plight from being forsaken by
the ‘Arab brethren’ in their rush to normalise relations with the
Jewish state. For Netanyahu’s government, however, this is a
purely reactive war with no political objective beyond that of
reaching a pause until the next round of hostilities.
A country that didn’t hold its leaders accountable for an outcome
like what has played out in the horrific scenes around Gaza would
lose its claim to being a genuine democracy. But Netanyahu’s
machine of poisonous political disinformation is already at work
disseminating a conspiracy theory according to which leftist army
officers were responsible for the negligence that led to this
dirty war. No one should be surprised that Netanyahu would resort
to the infamous stab-in-the-back narrative—a conspiracy theory
also peddled by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. How else could
the inciter-in-chief explain his criminal negligence?
When the fighting ends, negotiations for an exchange of hostages
and prisoners are inevitable. Possibly, the clearly ineffective
blockade on Gaza should be lifted. In any case, a different
question will remain: whether the barbarity that the Hamas
militias displayed in the killing fields around Gaza is the right
path to Palestinian redemption. Their moment of supposed glory
will live in infamy for many years to come.