2023-11-09 17:27:34
TEL AVIV.- People warned me before coming to Tel Aviv a few days ago that the Israel of October 7 is an Israel I had never been to. They were right. It is a place Israelis have never lived before, a nation that generals have never had to protect before, an ally that the United States has never had to defend before – certainly not with the urgency and determination that would lead to a president of the United States to fly there and cheer up the entire nation.
After traveling through Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger, more danger than at any time since its war of independence in 1948. And it is for three key reasons:
First, Israel faces threats from a set of enemies that combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st-century weaponry – and are no longer organized as small militia bands, but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cyber capabilities, rockets. long range, unmanned aircraft and technical support. I am referring to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic militias of Iraq and the Houthis of Yemen, supported by Iran, and now even by Vladimir Putin, who openly embraces Hamas. These enemies have been there for a long time, but they all seem to emerge together like dragons during this conflict, threatening Israel with a 360-degree war at once.
How does a modern democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question that these demonic forces wanted to instill in the mind of every Israeli. They do not seek a territorial commitment to the Jewish State. Their goal is to destroy Israelis’ confidence that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders, so that Israelis will first move away from the border regions and then leave the country entirely. .
I am amazed at how many Israelis now feel this danger personally, wherever they live, starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem and tells me that she and her husband just got gun licenses to keep guns at home. Nobody is going to kidnap their children and take them to a tunnel. Hamas, unfortunately, has put fear into many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.
The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies necessary to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad. President Joe Biden, quite heroically, has been trying to help Israel with its immediate and legitimate goal of dismantling the messianic Hamas terrorist regime, which is a threat both to the future of Israel and to Palestinians who yearn for a state of their own. decent in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank.
But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza involves urban, house-to-house fighting, causing thousands of civilian casualties – innocent men, women and children – among whom Hamas deliberately inserted itself to force Israel to have to kill those innocents with in order to kill Hamas leaders and tear out its kilometers of attack tunnels.
But Biden can only sustainably generate the support Israel needs if Israel is willing to engage in some sort of diplomatic war effort aimed at Palestinians in the West Bank – and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza – that indicates that Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solution if Palestinian officials manage to unify and put their political house in order.
This brings me directly to my third and profound concern. Israel has the worst leader in its history, perhaps in all of Jewish history, who has neither the will nor the ability to carry out an initiative of this type.
Worse, I am stunned by the extent to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of maintaining the support of his far-right base – and preemptively blaming Israel’s security and intelligence services for the war – first. to maintain national solidarity or do some of the basic things Biden needs to get Israel the resources, allies, time and legitimacy it needs to defeat Hamas.
Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of American, European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas if Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza, while we work to expand the settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”
Let’s delve into these dangers.
Last Saturday night, a retired Israeli army commander stopped by my hotel in Tel Aviv to share his perspective on the war. I took him to the 18th floor executive lounge for our talk and as we entered the elevator to go up, we met a family of four: two parents, a toddler, and a baby in a stroller. The Israeli general asked them where they were from. “Kiryat Shmona,” the father responded.
On the way out, I joked with the general that he could skip his briefing. 18 floors and those two words – “Kiryat Shmona” – were enough to describe Israel’s new and perversely complex strategic dilemma created by Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7.
Kiryat Shmona is one of the most important Israeli cities on the border with Lebanon. That father explained that his family had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began launching rockets and artillery and carrying out raids in solidarity with Hamas.
When could they return? They have no idea. Like more than 200,000 Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels throughout this small country of nine million inhabitants. And it only took a few weeks for Israelis to start buying real estate in seemingly safer cities in central Israel. For Hezbollah, that is mission accomplished, without even invading like Hamas.
The euphoric rampage of October 7 in which some 1,400 soldiers and civilians were killed has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli military and defense establishment, for having failed in its most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.
As a result, there is a conviction in the military that they must show the entire neighborhood – Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Islamic militias in Iraq, Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank – that they will stop at nothing. to restore the security of its borders. Although the army insists that it abides by the laws of war, it wants to show that no one can be crazier than Israel, even if the Israeli military has to defy the United States and even if it has no solid plan to govern Gaza the next morning. from the war.
Early on the morning of October 29, as the Israeli army had just entered Gaza, Netanyahu tweeted and then deleted a social media post in which he blamed the Israeli defense and intelligence services for failing to foresee the surprise attack by Hamas. (Somehow, Netanyahu forgot how many times Israeli military and intelligence leaders had warned him that his totally unnecessary strike against the country’s judicial system was fracturing the military and all of Israel’s enemies were realizing its vulnerability.)
After being battered by public opinion for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of the war, Netanyahu published a new tweet. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said after the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of the security services [de Israel]”.
with our fighters in the field. We are not going to stop, we are going to continue until victory. I trust you, believe in you, and give you all the strength.
(Photo: Haim Tzach, L.A.M.) pic.twitter.com/yTKu2WutLr
— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) November 7, 2023
But the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave like this at the beginning of a survival war?
I will not mince words, because the hour is dark and Israel, as I have already said, is in real danger. Netanyahu and his far-right fanatics have taken Israel down multiple paths in the last year: dividing the country and the military over fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that do not teach mathematics and in Jewish settlements of West Bank that do not teach pluralism – while strengthening Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.
The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left/center-right national unity government, the better chance it will have of holding together during what is going to be a hellish war and its aftermath. And there will be more chances that Biden – who may be trailing in the polls in the United States, but who could be elected here in a landslide victory because of the empathy and firmness he showed in Israel’s time of need – has not linked his credibility and ours to a Netanyahu’s Israel that will never be able to fully help us help him.
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