Israel must rethink its defunct Gaza strategy
Palestinians bid farewell to their relatives who were killed during an Israeli air strike at Al-Najjar Hospital, in the city of Rafah in the southe...
The war in Gaza is approaching its first 100 days. It may well take another 100 days. Perhaps a thousand. Who knows? Israel will pursue the war against Hamas until victory, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week.
But what does victory look like? And what if this war cannot be “won”? What if Israel’s security can no longer be guaranteed by the force of arms alone? What if it’s heading up a blind alley?
Israel is now fighting on (at least) two fronts: Gaza and southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is conducting a low-level war of attrition against Israel’s civilian rear.
The declared war aim in Gaza of wiping out Hamas is proving to be hard going. Israel’s military style is to win fast and to win big: 1948, 1967 and 1973. Gaza is different. This is house-to-house fighting backed by massive bombing against an enemy, still holding some 130 hostages, well dug into an underground city of tunnels.
Hamas has been preparing for years. So far most of its leadership remains at large and despite thousands of civilian deaths there is scant evidence of irreversible damage to its forces. Some Israeli commentators think destroying Hamas and its infrastructure could take years. One retired Israeli Brigadier-General suggested last week: “There is no solution to the Hamas tunnels.”
In the oil-rich Gulf 1,500 miles away from Gaza, the US, Britain and a coalition of countries, dependant on the Red Sea route for oil and trade, have opened a third front against the Yemeni Houthi rebels — also backed by Iran. The Bab-el-Mandab straits (the Gate of Grief), barely 14 miles across (narrower than the English Channel between Dover and Calais), is a choke-point for the world economy.
Meanwhile Iran and the US are conducting a carefully balanced sabre-rattling exercise in public while no doubt using back-channels to keep the temperature down. Neither country can afford a war. Joe Biden, the US President, has an election to win (or lose) in November. Iran’s theocracy may be bellicose but it’s also realistic.
Israel’s wars do not stay with Israel. Like a boulder thrown into a lake its ripples are felt way beyond Israel and the occupied territories. David Cameron, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, says that the “lights are flashing red on the global dashboard”. There is talk of a worldwide economic turndown as bulk carriers are rerouted via the Cape of Good Hope.
Which brings us back to the question of Israel’s long-term security and whether it’s on the right track. Uri Bar-Joseph is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Haifa university. He is one Israel’s most astute military thinkers. Bar-Joseph’s thesis is simple and stark: Israel’s defence posture, which was fine in the 1960s, is now bankrupt.
Israel’s doctrine, argues Bar-Joseph, has been based since its creation in 1948 on three, fundamental principles: deterrence, swift mobilisation and beating the enemy quickly and decisively. As the Romans said: “If you want peace, prepare for war”.
Given that Israel is very small territorially with virtually no strategic depth, its population dwarfed by that of its mainly hostile neighbours, this requires three other things: a highly trained, well-equipped, lightning-fast armed forces; a faultless intelligence apparatus and, to ward off the unthinkable, a nuclear deterrent.
Of these, an intelligence service of the first order is by far the most important. Because of its position and its size, to survive Israel must be able to see what’s coming early and react fast. It failed to do this in the run-up to the slaughter on October 7 (despite a network of ultra-sophisticated surveillance equipment), as it failed 50 years earlier on the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war.
Just a week before the Hamas attack, the Israel Defence Forces website published a piece in which it lauded its Military Intelligence units “that know everything about the enemy.” This hubris was not unprecedented. Twenty-four hours before Egyptian and Syrian forces overran Israel’s positions on the Golan Heights and the Sinai in 1973, military intelligence chief, Eli Zeira, told a General Staff meeting that the probability of all-out war was “lower than low”.
The complacency that led to these spectacular failures of intelligence – at least in the case of Hamas — is twinned with a refusal to accept that a rounded security doctrine must include a political element. You can’t break a siege if you’re not prepared to talk to your enemy. Since returning to power in 2009, Netanyahu has done everything he can to ward off any talk of a revived peace process. He is just not interested.
On the contrary Netanyahu — with the support of his ultra-right, religious camp — actively supported Hamas in Gaza as a way of undermining the Palestinians on the West Bank. He even turned a blind eye to funding for a terrorist organisation from Qatar. This led to the fatally flawed assumption that Hamas (which does not recognise Israel’s right to exist and never will) was dormant.
Israel’s prolonged occupation, especially of the West Bank, now in its 57th year, has played its part in this gradual weakening of its political and military antennae. An army of occupation is not the same as an offensive fighting force. It lives at a different pace and has entirely different priorities. It’s arguable that the IDF – despite its panache and occasional, spectacular successes – has lost its edge precisely because it has largely been turned into a police force.
At some point there will be a reckoning about what went wrong on October 7th. Netanyahu will want to keep that as narrowly focused as possible: why did Shin-Bet, the Israeli security agency, not see this coming? It’s supposed to know what is happening in Gaza. Why did the electronic wall fail? What can we do to beef up the IDF?
There is even talk of Israel retaining overall security control in Gaza. Yet October 7 and its aftermath are the clearest possible evidence that Israel’s insistence of control by force of arms alone is flawed. A permanent state of war by any power is unsustainable — even against a barefoot army. The 20th century taught us that.
The circular arguments about who was responsible in previous failed attempts at peace between Israel and the Palestinians are irrelevant. In any case Israel has been able to make peace, or something approaching peace, with a number of Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan. It was close to an agreement with Saudi Arabia before October 7.
Also the centre of gravity in the Arab world since the Arab spring of 2011 has shifted decisively away from the so-called frontline states (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya) to the Gulf. Which is precisely why Netanyahu miscalculated. He thought the “bad guys” had been dealt with.
Peace is not impossible. The Arab states of the Gulf are rich and could fund an economic revival in Palestine. The extraordinary reinvention of these desert kingdoms is driven by money. It would be in their interest and in everyone’s else’s to have a thriving Levantine economy — even China’s, whose ultimate interest is in the bottom line.
There is always the question of Iran. It’s not about to roll over. But with carefully co-ordinated diplomacy Iranian mischief can be contained. And in the long-run the theocracy needs growth to keep its citizens sweet.
Hamas is toxic and its attack on Israel was barbaric. It still holds some 130 hostages. Israel is still deep in grief at those who died on October 7. The deaths of thousands of Palestinian children will seed a new generation who wish to exact revenge. Just as there will be many Israelis who, once again, will say “never again”.
But if Israel wants to avoid being at war forever, it has to acknowledge that its security doctrine — based solely on military prowess and continued occupation — is past its sell-by date. Something new is needed and that something is political.
Ami Ayalon, the decorated ex-head of Shin Bet and of Israel’s navy summed it up with the admirable clarity in a Guardian interview this week . Destroying Hamas was not a realistic military goal, he said, adding: “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation.”
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