Shortly after Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of
Israel, its sadistic massacre of 1,200 Israelis and kidnap of 246 men,
women and children from southern Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and his government declared war on Iran’s Palestinian proxy.
The government set four war goals: the military eradication of Hamas;
the eradication of Hamas’s civilian regime in the Gaza Strip; the return
of all the hostages; and the permanent pacification of Gaza to ensure
that it will never pose a threat to Israel again.
Almost immediately thereafter, anonymous
“senior IDF sources” began grousing to the media about the government’s
war goals. “Sources in the General Staff” have been regularly cited
advocating for replacing the goals of the war with others that rule out
Hamas’s eradication and the permanent pacification of Gaza.
A few weeks into the war, the Biden
administration began insisting that the government set out its vision
for postwar Gaza while making no effort to hide what it expects the plan
to include: the transfer of power to the terror-infused, Hamas-aligned
Palestinian Authority. As Netanyahu hemmed and hawed and delayed his
response to avoid a confrontation with the administration, Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant, Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy and
the other generals hopped on the U.S. bandwagon.
Buttressed by a chorus of retired
generals, the sitting generals have insisted on and off the record that
the absence of a vision of the day after the war leaves the military
directionless. Netanyahu, they gripe, is making it impossible for the
IDF to fight strategically.
The generals have things backwards.
Israel’s strategic goals of destroying Hamas and securing the release of
the hostages are both straightforward. It is the General Staff’s job to
set out a plan for achieving them, replete with benchmarks to mark
success. By demanding a plan for the day after the war, the General
Staff is not asking for further guidance. It is demanding that the war
goals be revised.
Last Saturday, the General Staff’s
insubordination reached an all-time high. Israeli reporter Ronen Bergman
co-authored an article in The New York Times based on the claims of four unnamed generals in the General Staff.
Titled, “In Strategic Bind, Israel Weighs
Freeing Hostages Against Destroying Hamas,” Bergman wrote, “After more
than 100 days of war, Israel’s limited progress in dismantling Hamas has
raised doubts within the military’s high command about the near-term
feasibility of achieving the country’s principal wartime objectives:
eradicating Hamas and also liberating the Israeli hostages still in
Gaza.”
The fact that the IDF is making slower
progress than anticipated owes in large part to the intelligence
failures that preceded the Hamas invasion. On Oct. 6, the IDF assessed
that Hamas had around 160 kilometers (nearly 100 miles) of underground
tunnels. Now, after two months of ground (and underground) warfare, the
IDF realizes that it was off by around 500%; Hamas’s underground tunnel
complex span up to 800 kilometers (500 miles). Obviously, under the
circumstances, the ground operation is taking longer than initially
anticipated. Rather than roll with the punches and keep slogging
forward, Bergman wrote that the slowness of Israel’s advance “has led
some commanders to privately express their frustrations over the
civilian government’s strategy for Gaza, and led them to conclude that
the freedom of more than 100 Israeli hostages still in Gaza can be
secured only through diplomatic rather than military means.”
“The dual objectives of freeing the
hostages and destroying Hamas are now mutually incompatible, according
to interviews with four senior military leaders, speaking on the
condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly
about their personal opinions,” he wrote.
Bergman is based in Tel Aviv. After
telling the world that Israel is incapable of winning, he turned to the
Israeli media to share the generals’ message with the public. Speaking
on Channel 12, Bergman said it is time for Israel to quit the
fight and sue for a deal—any deal—to secure the release of the hostages.
Citing the four generals, Bergman proclaimed that defeat is the only
option.
Appeasement doesn’t work
The generals’ rank insubordination—and
efforts to demoralize the public during a time of war while failing to
develop clear benchmarks for victory—comes as no surprise. For the past
generation, the General Staff has undergone radical politicization. In
successive appointment cycles in the past 30 years, colonels and
brigadier generals unwilling to toe the political left’s line have been
blocked from appointments to strategically significant postings, and
have generally found themselves out of the IDF before reaching the rank
of major general.
For a generation, the Holy Grail of the
General Staff has been to reject the very concept of victory. The
purpose of military campaigns is to secure deterrence, rather than
destroy the enemy. The amorphous concept of deterrence has enabled the
General Staff to embrace the incongruous claim that appeasement—that is
giving the enemy a payoff—can build deterrence. But, of course, if a
state seeks to appease its enemy, then it is the state, and not the
enemy, that is deterred.
Rejecting the concept of victory is the
natural consequence of embracing the left’s paradigm that Israel’s
enemies from Iran to Hezbollah to the Palestinians are appeaseable and
that their shared strategic goal of annihilating Israel is a bluff.
According to this thinking, in Iran, the regime is riven by power
struggles between moderates and extremists. And the trick is for the
Americans to figure out how to strengthen the moderates by giving the
extremists concessions.
Hezbollah, they argue, is deterred by the
Lebanese government. Hezbollah won’t go to war because it will make the
Lebanese government, which doesn’t want war, angry. And if Hezbollah
goes to war over the objections of the government, the government will
order the Lebanese Armed Forces to go to war against Hezbollah. This is
the U.S. line, and the IDF General Staff has stuck to it through thick
and thin since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. The only problem is that
it is based on a wilful blindness to two basic realities: First,
Hezbollah controls the Lebanese government; and second, Hezbollah
controls the LAF.
As for the Palestinians, members of the
General Staff, like their fellow leftists, are convinced that all they
need is to appease the Palestinians to resolve their conflict with
Israel. Give them money or jobs, let them build illegal villages and
neighborhoods in commanding positions along highways or adjacent to
Israeli cities, as well as villages on both sides of the 1949 Armistice
Line, and they will be appeased. Give Hamas-ruled Gaza cash from Qatar
and jobs in Israel, and prosperity will trump jihad.
This worldview, which has guided the
General Staff for decades, was destroyed completely on Oct. 7. Enemies
who seek to annihilate you are by definition undeterrable. Their goal is
your total destruction, and the more ingrained the goal, the more
obvious the imperative of destroying them becomes.
The government did not make Hamas’s
eradication the goal of the war because it sounded good politically.
They did so because, after Oct. 7, the existential nature of the
Palestinian war against the Jewish state is undeniable. Israel cannot
fight to a draw or lose (as the anonymous sources in the General Staff
advocate) and long survive. Not only will Hamas rebuild its strength
over time and strike again, but strategic diffidence and weakness
guarantee future aggression from Hezbollah and Iran that will be orders
of magnitude greater than the one-day Holocaust Israel suffered on Oct.
7.
Demanding an end to humanitarian aid
Notably, all of the General Staff’s
paradigms are shared by the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. So it
isn’t surprising that a consistent position of the generals is that the
United States, rather than the IDF, is the guarantor of Israel’s
survival. Accordingly, the generals oppose actions that would limit or
even end Israel’s strategic dependence on America. That dependence
commits the United States to protect Israel, and that protection will be
guaranteed if Israel maintains faith in its appeasement policies
towards Israel’s enemies.
The public—and rank-and-file officers and
soldiers on the ground in Gaza, along the border with Lebanon, and in
Judea and Samaria—are unmoved by the generals’ demoralizing messages.
They understand that Israel has no option other than to fight the war
until victory, whatever the price. The notion of appeasement-based
deterrence died on Oct. 7. In successive opinion polls since then, the
Israeli public has made clear that it opposes cutting a deal for the
hostages that will enable Hamas to survive the war. They oppose
Palestinian statehood, and under no circumstances is the public willing
to countenance a P.A. takeover of the Gaza Strip the day after the war.
The public’s unwillingness to accept
anything less than victory has placed the General Staff in a bind.
Reservists being sent home from the front have reacted not with
happiness but with indignation at leaving before victory has been
achieved. On Feb. 8, angry reservists are planning to hold a mass
demonstration demanding to be permitted to fight to victory down the
street from the Prime Minister’s Office.
On Wednesday and Thursday, hundreds of
relatives of hostages, mothers of IDF soldiers and other concerned
citizens blocked humanitarian aid trucks from entering Gaza through the
Kerem Shalom border crossing. These citizens recognize that humanitarian
aid is just a euphemism for resupply to Hamas. The government, they
say, may need to agree to humanitarian aid to placate the Biden
administration, but private citizens are under no such constraints. And
given the dire implications of the aid for the war effort, standing idly
by while Washington compels Jerusalem to give Hamas a lifeline to
remain in the tunnels is nothing short of insane.
The public’s operations are not limited to
the domestic realm. A new group, Mothers of IDF Soldiers, sent a letter
to President Joe Biden on Thursday demanding an end to humanitarian aid
to Gaza, arguing that the truckloads of fuel, food, water and medicine
endanger the lives of IDF soldiers; is not being distributed to
Palestinian civilians; enables Hamas to remain in charge of governing
affairs in Gaza; and prolongs the war by giving Hamas terrorists the
means to keep fighting from their tunnels and refusing to release the
hostages.
Netanyahu, for his part, is not relenting.
Nearly every day, he reiterates the war goals and insists that Israel
will fight until it achieves all of them. He is demanding that the IDF
provide him with benchmarks to measure its progress towards victory.
The generals in charge owe their positions
to their full adherence to the strategic paradigms of the United States
and the political left. They don’t want to move on. But the unanimity
of opinion from the public below and the government above will leave
them little choice. They will either get on board and deliver the
required victory, or they will eventually be forced to resign and make
room for others capable of doing the job.
1 comment:
For Israel most of their fights are not "win or lose." They are "win or die."
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