Israel will not find security in vengeance against Hamas
Netanyahu will be remembered as the self-styled strongman who disarmed Israel
Consider what your enemy wants you to do. Had George W Bush’s administration heeded that advice after the Al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States would not have gone to war against Iraq, and the Middle East, and the world would have been spared the violent chaos that followed.
Benjamin Netanyahu is in a mood to repeat the mistake. The Israeli prime minister promises unprecedented vengeance against Hamas after the horror of last weekend’s massacre. None but the perpetrators are responsible for the terrible violence wrought against innocent civilians. Israel has an absolute right to defend itself. But there is another unavoidable truth. The attack also holds up a mirror to the utter failure of Netanyahu’s Palestinian policy.
Israel’s response, the prime minister says, will “change the Middle East”. Hamas has already done that. Netanyahu’s vainglorious claim to have assured Israel’s security while disabling the Palestine Authority, permitting settlers to act with impunity in the West Bank, and operating a mix of containment and co-existence with Hamas in Gaza now lies in the bloodied ruins of the towns and villages of southern Israel. However many bombs are now dropped on Gaza that failure cannot be undone.
Alex Younger, a former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, has remarked that the attack came as a complete surprise because of “a failure of imagination” by the Israeli government. A blunter version of this analysis, which European intelligence agencies say is widely shared among security chiefs within Israel, is that Netanyahu’s refusal to contemplate anything but the triumph of his own approach militated against a serious examination of any contrary evidence. Israel did not see the slaughter coming because its prime minister did not want to see it.
The Israeli prime minister says he will “destroy” Hamas. Those same Israeli security chiefs know well that it is impossible. What, they must even now being asking themselves, does victory look like? Permanent armed occupation of Gaza? Many, perhaps most, of the present Hamas leadership can be killed. But there are more Palestinians than can be counted to take its place. The harsher the vengeance against the Palestinians locked up in Gaza, the stronger the radicalisation impulse among the young. This is precisely what the authors of the attack want.
The second pillar of Netanyahu’s approach assumed that the (imagined) security he had achieved within Israel could be accompanied by the normalisation of its relations with the Arab world. The Abraham accords of Donald Trump’s presidency moved in this direction, and Joe Biden’s administration has shown a readiness to underwrite an accord with Saudi Arabia.
Hamas had now blown up the underlying assumption of these initiatives - that the Palestinian question can simply be sidelined in a grand regional reconfiguration of powers calculated to isolate Iran. Prospects of an accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia have receded. So what does Hamas want now? An Israeli assault on Gaza so ferocious, and with such appalling civilian casualties, to destroy completely any prospect of Arab-Israeli detente and to turn international sympathy for Israel into condemnation.
Netanyahu is unwilling to contemplate such logic. Such has been the scale of his failure that his abiding preoccupation is with feeding the understandable anger and revulsion among Israelis. At the back of his mind may be the hope that somehow the United States can soon enough be pulled into a wider conflict against Iran. An American war against Tehran has always been a Netanyahu dream.
To say that this should be a time for cold strategic logic may defy the emotional realities stirred by the Hamas attacks. I am reminded, however, of a long interview that Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister gave just before the war against Hamas in 2009.
Israel will never turn armed might into strategic security, Olmert said then. If need be, it could win a war against all its enemies combined. But if it wanted peace it had to face the decision it had avoided for 40 years: withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. Military victories and land grabs were futile. Security would come only with political resolution.
In his last days in office, Olmert put aside his own advice as Israel went to war again with Hamas. But the sentiments he expressed are no less potent for that. “A prime minister must ask himself where best to direct his own efforts”, he said. “Are [they] directed toward making peace or are they directed constantly towards making the country stronger and stronger in order to win a war?”
The only lasting answer, he concluded, was to designate internationally endorsed borders between Israel and Palestine: “What I am saying here has never been said by a leader of Israel. But the time has come to say these things.” It is time again.
One can have utter revulsion of Hamas's act of terror but at the same time utter despair at Israels response. Patrick Cockburn, in the i likened Hamas's acts to the Tet offensive in Vietnam. He's right, ultimately ended in defeat for the Viet Cong but succeeded in highlighting the weakness of the American side. Israel are not very good at incursions and to enter into guerrilla warfare which can be morale sapping and devastating politically, as the body bags, come home is obstinate folly.
And let us not forget Hezbollah. What if they become involved? Will the US come to Israels aid after pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq?
Diplomacy will end this. But at the moment it's a long way off
Another insightful and helpful piece Philip. The atrocity of the Hamas attack cannot go unanswered, however as you point out, even in the heat of such a response there should be a view of what happens next. There is no doubt that Hamas and its sponsors have strategic objectives. It is important that these are understood such that the response avoids aiding and abetting achieving them. In this regard Hamas and its guiding hand care as much for the Palestinians as they did for the victims of their attack. We can only hope that the the personal agenda of the Israeli Prime Minister does not prevail.