During the shock last weekend that was as monumental for Israel as was Sept. 11, 2001, for the U.S. a generation ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set out a good framework to respond. Whether he can stick to that strategy and execute it, rather than repeat the mistakes the U.S. made in the years after al-Qaeda’s equally unexpected attack on New York, will decide his place in Israel’s history.
Netanyahu said his country was now at “war’’ with Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the U.S. Though understandable, or even inevitable, given the moment, this wasn’t a good sign. Wars demand clear battlefield victories that don’t necessarily bring strategic ones, and Israel’s strategic priority right now should be containment. This conflict could grow a lot worse if allowed.
The more substantive part of Netanyahu’s statement on Saturday was hard to fault. He divided his prescription for the days and weeks ahead into three parts: First, clear Hamas fighters from Israeli territory and restore security to the border; second, exact a price from Hamas, including in Gaza, while securing other borders to ensure nobody else attacks, and finally, unite and remain level-headed. It’s the second and third parts that will be hard to stick to, so let’s take them one at a time.
Netanyahu’s second point is critical. It balances the need for retribution, and to weaken Hamas’ capacity for any repeat, with the need to make sure that this brutal raid on Israeli territory doesn’t become a real war, fought by Israel on one side against a range of state and non-state actors on the other. This is likely to be Hamas’s intent.
Despite all the 1973 parallels, this isn’t the Yom Kippur war – yet. Israel has been attacked by just one of its regional adversaries, and one of the weakest at that. Some of the country’s battlefield opponents from the 1970s have even reconciled with it since. Still, all this can change quickly if the conflict escalates with the fury of the moment.
As with the U.S. and Afghanistan after Sept. 11, Netanyahu has little choice but to send his armed forces into Gaza, not least to retrieve hostages. But the nature and extent of that assault aren’t predetermined. Gaza is a densely populated urban territory of about 2 million people, and achieving full control will likely require the most vicious, difficult form of warfare. The Israel Defense Forces are equipped to do that, but it isn’t clear what an achievable endgame would be, and that needs to be determined in advance. Failure to do so cost the U.S. and ordinary Afghans dearly. Iraq was a still-worse example.
A full-blown invasion aimed at wiping Hamas and its supporters from the map would increase the risk that other regional players become involved, seeing an opportunity as Israeli forces become bogged down in Gaza. Public support for action in Arab states also would likely grow, in tandem with online images of civilian Palestinian casualties.
Some, including Republican U.S. senators, have concluded already that Iran organized last Saturday’s attack, enabled by $6 billion in fresh funding approved by the Biden administration as part of a prisoner exchange deal. It’s an understandable question. Iran does finance and support Hamas, and on Monday President Ebrahim Raisi congratulated the group on an attack that has already claimed more than 1,000 lives, many of them civilians. The U.S. says there is no hard evidence of Tehran’s substantive involvement. A Wall Street Journal report says there was Iranian coordination, citing sources in Hamas and Hezbollah.
Regarding the $6 billion. That money – which consists of previously frozen Iranian cash – is, as far as anyone can be sure, still tied up in Qatari banks. Given that the funds arrived in Qatar only after a Sept. 27 agreement, they couldn’t have paid for the months-long preparations needed for Hamas’ multi-pronged attack. It’s also reasonable to expect that if this plan had originated with Iran, it would have involved a second front opened by Hezbollah from Lebanon. So far, Hezbollah has only fired a few warning shots into the tiny, disputed Shebaa farms strip, which were met with a similarly symbolic response from the Israelis. A larger Hezbollah intervention could yet come.
Others have accused Russia, which could well benefit from the distraction from its war in Ukraine. But again, there is no evidence to support this. Perhaps it will come, too, but Hamas had plenty of reasons of its own to act when it did. Confirmation of an Iranian role in particular needs to be rock solid, because that could trigger a much wider regional war with unpredictable consequences. And if Iran did plan the attack, a wider war will have been part of its planning, if not its goal.
Which brings us to Netanyahu’s third agenda items: unity and level headedness. There is no justifying what Hamas has done, yet there will also be no repairing the puncture its attack has inflicted on Israeli confidence in the invincibility of its defenses. That needs to feed into a reassessment of whether the Netanyahu government’s uncompromising approach on every Palestinian red line – from access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, to the status of Jerusalem or settlement policies in the West Bank – is sustainable. Last Saturday’s mayhem suggests strongly that it is not.
One reason Hamas had so much success in achieving operational surprise against Israel’s storied intelligence service, as well as in storming the border, appears to have been that so many security services resources had been diverted north to the West Bank, to deal with Palestinian protests over the actions of Netanyahu’s government and its supporters. Israeli protests over his attempts to weaken the independence of nation’s judiciary created further distraction.
That record isn’t encouraging when it comes to achieving either unity or a level head. The political pressure on Netanyahu to exact maximum possible revenge rather than act strategically, especially from the right wing of his coalition government, will be overwhelming. So, it’s a good sign he said he’d consider forming a new cross-party government to deal with the emergency. As opposition leader Yair Lapid put it, the coming fight “won’t be easy and it won’t be short. It has strategic consequences, which we haven’t seen for many years. There is a serious risk that it will become a multi-front war.”
Less promising was Netanyahu’s address one week ago, in which he pledged victory in a war that would turn every hiding place in the “evil city” of Gaza to rubble. He needs to stay the course and follow his own advice on how to respond to Hamas’s attack, for the sake of Israelis, the vast majority of Palestinians who aren’t combatants and his own legacy.
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