A Generation of Misguided Policy in Israel
For more than a generation, defence policy and much else has been increasingly determined by the dictates of Israel’s religious settler lobby and its Messianic visions.
Israel was not founded by religious Jews. The early Zionists were secular, rational, and uniquely unsentimental about the Jewish condition in late 19th-century Europe and beyond. They believed that if Jews were to end their tragic two-thousand-year exile, their reliance on God and the fatalism it bred needed to be expunged.
The early Zionists’ focus on secularism seems to have been vindicated by recent events.
How could the catastrophe on 7 October, which claimed the lives of at least 1,400 Israelis and has left 220 as hostages of Hamas, have happened? How could Israel lose control, over the course of a few hours, of an entire swath of its sovereign territory, including twenty-two kibbutzim and other villages? Beyond the obvious intelligence failure, one reason is that a good portion of the troops in the enlarged division that was meant to be guarding the Gaza border had been redeployed to keep order and protect an ever-expanding archipelago of tiny, often unauthorized West Bank settlements and roads leading to them. The sole purpose of these outposts was to establish a de facto Jewish presence in the West Bank and hence restrict the actions available to future Israeli governments. Objections and warnings by the defence establishment that the military and security services were overstretched, that the army no longer had the requisite forces or the time to train soldiers properly, were dismissed as the defeatism of an old and tired secular elite, by a growing chorus of hyper-patriotic, right-wing zealots, people often with little or no practical military experience.
For more than a generation, defence policy and much else has been increasingly determined by the dictates of Israel’s religious settler lobby and its Messianic visions. Though not numerous, parties representing the settlers exploited Israel’s system of proportional representation, which magnifies the influence of small, well-organized pressure groups, to effectively capture an entire state. A careful programme of entryism allowed the Likud, too, to become heavily influenced by MKs and party members from the settlements that in no way reflected the party’s broader voter base.
Benny Morris
It is not just the tactical decision-making power of this group over troop deployments that has now collapsed, but their larger strategic vision. This was a belief that by dispersing a population of Jews around the West Bank we could gradually annex it, all the while pretending that we could ignore the presence of three million hostile Palestinians, and the demographic consequences their incorporation would entail. It is in this context that the settlers, and their secular avatar Benyamin Netanyahu, came to view Hamas as a strategic asset, because its radicalism made any efforts to find a compromise, or even merely to contain the conflict, impossible. Suitcases of cash, supplied by Hamas’ Qatari allies no less, could be relied upon to keep Hamas in power but restrained. What better proof was needed that God was on our side?
Yet beyond the failure of both tactics and strategy, it is the cultural effects of this way of thinking—which bred arrogance, complacency, and above all wishful thinking—that has created the greatest threat to Israel in at least fifty years. Religious obscurantists with government portfolios declared that Yeshiva study was as important as military service in protecting Israel from its enemies. Study Torah and God would not forsake us.
God did not intervene to save families like mine in 1939; and in 1973, the small number of surviving tank crews who ultimately stopped the columns of Syrian armour on the Golan Heights knew that only their heroism and sacrifice would protect their families from a similar fate. The kibbutzniks who fought and died trying to protect their communities against the Hamas terrorists on 7 October understood the same thing. One hopeful sign of change is that hundreds of ultraorthodox men, in defiance of their Rabbis and politicians, have now contacted the IDF and asked to be inducted into the reserves.
Netanyahu and his cabinet of Twitter warriors, sycophants and fixers need to go. Now. It is hard to see any of them being able to offer effective leadership during what may be a lengthy conflict, all the while knowing what future official inquiries are likely to reveal about their behaviour these last few months. Even if we exclude the ministers who were serving in the cabinet on the morning of the attack, there are enough people in the Knesset from both the coalition and opposition with serious defence credentials to form an emergency government, including two lieutenant generals (former chiefs of staff), a major general, two brigadier generals, two former chiefs of police, and the former deputy head of the Mossad. There are also people with executive experience in the civilian realm, particularly several former mayors.
And that is just the beginning. Long term, Israel is too vulnerable to be governed by feckless people in the grip of childish fantasies. For nine months, the government has been fixated on replacing Israel’s ill-designed, highly centralised democracy with a new model that would magnify its worst flaws, and passing a series of laws that would exempt it from judicial oversight.
In the days that followed the attack, survivors and the families of the hostages were left to their own devices. Israelis discovered just how hollowed out and incompetent state institutions had become—hobbled by years of corruption and patronage, proving how badly we need more, not less, accountability and external scrutiny. What did prove robust and filled the vacuum were Israel’s civil society organisations and volunteer networks—precisely the types of institutions that are incompatible with the overbearing system of centralized power the government wished to impose. Indeed, among the most effective have been the movements that brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets in recent months to protest the government’s constitutional machinations. And no one more than the military reservists and retirees of Brothers and Sisters in Arms, who have been at the forefront of the protests to preserve Israel’s liberal democracy from the beginning.
It was through this network that several retired senior military officers were alerted that morning that Hamas’ terrorists had crossed the first line of defence and were killing people in communities close to the border and the music festival nearby. Men of this type, aged sixty and over, whose first instinct was to grab a gun and drive toward the slaughter to kill terrorists and save random strangers, are not produced in societies governed by strongmen. In Israel, as in Ukraine, democracies foster initiative, improvisation, courage, and resilience rather than conformity and passivity.
Ali A. Rizvi
The goal of eradicating Hamas as an organisation may prove infeasible. Ensuring it never again governs the Gaza Strip may prove difficult as well, particularly given that the Palestinian Authority that governs much of the West Bank will not wish to be seen to be collaborating with Israel. They will be reluctant to resume control of the territory from which its officials were chased out or killed by Hamas thirteen years ago. Nonetheless, eliminating the physical infrastructure Hamas uses to manufacture rockets that target Israeli cities is achievable. So is killing or capturing some part of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s terror armies, which together constitute 40,000 individuals.
The Western press these days is full of warnings about the dangers of any such operation and is essentially lobbying Israel to stand down and agree to an unconditional ceasefire. One hears one commentator after another solemnly affirming Israel’s right to defend itself before asserting that any possible offensive action it might take will constitute a war crime. Though Israel uses precision guided bombs, Gaza’s packed population means that civilians will indeed inevitably be hurt, particularly if Hamas does not let them leave their homes. Cutting off food, water, or even just the electricity Hamas uses to manufacture fresh rockets to launch at Israel, will create a humanitarian disaster. Even the targeting of Hamas officials is deemed to be illegal extra-judicial killing. Needless to say, a ground invasion is treated as out of the question, as civilians will again be in the way. Yet even more nuanced commentators do, rightly, raise valid questions about how much that option will achieve.
Historically, fighting a guerrilla army in a densely populated urban setting exacts a heavy toll on regular troops. Hamas has spent years planning for this type of war. Every house along the plausible invasion routes will be filled with booby traps. Beneath the surface of every road, they will have buried special mines designed to take out tanks and other armoured vehicles. These will be stacked to increase their lethality and make removing them difficult. If all else fails, some fighters can escape capture by changing into civilian clothes and blending in with the civilian population. Warnings that Hamas may be deliberately luring the IDF into a long, bloody, and ultimately unwinnable campaign cannot be completely dismissed. The fate of the hostages and the possibility that Hezbollah, a far more powerful force, might open a second front makes all this more difficult still. Yet the successful fight by the US against Al Qaeda in Fallujah, and the combined efforts by the West and its local allies against ISIS in Mosul and Rakah, teach us that it is possible to defeat the Jihadis.
Furthermore, while many commentators have carefully elaborated the dangers of a ground invasion, they have generally failed to consider the broader implications for Israel should it choose not to invade. First, if Hamas emerges with its forces largely intact, there is nothing to stop it from launching further attacks in the years to come at a moment of its choosing. Others, too, will be emboldened by this Hamas victory. Far from garnering the world’s respect, restraint will be interpreted as weakness. Allies, including the United States, will gradually abandon Israel—no one needs a weak ally. The Arab states may publicly denounce Israel’s aggression, but privately they have much to fear from a Hamas victory and the resurgence of its ideology around the region. Yet Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE have no reason to cooperate with an Israeli state that is unable or unwilling to protect itself, and that has lost the confidence of its own citizens.
There are also wider implications for the core nations of the West in Europe and North America. In the last two years, Russia and now Iran—through its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon—have each gone to war against members of the West’s democratic alliance. With stocks of ammunition and arms running short, how soon before China and North Korea each do the same against Taiwan and South Korea? Who is to say which parts of the core Western alliance will come under pressure after that?
In the West, some people on the left complain bitterly about the hyper-individualism and social atomization of modern market-driven societies. But when such people talk about “community” and the “collective good,” some of them seem to mean only such things as safe bike lanes and free yoga classes—not protection from an invading army coming to kill your family. Because we wish to believe that we live in a world where such atrocities can never, ever happen. That blind spot reflects a different sort of religious dogma, equally unmoored from reality.
As for Israel, the drift towards religious nationalism and the magical thinking it encourages led us to underestimate our enemies and overextend our forces. In 2015 a previous hard-right government led by Netanyahu reduced the period of required military service for men from 36 to 32 months and announced plans to lower it to 30 in the future. The military was forced to condense training schedules to accommodate these changes. In retrospect, militaristic rhetoric was no substitute for more and better trained soldiers. Because despite all our hopes and prayers, there is so far no sign the Messiah is on his way. We are on our own.
