Yossi Mekelberg
Almost 50 years to the day after Israel was caught totally unprepared by a coordinated Egyptian-Syrian attack and suffered immense casualties, followed by a decades-long trauma, something very similar happened in the early hours of last Saturday. Another disaster has struck, but this time it was an unprecedented murderous incursion by Hamas.
We are still in the very early stages of what is now a war between Israel and this Palestinian fundamentalist organization, to which Israel has committed itself, and there is hardly any reason to suspect the seriousness of its intention, which is to eliminate Hamas altogether. This is the mood not only among the decision-makers in Israel, but the people too. Israel is in a state of shock, still digesting the horror of the mass killings of civilians and soldiers, but also the total intelligence failure and the collapse not only of its physical defenses in Gaza, but its conceptual approach to Hamas and, more generally, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Tragically, what is to follow is likely to become one of the bloodiest confrontations between Israel and the Palestinians since 1948 and one of the reasons for this is that Hamas surprised even itself and “overachieved” in the worst possible way. It has pushed Israel into a corner, from which it feels obliged to respond with full force. History is replete with miscalculations and unintended consequences and usually they come with a heavy price, which, catastrophically, is where the situation in Gaza is currently heading. It will take time and distance from Hamas’ assault on Israel to fully understand its exact intentions in launching such a land, sea and air attack, but the militants that carried out the attack left more than 1,000 Israelis dead, most of them civilians, and injured thousands more, while taking between 100 and 150 hostages. Many more are still missing. If those were the initial intentions of the organization, which I strongly doubt, then the objective was to start a war in the hope that the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would join them and perhaps even Hezbollah in Lebanon would wade in and, by that, ignite a regional Armageddon.
But in this unlikely scenario, as Hamas’ leaders must have known, by such a course of action they were bound to sign their own death warrants. More likely is that they were preparing an operation with a much more limited set of objectives in terms of taking probably just a few Israeli soldiers hostage and causing fewer casualties. What they did not expect was that crossing the border with Israel would be so easy in terms of physical barriers and military response, which left their way clear to enter towns, villages and kibbutzes and commit a terrible atrocity – the massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians, including the very young and the elderly – and take many hostages. If Hamas also thought that internal divisions in Israel would stretch to a refusal to serve in a state of emergency, they could not have been more mistaken. Ironically, they have probably saved Netanyahu’s political skin. At least for now.
This terrible blow to Israel, which has never before suffered such a huge loss of life in one day, especially not of so many civilians, makes it even worse than the debacle of 1973. Its entire strategy in regard to relations with Gaza and especially Hamas collapsed in the space of a few hours, badly damaging its deterrence and military credibility, not only vis-a-vis the Palestinians but across the region. Israel’s intelligence failure on this occasion goes well beyond the failure to gather credible information from its network of informers or its digital intelligence means, but embraces the entirety of its working assumptions about Hamas’ intentions and its capabilities. The failures that led to this calamity go all the way to the top of the government, including and especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
For months, if not years, Israeli strategists have believed that, by some limited improvement of economic conditions in the Gaza Strip, by allowing more Palestinians from Gaza to work in Israel and more commodities to enter and leave the territory, Hamas would be more interested in engaging in governing the Strip and increasing its political power, while refraining from military confrontation with a far superior power. Although nothing can excuse the killing of innocent people, it is the refusal to grasp the fact that conditions such as those created in Gaza breed extremism that is part of this conceptual failure. When this war is over – and one can only hope that targeting civilians will not have become a priority – it is inevitable that an official inquiry will be established to investigate these operational failures and who was responsible for them. In the meantime, while Israel is in mourning and burying its dead, it has also embarked on a prolonged and massive retaliation.
Since its deadly and unsuccessful 2014 operation in Gaza, Israel has avoided sending in ground troops to the territory, but it has now mobilized much of its reserve force and is ready to enter the Strip. From trying to find an uneasy coexistence with Hamas, Israel is now seeking a military solution for what has happened in Gaza, which might prove to be equally counterproductive. The level of anger in Israel at the carnage and the hostage-taking is profound, and naturally directed at Hamas, but there is also anger directed at the Israeli government for failing its people on the most important issues it is in charge of – their and their families’ lives and security. Despite Israelis’ justified rage, any operation in Gaza should not be about vengeance and revenge – and it most definitely must avoid a humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians who live there. There is an opportunity for Israel to go to war while also having a political solution in mind; one that ends the blockade on Gaza and opens the way for a peaceful coexistence with Gaza and its people, as well as the rest of the Palestinians.
As far-fetched as it sounds right now, this is what statesmen and great strategists do – look beyond the war and plan the peace in its aftermath. One of the reasons behind Hamas’ attack on Israel was its desire to derail the process of Israel normalizing its relations with other countries in the region. By launching as careful and measured a response as is possible, targeting the perpetrators of the atrocity and only them, Israel will enhance its long-term security and acceptability in the region.
