It seems like a whole lifetime has gone by since we were caught by total surprise by the Hamas attack on Israel’s Gaza border towns just over a week ago – an attack which led Israel to declare a state of war.
As the days have gone by, we have been gradually exposed to the full horrors of the beastly conduct of 1,000 (or more) Hamas terrorists, and an additional unknown number of riffraff, made up of private Gaza inhabitants, who took advantage of the fact that the Hamas had broken through the “unpassable” wall the IDF had constructed around the Gaza Strip at the cost of three billion shekels, to cross the border into Israel at their own initiative, and commit all forms of imaginable (and unimaginable) criminal offenses against Israeli civilians.
Both the surprise of the Hamas attack and the ease with which the barrier was crossed were the result of basic misconceptions on the part of Israel’s military and intelligence forces, and consequently by its political leaders, regarding the motives, capabilities, and plans of Hamas, and the reliability of sophisticated physical barriers, which are not accompanied by a sufficient physical presence of armed forces. It was a repetition of what had happened upon the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, 50 years and one day earlier.
For the time being only IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi has accepted responsibility for the total lack of preparedness and its consequences. The political level has so far failed to accept responsibility for anything, including, in addition to the lack of preparedness, the absence of immediate manifestations of sympathy and support for those who have personally experienced the horrors, loss of lives, and lack of information about persons taken hostage or missing. Undoubtedly, once this bloody war will be over, all those responsible for the foul-up will have to account for their conduct.
However, at the moment everything must be done to win this war as decisively and quickly as possible.
Even those of us who have not been exposed to the full graphic evidence of the horrors committed by Hamas and the accompanying riffraff are in total agreement that Iibersrael cannot tolerate the continued existence of Hamas and its military power, as the governing body of the Gaza Strip. Obliterating Hamas in the Gaza Strip will require a very different form of fighting from that to which we have been accustomed in previous military skirmishes and operations in the Gaza Strip.
Doing away with Hamas’s military force, infrastructures and that part of its leadership that resides in the Gaza Strip, will require a good deal of physical destruction, both above and under the ground, especially in the city of Gaza in the northern Gaza Strip. In order for the IDF to be able to achieve this successfully, and with a minimal number of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians being killed, Israel has called for around one million Palestinian inhabitants in and around Gaza – many of them offspring of 1948/49 Palestinian refugees – to move to the southern part of the Gaza Strip, and if possible, beyond into Egypt.
This is going to be a complicated operation, accompanied by many difficult tactical and strategic decisions, with numerous International Law pitfalls which the United States has reportedly already called upon Israel to try to avoid, and the danger of Israel losing the international sympathy and support, which it has been receiving since October 7, due to the humanitarian crisis that the results of the war will undoubtedly create in the Gaza Strip.
Among the various issues that Israel will have to attend to in cooperation with other states and international organizations, after the actual fighting will come to an end, hopefully with Israel attaining all its goals, are the problem of the displaced residents of the Gaza Strip; the question of who will replace Hamas as the governing force in the Gaza Strip; and how to prevent Hamas from continuing to exist in some form outside the Gaza Strip, with Iranian financing.
The situation could become even more complicated, should Hezbollah decide to open a second front against Israel along its northern border.
All this has contributed to the urgent need to form a national unity government in Israel, with at least part of the center/left opposition.
We need a unity government to fight Hamas, but Netanyahu will never allow it
Unfortunately, Netanyahu is unwilling to form a national unity government, such as the one which existed in 1984-88 between the Likud and the Labor Alignment – a government based on parity between the two sides, and rotation in the premiership between Labor leader Shimon Peres and Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir, even though no love was lost between these two figures. Such a government today would not only ensure an optimal decision-making process in the running of the war, but would also enable an agreed solution to the constitutional crisis, which has been put on hold since a week ago Saturday.
Netanyahu refused to form a unity government without all the members of the all-right coalition he formed at the end of December 2022, and the government that was finally formed several days ago was not a true national unity government, but his all-right coalition, plus Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party as a temporary addendum: a government supported by 76 MKs, but unlikely to survive for any length of time beyond the war.
What Gantz was offered were six positions of ministers without portfolio, and the participation of himself and Gadi Eisenkot (as an observer) in a narrow war cabinet, which will presumably be responsible for outlining the basic moves to be implemented in the war, but without breaking up any of the existing government forums involved in decision making. Thus, an already over-bloated government made up of 32 ministers (after Galit Distal-Atbaryan resigned as information minister the other day, will now include 38 ministers – many of them without portfolios – or totally superfluous.
At the moment, Yair Lapid, leader of Yesh Atid, refuses to join this arrangement, and it is doubtful whether Netanyahu is really interested in him joining. On Saturday it was announced that Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu would also be joining the coalition, but Liberman finally decided not to join because he was denied a seat in the narrow war cabinet.
The question is to what extent Gantz and Eisenkot – both former chiefs of staff – will have a real say in the decision making of how the war will be run from now until it ends. The Likud will be represented in the narrow war cabinet by Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer (as an observer).
We shall have to wait and see how this arrangement will work, even though the fact that the quintet includes three reserve generals, and Netanyahu himself, who is certainly proficient in some military matters, is encouraging. The question remains whether the five will manage to agree on the major critical issues, and whether Netanyahu is really interested in this happening.
It should be noted that an opinion poll held by Ma’ariv, simultaneously with the extension of the government, predicted that if elections were held today Gantz’s party would receive 41 seats, the Likud 19 seats and Yesh Atid 16. Netanyahu’s all-right bloc would go down from 64 to 48 seats. Under these circumstances, no matter how victorious Israel will emerge from this war, Netanyahu certainly has no incentive to let Gantz and Eisenkot catch any of the limelight.
The writer worked in the Knesset for many years as a researcher, and has published extensively both journalistic and academic articles on current affairs and Israeli politics. Her most recent book, Israel’s Knesset Members – A Comparative Study of an Undefined Job, was published by Routledge last year.