Week two of a long and bitter war is in progress. The international media is already according increasing coverage to the suffering of Gazans displaced by the fighting, to calls for “proportionality” that reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what international law and the Laws of Armed Conflict require, and to morally corrupt expressions of equivalency. The same tired and belabored calls upon Israel to exercise “restraint,” avoid a major operation that would be “disastrous” for it, and for the US to prevail on Israel to do so.
Enough. There are some 1,350 Israeli dead and counting, the per capita equivalent of 40,000 in United States, or 13 times 9/11s. There are approximately 150 Israelis in Hamas captivity, including infants, mothers, and the elderly. One can only imagine, or probably not, what they are going through.
In World War II entire German and Japanese cities were leveled, with no regard for civilian life. Fortunately, the world has moved on and no longer countenances such behavior. That does not mean that Gaza itself, nor its residents, who share responsibility for Hamas’s 16-year rule, should enjoy impunity. There is a price to be paid for an orgy of slaughter, mutilation, and killing of pregnant women, rape, burning families alive, devastating entire communities.
We have long warned of the murderous, indeed, genocidal intentions of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, that the population of any Israeli territory ever occupied, small as it might be, would be annihilated. These warnings fell on increasingly deaf ears. The events of the past week have proven to be tragically prescient.
I have always disliked contemporary comparisons to the Holocaust.
Israel was established precisely so that there could never be another one. The dire initial failures notwithstanding, the IDF remains a powerful military force and the situation as a whole bears no comparison. There is a very different United States, President Biden’s response could not have been better, and other countries have responded admirably, most notably the United Kingdom.
Israel will not be held hostage by a terrorist organization.
Nor should the people of Gaza, who may finally be freed of their radical theocratic oppressors and enjoy a new day. A major operation to fundamentally change the situation is now both a strategic and moral imperative. The Israeli government has publicly committed itself to the destruction of Hamas as a military force and to toppling it. A deeply traumatized Israeli public will have a hard time accepting anything less.
Let’s assume that the ground operation can successfully root out most of the tens of thousands of rockets and destroy the miles of underground tunnels with which Hamas has crisscrossed Gaza. The cost in the lives of IDF soldiers and Gazan civilians will be very high, but there is little choice today. Achieving these objectives is, however, a tall order and a number of critical questions arise.
What does toppling Hamas mean and what happens next?
WHAT DOES toppling Hamas, a mass popular organization, actually mean, and who takes over once it (and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) have been displaced. The obvious choice is to reinstate the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was overthrown by Hamas in a brief but bloody civil war in 2007. Neither the PA, as the governing body in the West Bank, however, nor its feckless octogenarian leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, have ever been particularly effective, even in the best of times.
As the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinians, they are the best of the bad options. An alternative is some sort of Gazan strongman willing to work with Israel. A third and more ambitious option, at a later stage, would be to try and install a leader who enjoys greater public legitimacy, possibly through internationally supervised elections. Someone with the credentials of former Palestinian prime minister (from 2007-2013) Salam Fayyad would be best, but the candidates are tragically few.
Israel can support these options behind the scenes, but any open support would be viewed as an act of collaboration that would taint the new leader. The question then is whether that leader can be given Palestinian, Arab, and international legitimacy. A US-led international coalition, a Saudi one, or preferably a combined one, would help.
Assuming that a new leader can be installed in Gaza, the next question is how to prop him up and prevent remnants of Hamas and PIJ from rapidly toppling him. Doing so will require a new Gazan military force, trained, supplied and guided, if not directly commanded, by foreign actors.
It will also likely require the deployment of foreign forces on the ground. Ideally, an American officer would be in overall command (with no American troops) along with contingents from countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt and Europe. Unlike the observer force deployed in nearby Sinai, this one would have to actually be capable of fighting and committed to doing so. The list of candidates who might be willing to contribute to this force, and with the capability to do so, is short.
The next question is how long Israel will continue to enjoy strong international support, the likes of which we have not seen in decades, as the operation expands and the pictures from Gaza grow increasingly ugly. While international leaders may understand Israel’s need to react massively, they will be under increasing public pressure to modify the tenor of their positions.
Arab leaders will be under particular pressure to go from verbal condemnations to more practical responses. Egypt and Jordan have withstood pressure in the past to sever relations during military confrontations, but the magnitude of the current one will likely be different. The already cooling peace with the Abraham Accords countries will be put to a further stress test.
Israel clearly prefers to contain this to a one-front war, but is unlikely to enjoy this luxury, especially if it appears to be crushing Hamas. The question then becomes how the operation in Gaza is affected by an escalation with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian and Hezbollah forces in Syria, and even Iranian missiles deployed in Iraq and Yemen, as well as missiles and drones launched directly from Iran itself.
Palestinian protests and acts of terrorism in the West Bank are also likely to increase, and some internal violence, from Israel’s Arab population, is also possible. In these circumstances, can Israel achieve the ambitious objectives set out for the Gaza front, or should the war aims be more limited to begin with.
A critical question refers to the fate of the Israeli hostages. Israel will do everything possible to secure their release, but the State of Israel cannot be held hostage, even if some of its citizens are.
THE FINAL question refers to the always critical quandary regarding the “day after.” Other than changing the situation in Gaza, in itself a major challenge, can this catastrophe be turned into some broader benefit? Just a week ago it looked like we were on the verge of a transformational breakthrough towards peace with Saudi Arabia.
How do we prevent Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas from successfully achieving their strategic objectives of derailing this breakthrough, and the establishment of an effective American-led anti-Iranian axis.
One answer is to try and create a link between what happens in Gaza and the normalization initiative. Under the Saudi terms for normalization, Israel was to make significant concessions towards the Palestinians. Might reinstating the PA, together with some other limited measures, constitute the necessary concession?
Saudi agreement might require that Israel also at least partly moderate its military objectives in the war and agree to an even more substantial peace process when it is over. Clearly the Netanyahu government would be unable to meet these demands and so a more positive “day after” may have to await the likely political fallout in Israel.
The writer, a former deputy national security adviser, is a senior fellow at INSS and the MirYam Institute. He is the author of Zion’s Dilemmas: How Israel Makes National Security Policy and Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change, as well as the new Israel and the Cyber Threat: How the Startup Nation Became a Global Superpower. Twitter: @chuck_freilich