Amid a shock this past weekend that was as monumental for Israel as was Sept. 11, 2001, for the US a generation ago, Israeli 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 US 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 nation is now at “war’’ with Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the US. Although understandable, or even inevitable, given the moment, this was not a good sign. Wars demand clear battlefield victories that do not 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 is the second and third parts that will be hard to stick to, so let us 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 does not become a real war, fought by Israel on one side against a range of state and non-state actors on the other. We know from Ukraine what that fight might look like.
Despite all the 1973 parallels, this is not 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 nation’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 for the US with Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, 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 is not predetermined. Gaza is a densely populated urban territory of about 2 million people and achieving full control would likely require the most vicious, difficult form of warfare. The Israel Defense Forces are equipped to do that, but it is not clear what an achievable endgame would be, and that needs to be determined in advance. Failure to do so cost the US 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.
Some, including Republican US senators, have concluded already that Iran organized Saturday’s attack, enabled by US$6 billion in fresh funding approved by the administration of US President Joe Biden as part of a prisoner exchange deal. It is an understandable question. Iran does finance and support Hamas, and was quick to welcome its attack on the state of Israel, but so far there is no hard evidence of Tehran’s involvement.
Take the US$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 could not have paid for the months-long preparations needed for Hamas’ multipronged attack.
It is 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.
Confirmation of an Iranian role in particular needs to be rock solid, because that could trigger a much wider regional war with unpredictable consequences.
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. 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 is not 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 is a good sign he said he would consider forming a new cross-party government to deal with the emergency.
Less promising was Netanyahu’s address on Sunday, 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’ attack, for the sake of Israelis, the vast majority of Palestinians who are not combatants and his own legacy.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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