{"id":82838,"date":"2023-10-10T14:00:56","date_gmt":"2023-10-10T03:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=82838"},"modified":"2023-11-06T16:39:51","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T05:39:51","slug":"hubris-meets-nemesis-in-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/hubris-meets-nemesis-in-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubris meets nemesis in Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sooner or later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s destructive political magic, which has kept him in power for 15 years, was bound to usher in a major tragedy. A year ago, he formed the most radical and incompetent government in Israel\u2019s history. Not to worry, he assured his critics<\/a>, \u2018I\u2019ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel.\u2019<\/p>\n

But by ruling out any political process in Palestine and boldly asserting<\/a>, in his government\u2019s binding guidelines, that \u2018the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel\u2019, Netanyahu\u2019s fanatical government made bloodshed inevitable.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, blood flowed in Palestine even when peace-seekers such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were in office. But Netanyahu recklessly invited violence by paying his coalition partners any price for their support. He let them grab Palestinian lands, expand illegal settlements, scorn Muslim sensibilities regarding the sacred mosques on the Temple Mount, and promote suicidal delusions about the reconstruction of the biblical Temple in Jerusalem (in itself a recipe for what could be the mother of all Muslim jihads). Meanwhile, he also sidelined the more moderate Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, effectively beefing up the radical Hamas in Gaza.<\/p>\n

According to Netanyahu\u2019s twisted logic, strong Islamist rule in Gaza would be the ultimate argument against a political solution in Palestine. By rewarding the extremists and castigating the moderates, Netanyahu believed that he, unlike the soft leftists, had finally found the solution to the Palestine conflict. The Abraham Accords, which normalised Israel\u2019s relations with four Arab states (and will probably soon include Saudi Arabia), blinded him to the Palestinian volcano beneath his feet.<\/p>\n

But, in the ruthless, barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians in the villages surrounding Gaza, Netanyahu\u2019s hubris met its nemesis in the form of Hamas\u2019s savagery. Fifty years and a day after Egypt and Syria launched their surprise attack in what became known as the Yom Kippur War, Hamas stormed Gaza\u2019s borders with Israel and slaughtered hundreds of defenceless civilians. Scenes of young women raped next to the bodies of their friends were recorded<\/a> on social networks. About a hundred people\u2014among them whole families, elderly women and toddlers\u2014have been abducted and taken to Gaza.<\/p>\n

Many have expressed surprise that Hamas so easily penetrated Israel\u2019s defences along the border with Gaza. But there were no such defences. When Hamas began slaughtering hundreds of defenceless civilians, Israel\u2019s glorious army was mostly deployed elsewhere. Many were assigned to the West Bank to protect religious settlers in clashes (sometimes initiated by the settlers themselves) with local Palestinians, and in festivals around invented holy shrines. For long hours, desperate men and women cried for help, and the strongest army in the Middle East was nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n

The assumption was always that Gaza was not a vital priority. The underground wall of sensors and fortified concrete that Israel has built around the enclave was supposed to block the tunnels through which Hamas tried in the past to penetrate Israeli border villages. It was of no use. Hamas militias simply stormed the fences on the surface.<\/p>\n

There was no intelligence about Hamas\u2019s intentions, either. The \u2018start-up nation\u2019, whose sophisticated cyber units can detect the movement of a leaf in a tree in an Iranian base in Syria, knew nothing of Hamas\u2019s plans. Israel\u2019s obsession with Iran\u2019s possible nuclear breakout and its internal security services\u2019 focus on the occupied West Bank partly explain this negligence.<\/p>\n

The attack by Hamas was not just a tactical surprise, but also a strategic bombshell. This was apparent in the group\u2019s calculated decision not to participate in any of the clashes of the past two years between Israel and Islamic Jihad, another militant group in Gaza. Hamas was creating the impression that it was becoming a government more interested in meeting its people\u2019s material needs than in presumably ineffective armed resistance. And the Israelis believed what they wanted to believe: that subsidies from Qatar and their own gestures would dissuade Hamas from future military adventures.<\/p>\n

And now what? Restore deterrence? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? A land invasion is difficult to imagine. The atrocious level of destruction and casualties that would entail is one reason, with the many Israeli hostages now in Gaza providing additional insurance. The risk of Hezbollah opening an additional front from Lebanon in the north is another. Hezbollah\u2019s capabilities dwarf those of Hamas, and a two-front war, with Iran possibly backing Israel\u2019s foes, is an apocalyptic scenario.<\/p>\n

This is exactly why US President Joe Biden warned Israel\u2019s enemies<\/a> \u2018not to exploit the crisis\u2019. To drive home the point, Biden has ordered the US Navy\u2019s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

But then when has the Israel\u2013Palestine conflict ever responded to Cartesian logic?<\/p>\n

We learned from Clausewitz that war is supposed to make sense in the context of a political objective. Hamas\u2019s current war has such objectives: securing its hegemony in the Palestinian national movement, freeing its men from Israeli prisons by trading hostages for them, and preventing Palestine\u2019s plight from being forsaken by the \u2018Arab brethren\u2019 in their rush to normalise relations with the Jewish state. For Netanyahu\u2019s government, however, this is a purely reactive war with no political objective beyond that of reaching a pause until the next round of hostilities.<\/p>\n

A country that didn\u2019t hold its leaders accountable for an outcome like what has played out in the horrific scenes around Gaza would lose its claim to being a genuine democracy. But Netanyahu\u2019s machine of poisonous political disinformation is already at work disseminating a conspiracy theory<\/a> according to which leftist army officers were responsible for the negligence that led to this dirty war. No one should be surprised that Netanyahu would resort to the infamous stab-in-the-back narrative\u2014a conspiracy theory also peddled by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. How else could the inciter-in-chief explain his criminal negligence?<\/p>\n

When the fighting ends, negotiations for an exchange of hostages and prisoners are inevitable. Possibly, the clearly ineffective blockade on Gaza should be lifted. In any case, a different question will remain: whether the barbarity that the Hamas militias displayed in the killing fields around Gaza is the right path to Palestinian redemption. Their moment of supposed glory will live in infamy for many years to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sooner or later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s destructive political magic, which has kept him in power for 15 years, was bound to usher in a major tragedy. 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