It is hard to win a war
when you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back. It's even
harder to win a war when you tie that hand back yourself. It's harder
yet still when you're wearing ideological blinders and fail to see the
full contours of the enemy.
In going to war against Hamas, Israel is indeed handicapped in so many ways.
Firstly, the IDF has
frighteningly handcuffed itself in order to avoid excessive civilian
casualties among the civilian population in Gaza, within which Hamas is
purposefully embedded.
What army that is truly
dedicated to crushing the enemy tells enemy forces which targets
exactly it is about to attack, warning the civilian population in
particular neighborhoods to flee on very specific days and at specific
hours?
Who drops warning
fliers from the air and "knocks on roofs" with null bomblets to give
further notice that "we are coming in now" -- allowing the enemy to set
its remote control booby-traps and run to hide while leaving women and
children behind to stare down the IDF?
Who ever heard of an army out to really defeat its adversary that telegraphs its every move in advance?
What army has its most
elite troops tip-toe through the enemy tulips, being oh-so-careful not
to trample the rosebeds, looking only for tunnels and rocket launchers,
instead of blasting its way forward with overwhelming power to the
center of the enemy formations, seeking to decapitate its leadership?
The answer is the Israel Defense Forces, fighting with one hand self-tied behind its back.
We call this a
"humanitarian" way of waging war. Humanitarian for the other side, that
is. I think it is cruel and unfair to the citizens and citizen-army of
Israel. Just think of the many Israeli boys who would not have been
buried this week were it not for Israel's super-humanitarian and
ultra-ultra-considerate combat doctrines.
Israel is further
handicapped by an IDF leadership that has not prepared the army for
full-scale ground warfare against the enemy. Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said
last year that he did not believe that Israel would have a major ground
war for at least a decade.
As a result, Israel
does not have sufficient well-trained and properly equipped troops, nor
fully developed battle plans, for reconquering the Gaza Strip and
crushing Hamas.
The chief-of-staff and
his team have unabashedly and decidedly chosen in recent years to
de-emphasize the ground army, investing instead in the air force, in
cyber-warfare capabilities, and in small-scale special operations
forces.
That's fine, but it has
knowingly come at the expense of the armored, artillery, infantry and
combat engineering corps. The result is that the IDF cannot have, does
not have, and has not presented to the cabinet, a truly serious plan for
a much broader, deeper and lengthier ground offensive against Hamas. I
suspect that the situation would be much the same were Israel to face
the need to rout Hezbollah in Lebanon -- and we will need to do so.
The army's inability to
present the political echelon with realistic options for an expansion
of the offensive against Hamas has of course blind-sided the government
and restricted the cabinet's options. It's no surprise that Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon are
hesitant to go any further.
The result is that the
IDF has more or less been marching in place for about a week, with large
contingents of troops holding static positions inside Gaza (exposed to
enemy fire) or whiling away in staging areas just outside Gaza (again,
exposed to enemy mortar fire). Sitting ducks.
Israel is further
crippled in the fight against Hamas by an invisible threshold that seems
to have been reached in terms of the patience of the international
community; a threshold that, alas, Israel seems to have resigned itself
to.
After three weeks of
fighting and much suffering to Palestinian civilians caught in the
battlefield, the world has had enough. Israel's credit has almost run
out; its diplomatic maneuvering room mostly exhausted. This is largely
because of U.S. President Barack Obama's fickle friendship, and his
unwillingness to understand the broader strategic stakes in this fight.
Finally, Israel is
handicapped by lingering delusions about the Palestinians. This includes
the erroneous notion that economic development and horizons of
prosperity will moderate Palestinian society or undercut the radical
Islamic leadership. Therefore Israel is supposed to be "careful" not to
destroy too much Palestinian infrastructure and it "must be a partner"
in rebuilding the Palestinian polity after the war.
Yet there has been no
evidence since Oslo that largesse bestowed upon the Palestinians
moderates their political goals or behavior.
The additional delusion
is the nonsensical belief, now being revived in some left-wing corners,
that Mahmoud Abbas and his so-called Palestinian Authority can be
Israel's salvation.
Abbas is part of the
problem, not the solution, as the past decade has demonstrated over and
over again. His "security services" cannot guarantee Israel's security,
neither in the Jordan Valley nor the Samarian mountaintops overlooking
Ben-Gurion International Airport nor the border crossings between Gaza
and Egypt.
Until this country's
leadership rids itself of the delusional belief that a Palestinian state
in the West Bank or Gaza is going to rescue Israel from its security
and diplomatic dilemmas, it is going to be very hard to make hard-nosed
decisions about using the military to truly rout and/or deter the
Palestinian terrorist armies on our borders.
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