This is the lesson of September 11 that Israel needs to learn
Thomas Friedman - the New York Times
🔴 While Israel is discussing what to do after the war in Gaza, I hope that the Israeli political and military leadership will reflect the adage often attributed to Confucius: "before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves" - one for your enemy and one for yourself.
A wise man, Confucius.
🔴 The reason I was so wary of Israel's invasion of Gaza with the aim of completely eliminating Hamas was certainly not because of any sympathy for Hamas, which was more anathema to the Palestinian people than Israel. It was a matter of deep concern that Israel was acting out of blind rage, pursuing an unattainable goal - to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth as one of its ministers called for - and without a plan the morning after that.
🔴 And so Israel could get stuck in Gaza forever - owning all its diseases and having to rule over two million people in the midst of a humanitarian crisis and, even worse, discrediting the very Israeli army that was trying to regain the trust of Israelis in it.
🔴 Quite frankly, I thought again about America after September 11th. And I asked myself, ' What do I wish I had done more before we launched two wars of revenge and transformation in Afghanistan and Iraq that we paid dearly for?'
🔴 I wish I had argued for what the CIA calls a "red cell" or "red team" - a group of intelligence officers outside the direct military or political chain of command, whose main task was to examine and test the war plans and goals for Iraq and Afghanistan by proposing contradictory alternatives to achievable goals of restoring security and deterrence in the United States. And that the recommendations of the red team will be announced before we go to war.
🔴 As a retired senior US intelligence official told me: it was the role of the red cell of C.I.A. In other thorny problems " help the US government make decisions with wide-open eyes and detect risks, but not eliminate them. It is not a sign of weakness to make fully informed decisions and I think the red cell is a great tool for weighing alternative options and possible second-and third-order effects. The leaders of Israel should be strict and not just zealous at this moment in time."
🔴 So with that in mind, I propose to Israel not only to create a red team for how to deal with Hamas in Gaza but also a blue team to criticize the red team. Israel needs a more robust internal debate because it has clearly rushed into a war with multiple contradictory goals.
Israel's stated goal is to recover all of its remaining hostages - now more than 130 soldiers and civilians - while destroying Hamas and its infrastructure once and for all, while doing so in a way that does not cause more civilian casualties in Gaza than the Biden administration can defend, and without leaving Israel in charge of Gaza forever and having to pay its bills every day. Good luck with all that.
🔴 Here's what the Israeli red team might point to and defend instead.
🔴 For starters, because the army and the Cabinet rushed to Gaza in this war and it seems that they never planned any final plan, Israel now finds itself in a difficult predicament. It has pushed more than a million civilians from northern Gaza to the south to keep them away from the fighting as it has tried to eliminate all Hamas fighters in Gaza City and its suburbs. But now, the only way Israel can move the ground war to southern Gaza - around Khan Yunis, where the Hamas high command is suspected of hiding in tunnels - is by moving through this mass of displaced people and creating more of them.
🔴 Faced with this impasse, the Israeli red team proposes a radical alternative: Israel should call for a permanent ceasefire followed by an immediate Israeli withdrawal of all military forces in Gaza on the condition that Hamas returns all the hostages it has left, civilian and military, and any dead. But Hamas will not get Palestinian prisoners in return. Just a clean deal - an Israeli withdrawal and a permanent ceasefire in exchange for more than 130 Israeli hostages.
🔴 Despite this, there will be an Israeli marginal point, which will not be written in the body of the agreement, but everyone will understand that it exists: Israel reserves the right in the future to bring to justice the senior leaders of Hamas who planned this massacre. As it did after the Munich massacre, though, Israel will do it with a scalpel, not a hammer.
What are the advantages of such a strategy for Israel The red team will cite five.
first, he will argue that all the pressure for a ceasefire to spare civilians in Gaza more death and destruction will fall on Hamas, and not on Israel. Let Hamas tell its people living in the cold and rain - and the world-that it will not agree to a ceasefire in exchange for just a humanitarian price for the return of all Israeli hostages.
Moreover, Israel would have ensured that Hamas would not gain a major political victory from this war such as forcing Israel to release more than 6,000 Palestinians in its prisons in exchange for hostages held by Hamas. No, no - it will just be a clean deal: a permanent ceasefire for Israeli hostages, period. The world can understand that. Let's see Hamas reject it and declare that it wants more war.
🔴 Secondly, some, perhaps many, in Israel will complain that the army did not achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas, and therefore it was a victory for Hamas. The red team will reply that the goal, for starters, was unrealistic, especially with a right-wing Israeli government unwilling to work with the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to build an alternative to Hamas to run Gaza.
What Israel will achieve, the red team argues, is to send a strong deterrent message to Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon: you are destroying our villages, we will destroy your village 10 times more. These are ugly things, but the Middle East is a jungle. It's not the Scandinavian countries.
And think smart about it: in the wake of this permanent ceasefire, Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, will have to get out of his tunnel, move in the sun, and face his people for the first time since this war began. Yes, the morning after his exit, many Gazans will carry him on their shoulders and sing his name to deliver such a heavy blow to the Jews.
But the next morning after the first morning, the red team predicts, that many of those who are holding him will begin to whisper to him: "snorar, what were you thinking about?" My house is now a pile of rubble. Who will rebuild it My job in Israel, which was feeding my family of 10, has disappeared. How will I feed my children You need to get some international humanitarian aid and a new home and job - and how will you do that if you keep hitting the Rockets on the Jews"
With the exit of Israel, the humanitarian crisis caused by this war in Gaza will become the problem of Sinwar and Hamas - as it should be. Every problem in Gaza will be Sinwar's fault, starting with jobs.
Keep in mind, as Reuters recently pointed out, that before Oct. Israel was issuing "more than 18,000 permits allowing Gazans to cross into Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to obtain jobs in sectors such as agriculture or construction that typically carry salaries up to 10 times what a worker can earn" in Gaza. Gaza was also exporting more than 130 million dollars a year of fish, agricultural products, textiles and other products to Israel and the West Bank. Stop all this now.
thirdly, the Israeli red team will argue that this will create the same kind of deterrence for Hamas that occurred in Israel's devastating bombing of pro-Hezbollah communities in the southern suburbs of Beirut in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has never dared to provoke a full-scale war with Israel since then.
The red team will add that the damage inflicted by Israel on Hamas and Gaza will create not only a similar deterrence, but also the fact that Israel can now re-imagine and strengthen its border defenses. Hamas showed Israel where all its weaknesses were and how a lot of weapons were smuggled - and Israel can now be sure that this will not happen again.
Fourth, one of the biggest strategic benefits of Israel's exit from Gaza in exchange for an internationally monitored ceasefire is that it can devote full attention to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah and Iran will not want that. They want Israel to be permanently militarily burdened and forced to keep a significant part of the more than 300,000 reservists - who drive its economy - permanently mobilized to rule Gaza.
They also want the Israeli economy to be permanently overloaded to pay for it. They want Israel to be morally burdened by permanently owning the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, so that the sun does not shine every day in Gaza, it does not rain, electricity does not flow, and the world will say that it is Israel's fault. Israel's worst enemies could not design a worse fate for it - this is what Hezbollah and Iran are praying for.
🔴 Finally, the Israeli red team will argue that Israel has an important hospitalization to do at home. This surprise attack happened because Israel had a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who broke the country by trying to do a crazy judicial coup and ruled Israel for 16 years with a strategy of dividing everyone - religious and secular, left from right, Ashkenazi from Sephardim, Israeli Arabs from Israeli Jews - weakening the country's immune system. Israel can be healed internally and resume its project to normalize relations with its Arab neighbors and establish a stable relationship with the more moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank only if Netanyahu is removed. If the war goes on forever, it will never happen. And that's exactly what Netanyahu wants.
But now comes the Israeli Blue Team. What will he say about the red team
Well, first of all, he will ask, what to do if Sinwar simply says No , I will not accept just a ceasefire, I need more than 6,000 prisoners from Israeli prisons and I will pay the price to hold out for them
🔴 The Israeli Blue team will say: we have a better idea. First, lower our goals. He declared that the army's goal is not to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, but to significantly reduce its combat capability.
🔴 Because, the blue team will say, we actually don't believe in deterrence. Hezbollah has not really been deterred since 2006. This is an illusion. Iran saves Hezbollah only for the day when Israel will threaten its nuclear program. We Blue teams believe in constantly reducing the capabilities of our enemies. Once we have greatly reduced the capabilities of Hamas, we will not stay in Gaza forever until we kill every leader.
🔴 Instead, we will retreat and establish a one-mile perimeter and outposts within the Gaza-Israel border to ensure that our border communities cannot be attacked again by land as they were in October. We will do this to confirm that we have the capabilities and intentions to return at will if Hamas continues to fire rockets at us. If Hamas wants to exchange our hostages for prisoners, we can talk. As for governing Gaza, a diminished Hamas can remain in charge if that is what the Gazans want. Let Hamas be responsible for water and electricity.
🔴 Finally, the blue team of the Israeli political leadership will say: "stop lying to yourself and the public. If we try to conquer and hold all of Gaza, not only will Gaza eventually swallow us up, but you politicians will create great doubts in the public mind about the army by giving it an unattainable goal and Israel simply cannot afford more doubts about the army any longer, "he said.
🔴 In short, Israel needs this kind of internal discussion, where the Israeli red team and the blue team can remind the country's leadership that no ideal result awaits Israel in Gaza. Fixing the Gaza dilemma "once and for all" has always been a fantasy.
🔴 But this is what is not fiction: the real history of relations between Israel and Hamas. It's very simple. It's war, time-out, war, time-out, war, time-out, war, time-out .... Hamas thrives in wars, because that's all it can offer and all it exists for. Israel thrives in the long run-in the ceasefire-when all its societal and economic strengths are flourishing. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah want to drag Israel into a permanent state of war. Israel needs a red team and a blue team to instead advocate for a longer ceasefire, firmer borders, and the flexibility to return to Gaza if Hamas forces it to do so.
🔴 Not perfect, but perfection has never been among the options on the menu. It's the Middle East, Jake.
