What did Israel fail in Gaza? Lessons for the inevitable: Iran and Hezbollah

By: Ricardo Israel - 14/07/2024

In recent days, the possibility of an agreement for the return of some or all of the hostages who are alive in exchange for a truce and a massive release of Palestinian prisoners has reappeared. Considering previous negotiating experiences, there are possibilities of both success and failure, even if it is short-lived, and from Israel's point of view, it combines a military performance that has been successful considering the difficulties of this type of war, along with the fact that the goals set by the political authorities were not met.

As in the eight previous wars (two with Hamas), this one was not started by Israel, which faced it with the good performance of its soldiers, with state policies and with the unity of the Jewish people, inside and outside the country. As on other occasions, there has been understanding of the Arab, Bedouin and Druze minorities in Israel, and as a welcome development, the Sunni Arab governments and the Middle Eastern countries with which Israel has some type of relationship, have had the understanding of what has lacking part of the west. The Arab countries became visible in April of this year, when several of them came to the military defense of Israel, in the face of an (unsuccessful) attack by Iranian rockets and missiles.

However, in relation to the title of this column, the underlying issue is that Israel has not been able to meet those objectives such as the return of all the live hostages, the end of Hamas as a military and power alternative, and a new government for Gaza, without Hamas.

Militaryly, this type of conflict in which terrorist militias use their own people as human shields constitutes not only a crime according to the Geneva Conventions that regulate the international law of war, but it is also the most difficult of all. conflicts for a regular army, as was clarified in the US's own experience in Iraq with ISIS as well as in other conflicts, and perhaps for this reason, its advice was not to enter Gaza after the massacres, since that was the trap that Hamas and Iran had supposedly set.

In the case of the hostages, military pressure has helped, but it is not the solution for their return, as Israel itself knew, due to the way in which in the past it had to negotiate for Israeli citizens, civil and military, kidnapped by Hamas. Furthermore, with the passage of time, Israeli public opinion has grown in support of the relatives who want a ceasefire agreement in exchange for the return of the hostages alive.

While waiting for the future investigative commission, on 7-X there was not only surprise but also an inexcusable failure of the Israeli authorities, the excess of confidence that allowed the tragedy being completely unacceptable. For a brief period it seemed that there was understanding and sympathy in the West, but it did not last long, and instead the worst display of anti-Semitism that the world has known since the Holocaust spread and it even seemed to have forgotten that the origin of this war was attack by Hamas and also Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, all coordinated, armed and financed from Iran. There has also been a lack of interest in the fate of the hostages and in the sexual violence exercised against women.

For many, what has happened in the rest of the world, and the massiveness and ignorance demonstrated by so many demonstrations in Western countries, helps to understand how the Holocaust occurred and that the existence of the State of Israel is the main reason why it is not I would repeat now, and not because of a lack of will on the part of those who hate so much.

If the military performance has been good as specialists around the world have said, Israel has also had a political agreement on governability in decision-making and a unity government, circumstances that have disappeared, but that were present in the most of the time that has passed since 7-X, so the question is why the campaign objectives have not been achieved.

The answer is that Gaza demonstrates how right the most important theorist of military conflict, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), was when he defined war as the continuation of politics by other means. It is also important, because everything indicates that Gaza is going to be seen in the future only as a stage of this jihad unleashed against Israel, which has less to do with territories and more to do with its own existence, so everything indicates that is going to move to Lebanon, since there has not been a day since 7/10 where it has not been attacked by Hezbollah.

Almost 100,000 inhabitants of northern Israel, Jews and Arabs, have had to be evacuated, as Iran acts as the puppet master behind everything, which orchestrated the Hamas attack to prevent the signing of a peace agreement between Israel and Arabia. Saudi. Probably, the confrontation with Tehran will come when there is evidence that they already have the atomic bomb that they have sought so hard, which explains a possible alliance between Israel and the Sunni Arab countries against the common enemy.

Among the reasons why Israel has not been able to achieve its objectives, the military one that stands out is that US pressure stopped the Israeli advance when it was at the gates of Rafah, but political circumstances also play a role, such as the division caused by In Israel, the figure of Benjamin Netanyahu, where there is no doubt that his political weakness inside and outside the country, has made him more susceptible to pressure than any other prime minister, since decisions related to the conduct of the war obey more to politics of State than to personal positions.

And that is a lesson for the future, and just as it is negative and unacceptable for Israel that politicians from other countries like Chuck Schumer, majority leader of the US Senate, even though he is Jewish, allow himself to ask Netanyahu to resign, which he does not like. corresponds, equally these situations must be faced without that open flank, internally and internationally, since above all, trust and unity are needed.

But in a war of these characteristics, which even displaced the invasion of Ukraine from the headlines, there is no doubt that problems that have been going on for a long time have manifested themselves, such as setbacks in world public opinion, communication failure, with (although improved) a slow reaction to the immediacy of the Social Networks, where Hamas imposed the narrative, to which we can add judicialization and lawfare or legal warfare in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

To this we must add a slow reaction to the magnitude of Judeophobia that has been unleashed in Western countries, unexpected in its extension and depth, difficult to understand in cases such as human rights, feminist and LGTBIQ+ sexual diversity organizations. due to the persecution they suffer from Islam, but this time they have also managed to move their governments and the White House itself towards positions harmful to Israel. At this point, the "insufficient" response shares responsibilities with Jewish communities such as the United States, since due to resources, experience, professional staff and favorable legislation, it was expected that more would be done than what has been done, just as the case of the representative institutions that depend on it, for the simple reason that it is difficult to expect others to do for the Jews what they are not doing in defense of themselves, such as bringing those responsible to court.

If it is necessary to review this type of actions, it is because of the way in which they have ended up affecting the conduct of the war, and what makes it imperative is that Hezbollah is going to be a military conflict of much greater magnitude than Gaza, in addition to the fact that Iran has a greater presence in that theater of operations. For their part, except in the once communist regions, too many people in Europe seem to have lost the will to confront Islamism, but even more worrying is what has happened in the US, divided as it seems to be in the face of something that Until October 6, there seemed to be unanimous support for Israel. Today, it seems evident that something has broken, from the moment that, for electoral reasons, the White House has stopped the delivery of compromised weapons and has voted against Israel in the Security Council.

When Washington faces China, Russia and Iran in three different scenarios and at the same time, if it acts like this against Israel, what can other countries expect that do not have the same relationship that Israel was supposed to have? It is not something minor, when discrepancies led Israel to lose the total support that it believed it had in the only irreplaceable power such as the United States, at a time when of the three scenarios, the only news that seemed military positive for Washington was Gaza, and they themselves were in charge of stopping the advance, as if they were afraid to display any triumph, feeding what seems to be typical of the current West, the cultural replacement of military triumph with victimization.

In any case, as it is related to one of the objectives of this war, Israel's responsibility is total in its lack of definition regarding the issue of who takes charge of Gaza after Hamas, and the biggest problem is that it does not have a political plan. , at least not a State one, agreed upon not by a political coalition, but rather a consensus plan for the entire country, to be followed by all governments, one after the other.

Indeed, it is not clear what Israel wants and who is applying to take charge of the government of the enclave, where it is evident that no one is going to want that responsibility if Hamas is not defeated first, that is, if all possibility of that they continue to hold government power. In this regard, my opinion is that the most reasonable solution is for Israel to maintain a security presence, but for no reason take charge of the day-to-day administration, since for some reason it withdrew from there in 2005, taking all presence with it. Jewish, living Israelis, but also the corpses of the cemetery, nothing that served as a pretext, just for Hamas to carry out the military coup against the Palestinian Authority (PA), with little resistance from the defeated.

In my opinion, if this possibility arises, I hope there is as minimal a presence as possible of the United Nations, directly committed through some of its agencies to terrorism, nor of Europe, in general already deferential to Islamism and the as does the UN, with little understanding of what groups like Hamas mean. My opinion is that, if the PA wishes to participate, it is essential that its support be an international mandate for the Sunni Arab countries, whose governments have the organizational muscle that Ramallah lacks just as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries have the resources economic resources to undertake reconstruction, together with the US and perhaps China if it is motivated to participate.

The Arab countries also have greater clarity than the powers that Iran must be isolated, and they perfectly understand the danger of Hamas. For the rest, they may have the desire to promote the creation of the Palestinian State, since the original decision of the UN was to create in what remained of the British mandate (most of the surface had already been given to create Jordan), a Jewish State and another Arab, since then, there was no talk of the Palestinian State as it is today, since Palestine was the entire territory, so much so that the current West Bank was occupied until 1967 by Jordan and Gaza, by Egypt.

Israel must face the problem of its political and communication deficiencies in the face of what comes next, since since 1948 it has not been able to find a Palestinian partner for peace, nor has a pro-Western liberal political faction emerged within it that is committed to definitive peace, an element that manifested itself in the refusal of the two-state solution before 1948, at the time of the creation of Israel after the UN vote, nor on the part of the Arab League in response to the Israeli offer of return everything conquered in 1967 in exchange for recognition, or Arafat's rejection of Clinton's proposal at Camp David in 2000.

If the Arab countries participated in Gaza, they would probably give space to a group that Israel has only recently been giving importance to, which are the very important family clans, which everything indicates have lost confidence in both the PA and Hamas. These clans or tribal loyalties long predate the creation of modern States that was made from the presence of the British and French empires that replaced the Ottomans after the First World War, since they have existed for centuries with strong dedication to commerce and merchandise traffic (the origin of the now famous tunnels is located there). Some have their own weapons as seen in their participation in the kidnapping of Israelis on 7/10. For these purposes, the presence of Arab countries is essential, since many of them have found a source of stability for their countries in these clans, incorporating them into their governance, as is the case in Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but also in Syria. the Assads and in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Israel needs to address as an element of the greatest importance what has failed, such as the theme of the narrative, since important liberal media in the West seem to have lost all reference to how this war started, forgetting about the hostages, and Just as governments and the UN have ignored sexual violence against Jewish women. In other words, there is no sufficient explanation why concessions are always asked only from Israel, but nothing from Hamas or its sponsors such as Iran and Qatar.

This element is also present in the various stories that Hamas has imposed, but which, over time, have proven to be totally false, such as the number of victims that has been revised downwards by the United Nations itself, or the permanent discourse about “famine” in Gaza, without evidence appearing in this regard despite the time that has passed, or the unproven accusations of “apartheid” or “genocide”, despite resolutions where the International Court of Justice has said that it finds no evidence, since genocide is a crime fully classified in international law, or lastly, so many statements refuted by the truth about massacres that never existed in places that Hamas captured, such as hospitals and schools, where Hamas committed crimes against its own people , they just don't spread. In this regard, the media in general has not used Israel, but has used Hamas as a source, regardless of its discredit or falsehood.

And, by the way, anti-Semitic Judeophobia is a factor, but it does not serve as an explanation since it is something that has always existed as it is the oldest phobia of humanity, which today is recreated with the argument that those who hate would not be anti-Semitic, but only “anti-Zionists”, updating what previously attacked religion as “deicide” and later, the use of “race” by the Nazis.

The issue is not that these groups exist, but that Israel must better combat their effects and impact, since so far it has failed in this aspect, the existence of hatred is not enough, but it must be combated in a better way, from the moment which has ended up complicating the chances of success in Gaza.

Hamas is weakened, but it has not disappeared. It has lost half of its militiamen and has now changed its way of confronting Israel, since it does so more as a guerrilla, returning to the places from which it had been expelled, to control the population that lives there. Everything indicates that it does not want to disappear, and is reinventing itself as a terrorist group, just as happened with ISIS or Al Qaeda.

Israel must, therefore, attack any attempt to reconstitute Hamas and success will be measured by its ability to avoid that scenario, as well as not having a role in the future government of Gaza, but to confront Hezbollah in Lebanon and especially Iran, in addition to the strictly military aspect, Israel must greatly improve those other aspects mentioned such as politics and communication. legal matters in international courts, and do it now, without pause and without delay, with better use of resources and time than what has been achieved up to this moment.

And as for anti-Semitic Judeophobia, it has always caught my attention that not only Germans or Austrians participated in the Holocaust (as much as the latter prefer to present themselves as what they also are, that is, victims), but also "volunteers" of occupied and non-occupied countries. In this regard, emblematic was the 110th Brigade of Polish volunteers, too old to participate in a war role, so these merchants and professionals from neighboring cities dedicated time during the week to “collaborate” in extermination camps, or what happened in Vichy, where only French people participated in at least one delivery of French Jews to occupied France, without the participation of Germans, except for those who received them before D-Day.

From these examples arises the opinion that only the existence of Israel is a guarantee that it will not be repeated, an additional reason why Israel cannot lose any war, and also because the issue is of sufficient seriousness today, in Europe and US, to need better performance by the Jewish state and local Jewish communities in this effort.

In the war, now comes Lebanon, a state that was an example in the world of multiculturalism and that jihadism and Iran have transformed into a failed state, almost completely forgetting the fact that it was created to protect the Christian population of the region. , numerically decreasing.

Although it has won the wars that have been imposed on it, Israel must not forget that it has been fighting against Iran, since 1979 determined to destroy it, and that today it attacks it with proxies from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and its own territory.

None of them want peace, none of them want to reach agreements, since for them the problem is not more or less territories, but the very existence of the only Jewish state.

@israellzipper

-PhD. in Political Science (U. of Essex), Graduate in Law (U. of Barcelona). Lawyer (U. de Chile), former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».