Failed Concepts

Worthwhile reading from Mosiac, an essay by Shany Mor, "The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7", an essay I find myself mostly in agreement with.  Mor does not look at the tactical intelligence and military failures leading up to, and occurring on, that day, instead focusing on the longer-term strategies and the politics resulting in that tragic day.  He describes four failures:

The first is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's failure to have a longer-term strategy combined with his delusions about Hamas.

The second "the ideology of right-wing religious settler Zionism" and the policy distortions imposed by it.

Third is the blindness of the "peace processors", primarily in the Western foreign policy establishments who have refused to face into the realities of the Middle East.

Finally there is the way "the international community, UNRWA, and sundry human-rights organizations at every step have acted as a force multiplier for Hamas and Hizballah". 

Here's an excerpt from each part of the essay, though you should read the entire piece to get the complexity of the argument Mor makes. 

Netanyahu

The basic contours of Israel’s position vis-à-vis Hamas, Gaza, the Palestinians, and the Arab world on October 6 are a catalog of Netanyahu’s wishes, fears, hopes, illusions, and procrastinatory temptations.

Netanyahu isn’t just stricken by decisional paralysis or lazy procrastination. He came into power believing the time wasn’t right, and at each decision node since, he has discovered new reasons why the time just isn’t right. He keeps poking his head out and seeing no parking ticket on the state’s windshield, so he goes back in and promises to keep checking. True on the West Bank, and true on the issue he rode back into power on in 2009: the need to confront the Iranian nuclear program. For years he was mocked for his indecision by experts in Israel and abroad whose prognostications often invoked the image of a “tsunami” of one kind or another that was about to wash over Israel due to Bibi’s negligence.

As for messaging, Netanyahu’s career has been a continuous exercise in public diplomacy, his polished English employed to impress not so much foreign audiences as the domestic Israeli one. His skill (real or imagined) at making Israel’s case—at the UN, the U.S. Congress, and elsewhere—came to substitute for actual strategic thinking. And, as with skepticism and deferral, experience kept teaching him the wrong lessons—until disaster struck.

The religious settler movement:

The long march of the West Bank settler movement has been a generational project that has resulted in what might best be termed state capture.

To discuss the West Bank settler movement and its impact on policy in terms of state capture is to imply two things. First, that the policy priorities of the movement do not represent those of the majority of the Israeli public or any reasonable aggregation of diverse interests and desires. Second, that the result is to distort the state’s policies in a way that are inimical to its actual strategic interests but to the benefit of the particular interest that has effected the capture.

When I speak of the “settler movement” of “right-wing religious settler” ideology, I am not talking about the motives of all the Israelis who chose to make their lives beyond the Green Line. . .

The Palestinians’ defeat in the second intifada, and the tectonic shifts in Arab politics after the failed Arab Spring, opened before Israel genuine diplomatic opportunities. These have already resulted in the Abraham Accords. But to exploit these opportunities fully, Israel needed leaders dedicated to the pursuit of the state’s strategic interests. It has been years, maybe decades, since Israel had a leadership that was able to set aside the settler movement’s special pleas and pursue those interests rationally. By the time the far-right swept into power on the coattails of Netanyahu’s return in 2022, these were no longer even special pleas. The call was coming from inside the house.

In short, Israel lulled itself into complacency on the Gaza front not just because of an overabundance of confidence in its deterrence and not just because of its prime minister’s vices, but because both of these were nurtured by, and reinforced, a comprehensive ideological worldview that places the West Bank settler enterprise above the state’s considered interests.

Mor notes that, on October 7, there were 32 IDF combat battalions deployed in the West Bank, many in response to turmoil created by the religious settlers, while only two battalions were deployed along the Gaza Strip.

The peace processors:

. . . the peace-processor concept of mediation ignores all the conventional rules of negotiating and diplomacy, not to mention common sense, and hasn’t changed despite the fact that it has failed consistently.

The most exemplary instantiation of this failure is the string of diplomatic initiatives following the failure of Camp David and the eruption of the second intifada. In all of them, whether at Taba or Geneva, whether by informal negotiators or international mediators, whether in talks or UN Security Council resolutions, the Palestinians are offered better terms than what they have rejected and the Israelis worse terms than what they previously agreed to. The implication is that previous initiatives failed and violence erupted because the Palestinians just weren’t given enough.

Imagining this method in any other kind of conflict shows just how perverse it is. Offering better terms to the side that rejected a previous compromise, resorted to violence in the hopes of securing for itself a better outcome, and was defeated in the war it initiated incentivizes all the worst behavior of all sides. The losing side has no incentive to agree, because losing again only improves its position. The winning side has no incentive to agree, but the status quo of conflict gives it a better position than the proposed compromise.

 On the international community:

None of Gaza’s population would qualify as refugees under the UN’s official definition: “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.” Those who fled one part of Palestine during the 1947–9 war for another are considered internally displaced persons (“someone who has been forced to flee their home but never crossed an international border”). . . . Arabs who fled from Palestine into Lebanon would certainly count as refugees under the standard UN definitions, but not their descendants. Many others fled to Jordan or to places that Jordan would occupy, but as they quickly became Jordanian citizens, they would, by standard legal definitions, be considered “rehabilitated” and no longer refugees.

Gaza, though, has no refugees. Not the tiny handful of people still alive who lived in what is now Israel before 1948, and certainly not their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The idea that a Palestinian living in Palestinian territory under a Palestinian government is somehow a refugee from Palestine is a deadly contrivance, the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

The constitutions of Hizballah in southern Lebanon, Fatah in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza can be best described as anti-sovereign governance, and, for all the variation among them, they are all the creation of the international community and its unique approach to the Arab conflict with Israel. These constitutions are anti-sovereign in two senses, an internal one and an external. Internally, they exercise stable political and military power without full sovereignty and without any of the responsibilities that come with full sovereignty. And externally, the ideological basis of their entire political project is the denial of sovereignty to the Jewish state they live next to.

Avocado deterrence was the rule with Hizballah in Lebanon after 2006 just as it was the rule with Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. And nowhere was the avocado principle more dearly held to than in Gaza. Hamas rockets were something Israel needed to learn to tolerate or even accept that it deserved. The incendiary bombs, carried by balloons, which burned so much productive Israeli farmland during the five years before the October 7 attack were far too small a provocation to warrant an Israeli response. Attempts by Hamas militants to breach the fence in 2018 were best understood as a protest against the Palestinians’ righteous victimhood and not a security threat (as October 7 clearly showed them to be) to the Israeli communities just outside the Strip. Any Israeli preventive action against the growing arsenal of rockets and tunnels was, as it was always asserted, an overreaction to an exaggerated threat.

When wars did break out in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, the consensus suddenly shifted. Now any action Israel might take to eliminate the threat was too costly and impractical. Hamas was too embedded in the territory, its rockets too numerous, and any invasion would result in too many casualties.

The problem is, given the truth of the above analysis, what is to be done next?

Theoretically I still support a two-state solution but, as a practical matter, that is not going to occur in the foreseeable future because it is abundantly clear that Palestinian public opinion much prefers not having a state if the price of its creation results in the continued existence of a Jewish state alongside it.

Disbanding UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) is an essential first step towards any type of eventual settlement but that is not going to happen with a United Nations dominated by dictators, oligarchs, and authoritarians.  Even the next best solution, permanently stopping UNRWA's funding by the U.S. and other Western nations seems like it will not happen.  As of 2022, 85.5% of UNRWA funding came from the U.S. (29.4%), Europe, and Japan.  We are paying to perpetuate the problem and impede its solution, but generations of US and European diplomats refuse to recognize the obvious.

Beyond that, who knows?