The Failure
The first of the Israeli army self-investigations are being released to the public and one of the clear elements appearing in the reports is the claim of the false conceptions which guided Israel’s “strategic” calculations. That false conception, as reported, is that Hamas was deterred. The Israeli military and security commands believed that Hamas was contained and was willing to divert its attention and resources from armed resistance to the development of Gaza. The Israeli adage of “quiet begets quiet” was the policy employed by Israel. Hamas knowingly used this policy to develop their strategy and military preparedness while Israel was sleeping. Every so often, an Israeli military response was employed to “rebuild deterrence” when one of the non-Hamas factions in Gaza would dare to shoot some rockets into Israel. Israel always responded with massive military responses, mostly in the form of bombing from the air, often hitting targets without human casualties, but also at times with human casualties and horrible physical damage.
No Deterrence
I remember sitting in one of the Israeli television studios during the Cast Lead operation (27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009) with a panel of retired military and security men who were all talking about the need to rebuild Israel’s deterrence towards Hamas. I was the only non-military person on the panel and the only person on the panel who had ever actually spoken with Hamas leaders and members. I stated quite clearly that there was no possibility of creating deterrence towards Hamas and that the panelist did not understand the enemy. Hamas is an Islamic Palestinian nationalist movement that fostered a distorted version of Islam that sanctifies death and martyrdom. It is a commandment, according to Hamas, to die as a martyr in the cause of Islam and freeing Palestine. It is not about the 72 virgins as some people in the West seem to emphasize. It is all about eternal paradise if you are killed fighting for Islam and Palestine. There is no greater deed that one can carry out in one’s life than to fulfill this commandment. You can not deter someone who believes that it is a divine commandment to be killed in battle while killing as many of the enemy as possible. So, one could conclude that, yes, Israel was operating under a false conception of deterrence and that Hamas was never deterred. This is certainly a major fault line within the Israeli security doctrine and one that Israel’s super intelligence community got completely wrong.
The Hamas Deception
While Israel was busy thinking that they were deterring Hamas from attacking Israel, Hamas was busy building its forces, improving its weapons, studying the enemy, and planning a surprise attack strategy. During the Gaza “March of Return,” which took place almost every weekend during 2018-2019, Hamas’s military wing, Ezz e-din al Qassam, was testing Israel’s resolve and its border defense. Hamas was searching for weaknesses in the border defense and for points where the border could easily be breached. Hamas was also testing the resolve of the Gaza public to enlist in the fight with the knowledge that the consequences could be fatal. There was mass willingness to take on Israel from the young people of Gaza. Life in Gaza had become quite intolerable for most of the young people. Youth are the overwhelming majority of people in Gaza – 68% of them under the age of 30. Forty-seven percent of them are under the age of 18. Amongst this population group, unemployment was around 70%. Despite Gaza having seven working universities before the war, most of the graduates had no work or even hope of finding a suitable job. Gaza was closed to the world and for the average Gazan, hope was something that could only be seen on the screens of their smart phones.
Hamas was elected democratically in 2006, but that was the last time elections were held. Most votes for Hamas were not ideological and not Islamic. Most Palestinians who voted for Hamas did so as a protest vote. Hamas also did not run for elections under the Hamas label (Islamic Resistant Movement is what Hamas means) but rather under the name of a political party called “Change and Reform”. Change and reform are what most Palestinians wanted. The second intifada had devastated Palestinian society. The economy was dying. The PLO’s promise of liberation was an even more distant dream. Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza even after Mahmoud Abbas failed to convince Ariel Sharon to negotiate the transfer of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority as the first step towards Palestinian statehood. Sharon humiliated Abbas, calling him a “chick with no feathers” and a non-partner and thus Hamas won the narrative of being responsible for Israel’s exit from Gaza. People in Palestine lost hope that there could be a negotiated path to freedom and to ending the occupation and were more convinced that Israel only understands the language of force.
The victory of Hamas was the result of the victory of their narrative combined with the electoral system in which half of the Legislative Council was elected on the basis of localized district-based elections. Hamas appointed well-known and respected local candidates, most of whom were involved in the local mosque, school, clinic, and social-religious affairs. The candidates were well educated and thought to be clean from corruption for which the Palestinian Authority became so well known. Once elected, it did not take long for Hamas to turn into a machine of corruption empowered by the great wealth accumulated from more than 1000 smuggling tunnels, which fueled the Gaza economy after Israel imposed an economic siege on the Strip. Hamas was so sophisticated in their tunnel smuggling operations that they even created a government ministry for tunnel affairs. It was possible for Gaza business people to lease a tunnel for a day or more to bring in whatever goods they wanted. Eventually, the tunnel operations ended when Abdel Fatah A-Sisi came to power and threw the Muslim Brotherhood elected government into prison. Then the tunnels, or almost all of them were shut down and destroyed. But by then, enough weapons and materials to produce homemade weapons had been stockpiled in Gaza.
Where was the Israeli Army?
In deference to the continued Palestinian demand to end the occupation, Israel’s right-wing government moved forward fast with their settlement development plans and eventual annexation of parts of the West Bank. Israel’s right-wing government increased tensions over Al Aqsa (The Temple Mount) with the change of the historic status quo, which prohibited Jewish prayer on the Mount. Al Aqsa is the nuclear bomb of the Arab and Muslim world and the launching pad for all Hamas attacks against Israel. On October 7, the Israeli army wasn’t around the Gaza border. The army, or what was on duty during the Simchat Torah weekend holiday, was stationed in the West Bank to protect Israeli settlers. The threat perceived by the Israeli government and its military was to the lives of Israeli settlers and not the lives of Israelis living in communities along the Gaza border. If the army had been present on the Gaza border on October 7, it would not have happened. It was not the Russian army standing against Israel in Gaza. According to what one Hamas leader told me, their expectation was that they would lose 2/3 of their Nukhba fighters while trying to breach the border. They were more surprised than Israel when they broke through the border and discovered that the Israeli army was not there. One Hamas leader told me that if they knew the army wouldn’t be there, they would have sent 10,000 fighters across the border and would have conquered Tel Aviv. That is, of course, a huge exaggeration, but it demonstrates the surprise from the Hamas side that they met very little resistance as opposed to what they expected. If there had been 15-25 tanks on the border with troops armed and ready and three attack helicopters in the air, October 7 would not have happened.
The Biggest Conceptual Failure
But even when understanding all of the errors and conceptual fallacies, the biggest conceptual mistake of them all is believing that Israel can control or occupy the Palestinian people for 56 years and expect to live in peace. Furthermore, that Israel could lock more than 2 million people in a territory like Gaza for 20 years with abhorrent poverty and expect to have quiet. How do Israelis not see this, even today, 16 months into the war? How could the people of Israel, who have been so willing to fight, to die, and to kill for their territorial expression of their identity, expect that the other people living on this land would do less? How is it possible that Israel has had so little respect for the Palestinian people’s desire and ambition for freedom, self-determination and dignity? Israelis would never agree to live under the conditions that Israel has subjected millions of Palestinians to live under. No amount of military pressure, threat of arrest, poverty or physical abuse would have ever convinced Israelis to give up their fight for freedom, self-determination, and dignity in a country of their own. Why do Israelis so underestimate the same from the Palestinian people? But Netanyahu’s strategy since 2009 (after his Bar Ilan speech in which he lied that he was willing to accept a Palestinian state) was to make permanent the separation between the West Bank and Gaza. He empowered Hamas in Gaza and continually delegitimized the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. In 2012 and 2013, I personally transmitted messages three times from Abbas to Netanyahu to begin secret direct negotiations, but Netanyahu completely refused. His strategy was to continue to tell the Israeli public and the world that Israel wanted peace but had no one to negotiate with. His strategy worked until October 7, 2023.
Two State Solution is Back!
There are two peoples living in this land. Even after this horrible war comes to an end, there will be two peoples living on this land, and both of them believe that it belongs to them and that they are the sole rightful owners of the land. There is little chance that each side will recognize the moral right of the other side to claim ownership over the land. Palestinians will probably never recognize the legitimacy of Zionism. Israelis will probably never recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim of being the legitimate indigenous people of this land. Perhaps at some time in the distant future people on both sides might be willing to recognize the legitimacy to the claims of the other side. That can wait for the future. What cannot wait for the future is the recognition of reality – that there are two peoples on the land that are here to stay and that are not willing to be subjugated by the other. Both sides demand self-determination. Both peoples demand freedom, dignity and security. Both sides can only get what they want if they also grant it to the other side. This is the primary and most fundamental recognition that both peoples need to arrive at right now. That is why the two-state solution is back on the table as well. There is no other solution to this conflict and there has never been a more urgent time to accept it.
The horrors of the past 16 months must come to an end with the determination that this will be the last Israeli-Palestinian war. We need new leaders on both sides, each willing to take the first step towards each other. The leaders of the past who still control us will be judged in history as responsible for sustaining the conflict and guilty of the tragedies that they brought to their people. A large majority of Israelis and Palestinians would be willing to live with the compromises necessary to make peace with the other side if they believed that the other side was in fact genuinely ready to live in peace. The only way to achieve that shift in understanding on both sides is through the adoption of the paradigm of cross-boundary cooperation, which must replace the paradigm of high walls and fences. We need influencers on both sides to stand together to speak about peace and living together in two states with good neighborly relations. We can no longer deny the existence of the other side or live with the false dream that they would be willing to live in a cage with limited freedom and limited legitimate expressions of their national-religious identity.
There are solutions for every issue in conflict between Israel and Palestine. Those solutions can be found if we start resolving those issues from the endgame first. The solution is two states between the river and the sea and all the rest can be negotiated. The basic premise of two states is not negotiable and neither Israel nor Palestine agree to have their right for self-determination under negotiations. Everything else can be negotiated. Learning from the failure of the Oslo peace process, it would be wise for leaders and public figures on both sides to speak openly about the need to evaluate and change what we teach in our schools to the next generation. It is true that the “school of life” is perhaps more influential than what is learned in schools, but I would argue that what is taught in schools is the truest reflection of the real values of the society. Accordingly, neither Israelis nor Palestinians learn about each other, of course other than that the other side is guilty of war crimes and preventing freedom and security. Neither side learns about the reality of the existence of the other side or about the eventual possibility of living in peace. Neither side learns the language of the other side and that is the easiest place to begin to change our reality.
Naturally, there is a lot of opposition to what I propose on both sides, even more so today than before October 7. Both publics seem to be more disposed to seeking revenge than thinking rationally and coherently on how to make sure that this never happens again. But when the war ends, more Israelis and Palestinians will understand that there is no possibility of one side being victorious in the fight against the other. There are no winners here. Both sides have lost miserably in this war. Both sides are suffering from extreme trauma and we don’t have leaders who behave differently than the people in the street. Our leaders are failing us and are even encouraging the incitement and hatred against the other. These are irresponsible leaders and they need to go – they do not serve the interests of their people. We have very few leaders on both sides who actually say and believe what is necessary for us to move out of 100 years of war, death and destruction. But I am sure that they are out there, and they will rise. As two peoples who have a burning desire to survive and live in security, we must have new visions and new realizations that we cannot continue to do what we have done for all too long. Israelis and Palestinians are, at the end of the day, the solution for each other’s right to live in peace and security. There will never be peace and security for only one of the sides here. It’s live together or die together. So, it is now time for the peace of no choice.
