This site is unconnected to the award winning blog concerned with: "Reflections on human rights and peacemaking in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" for that site please click on:http://guidetotheperplexed.blogspot.com/
· Main Points
1· The Kadima and Labour-led war is bound to fail unless a major change in tactics and strategy are made.
2· The Likud’s support of the government is unsustainable.
3· Hamas will celebrate a great “victory” unless they are defeated on the battlefield.
4· The loss of nerve by the Centre-Left Establishment in Israel could spell the end of liberal and left secular political influence in Israel for the foreseeable future.
· ANALYSIS
· It is clear from the modest efforts of the IDF in Gaza that the IDF and Defence Ministry under the leadership of Ehud Barak and Gabi Ashkenazi no longer have the will to fight a conventional war.
The forces currently available are not appropriate for use in any major campaign. Hamas therefore cannot be defeated. Unless Hamas are defeated they will continue to strike at Israel indefinitely. Therefore the stated aim of the current operation “to stop Hamas from attacking our citizens and soldiers” (Ehud Barak) cannot be achieved, and the idea that this will be fought “until the bitter end” (Barak)” makes no sense.
· The logic of Barak and Ashkenazi is clear. Unless Israel has absolutely no choice but to fight a conventional war it should not do so. Nor should Israel interfere in internal Palestinian or Arab politics. They perceive the two wars fought in Lebanon as failures, and thus any strategic gains made there, such as the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut, were seen as worthless or too high a price to pay.
Therefore, it follows that Israel must never get bogged down again in any Arab lands except when there is absolutely no choice and Israel’s very existence is at stake.
· This thinking is deeply flawed and has already led to the Second Intifada, and the Second Lebanon War. The reasons for the flaws in this reasoning are clear:
it consistently undermines Israel’s deterrence capability and thus emboldens militant groups, and it confirms Arab suspicions that their ultimate goal of wearing down an independent Jewish presence in the region through a series of wars of attrition is succeeding. A succession of catastrophic defeats is the only process that will convince the Arab street that, however justified eliminating an independent Jewish presence may be, it may simply not be worth the effort.
· Barak’s current strategy will fail for the following reasons:
1. Hamas will not bow to petty incursions. At most they will reinstitute a temporary ceasefire if they come under sustained devastating attack.
2. Hamas cannot be defeated unless a major ground war, and the complete retaking of Gaza, is accomplished.
3. This could have been accomplished in a few days but the IDF High Command and Barak have refused to countenance it because of the casualties involved.
4. A prolonged campaign cannot succeed because international pressure will force Israel to concede before some, if any, of its goals can be achieved.
5. Barak has wrongly assumed that the international community will allow, or even want, his slow campaign of attrition to succeed.
6. Barak has wrongly assumed that Israeli society can countenance a prolonged campaign in Gaza in which there is no hope of anything more than partial success.
7. Barak and the IDF High Command have wrongly assumed that Israeli society would not countenance the sacrifices necessary to retake Gaza.
8. This attitude is based on the wrong assumption that the Lebanon campaigns were failures and the sacrifices not worthwhile. The opposite is true. The first Lebanon war led the PLO to accept Israel’s existence and to the Oslo Accords. The Second Lebanon War introduced a significant UNIFIL presence as well as the Lebanese Army to South Lebanon for the first time in 40 years. This meant that for the first time since the 1960s legitimate governments were responsible for Lebanon-Israel security.
· Ehud Barak has proven himself to be a loose canon, both dangerous to Israel and the Jewish people’s vital interests:
1. His precipitate withdrawal from South Lebanon (2000) led directly to the Second Intifada as Yasser Arafat saw that violence paid. It also led to the direct takeover of southern Lebanon by Hizb’allah, which in turn led directly to the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
2. His talks with Hafez al-Assad (senior) were a disaster; he embarrassed President Clinton by reneging on promises and pulling out of commitments in Shepherdstown in 2000.
3. Barak was incapable of leading his coalition in 1999-2000 and wavered whenever public opinion polls appeared to contradict his plans, which in any case frequently changed, and which he often refused to share with anyone else out of mistrust.
4. Barak’s strategic political and military choices have consistently been proven wrong. He has refused to fortify the South with the necessary bunkers and infrastructure despite knowing that a prolonged confrontation with Hamas was inevitable and might lead to a regional conflict in which all of Israel’s population centres would be in danger. This includes a shortage of gas masks, which have not even been redistributed amongst the population after they had been forcibly recalled for repairs and renovation. The population in the North of Israel is totally exposed as no money has been allocated for bunker repairs and renovations by the Ministry of Defence.
· Barak’s plan can only succeed if the international community and soon-to-be President Obama permit it. All the evidence points to their not being willing to countenance a prolonged campaign.
His campaign can also only succeed if each of the IDF’s mini-incursions over the coming weeks and months are 100% successful and cause devastating defeats on Hamas as well as result in few Israeli casualties. The reason for this precarious view of Barak’s strategy is that it will become clear that a major incursion in the summer of 2008 would have ended Hamas rule despite significant IDF casualties, though mitigated by perfect weather conditions for the IAF, which of course is not the case in December 2008 or January-February 2009.
· If Barak manages to sustain a campaign against Hamas over the coming weeks and months he may stand a chance of getting some kind of ceasefire from Hamas only, but not from any other Palestinian group. In effect all his efforts, even if they succeed, will not bring about the strategic changes he set out to achieve. The elections, whether delayed or not, will see the collapse of Israel’s centre-left, Barak’s probable resignation, and the almost certain premature end to Gabi Ashkenazi’s term as Chief-of-Staff. Ashkenazi will be seen as weak when it came to any major combat decisions but an excellent manager of the rehabilitation of the IDF into an institution capable of combat despite not having any senior officers either willing or capable of bringing Israel victory on the battlefield.
· Finally, it is worth noting that if this method of war, by relatively slow attrition without any definitive victory on the battlefield, is allowed to succeed by the international community and Israeli society, then it will likely become the model for many future conflicts. As in Iraq, a combination of political accomodation, counter-insurgency, bribery or economic incentives, and specialist units operations and assassinations, will be seen as the paradigm for containing all future conflicts involving extreme radical organizations, whether Islamist, or otherwise. The conflicts will be considered at an end not when any 'victory' is achieved but when a political accomodation is finally reached with the former terrorist organizations and parties involved. It is interesting to note that the conflict in Northern Ireland has been contained as a result of similar tactics and that it took 38 years to achieve, and even now could break down at any moment. Whether the international community will allow Israel the same luxury as it allowed a tiny conflict on the edge of a tiny island on the furthest periphery of Western Europe is another matter.
Links:
For the best English language news site on Israel:
http://www.jpost.com/¨
For a vigorous Liberal-Left position of the Israeli daily paper:
http://www.haaretz.com/¨
For a Centre-Left view on Israel, in occasionally appalling English:
http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-3083,00.html¨
For an insight into Arab and Muslim media coverage of the Israel-Palestinian issue, anti-Semitism, and other Middle East issues see:
http://www.memri.org/¨
For an overview of the media coverage of Israel see the BICOM (Britain Israel Research and Communications Centre) site. Below are the sites for -
News headlines with links to each site:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/news/headlines¨
A written summary of the news:
news:http://www.bicom.org.uk/news¨
The main issues behind the news:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/briefings/behind_the_news/¨
Extracts from editorial and article Opinion:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/news/comment-and-opinion
A small selection of Quotes:
http://www.bicom.org.uk/news/quotes
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