OPINION
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
What Worries Me About the Gaza War After My Trip to Arab States
Dec. 12, 2023
Destruction in Gaza City.Credit...Mohammed Hajjar/Associated PressShare full article
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By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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I’ve been concerned from the start that Israel launched its invasion of Gaza to eradicate Hamas with no plan for what to do with the territory and its people in the wake of any victory. Having just spent a week in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates taking the pulse of this important corner of the Arab world, I am now even more worried.
Let me summarize my concerns this way: Because Hamas built a vast tunnel network under Gaza, Israeli forces, in their quest to eliminate that vicious terrorist organization, are having to destroy huge numbers of structures. It’s the only way they can kill a lot of Hamas fighters and demilitarize Gaza without losing a lot of their own soldiers in the short window that Israel feels it has in the face of pressure from the U.S. and other allies to wind down the invasion.
Israel was justified in hitting back at Hamas for breaking the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7 and indiscriminately murdering, raping or maiming more than 1,200 people and kidnapping some 240 others in its path that day. Hamas plotted and executed a campaign of unspeakable barbarism that seemed designed to make Israel crazy and lash out without thinking about the morning after the morning after. And that is just what Israel did.
But nine weeks later, we can now see the morning after the morning after. In pursuing its aims of dismantling Hamas’s military machine and wiping out its top leaders, Israel has killed and wounded thousands of innocent Gazan civilians. Hamas knew this would happen and did not care a whit. Israel must. It will inherit responsibility for a gigantic humanitarian disaster that will require a global coalition years to fix and manage. As The Times reported on Tuesday, “Satellite imagery shows that the fighting has resulted in heavy damage to almost every corner of Gaza City” — at least 6,000 buildings hammered, with about a third of them in ruins.
A recent essay on this subject in Haaretz by David Rosenberg noted that “even if the fighting ends in a decisive victory over Hamas, Israel will be saddled with a problem that almost defies solution. Most of the public discussion about what happens the day after the war has focused on who will govern Gaza. That alone is a knotty question, but the problem goes much deeper than who will be responsible for law and order and providing basic services: Whoever is in charge will have to rebuild the wreckage that is Gaza and create a functioning economy.”
That will be a multibillion-dollar, multiyear endeavor. And I can tell you based on my conversations here, no Gulf Arab states (not to mention European Union states or the U.S. Congress) are going to come into Gaza with bags of money to rebuild it unless — and even this is not a sure thing — Israel has a legitimate, effective Palestinian partner and commits to one day negotiating a two-state solution. Any Israeli official who says otherwise is delusional. “We need to see a viable two-state solution plan, a road map that is serious before we talk about the next day and rebuilding the infrastructure of Gaza,” Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview Tuesday with The Wall Street Journal.
The most hopeful thing I can report from Riyadh, and from talking to U.S. officials in Washington before I arrived, is that when the war in Gaza ends, Saudi Arabia remains committed in principle to resuming the negotiations that were underway before Oct. 7. What the negotiators were discussing was a grand bargain in which the U.S. would enter into a security treaty with Saudi Arabia and, at the same time, Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel — provided that Israel committed to defined steps to work with the Palestinian Authority toward a two-state solution.
But I was left with the very strong impression here that the Saudis want the Americans to shut down the Gaza war as soon as possible, because the death and destruction in Gaza is radicalizing their young population (who were by and large not focused on Israel-Palestine before), while frightening away foreign investors and generally getting in the way of what Saudi Arabia wants to focus on: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan for transforming the country, from education to infrastructure to women’s empowerment.
While the leaders here are not the least bit sympathetic to Hamas, and would not mourn the group’s disappearance for a second, they are dubious that Israel can wipe Hamas out forever and worried that, in trying to do so, the damage to Gaza will set off unintended bad consequences.
Of course I understand why reviving this Saudi-U.S.-Israel-Palestinian dialogue would be hard for even a moderate Israeli government to commit to right now — let alone the collection of fanatics currently running Israel, who are committed to annexing the West Bank and the craziest of whom even look longingly on adding Gaza. And given what happened on Oct. 7, not a lot of Israelis want to even think about, let alone agree to, ceding territorial control to any Palestinian governing authority.
But if Israel does not come up with a long-term political vision to entice the world to help it fund the rebuilding of Gaza, it is going to be in for a lot of diplomatic and economic hurt. Gaza could end up a giant, sucking chest wound that overstretches Israel militarily, economically and morally — and takes its U.S. superpower patron along for the ride.
Yes, along for the ride …. Bibi Netanyahu is campaigning right now to keep his job by trying to prove to his far-right base that he is the only leader ready to tell the Biden administration to its face that his country will never do the minimum that the U.S. is asking: for Israel to help nurture a revamped Palestinian Authority, and to offer some long-term political horizon for Palestinian statehood in order to develop a Palestinian partner that can one day govern a Gaza liberated from Hamas and Israel.
It is why Saudi Arabia’s willingness — if it holds — to proceed with the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian dialogue when this war stops is so important. But this is not just some act of charity by the Saudis. This is a hard-core strategy. This generation of leaders in Saudi Arabia as well as in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco (three countries that signed the Abraham Accords with Israel) is quite unsentimental when it comes to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. Although it’s complicated.
These leaders are fed up with being told they have to postpone their priorities and focus their energy, attention and resources on the Palestinian cause. At the same time, though, they are genuinely horrified at the civilian losses in Gaza. At the same time, they are keenly aware of the corruption and general incompetence of the Palestinian Authority. And at the same time, they detest the Muslim Brotherhood offshoots like Hamas and understand how its sympathizers around the region, with the ever-cynical help of Iran, are trying to use the images of dead babies in Gaza on television and social media to inflame Arab populations.
Western diplomats and Saudi officials pointed out to me how all of these political crosswinds are howling today in nasty inter-Arab battles going on in Arabic social media over the Palestine issue. This was especially true after Prince Mohammed, in an interview with Fox News in September, expressed enthusiasm about normalizing relations with Israel if it would move toward a solution with the Palestinians. (I believe this Saudi willingness was, indeed, a key reason Hamas attacked on Oct. 7.)
For instance, when Saudi Arabia went ahead on Oct. 28 with its annual entertainment and sports festival known as Riyadh Season — which features widely attended sports matches by prominent athletes and performances by Arab and international singers, dancers and other artists — pro-Palestinian social media influencers largely from Kuwait and Egypt began trashing Saudis for having fun while Gaza was burning. Posts contrasting images of cultural performances in Riyadh with Palestinians being bombed in Gaza began to proliferate, much to the annoyance of Saudis, plenty of whom are as enraged by the deaths of so many Gazan civilians as any other Arabs.
The Daily Mail Australia reported that at the Nov. 21 soccer World Cup qualifier match in Kuwait between the Palestinian and Australian teams, Palestinian fans “staged a protest against Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.” On the seventh minute of the game, they raised Palestinian flags and waved Palestinian head scarfs, kaffiyehs, “to mark the start of the war on 7 Oct. — the date of the Hamas attack inside Israel.”
That seventh-minute protest was not only a declaration of support for Hamas but also perceived as a dig at the Saudis, one official here explained to me. The Portuguese soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo now plays for the Saudi team Al-Nassr. Ronaldo wears No. 7 — and at the seven-minute mark of games Al-Nassr fans let out a huge cheer for him.
Two weeks ago, Saudi Arabia hosted the second preliminary regatta of the 37th America’s Cup at the Jeddah yacht club on the Red Sea coast, while Houthi pirates from Yemen were attacking Israeli-owned ships in that same Red Sea and Houthi militiamen were firing rockets at Israel. While all of this was going on overhead and on the ocean, an American friend of mine attending the regatta said one of his Saudi hosts was berating him about U.S. support for the destruction of Gaza. It’s complicated.
And yet: I was walking in the Faisaliah mall Monday when a middle-aged shopkeeper who recognized me walked out of his women’s clothing store to say hello. He talked about all the business opportunities that were opening up in Saudi Arabia. Our conversation, though, quickly turned to Gaza, and he wanted to make sure I understood that many Saudis did not support Hamas, because its mass murder of civilians and abduction of children in war was expressly banned by the Prophet Muhammad and was done at the behest of Iran.
The good news: A few months ago, the Saudi government did a private poll asking Saudis how they felt about normalization with Israel — if it were done in the context of Saudi support for Palestinian statehood. Seventy percent approved, a senior official told me. The bad news: Given the images coming out of Gaza now, he added, the government wouldn’t dare conduct that poll today.
More on the Israel-Hamas war
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THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Understanding the True Nature of the Hamas-Israel War
Nov. 28, 2023
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, during a visit to the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in July.Credit...Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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The reason the Hamas-Israel war can be hard for outsiders to understand is that three wars are going on at the same time: a war between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians exacerbated by a terrorist group, a war within Israeli and Palestinian societies over the future and a war between Iran and its proxies and America and its allies.
But before we dig into those wars, here’s the most important thing to keep in mind about them: There’s a single formula that can maximize the chances that the forces of decency can prevail in all three. It is the formula that I think President Biden is pushing, even if he can’t spell it all out publicly now — and we should all push it with him: You should want Hamas defeated, as many Gazan civilians as possible spared, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his extremist allies booted, all the hostages returned, Iran deterred and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank reinvigorated in partnership with moderate Arab states.
Pay particular attention to that last point: A revamped Palestinian Authority is the keystone for the forces of moderation, coexistence and decency triumphing in all three wars. It is the keystone for reviving a two-state solution. It is the keystone for creating a stable foundation for the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab Muslim world. And it is the keystone for creating an alliance among Israel, moderate Arabs, the United States and NATO that can weaken Iran and its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — all of whom are up to no good.
Unfortunately, as Haaretz’s military correspondent, Amos Harel, reported on Tuesday, Netanyahu “is locked in by the extreme right and the settlers, who are fighting an all-out war against the idea of any involvement of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza mainly out of fear that the United States and Saudi Arabia will exploit such a move to restart the political process and push for a two-state solution in a way that will require Israel to make concessions in the West Bank.” So Netanyahu, “under pressure from his political partners, has banned any discussion of this option.”
If Netanyahu is a captive of his political right, Biden needs to be very careful not to become a captive of Bibi. That is no way to win these three wars at once.
The first and most obvious of the three is the latest round of the century-long battle between two indigenous peoples — Jews and Palestinians — over the same land but now with a twist: This time the Palestinian side is not being led by the Palestinian Authority, which since Oslo has been committed to reaching a two-state solution based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war. It’s being led by Hamas, a militant Islamist organization dedicated to eradicating any Jewish state.
On Oct. 7, Hamas embarked on a war of annihilation. The only maps it carried were not of a two-state solution but of how to find the most people in the Israeli kibbutzim and kill or kidnap as many of them as possible.
While I have no doubt that ending Hamas’s rule in Gaza — something every Sunni Arab regime except Qatar is quietly rooting for — is necessary to give both Gazans and Israelis hope for a better future, the whole Israeli war effort will be delegitimized and become unsustainable unless Israel can do it with much greater care for the Palestinian civilians. The Hamas invasion and the rushed Israeli counterinvasion are unleashing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza that is only underscoring how much Israel needs a legitimate Palestinian partner to help govern Gaza in the morning after.
The second war, very much related to the first, is the struggle within the Palestinian and Israeli societies over their respective longer-term visions.
Hamas argues that this is an ethnic-religious war between primarily Muslim Palestinians and Jews, and its goal is an Islamic state in all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. For Hamas, it’s winner take all.
There is a mirror image of Hamas’s extremist views on the Israeli side. The Jewish supremacist settlers represented in Netanyahu’s cabinet make no distinction between those Palestinians who have embraced Oslo and those who embrace Hamas. They see all Palestinians as modern-day descendants of the Amalekites. As Mosaic magazine explained, Amalekites were a tribe of desert raiders mentioned often in the Bible who inhabited today’s northern Negev, near the Gaza Strip, and lived by plunder.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that some Jewish settlers simply cannot stop talking about rebuilding settlements in Gaza. They want a Greater Israel from the river to the sea. Netanyahu embraced these far-right parties and their agenda to form his government and now cannot banish them without losing his grip on power.
In each community, though, you also have those who see this war as a chapter in a political struggle between two nation-states, each with a diverse citizenry that believes in theory that the war does not have to be winner take all. They envision a partitioning of the land into a Palestinian state with Muslims and Christians — and even Jews — in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, which coexists peacefully alongside an Israeli state with its own mix of Jews, Arabs and Druze.
These two-staters right now are on the defensive in both communities in their struggle with the one-staters. Therefore, it is in the highest interest of the United States and all moderates to bring back the two-state alternative. That will require a reinvigorated Palestinian Authority that is cleansed of corruption and antisemitic incitement in its schoolbooks and that has reliable governing and security forces. This is where states like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, together with the United States, should get involved immediately.
Any two-state solution down the road is impossible without a credible, legitimate Palestinian Authority that Israel trusts to govern a post-Hamas Gaza and a West Bank. But that requires not only Israeli assent; it also requires Palestinians to get their act together. Are they up to it?
Victory in the third war is also impossible without that. That third war is the one that scares me the most.
It’s the war between Iran and its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — against America, Israel and the moderate Arab states of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the U.A.E. and Bahrain.
This war is not only about hegemony, raw power and energy sources but also about values. Israel, at its best, and America, at its best, represent the promotion of Western humanistic concepts of women’s empowerment, multiethnic democracy, pluralism, religious tolerance and the rule of law — which are a direct threat to Iran’s misogynist Islamic theocracy, which demonstrates daily its ruthless willingness to jail or even kill Iranian women for not sufficiently covering their hair.
And while Arab allies of America and Israel are not democracies — and do not aspire to be — their leaders are all on a journey away from the old model of building legitimacy through resistance — resistance to Israel, to America, to Iran and Iranian-backed Shiites — and toward building their legitimacy on delivering resilience for all their people (through education, skills and growing environmental awareness) so they may realize their full potential.
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That is not Iran’s agenda. The raw power dimension is over who will be the hegemon, i.e. the big dog, in the region — Shiite Iran, tied to Russia and extending its reach to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, or Sunni Arab-dominated Saudi Arabia in a tacit alliance with Bahrain, the U.A.E., Jordan, Egypt and Israel and all backed by America. In this third war, Iran’s goal is to drive the United States out of the Middle East, to destroy Israel and to intimidate America’s Sunni Arab allies and bend them to its will.
In this war, America is projecting its power through our two aircraft carrier groups now stationed in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran is countering us with what I call landcraft carriers — a network of proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and Iraq serving as platforms for launching rocket attacks on U.S. forces and Israel every bit as lethal as those from our aircraft carriers.
This third war started to escalate on Sept. 14, 2019, when Iran launched an audacious, unprovoked drone attack against two major Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais. The Trump administration did nothing. “That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an attack on us,” Donald Trump said. On Jan. 17, 2022, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi militia attacked the United Arab Emirates with missiles and drones, igniting a fire near the Abu Dhabi airport and setting off explosions in fuel trucks that killed three people. Again, no U.S. response.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that on Oct. 7, Hamas dared to launch its murderous attack on Israel’s western border; shortly after, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah began daily missile attacks along Israel’s northern border, and the Houthis began launching drones at Israel’s southern tip, seized a ship in the Red Sea and attacked two others.
I believe the chokehold that Iran’s Jew-hating clerical regime is putting on Israel from the west, north and south is an existential threat to Israel. All Iran needs to do is have Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis launch one rocket a day at Israel, and tens of thousands of Israelis will refuse to go back to their homes along the border areas that are under fire. The country will shrink — or worse.
Consider the research of the Israeli economist Dan Ben-David, who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research at Tel Aviv University. In a country of nine million people where 21 percent of Israeli first graders are ultra-Orthodox Jews, a vast majority of whom grow up with virtually no secular education, and an additional 23 percent are Israeli Arabs, who attend chronically poorly funded and poorly staffed public schools, Ben-David noted, “fewer than 400,000 individuals are responsible for keeping Israel in the developed world.”
We’re talking about the top Israeli researchers, scientists, techies, cyberspecialists and innovators who drive the start-up nation’s economy and defense industries. Today, a vast majority are highly motivated and support the Israeli government. But if Israel cannot maintain stable borders or shipping lanes, some of these 400,000 will emigrate.
“If a critical mass of them decide to leave, the consequences for Israel will be catastrophic,” Ben-David said. After all, “in 2017, 92 percent of all income tax revenue came from just 20 percent of adults” — with those 400,000 responsible for creating the wealth engines that generated that 92 percent.
If Iran gets away with this, its appetite for squeezing any rival with its landcraft carriers will only grow. Israel can put up a strong fight and is capable of striking deep in Iran. But ultimately, to break Iran’s tightening stranglehold, Israel needs allies from the United States and NATO and the moderate Arab states. And the United States, NATO and the moderate Arab states need Israel.
But such an alliance will not come together if Netanyahu sticks with his policy of undermining the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — essentially driving Israel and its seven million Jews into indefinite control of five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The pro-American forces in the region and Biden cannot and will not be party to that.
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So I end where I began, only now I hope three things are totally clear.
1. The keystone for winning all three wars is a moderate, effective and legitimate Palestinian Authority that can replace Hamas in Gaza and be an active, credible partner for a two-state solution with Israel and thereby enable Saudi Arabia and other Arab Muslim states to justify normalizing relations with the Jewish state and isolating Iran and its proxies.
2. The anti-keystones are Hamas and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, which refuses to do anything to rebuild, let alone expand, the Palestinian Authority’s role.
3. Israel and its U.S. backer cannot create a sustainable post-Hamas regional alliance or permanently stabilize Gaza while Netanyahu reigns as the prime minister of Israel.
More on Israel and the war
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OPINION
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Debate That Israel Needs Over the War
Dec. 1, 2023
Israeli soldiers near the border with Gaza on Wednesday.Credit...Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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As Israel debates what to do next in Gaza, I hope Israel’s political-military leadership will reflect on 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.
Wise man, Confucius.
The reason I was so wary about Israel invading Gaza with the aim of totally eliminating Hamas was certainly not out of any sympathy for Hamas, which has been a curse on the Palestinian people even more than on Israel. It was out of a deep concern that Israel was acting out of blind rage, aiming at an unattainable goal — wiping Hamas from the face of the earth as one of its ministers advocated — and with no plan for the morning after.
In doing so Israel could get stuck in Gaza forever — owning all its pathologies and having to govern its more than two million people amid a humanitarian crisis, and even worse, discrediting the very Israeli military that it was trying to restore Israelis’ trust in.
Quite honestly, I thought back to America after 9/11. And I asked myself, what do I wish I had done more of before we launched two wars of revenge and transformation in Afghanistan and Iraq for which they and we paid a huge price?
I wish I’d argued for what the C.I.A. calls a “Red Cell” or “Red Team” — a group of intelligence officers outside the direct military or political chain of command, whose main job would have been to examine the war plans and goals for Iraq and Afghanistan and stress-test them by proposing contrarian alternatives for achievable goals to restore U.S. security and deterrence. And to have that Red Team’s recommendations be made public before we went to war.
As a retired senior U.S. intelligence official said to me: The role of the C.I.A.’s Red Cell on other thorny problems “was to help the U.S. government make decisions with eyes wide open and to buy down, but not eliminate, risk. It’s 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 potential second- and third-order effects. Israel’s leaders need to be rigorous and not only passionate at this moment in time.”
So it’s with that in mind that I am proposing Israel create not only a Red Team for how to deal with Hamas in Gaza but also a Blue Team to critique the Red Team. Israel needs to have a much more robust internal debate because it has clearly rushed into a war with multiple contradictory goals.
Israel’s stated aim is to get back all its remaining hostages — now more than 130 soldiers and civilians — while destroying Hamas and its infrastructure once and for all, while doing it in a way that doesn’t cause more Gazan civilian casualties than the Biden administration can defend, and without leaving Israel responsible for Gaza forever and having to pay its bills every day. Good luck with all that.
Here’s what an Israeli Red Team might point out and advocate instead.
For starters, because the military and cabinet rushed into Gaza in this war and seemingly never game-planned for any endgame, Israel now finds itself in a difficult predicament. It has pushed well over one million civilians from northern Gaza to the south to get them away from the fight as it has attempted to wipe out all Hamas fighters in Gaza City and its environs. But now, the only way that Israel can take the ground war to southern Gaza — around Khan Younis, where Hamas’s senior leadership is suspected of hiding in tunnels — is by moving through this mass of displaced people and by creating even more.
Facing this predicament, the Israeli Red Team would suggest a radical alternative: Israel should call for a permanent cease-fire that would be followed by an immediate Israeli withdrawal of all military forces in Gaza on the condition that Hamas return all the hostages it has left, civilians and military, and any dead. But Hamas would get no Palestinian prisoners in return. Just a clean deal — Israeli withdrawal and a permanent cease-fire in return for the 130-plus Israeli hostages.
There would be an Israeli asterisk, though, which wouldn’t be written in, but everyone would understand it is there: Israel reserves the right in the future to bring to justice the top Hamas leaders who planned this massacre. As it did after the Munich massacre, though, Israel will do that with a scalpel, not a hammer.
What might be the advantages of such a strategy for Israel? The Red Team would cite five.
First, it would argue, all the pressure for a cease-fire to spare Gazan civilians more death and destruction will fall on Hamas, not on Israel. Let Hamas tell its people living out in the cold and rain — and the world — that it will not agree to a cease-fire for the mere humanitarian price of returning all the Israeli hostages.
Moreover, Israel would have ensured that Hamas got no big political victory out of this war like forcing Israel to free all the more than 6,000 Palestinians in its jails in return for the hostages Hamas is holding. No, no — it would just be a clean deal: permanent cease-fire for Israeli hostages, period. The world can understand that. Let’s see Hamas reject it and declare that it wants more war.
Second, some, maybe many, in Israel would complain that the military did not achieve its stated objective of eliminating Hamas, therefore it was a Hamas victory. The Red Team would respond that, for starters, the objective 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 have achieved, the Red Team would argue, is to have sent a powerful message of deterrence to Hamas and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: You destroy our villages, we will destroy yours 10 times more. This is ugly stuff, but the Middle East is a Hobbesian jungle. It is not Scandinavia.
And think smart about it: In the wake of such a permanent cease-fire, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader, would have to come out of his tunnel, squint into the sun, and face his own people for the first time since this war started. Yes, the morning after he comes out, many Gazans will carry him on their shoulders and sing his name for dealing such a heavy blow to the Jews.
But on the morning after the morning after, the Red Team would predict, many of those carrying him around would begin whispering to him: “Sinwar, what were you thinking? My house is now a pile of rubble. Who is going to rebuild it? My job in Israel that was feeding my family of 10 is gone. How am I going to feed my kids? You need to get me some international humanitarian assistance and a new house and job — and how are you going to do that if you keep lobbing rockets at the Jews?”
With Israel out, the humanitarian crisis created by this war in Gaza would become Sinwar’s and Hamas’s problem — as it should be. Every problem in Gaza would be Sinwar’s fault, starting with jobs.
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Israeli soldiers in position above the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank.Credit...Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via Shutterstock
Keep in mind, as Reuters recently noted, that before Oct. 7 Israel was issuing “more than 18,000 permits allowing Gazans to cross into Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to take jobs in sectors like agriculture or construction that typically carried salaries up to 10 times what a worker could earn” in Gaza. Gaza was also exporting over $130 million a year of fish, agricultural produce, textiles and other products to Israel and the West Bank. That’s now all stopped.
Third, the Israeli Red Team would argue, this will create the same kind of deterrence for Hamas that Israel’s devastating bombardments of pro-Hezbollah communities in the southern suburbs of Beirut did in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has never dared to provoke a full-scale war with Israel since.
The Red Team would add that not only would the damage Israel has inflicted on Hamas and Gaza create similar deterrence, but so too would the fact that Israel could now reimagine and strengthen its own border defenses. Hamas has shown Israel where all its vulnerabilities were and how it smuggled in so many weapons — and Israel can now make sure this will never happen again.
Fourth, one of the biggest strategic benefits of Israel getting out of Gaza in return for an internationally monitored cease-fire is that it could then devote full attention to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah and Iran would not like that. They want Israel permanently militarily overstretched and forced to keep a good chunk of its 300,000-plus reservists — who drive its economy — permanently mobilized to govern Gaza.
They also want Israel’s economy permanently overstretched to pay for it. And they want Israel morally overstretched by permanently owning the Gaza humanitarian crisis, so that every day the sun did not shine in Gaza, the rain did not fall, the electricity did not flow, the world would say that it is Israel’s fault. Israel’s worst enemies could not design a worse fate for it — and that is what Hezbollah and Iran are praying for.
Finally, the Israeli Red Team would argue, Israel has important healing to do at home. This surprise attack happened because Israel had a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had fractured the country by trying to mount an insane judicial coup and who governed Israel for a total of 16 years with a strategy of dividing everyone — religious from secular, left from right, Ashkenazim from Sephardim, Israeli Arabs from Israeli Jews — weakening the country’s immune system. Israel can be healed internally and resume its project of normalizing relations with its Arab neighbors and forging a stable relationship with the more moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank only if Netanyahu is removed. If the war goes on forever, that will never happen. And that is exactly what Netanyahu wants.
But now comes the Israeli Blue Team. What would it say about the Red Team?
Well, first, it would ask, what do you do if Sinwar simply says no, I won’t accept just a cease-fire, I need my 6,000-plus prisoners out of Israeli jails and I will pay the price in Western public opinion to hold out for them? Then Israel is stuck again.
The Israeli Blue Team would say: We have a better idea. First, downgrade our objectives. Declare that the military’s objective is not to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, but to significantly diminish its fighting capacity.
Because, the Blue Team would say, we actually don’t believe in deterrence. Hezbollah has not really been deterred since 2006. That is an illusion. Iran is just saving Hezbollah for the day Israel will threaten its nuclear program. We Blue Teamers believe in constantly diminishing our enemies’ capabilities. Once we have greatly diminished Hamas’s capabilities, we are not going to stay in Gaza forever until we kill every leader.
Instead, we will pull back and create a perimeter and outposts one mile inside the Gaza-Israel border to ensure that our border communities can never again be attacked overland as they were on Oct. 7. And we will do that to emphasize that we have the abilities and intentions to return at will if Hamas keeps firing rockets at us. If Hamas wants to trade our hostages for prisoners, we can talk. As for governance of Gaza, a diminished Hamas can stay in charge if that is what Gazans want. Let Hamas be responsible for the water and electricity.
Finally, the Blue Team would say to the Israeli political leadership: “Stop lying to yourself and the public. If we try to conquer and hold all of Gaza, Gaza will not only swallow us in the end, you politicians will create huge doubts in the public’s mind about the military by giving it an unachievable goal and Israel simply cannot afford more doubts about the military a second longer.”
In sum, Israel needs this kind of internal debate, where an Israeli Red Team and Blue Team can remind the country’s leadership that there is no perfect outcome waiting for Israel in Gaza. Fixing Gaza “once and for all” was always a fantasy.
But here is what is not a fantasy: The true history of Israel-Hamas relations. It is very simple. It is war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout …. Hamas thrives in the wars, because that is all it can deliver and all that it exists for. Israel thrives in the long timeouts — in the cease-fires — when all of its societal, economic and innovative strengths come to the fore. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah want to drag Israel into a permanent state of war. Israel needs a Red Team and a Blue Team to advocate instead for longer cease-fires, a more hardened border and the flexibility to return to Gaza if Hamas forces it to.
Not perfect, but perfect was never on the menu. It’s the Middle East, Jake.
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Understanding the True Nature of the Hamas-Israel War
Nov. 28, 2023
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, during a visit to the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in July.Credit...Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via ShutterstockBy Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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The reason the Hamas-Israel war can be hard for outsiders to understand is that three wars are going on at the same time: a war between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians exacerbated by a terrorist group, a war within Israeli and Palestinian societies over the future and a war between Iran and its proxies and America and its allies.
But before we dig into those wars, here’s the most important thing to keep in mind about them: There’s a single formula that can maximize the chances that the forces of decency can prevail in all three. It is the formula that I think President Biden is pushing, even if he can’t spell it all out publicly now — and we should all push it with him: You should want Hamas defeated, as many Gazan civilians as possible spared, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his extremist allies booted, all the hostages returned, Iran deterred and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank reinvigorated in partnership with moderate Arab states.
Pay particular attention to that last point: A revamped Palestinian Authority is the keystone for the forces of moderation, coexistence and decency triumphing in all three wars. It is the keystone for reviving a two-state solution. It is the keystone for creating a stable foundation for the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab Muslim world. And it is the keystone for creating an alliance among Israel, moderate Arabs, the United States and NATO that can weaken Iran and its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — all of whom are up to no good.
Unfortunately, as Haaretz’s military correspondent, Amos Harel, reported on Tuesday, Netanyahu “is locked in by the extreme right and the settlers, who are fighting an all-out war against the idea of any involvement of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza mainly out of fear that the United States and Saudi Arabia will exploit such a move to restart the political process and push for a two-state solution in a way that will require Israel to make concessions in the West Bank.” So Netanyahu, “under pressure from his political partners, has banned any discussion of this option.”
If Netanyahu is a captive of his political right, Biden needs to be very careful not to become a captive of Bibi. That is no way to win these three wars at once.
The first and most obvious of the three is the latest round of the century-long battle between two indigenous peoples — Jews and Palestinians — over the same land but now with a twist: This time the Palestinian side is not being led by the Palestinian Authority, which since Oslo has been committed to reaching a two-state solution based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war. It’s being led by Hamas, a militant Islamist organization dedicated to eradicating any Jewish state.
On Oct. 7, Hamas embarked on a war of annihilation. The only maps it carried were not of a two-state solution but of how to find the most people in the Israeli kibbutzim and kill or kidnap as many of them as possible.
While I have no doubt that ending Hamas’s rule in Gaza — something every Sunni Arab regime except Qatar is quietly rooting for — is necessary to give both Gazans and Israelis hope for a better future, the whole Israeli war effort will be delegitimized and become unsustainable unless Israel can do it with much greater care for the Palestinian civilians. The Hamas invasion and the rushed Israeli counterinvasion are unleashing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza that is only underscoring how much Israel needs a legitimate Palestinian partner to help govern Gaza in the morning after.
The second war, very much related to the first, is the struggle within the Palestinian and Israeli societies over their respective longer-term visions.
Hamas argues that this is an ethnic-religious war between primarily Muslim Palestinians and Jews, and its goal is an Islamic state in all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. For Hamas, it’s winner take all.
There is a mirror image of Hamas’s extremist views on the Israeli side. The Jewish supremacist settlers represented in Netanyahu’s cabinet make no distinction between those Palestinians who have embraced Oslo and those who embrace Hamas. They see all Palestinians as modern-day descendants of the Amalekites. As Mosaic magazine explained, Amalekites were a tribe of desert raiders mentioned often in the Bible who inhabited today’s northern Negev, near the Gaza Strip, and lived by plunder.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that some Jewish settlers simply cannot stop talking about rebuilding settlements in Gaza. They want a Greater Israel from the river to the sea. Netanyahu embraced these far-right parties and their agenda to form his government and now cannot banish them without losing his grip on power.
In each community, though, you also have those who see this war as a chapter in a political struggle between two nation-states, each with a diverse citizenry that believes in theory that the war does not have to be winner take all. They envision a partitioning of the land into a Palestinian state with Muslims and Christians — and even Jews — in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, which coexists peacefully alongside an Israeli state with its own mix of Jews, Arabs and Druze.
These two-staters right now are on the defensive in both communities in their struggle with the one-staters. Therefore, it is in the highest interest of the United States and all moderates to bring back the two-state alternative. That will require a reinvigorated Palestinian Authority that is cleansed of corruption and antisemitic incitement in its schoolbooks and that has reliable governing and security forces. This is where states like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, together with the United States, should get involved immediately.
Any two-state solution down the road is impossible without a credible, legitimate Palestinian Authority that Israel trusts to govern a post-Hamas Gaza and a West Bank. But that requires not only Israeli assent; it also requires Palestinians to get their act together. Are they up to it?
Victory in the third war is also impossible without that. That third war is the one that scares me the most.
It’s the war between Iran and its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — against America, Israel and the moderate Arab states of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the U.A.E. and Bahrain.
This war is not only about hegemony, raw power and energy sources but also about values. Israel, at its best, and America, at its best, represent the promotion of Western humanistic concepts of women’s empowerment, multiethnic democracy, pluralism, religious tolerance and the rule of law — which are a direct threat to Iran’s misogynist Islamic theocracy, which demonstrates daily its ruthless willingness to jail or even kill Iranian women for not sufficiently covering their hair.
And while Arab allies of America and Israel are not democracies — and do not aspire to be — their leaders are all on a journey away from the old model of building legitimacy through resistance — resistance to Israel, to America, to Iran and Iranian-backed Shiites — and toward building their legitimacy on delivering resilience for all their people (through education, skills and growing environmental awareness) so they may realize their full potential.
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That is not Iran’s agenda. The raw power dimension is over who will be the hegemon, i.e. the big dog, in the region — Shiite Iran, tied to Russia and extending its reach to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, or Sunni Arab-dominated Saudi Arabia in a tacit alliance with Bahrain, the U.A.E., Jordan, Egypt and Israel and all backed by America. In this third war, Iran’s goal is to drive the United States out of the Middle East, to destroy Israel and to intimidate America’s Sunni Arab allies and bend them to its will.
In this war, America is projecting its power through our two aircraft carrier groups now stationed in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran is countering us with what I call landcraft carriers — a network of proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and Iraq serving as platforms for launching rocket attacks on U.S. forces and Israel every bit as lethal as those from our aircraft carriers.
This third war started to escalate on Sept. 14, 2019, when Iran launched an audacious, unprovoked drone attack against two major Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais. The Trump administration did nothing. “That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an attack on us,” Donald Trump said. On Jan. 17, 2022, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi militia attacked the United Arab Emirates with missiles and drones, igniting a fire near the Abu Dhabi airport and setting off explosions in fuel trucks that killed three people. Again, no U.S. response.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that on Oct. 7, Hamas dared to launch its murderous attack on Israel’s western border; shortly after, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah began daily missile attacks along Israel’s northern border, and the Houthis began launching drones at Israel’s southern tip, seized a ship in the Red Sea and attacked two others.
I believe the chokehold that Iran’s Jew-hating clerical regime is putting on Israel from the west, north and south is an existential threat to Israel. All Iran needs to do is have Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis launch one rocket a day at Israel, and tens of thousands of Israelis will refuse to go back to their homes along the border areas that are under fire. The country will shrink — or worse.
Consider the research of the Israeli economist Dan Ben-David, who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research at Tel Aviv University. In a country of nine million people where 21 percent of Israeli first graders are ultra-Orthodox Jews, a vast majority of whom grow up with virtually no secular education, and an additional 23 percent are Israeli Arabs, who attend chronically poorly funded and poorly staffed public schools, Ben-David noted, “fewer than 400,000 individuals are responsible for keeping Israel in the developed world.”
We’re talking about the top Israeli researchers, scientists, techies, cyberspecialists and innovators who drive the start-up nation’s economy and defense industries. Today, a vast majority are highly motivated and support the Israeli government. But if Israel cannot maintain stable borders or shipping lanes, some of these 400,000 will emigrate.
“If a critical mass of them decide to leave, the consequences for Israel will be catastrophic,” Ben-David said. After all, “in 2017, 92 percent of all income tax revenue came from just 20 percent of adults” — with those 400,000 responsible for creating the wealth engines that generated that 92 percent.
If Iran gets away with this, its appetite for squeezing any rival with its landcraft carriers will only grow. Israel can put up a strong fight and is capable of striking deep in Iran. But ultimately, to break Iran’s tightening stranglehold, Israel needs allies from the United States and NATO and the moderate Arab states. And the United States, NATO and the moderate Arab states need Israel.
But such an alliance will not come together if Netanyahu sticks with his policy of undermining the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — essentially driving Israel and its seven million Jews into indefinite control of five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The pro-American forces in the region and Biden cannot and will not be party to that.
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So I end where I began, only now I hope three things are totally clear.
1. The keystone for winning all three wars is a moderate, effective and legitimate Palestinian Authority that can replace Hamas in Gaza and be an active, credible partner for a two-state solution with Israel and thereby enable Saudi Arabia and other Arab Muslim states to justify normalizing relations with the Jewish state and isolating Iran and its proxies.
2. The anti-keystones are Hamas and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, which refuses to do anything to rebuild, let alone expand, the Palestinian Authority’s role.
3. Israel and its U.S. backer cannot create a sustainable post-Hamas regional alliance or permanently stabilize Gaza while Netanyahu reigns as the prime minister of Israel.
More on Israel and the war
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OPINION
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Debate That Israel Needs Over the War
Dec. 1, 2023
Israeli soldiers near the border with Gaza on Wednesday.Credit...Abir Sultan/EPA, via ShutterstockBy Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
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As Israel debates what to do next in Gaza, I hope Israel’s political-military leadership will reflect on 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.
Wise man, Confucius.
The reason I was so wary about Israel invading Gaza with the aim of totally eliminating Hamas was certainly not out of any sympathy for Hamas, which has been a curse on the Palestinian people even more than on Israel. It was out of a deep concern that Israel was acting out of blind rage, aiming at an unattainable goal — wiping Hamas from the face of the earth as one of its ministers advocated — and with no plan for the morning after.
In doing so Israel could get stuck in Gaza forever — owning all its pathologies and having to govern its more than two million people amid a humanitarian crisis, and even worse, discrediting the very Israeli military that it was trying to restore Israelis’ trust in.
Quite honestly, I thought back to America after 9/11. And I asked myself, what do I wish I had done more of before we launched two wars of revenge and transformation in Afghanistan and Iraq for which they and we paid a huge price?
I wish I’d argued for what the C.I.A. calls a “Red Cell” or “Red Team” — a group of intelligence officers outside the direct military or political chain of command, whose main job would have been to examine the war plans and goals for Iraq and Afghanistan and stress-test them by proposing contrarian alternatives for achievable goals to restore U.S. security and deterrence. And to have that Red Team’s recommendations be made public before we went to war.
As a retired senior U.S. intelligence official said to me: The role of the C.I.A.’s Red Cell on other thorny problems “was to help the U.S. government make decisions with eyes wide open and to buy down, but not eliminate, risk. It’s 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 potential second- and third-order effects. Israel’s leaders need to be rigorous and not only passionate at this moment in time.”
So it’s with that in mind that I am proposing Israel create not only a Red Team for how to deal with Hamas in Gaza but also a Blue Team to critique the Red Team. Israel needs to have a much more robust internal debate because it has clearly rushed into a war with multiple contradictory goals.
Israel’s stated aim is to get back all its remaining hostages — now more than 130 soldiers and civilians — while destroying Hamas and its infrastructure once and for all, while doing it in a way that doesn’t cause more Gazan civilian casualties than the Biden administration can defend, and without leaving Israel responsible for Gaza forever and having to pay its bills every day. Good luck with all that.
Here’s what an Israeli Red Team might point out and advocate instead.
For starters, because the military and cabinet rushed into Gaza in this war and seemingly never game-planned for any endgame, Israel now finds itself in a difficult predicament. It has pushed well over one million civilians from northern Gaza to the south to get them away from the fight as it has attempted to wipe out all Hamas fighters in Gaza City and its environs. But now, the only way that Israel can take the ground war to southern Gaza — around Khan Younis, where Hamas’s senior leadership is suspected of hiding in tunnels — is by moving through this mass of displaced people and by creating even more.
Facing this predicament, the Israeli Red Team would suggest a radical alternative: Israel should call for a permanent cease-fire that would be followed by an immediate Israeli withdrawal of all military forces in Gaza on the condition that Hamas return all the hostages it has left, civilians and military, and any dead. But Hamas would get no Palestinian prisoners in return. Just a clean deal — Israeli withdrawal and a permanent cease-fire in return for the 130-plus Israeli hostages.
There would be an Israeli asterisk, though, which wouldn’t be written in, but everyone would understand it is there: Israel reserves the right in the future to bring to justice the top Hamas leaders who planned this massacre. As it did after the Munich massacre, though, Israel will do that with a scalpel, not a hammer.
What might be the advantages of such a strategy for Israel? The Red Team would cite five.
First, it would argue, all the pressure for a cease-fire to spare Gazan civilians more death and destruction will fall on Hamas, not on Israel. Let Hamas tell its people living out in the cold and rain — and the world — that it will not agree to a cease-fire for the mere humanitarian price of returning all the Israeli hostages.
Moreover, Israel would have ensured that Hamas got no big political victory out of this war like forcing Israel to free all the more than 6,000 Palestinians in its jails in return for the hostages Hamas is holding. No, no — it would just be a clean deal: permanent cease-fire for Israeli hostages, period. The world can understand that. Let’s see Hamas reject it and declare that it wants more war.
Second, some, maybe many, in Israel would complain that the military did not achieve its stated objective of eliminating Hamas, therefore it was a Hamas victory. The Red Team would respond that, for starters, the objective 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 have achieved, the Red Team would argue, is to have sent a powerful message of deterrence to Hamas and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: You destroy our villages, we will destroy yours 10 times more. This is ugly stuff, but the Middle East is a Hobbesian jungle. It is not Scandinavia.
And think smart about it: In the wake of such a permanent cease-fire, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader, would have to come out of his tunnel, squint into the sun, and face his own people for the first time since this war started. Yes, the morning after he comes out, many Gazans will carry him on their shoulders and sing his name for dealing such a heavy blow to the Jews.
But on the morning after the morning after, the Red Team would predict, many of those carrying him around would begin whispering to him: “Sinwar, what were you thinking? My house is now a pile of rubble. Who is going to rebuild it? My job in Israel that was feeding my family of 10 is gone. How am I going to feed my kids? You need to get me some international humanitarian assistance and a new house and job — and how are you going to do that if you keep lobbing rockets at the Jews?”
With Israel out, the humanitarian crisis created by this war in Gaza would become Sinwar’s and Hamas’s problem — as it should be. Every problem in Gaza would be Sinwar’s fault, starting with jobs.
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Israeli soldiers in position above the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank.Credit...Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via ShutterstockKeep in mind, as Reuters recently noted, that before Oct. 7 Israel was issuing “more than 18,000 permits allowing Gazans to cross into Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to take jobs in sectors like agriculture or construction that typically carried salaries up to 10 times what a worker could earn” in Gaza. Gaza was also exporting over $130 million a year of fish, agricultural produce, textiles and other products to Israel and the West Bank. That’s now all stopped.
Third, the Israeli Red Team would argue, this will create the same kind of deterrence for Hamas that Israel’s devastating bombardments of pro-Hezbollah communities in the southern suburbs of Beirut did in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has never dared to provoke a full-scale war with Israel since.
The Red Team would add that not only would the damage Israel has inflicted on Hamas and Gaza create similar deterrence, but so too would the fact that Israel could now reimagine and strengthen its own border defenses. Hamas has shown Israel where all its vulnerabilities were and how it smuggled in so many weapons — and Israel can now make sure this will never happen again.
Fourth, one of the biggest strategic benefits of Israel getting out of Gaza in return for an internationally monitored cease-fire is that it could then devote full attention to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah and Iran would not like that. They want Israel permanently militarily overstretched and forced to keep a good chunk of its 300,000-plus reservists — who drive its economy — permanently mobilized to govern Gaza.
They also want Israel’s economy permanently overstretched to pay for it. And they want Israel morally overstretched by permanently owning the Gaza humanitarian crisis, so that every day the sun did not shine in Gaza, the rain did not fall, the electricity did not flow, the world would say that it is Israel’s fault. Israel’s worst enemies could not design a worse fate for it — and that is what Hezbollah and Iran are praying for.
Finally, the Israeli Red Team would argue, Israel has important healing to do at home. This surprise attack happened because Israel had a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had fractured the country by trying to mount an insane judicial coup and who governed Israel for a total of 16 years with a strategy of dividing everyone — religious from secular, left from right, Ashkenazim from Sephardim, Israeli Arabs from Israeli Jews — weakening the country’s immune system. Israel can be healed internally and resume its project of normalizing relations with its Arab neighbors and forging a stable relationship with the more moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank only if Netanyahu is removed. If the war goes on forever, that will never happen. And that is exactly what Netanyahu wants.
But now comes the Israeli Blue Team. What would it say about the Red Team?
Well, first, it would ask, what do you do if Sinwar simply says no, I won’t accept just a cease-fire, I need my 6,000-plus prisoners out of Israeli jails and I will pay the price in Western public opinion to hold out for them? Then Israel is stuck again.
The Israeli Blue Team would say: We have a better idea. First, downgrade our objectives. Declare that the military’s objective is not to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, but to significantly diminish its fighting capacity.
Because, the Blue Team would say, we actually don’t believe in deterrence. Hezbollah has not really been deterred since 2006. That is an illusion. Iran is just saving Hezbollah for the day Israel will threaten its nuclear program. We Blue Teamers believe in constantly diminishing our enemies’ capabilities. Once we have greatly diminished Hamas’s capabilities, we are not going to stay in Gaza forever until we kill every leader.
Instead, we will pull back and create a perimeter and outposts one mile inside the Gaza-Israel border to ensure that our border communities can never again be attacked overland as they were on Oct. 7. And we will do that to emphasize that we have the abilities and intentions to return at will if Hamas keeps firing rockets at us. If Hamas wants to trade our hostages for prisoners, we can talk. As for governance of Gaza, a diminished Hamas can stay in charge if that is what Gazans want. Let Hamas be responsible for the water and electricity.
Finally, the Blue Team would say to the Israeli political leadership: “Stop lying to yourself and the public. If we try to conquer and hold all of Gaza, Gaza will not only swallow us in the end, you politicians will create huge doubts in the public’s mind about the military by giving it an unachievable goal and Israel simply cannot afford more doubts about the military a second longer.”
In sum, Israel needs this kind of internal debate, where an Israeli Red Team and Blue Team can remind the country’s leadership that there is no perfect outcome waiting for Israel in Gaza. Fixing Gaza “once and for all” was always a fantasy.
But here is what is not a fantasy: The true history of Israel-Hamas relations. It is very simple. It is war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout …. Hamas thrives in the wars, because that is all it can deliver and all that it exists for. Israel thrives in the long timeouts — in the cease-fires — when all of its societal, economic and innovative strengths come to the fore. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah want to drag Israel into a permanent state of war. Israel needs a Red Team and a Blue Team to advocate instead for longer cease-fires, a more hardened border and the flexibility to return to Gaza if Hamas forces it to.
Not perfect, but perfect was never on the menu. It’s the Middle East, Jake.
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