Law, Power, and Justice

Israel cannot return to the status quo that existed before October 7.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/why-israel-slept-yadlin-evental

For years, the country’s political and military establishment had allowed intolerable threats to gather by seeking to maintain the status quo in the conflict with the Palestinians and to establish a modus vivendi with the de facto Hamas state in Gaza based on deterrence, aiming to extend periods of tranquility.

the government and the political establishment must accept responsibility for their strategic errors. They should prioritize national security interests above political survival and work to foster unity among Israelis, preparing them for the demanding times and challenges that lie ahead. And once the danger posed by Hamas has been eliminated, Israel must renew the process of promoting stable security and political arrangements with the Palestinians

Hamas may have calculated there was a good chance that a major assault and the likely Israeli response might spark violence on other fronts, including inside Israel—as was the case with an escalation of the fighting in Gaza in May 2021 that provoked clashes among Arabs and Jews in cities across Israel.

It is worth noting that officials with Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and the minister of defense had all cautioned Netanyahu about Israel appearing historically weak in the eyes of its adversaries. Despite these warnings conveyed in recent months through a series of letters, Netanyahu chose to disregard them.

But Israeli intelligence and decision-makers had come to believe that Hamas’s responsibilities in Gaza—where it essentially governed a de facto state of over two million Palestinians—had tempered its extremism. Hamas deceitfully encouraged this misperception in recent years, posing as a reliable actor and warning of escalation if Israel did not allow funding from Qatar to arrive in Gaza and did not permit more Gazan workers in Israel. When Israel agreed to those concessions, Hamas used the resulting money and the information gathered from Gazans allowed to work in Israel to clandestinely plot its murderous offensive.

This failure to properly comprehend Hamas’s nature and its intentions dates back to the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the subsequent Hamas coup against the Palestinian Authority there. Since then, Israel had operated on the premise that a deterred and weakened Hamas was preferable to a governance vacuum in Gaza and would allow Israel to focus on what it perceived as more critical strategic challenges, such as Iran’s nuclear aspirations and Hezbollah’s military buildup. Accordingly, each time a flare-up occurred in Gaza, Israel’s aim was to reestablish deterrence through a limited use of force. This allowed Hamas to carry out a long-term buildup of arms and military infrastructure and to improve its operational capabilities.

But Israel failed to imagine an aboveground invasion and did not reinforce defenses around Gaza in proportion to Hamas’s growing military capabilities, deviating from a key lesson learned during the Yom Kippur War: organize defense according to an adversary’s capabilities and not only to its assessed intentions. Consequently, Israeli forces in the area were outnumbered and caught off guard after the IDF reduced its troop presence around Gaza and granted leave to many soldiers during the Sukkot holiday.

The

The fourth pillar of Israel’s security doctrine is the concept of achieving a decisive military outcome—that is, securing an uncontested victory over the enemy by neutralizing both its military capabilities and its resolve to continue fighting. This idea has sparked extensive debate among experts and senior

In the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack, Israel has come to see that it cannot coexist with a jihadi Islamist state akin to

More fundamentally, the government must work to restore trust in the state’s institutions among Israeli citizens. This will require new and unified leadership, the coordinated mobilization of all government ministries, and an official investigation into the origins of the Hamas attack. The current government—and especially Netanyahu—is unfit for this task. He and his close allies, after all, are responsible for the failure to address the problem of Gaza and Hamas over the past 15 years and for the unprecedented rift in Israeli society that reduced its preparedness in the months leading up to the attack. Israel will have to hold elections as soon as possible after the ground operation in Gaza ends, as long as security conditions, including in the north, allow for it.

Hamas has opposed and undermined the prospect of two states; whenever talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization seemed to gain momentum, Hamas reliably launched terror attacks. The organization adamantly rejects the Oslo accords, refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and openly pursues its destruction. Consequently, the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza is not an impediment to the two-state idea: it is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for any positive advancements in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and in the Middle East in general.