In what could be a Three Stooges sketch, Israel’s leaders are all playing hot potato with the policy that assumed that Hamas wanted to build a state-like entity that would prioritize the welfare of the Gazan residents instead of the military goal of destroying Israel and killing Jews. Qatari cash and other foreign aid (including much from the EU, UN and USAID) flowed with Israeli acquiescence and encouragement and workers from Gaza were given jobs in Israel with the assumption that these inducements (not bribes, mind you) would create a situation where Hamas would have no choice but to create a true civil society.
No one wants to take “credit” to be the first in the world to civilize a fanatical Islamic terror group, but this was a consensus foreign and security policy view across the entire ruling political, legal and military class. Netanyahu and the pretenders to the throne – Gantz, Lapid, Eizenkot, Golan and Bennet all were supporters of this policy. All the IDF chiefs of staff and all the Ministers of Defense (with the possible exception of Avigdor Lieberman) since at least 2014 supported this policy. But instead of saying “we thought it could work but didn’t – we were wrong” everyone is trying to pass the blame.
One voice in the wilderness was Simcha Goldin, professor of medieval Jewish History at Tel-Aviv University and father of Hadar Goldin, an IDF officer who was killed during an Obama/UN cease fire in 2014 and who has been held ever since by Hamas. Simcha Goldin has written article after article about the dangers that Hamas presents to Israel in Gaza and other places. He and his family tried unsuccessfully to get the Israeli government and military to take Hadar’s case seriously and to demand his return before any civil aid is sent to Gaza. The entire military and political establishment ignored his calls and his claims that humanitarian aid should be given only if they return their son for burial – humanitarian for humanitarian. He was accused many times of supporting a policy that would only lead to war. The publisher of Ha’aretz went so far as to deem him Israel’s most dangerous person.
We won’t ever know if Simcha Goldin’s proposed policy would have led to war, but we do know what happened by ignoring it. But he was one of the few to warn and believe in what he said.
So, let’s take a step back and look at two “hopeful” policies that failed utterly over the past 30 years – Oslo and the Hamas appeasement. The problem with both was not only that policy itself but the fact that those in power knowingly ignored the signals that showed, early on, that it was a failure. With Oslo, one could make the argument that Arafat was to be the Palestinian’s Mandela and lead them to a peaceful co-existence with their existential enemy, Israel. However, early on Arafat allowed, if not planned, terror attacks. Rabin’s claim that Arafat is better able to deal with terrorists because he didn’t have to face the Israeli Supreme Court and the pro-Palestinian Israeli “humanitarian” group B’Tzelem showed that Arafat may have bee able but was not willing. Once can’t forget that after each bus blew up the talking-heads would hold their breath waiting for Arafat to condemn the attack. After a delay and pressure from the US or Israel or whomever, he would half-heartedly condemn it allowing the “journalists” to breathe again.
Rabin might have fixed Oslo had he stood up to Arafat at the start, but then again, it might have been too late. The point is that whether Oslo was good or bad is as important a question as how it was handled from the start. The old Labor Party people like to blame the election of Netanyahu after the Rabin assassination for the collapse of Oslo but they ignore two points. The first point is that Oslo was already on shaky feet since Israel accepted mass terror attacks as part of the birthing pains Israel had to suffer as part of the peace “process”. The second wat that Netanyahu, for all intents and purposes, kept the Oslo agreement intact – and may even have strengthened it with his stronger response to Palestinian terror.
This leads us to the Hamas appeasement. In an interview with Gadi Taub, Netanyahu blamed October 7 on the lack of response by the IDF’s senior command and of course he is right. But he ignores everything that led up to that.
Although we can use Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza as the starting point of the appeasement policy we will focus on what happened during and after the Tzuk Eitan operation in 2014. Tzuk Eitan was a response to the kidnapping and murder of three high school boys in Gush Etzion (between Jerusalem and Hebron) followed by rocket attacks to Jerusalem. Israel, as it has always done, hesitated bringing in ground forces until they realized that they needed to destroy the tunnels that went into Israel. In what was then considered a long 56 day war the IDF announced that they had destroyed all the attack tunnels that came into Israel.
In spite of the fact that Hamas attacked during the Obama/UN cease fire, after they accomplished their mission of destroying the attack tunnels, the IDF its forces withdrew (leaving Hadar Goldin behind). Hamas of course wanted to “rebuild” Gaza and Israel wanted to make sure it didn’t rebuild the tunnels. Then Defense Minister Moshe Bogie Ya’alon stated in a private conversation that I heard (and he later denied) that he knew where every sack of cement was going. He was wrong of course and Hamas spent the next 10 years building the vast tunnel network that 17 months of fighting has yet to fully destroy, while Israel built an underground wall denying the Hamas tunnels their attack capabilities all the while appeasing Hamas with all sorts of goodies including the infamous Qatari cash in suitcases.
There were three main events or decisions that directly led to October 7. The first is allowing unsupervised and a nearly unlimited amount of building materials into Gaza. This lack of supervision meant that Israel had no satellites focused on Gaza, no human intelligence and apparently no focus at all on what was being built. As an example – after the war started an attorney was interviewed where he said that a few years earlier a client of his, a building contractor, came to him to check the legality of buying sand from Gaza. He said he was offered an incredible amount of sand at a vastly reduced price. Sand is a premium in Israel because it is illegal to “farm” it in most places.
Those responsible for monitoring security in Gaza, the IDF and the Shaback, told him that there was no problem buying the sand. We don’t have to ask where this sand came from – it was not from the beautiful beaches of Gaza.
The second thing that happened was the movement of cash from Qatar, ostensibly in order to pay the government workers and allow order to be maintained. This freed up Hamas from the responsibility to govern properly and within budget – the very goal of the global appeasement policy towards Hamas! The logic behind the appeasement was to force Hamas to concentrate on providing civil services – but the Qatari money (as well as US and EU money) meant that they could now “invest” in other things like building the largest terror base in the world, since the “world” would take care of paying for civil services.
The third event is really two – the operations in 2021 and 2022 and the subsequent permissioning of nearly 20,000 workers from Gaza to enter Israel on a daily basis.
In the military operations, the government and the IDF were convinced that there was a split between Hamas and Islamic Jihad -meaning that Hamas were now the moderates (a place of honor previously given only to Fatah). This was followed by the announcement by IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi that Israel successfully destroyed the main part of the Hamas tunnel network in Gaza – rending it unusable. This mean that the Hamas trickery made its way deep into Israeli’s military establishment and showed Hamas that Israel had no real intelligence. And by allowing workers into Israel proper it allowed Hamas to gather intelligence that it used on October 7 in order to massacre and kidnap Israeli civilians and soldiers.
This all came before October 7. The main failure of October 7 itself falls to the IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Shaback head Ronen Bar for not raising the readiness of the soldiers in Gaza and calling in the reserve battalions (not the reservists but the battalions of regular forces held in reserves for such occasions) and for not alerting the Prime and Defense Ministers. The head of the Air Force is also at fault for not having a proper order of forces to defend against a surprise attack and the head of IDF operations for the same thing.
These are professional failures of the highest order bordering on criminal negligence. At a minimum it is dereliction of duty.
But Hamas never would have reached their level of preparedness and competence had not the political and security masters, since 2006, and more specifically since 2014 paid more attention to what was happening in Gaza instead of adopting the views that it could turn Hamas from fanatical religious goals to secular ones. Essentially an entire generation of political, legal and military leaders is at fault for this failure.
However, it is Benjamin Netanyahu who is primarily responsible. Whether he allowed the army to go against his wishes or instincts is irrelevant to the fact that he allowed it, encouraged it and in the case of the Qatari money was intimately involved in it. The same goes for all the IDF Chiefs of Staff, the last two heads of the Shaback, IDF intelligence chief and certain figures in the Mossad. The government legal advisors and the courts also have their hands in this. The problem of course is that everyone of these figures thinks that he can manipulate the investigations and that the people, that history, will only look at the official investigations as opposed to what actually happened. The official investigations that have so far been released have been CYA on steroids.
An investigation headed by a team who 50% of the country does not trust will similarly be dismissed by that same 50%. Israel is a small country and there are few people in positions of power who have the competence to investigate both the leadup to October 7 and October 7 and its aftermath, who are not on social terms with those responsible. Does that mean that there won’t be a legitimate investigation?
There are honorable people in the country who can look beyond politics and can work their way through the fog of war and politics. These people are probably mid-level lawyers, junior grade reserve officers who have fought in this war and others who have not yet reached the pinnacle of their professions. In other words, as opposed to the “elder statesmen” that we spoke about in a previous post, what we need here are those competent enough, mature enough and experienced enough in life to be able to conduct a proper investigation but young enough that they don’t have personal ties to those they are investigating. What we need are not ex-generals, law firm partners and current or ex-Supreme Court justices who know the protagonists all too well – but those young, hopeful and not yet overly cynical about the country – in short, those with a real stake in the future of the country.
The problem of course is that those being investigated (and that includes the legal profession since they have so much influence in rules of engagement and appeasing Hamas) will never trust those who are not part of their generation. The attempts to “balance” the investigations means that you choose your friends and I will choose mine and together they will all make sure there is just enough guilt to satisfy the “other side” without actually having anyone take responsibility.
The “crime” here (and I don’t use crime in a legal sense) is generational – and this generation cannot judge itself.
Mr Goldin being labeled is typical projection from the left, how frustrating, didn't know of his ongoing one man truthtelling mission.
Humanitarian for humanitarian could have been a foundation for the most moral army in the world.
Excellent overview of the incompetence of hubris, corruption and complicit complacency