Abbas is part of the problem, not the solution, as the past decade has shown over and over again.
By DAVID M. WEINBERGSmoke rises following what witnesses said was an IAF air strike in the east of Gaza City.(photo credit: REUTERS)
It is hard to win a war when you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back. It’s even harder to win a war when you tie that hand back yourself. It’s still harder yet when you’re wearing ideological blinders and fail to see the full contours of the enemy.In going to war against Hamas, Israel is indeed handicapped in so many ways.Firstly, the IDF has frighteningly handcuffed itself in order to avoid excessive civilian casualties among the civilian population in Gaza – within which Hamas is purposefully embedded.What army truly dedicated to crushing the enemy tells enemy forces exactly which targets it is about to attack, warning the civilian population in particular neighborhoods to flee on very specific days and at specific hours? Who drops warning flyers from the air and “knocks on roofs” with null bomblets in order to give further notice that “we are coming in now” – allowing the enemy to set its remote control booby-traps and run to hide while leaving women and children behind to stare down the IDF? Who ever heard of an army out to defeat its adversary that telegraphs its every move in advance? What army has its most elite troops tiptoe through the enemy tulips, being oh so careful not to trample on the flowers, looking only for tunnels and rocket launchers, instead of blasting its way forward with overwhelming power to the center of the enemy formations, seeking to decapitate its leadership? The answer is the Israel Defense Forces, fighting with one hand self-tied behind its back.We call this a “humanitarian” way of waging war. Humanitarian for the other side, that is. I think it cruel and unfair to the citizens and citizen-army of Israel.Just think of the many Israeli boys who would not have been buried this week were it not for Israel’s super-humanitarian and ultra-ultra-considerate combat doctrines.Israel is furthermore handicapped against Hamas by IDF leadership that did not prepare the army for full-scale ground warfare. Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz said last year that he doesn’t believe that Israel will have a major ground war for at least a decade.As a result, Israel doesn’t have sufficient well-trained and properly equipped troops nor fully developed battle plans for reconquering the Gaza Strip and crushing Hamas.The chief of staff and his team have unabashedly, consciously chosen to deemphasize the ground army in recent years, investing in the air force, in cyber-warfare capabilities, and in smallscale special operations forces instead.That’s fine, but it knowingly came at the expense of the Armored, Artillery, Infantry and Combat Engineering corps.The result is that the IDF does not have, cannot have, and has not presented to the cabinet a truly serious plan for a much broader, deeper and lengthier ground offensive against Hamas. I suspect that the situation would be much the same were Israel to face the need to rout Hezbollah in Lebanon – and we will still need to do so.The army’s inability to present the political echelon with realistic options for an expansion of the offensive against Hamas has of course blinded the government and restricted the cabinet’s options.It’s no surprise that Binyamin Netanyahu and Moshe Ya’alon are hesitant go further.The result is that the IDF has more or less been marching in place for about a week, with large contingents of troops holding static positions inside Gaza (exposed to enemy fire) or whiling away time in staging grounds just outside Gaza (again, exposed to enemy mortar fire).Sitting ducks.ISRAEL IS FURTHERMORE crippled in the fight against Hamas by an invisible threshold that seems to have been reached in terms of the patience of the international community; a threshold that, alas, Israel seems to have resigned itself to.After three weeks of fighting and much suffering to Palestinian civilians caught in the battlefield, the world has had enough. Israel’s credit has almost run out, its diplomatic maneuvering room mostly exhausted. This is largely because of US President Obama’s fickle friendship, and his unwillingness to understand the broader strategic stakes in this fight.Finally, Israel is handicapped by lingering self-delusions about the Palestinians.This includes the erroneous notion that economic development and horizons of prosperity will moderate Palestinian society or undercut the radical Islamic leadership. Therefore Israel is supposed to be “careful” not to destroy too much Palestinian infrastructure and it “must be a partner” in rebuilding the Palestinian polity after the war.Yet there is no evidence since Oslo (1993) that largesse bestowed upon the Palestinians moderates their political goals or behavior.The additional hallucination is the nonsensical belief, now being revived in some left-wing corners, that Mahmoud Abbas and his so-called Palestinian Authority can be Israel’s salvation.Abbas is part of the problem, not the solution, as the past decade has shown over and over again. His “security services” cannot guarantee Israel’s security, neither in the Jordan Valley nor on the Samarian mountaintops overlooking Ben-Gurion Airport nor at the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.Until this country’s leadership rids itself of the hallucinatory belief that a Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza is going to rescue Israel from its security and diplomatic dilemmas, it is not going to make hard-nosed decisions about using the military to truly rout and/or deter the Palestinian terrorist armies on our borders.www.davidmweinberg.com
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