Israeli soldiers are fighting on multiple fronts. Just as the brave soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought on D-Day did so for a better future for the US and the world, Israel’s fighters’ success must be leveraged into a safer and more successful future for this small country.
I grew up like most Americans loving football, basketball and baseball. There were times when I could get a $20 bill from my mother and that was enough for my brother and me to go to Wrigley Field, have a great time and take the train round trip. Our kids growing up in Israel were generally crazy about soccer, local but mostly international. I used to know all of the one-name superstars like Messi, Ronaldo, Pepe, Ramos and others by heart.
Once, the kids were watching a game and I joined them. The final score was 2-0. That’s a pretty typical soccer score and one of the reasons why Americans still have not fallen in love with the sport. They want 110-90 basketball or 42-21 football results. The strange thing about this game was that after it was finally over, the guys with zero ran around like they had been accepted to Harvard when it was still good, while the team that had actually scored seemed dejected as if they had been invited to the White House to dine with Joe Biden. When I pointed out that everything seemed backwards, my boys patiently explained that this was the second of two games. The guys running around without their shirts won the first round 3-0, so they only needed to win, tie, or lose by two goals or less to move on to the finals. “So, you are saying that sometimes losing is okay?” I asked. They agreed. More recently, we see American clubs that tank their season for a future high draft pick.
I was thinking about this match when I thought about Israel after the current war. What will victory look like? Can anyone define what success of the war will be? Will citizens in the north and the south of the country be able to live in their homes without fear of rockets or terrorist infiltration? What should Israel do to maximize deterrence? If we were living around 70 years ago, the answers would have been easy. The names Subic Bay and Clark AFB were part of my childhood in the 1970s. They were two massive military installations that the US ran out of the Philippines. The US earned those bases and many more throughout the world with the blood and treasure it spilled to win World War II. I had a Harvard professor who often said that if you want to see the US army, go to Germany. And he was right. On my first trip there in the 1980s, we were passed by jeeps and covered army trucks, something that I had almost never seen at home.
So if we were living in the older, saner days, Israel would defeat Hamas and set up bases in Gaza proper. It would definitely hold on to the Gaza border with Egypt. Egypt is adamant that Israel leave the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza side of the fence, and one must wonder why. Why does Egypt care who receives the trucks once they leave Egyptian Sinai and enter the hellhole that is Gaza? The simple answer is that apparently after fleecing tourists at the pyramids and taking huge sums for ships to transit the Suez Canal, Egyptian skimming of Gaza-bound and Gaza-leaving traffic is a top money-maker for an otherwise poor country. And as the Houthi rockets and drones have turned the Suez into a museum, one might be tempted to understand why the Egyptians want the Hamas business back again which must have brought in millions.
In a saner world, Israel would control everything that goes into and comes out of Gaza. If that means dismantling the American floundering floating pier, so be it. Israel, as a victor, would take whatever spoils and arrangements that would serve its own purposes just as victors always have. The same would be true in the north. Hezbollah is in a much higher league than Hamas. They have better intelligence and far more sophisticated weaponry. Again, in the old days, Israel would blast Lebanon back to the stone age, and Beirut and Gaza City would become indistinguishable. But we have the current US government, the UN, the various international courts, the Europeans, and of course the press, academia and Hollywood, all demanding that Israel lose or minimally turn whatever victory gained into a defeat. Demands for a ceasefire are disingenuous. All they want is for Hamas to live on to fight another day.
So what does Israel do? Can it tell all of the external and yes, some internal, voices to get lost? Does Israel need US aid and international acceptance to the point of not taking care of its own national interests? Based on past experience, the answer is probably and unfortunately yes. Much of the second intifada and the current fighting was and is based on pleasing external kibbitzers so that they leave Israel alone. There are rare occasions when Israel flashes its fangs and does the militarily prudent thing, like going into Rafah against an international chorus of nudnikim demanding that Hamas be spared its last bastion of fighters and access to weaponry and money. I remember when Ariel Sharon started to take apart the Muqata, with Arafat inside. It was the only time I saw him terrified. When he put out a desperate order to stop all terror, he was white as a sheet.
Israeli leaders need to stop looking in the rearview mirror and reading the foreign press. They need to figure out what serves the country’s interests most. If they cannot completely destroy Hezbollah or Iran, then they need a deterrence that would make the price of attack too high to consider. Both are unpopular with the local populations and will need to think how much the citizens will suffer before they revolt. Gaza must be pacified and the West Bank also needs to be under heavy Israeli control. Most Western media do not discuss the very frequent incursions of Israeli forces into Nablus, Hebron and the like, but it happens on a near weekly basis. Israelis have no interest in conquering or ruling over Palestinians, but because the latter have no national goal other than to destroy Israel, Israel must take all actions—however unpopular in Hollywood or Brussels—to protect its citizens and its interest. The time has come for Israel to tell the international Hamas chorus to go pound sand.
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