A Generation of Misguided Policy in Israel. By Michael Ben-Gad, who served in the IDF Armoured Corps from 1982 through 1985.
Israel was not founded by religious Jews. The early Zionists were secular, rational, and uniquely unsentimental about the Jewish condition in late 19th-century Europe and beyond. They believed that if Jews were to end their tragic two-thousand-year exile, their reliance on God and the fatalism it bred needed to be expunged. …
Why was 7 October a surprise?
Beyond the obvious intelligence failure, one reason is that a good portion of the troops in the enlarged division that was meant to be guarding the Gaza border had been redeployed to keep order and protect an ever-expanding archipelago of tiny, often unauthorized West Bank settlements and roads leading to them.
The sole purpose of these outposts was to establish a de facto Jewish presence in the West Bank and hence restrict the actions available to future Israeli governments. … For more than a generation, defence policy and much else has been increasingly determined by the dictates of Israel’s religious settler lobby and its Messianic visions. …
This was a belief that by dispersing a population of Jews around the West Bank we could gradually annex it, all the while pretending that we could ignore the presence of three million hostile Palestinians, and the demographic consequences their incorporation would entail. It is in this context that the settlers, and their secular avatar Benyamin Netanyahu, came to view Hamas as a strategic asset, because its radicalism made any efforts to find a compromise, or even merely to contain the conflict, impossible. Suitcases of cash, supplied by Hamas’ Qatari allies no less, could be relied upon to keep Hamas in power but restrained. What better proof was needed that God was on our side?
If God/Allah wills:
It is the cultural effects of this way of thinking — which bred arrogance, complacency, and above all wishful thinking — that has created the greatest threat to Israel in at least fifty years. Religious obscurantists with government portfolios declared that Yeshiva study was as important as military service in protecting Israel from its enemies. Study Torah and God would not forsake us.
God did not intervene to save families like mine in 1939; and in 1973, the small number of surviving tank crews who ultimately stopped the columns of Syrian armour on the Golan Heights knew that only their heroism and sacrifice would protect their families from a similar fate. …
One hopeful sign of change is that hundreds of ultraorthodox men, in defiance of their Rabbis and politicians, have now contacted the IDF and asked to be inducted into the reserves. …
Power corrupts. The state and its big-government sheep become incompetent.
Long term, Israel is too vulnerable to be governed by feckless people in the grip of childish fantasies. …
In the days that followed the attack, survivors and the families of the hostages were left to their own devices. Israelis discovered just how hollowed out and incompetent state institutions had become — hobbled by years of corruption and patronage, proving how badly we need more, not less, accountability and external scrutiny.
What did prove robust and filled the vacuum were Israel’s civil society organisations and volunteer networks — precisely the types of institutions that are incompatible with the overbearing system of centralized power the government wished to impose. …
Several retired senior military officers were alerted that morning that Hamas’ terrorists had crossed the first line of defence and were killing people in communities close to the border and the music festival nearby. Men of this type, aged sixty and over, whose first instinct was to grab a gun and drive toward the slaughter to kill terrorists and save random strangers, are not produced in societies governed by strongmen. In Israel, as in Ukraine, democracies foster initiative, improvisation, courage, and resilience rather than conformity and passivity. …
What if Israel agrees to an early ceasefire?
While many commentators have carefully elaborated the dangers of a ground invasion, they have generally failed to consider the broader implications for Israel should it choose not to invade. First, if Hamas emerges with its forces largely intact, there is nothing to stop it from launching further attacks in the years to come at a moment of its choosing. Others, too, will be emboldened by this Hamas victory. Far from garnering the world’s respect, restraint will be interpreted as weakness. Allies, including the United States, will gradually abandon Israel — no one needs a weak ally. …
In the last two years, Russia and now Iran — through its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon — have each gone to war against members of the West’s democratic alliance. With stocks of ammunition and arms running short, how soon before China and North Korea each do the same against Taiwan and South Korea? Who is to say which parts of the core Western alliance will come under pressure after that?
Leftist nonsense:
In the West, some people on the left complain bitterly about the hyper-individualism and social atomization of modern market-driven societies. But when such people talk about “community” and the “collective good,” some of them seem to mean only such things as safe bike lanes and free yoga classes — not protection from an invading army coming to kill your family. …
That blind spot reflects a different sort of religious dogma, equally unmoored from reality.
