Victory for Israel but Defeat for Netanyahu?

Tikvah advanced institute alumnus Haviv Rettig Gur has a characteristically incisive and original analysis of the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge for The Times of Israel. Netanyahu has achieved his military objectives, Gur argues, but they were not what the Israeli people expected. Gur opens his analysis by pointing to a fundamental tension between the Western way of war and the circumstances Western nations like Israel so often confront:

American military historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that for 2,500 years, democracies have held to a particular view of wars as brief, decisive, winner-takes-all confrontations between like-minded opponents. This notion of war is embedded deep in Western culture. Wars should be as decisive as elections, and since they are ultimately a distraction from life’s true purpose, as brief. This view has given Westerners “a distaste for what we call the terrorist, guerrilla, or irregular who chooses to wage war differently.”

But Netanyahu realized that the classic, decisive military campaign was ill-suited for the type of threat Hamas poses:

Netanyahu did not set out on July 8 to uproot Hamas – for two reasons. First, he believes time is on Israel’s side. Hamas is mismanaging Gaza into economic and political oblivion (even those who blame Gaza’s dire condition squarely on Israel have trouble defending Hamas’s decision to drag Gaza’s economy and last open border into the Egyptian civil war, leading to the huge blow caused by the shuttering of that border over the past year). Hamas’s permanent belligerency also forms Exhibit A in Netanyahu’s explanations to the West as to why his security demands in the West Bank are so high.

Second, according to sources familiar with his thinking, Netanyahu believes, as do the IDF chief of staff, the defense minister and others in the Israeli security establishment, that the cost of the sort of military reconquest of Gaza required to root out Hamas is too high to be worthwhile. The IDF believes it could take years to “pacify” such a crowded, politically hostile territory, at the cost of hundreds of IDF dead and untold thousands of Palestinian dead, massive international opprobrium, and vast drains on the IDF’s manpower and financial resources that could limit its operational flexibility on other dangerous fronts, especially Syria-Lebanon and Iran.

Instead of the classic, decisive Western approach, Netanyahu opted for one more suited to the irregular, psychological nature of Hamas’s style of war. Hamas seeks to change Israeli behavior by terrorizing Israelis; Israel, then, has sought to demonstrate to Hamas that none of its planned “force multipliers” – international pressure on Israel due to civilian deaths, domestic political pressure to end the conflict from rocket-battered Israeli civilians – could protect the organization. Israel could operate in Gaza, Netanyahu sought to demonstrate, with no meaningful political or international constraints, dealing pain to Hamas at its leisure and escalating at will.

This strategy, of course, cost him his political standing with an electorate morally and psychologically accustomed to the Western way of war. The result, Gur chronicles in the rest of the piece, has been attacks of Netanyahu from the right and the left.

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Victory for Israel but Defeat for Netanyahu?

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