May 14: Biden Pushes Hezbollah Solution in Gaza

How close is Iran to a bomb?; UNC axes DEI; Senators ask IRS to sanction Tides, WESPAC

---

---

The Big Story

The United States claims that it supports Israel’s goal of an “enduring defeat” of Hamas, even as it has also struggled desperately to secure a cease-fire deal that it hopes would end the war while pressuring Israel not to expand its operations into Rafah. In a Tuesday story, anonymous U.S. officials spoke to The Times of Israel’s Jacob Magid to explain the apparent contradiction. What they said offered further confirmation of what we’ve been saying for a long time, which is that in Gaza, as in Lebanon, the United States and Israel are on opposite sides.

First, there’s the question of what the “defeat” of Hamas looks like. Here, U.S. officials have variously claimed that “victory” in Gaza is impossible, and that it has already been achieved. The contradiction here is only apparent, since, practically speaking, they cash out to the same demand: that Israel not enter Rafah. A non-exhaustive selection of recent quotes:

• “The goal is for Hamas to be severely weakened … but we have to be honest about the fact that Hamas will remain in Gaza in some form after the war is over. The past six months have proven no amount of fighting is going to change that.” —one of the U.S. officials quoted in Magid’s story

• “Sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talked about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory. I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.” —Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, speaking at a NATO Youth Summit on Monday

• “We have learned in our own experience in difficult wars that eliminating something is different than making it no longer be a threat. The challenge is to reduce Hamas to the point that it’s no longer a threat.” —U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew to Israel’s Channel 12 News on Sunday 

• “We believe that [Israel has] put an enormous amount of pressure on Hamas and that there are better ways to go after what is left of Hamas in Rafah than a major ground operation. … The picture of Hamas today is not what it was six months ago.” —National Security Council spokesman John Kirby in a press conference last week

• “Military pressure is necessary but not sufficient to fully defeat Hamas. If Israel’s military efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back” —National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Monday

Israel can’t win, so it should stop the war and proceed to a “political plan,” but also it’s already won, so it should stop the war and proceed to a “political plan.” As Omri Ceren and Tablet’s Tony Badran point out on X, this communications playbook is not even unique to Gaza. Rather, it’s standard operating procedure for Team Obama-Biden whenever an Iranian “equity” is threatened, going back to the Syrian civil war:

For instance, here’s then White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on May 29, 2012, responding to reports that a Syrian government militia had massacred over 100 people in the town of Taldou:

We do not believe that militarization, further militarization of the situation in Syria at this point is the right course of action. We believe that it would lead to greater chaos, greater carnage.

And here’s Carney again on Feb. 18, 2014:

It is still our view, absolutely, that there is not a military solution to this conflict and that a negotiated political settlement is the only path forward for Syria, and the Geneva process is the process by which that is pursuable and achievable at this time.

In reality, of course, the U.S. line that the conflict could not be resolved by “militarization” or a “military solution” was merely cover for U.S. inaction while Iran and Russia successfully implemented a “military solution” to ensure the Assad regime’s survival. Later reporting revealed that the Iranians had told the Obama administration directly that they would collapse nuclear talks if Washington intervened against Tehran’s Syrian “equity.” 

But let’s return to Gaza. The Americans claim that Hamas cannot be defeated and has already been defeated. What do they propose instead? Formally, the answer is a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state led by a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, with Israel receiving normalization with Saudi Arabia as an inducement. Informally, according to Magid’s reporting, the answer is a Hezbollah-style arrangement in Gaza in which Hamas reconciles with the PA and formally withdraws from government while remaining as an independent political and military force. Per Magid: 

The American source said there are some in the administration and in Arab capitals who believe that Hamas will be willing to formally withdraw from governing responsibilities in Gaza if it is part of a reconciliation deal with PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement.

Notably, the US has signaled its tepid support for China’s recent efforts to strike a long-elusive deal between Hamas and Fatah. “If China wanted to play a productive role in bringing this conflict to an end, that is something that we would welcome,” [State Department Spokesman Matthew] Miller said last week.

This would likely mean a degree of Hamas approval of the individuals tapped to lead the transitional Palestinian government in Gaza, but the American source said that no Hamas members would be allowed in the government.

Ah. Hamas will approve the individuals tapped to lead the Palestinian government, but Hamas will not be in the government. This White House drives a hard bargain!

Except—hold the fort—the U.S. plan almost precisely mirrors Hamas’ plan, as articulated by Matthew Levitt in a recent article in Foreign Affairs. That plan is to withdraw from governing responsibilities in order to create a Hezbollah-style arrangement in a future Palestinian state. Here’s Levitt:

In launching the October 7 attack, Hamas upended the status quo in Gaza. Less noted has been what it wants instead. In fact, as debate ensues over postwar administration of the strip, Hamas has begun to lay the groundwork for reconciling with and ultimately taking over the PLO, thereby guaranteeing that it is part of whatever governance structure emerges. Al-Hayya, the Hamas official who explained that his group wanted to change the whole equation, recently acknowledged this plan and has floated the idea of a five-year truce with Israel based on the armistice lines that existed before the 1967 war and on a unified Palestinian government that controls both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, since December, senior leaders from Hamas have been meeting with factions of Fatah that are opposed to Mahmoud Abbas, the deeply unpopular leader of the PA, to discuss just such a rapprochement. On April 21, Haniyeh explicitly proposed restructuring the PLO to include all Palestinian factions.

For a militant Islamist movement that has long disavowed the more moderate and secular Palestinian Authority, seeking to join forces with the PLO may seem surprising. But behind Hamas’s recent push is the more important strategic goal of emulating the Hezbollah model. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is nominally part of the weak Lebanese state, allowing it to influence policy and have at least some say in directing government funds, yet it maintains complete autonomy in running its own powerful military and in fighting Israel. Under a new arrangement for Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas hopes to exert the same influence and independence with its own movement and militia, neither beholden to nor controlled by a government.

Indeed, we’d go one farther than Levitt. Hezbollah does not merely “influence policy” in Lebanon, but effectively controls the country on behalf of its sponsor, Iran.

So U.S. policy is the Lebanonization of “Palestine,” which also happens to be Hamas policy—and, we presume, Iranian policy. The only ones who aren’t on board are the Israelis, which is why we’re seeing a full-court press to bring them in line. 

Read more here.

And here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Israel must abandon the idea that it can defeat its enemies through technology, argue Michael Doran and Can Kasapoğlu

---

The Rest

→Speaking of running cover for Iran, U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel said Monday that the U.S. assessment was that “Iran is not taking any key activities that would be necessary to produce” a nuclear bomb and that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not “yet made a decision to resume the [nuclear] weaponization program that we judge Iran suspended or stopped at the end of 2003.” Miller’s comments came in response to remarks from Kamal Kharrazi, a senior adviser to Khamenei, who told Al Jazeera on May 8 that Iran “has the capability to produce a nuclear bomb” and may choose to do so if its “interests are threatened.” Kharrazi, in fact, was echoing remarks by several other current and former Iranian officials. On May 10, according to Iran International, Iranian lawmaker Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani told an Iranian website that he believed Iran’s April attack on Israel indicated that Tehran already possesses a nuclear weapon, and in February, former Iranian foreign minister and former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Ali-Akbar Salehi told an interviewer, “We have [crossed] all the thresholds of nuclear science and technology.” Iran has limited its cooperation with inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2021, and experts now believe its nuclear breakout time is at or near zero, meaning it could produce a weapon in a matter of days or weeks.

→Patel also stated that “Biden and Blinken will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” which brings up our Chart of the Day, courtesy of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Institute of Science and International Security:

→Yesterday’s Big Story discussed Endeavors Inc., a migration nonprofit run by a former Obama administration Department of Homeland Security official that earned a $1.3 billion contract from the federal government in 2022. What we missed was an April 2021 story from Axios, which reported that Endeavors—then known as Family Endeavors—earned its first major contract with the Biden administration shortly after hiring Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who served on the Biden transition team. Axios noted at the time that the other recipients of large contracts from the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, were “for-profit firms with more experience working on such large-scale operations.” Lorenzen-Strait, however, in addition to advising the Biden transition team, also ran a for-profit consulting firm “advising companies on federal procurement practices.”

→The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees voted Monday to dismantle the university’s DEI programs and reallocate its current $2.3 million DEI budget to police and public safety measures, Fox News reports. In scrapping its DEI programs, UNC, the fourth-ranked public university in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report, follows the University of Florida-Gainesville (No. 6 on the same list), which eliminated all DEI-related positions in early March. While board members stressed that the move was under consideration prior to the anti-Israel campus protests in April, UNC Trustee Marty Kotis told Raleigh’s News & Observer that the protests underscored the need for additional funding for campus law enforcement. “It’s important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations.”

→Quote of the Day: 

She’s a Nazi. She’s a fucking Nazi, Nellie. Like, are you serious, Nellie?

That is what an unnamed New York Times news editor told former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles over drinks upon learning that Bowles was dating the infamous Nazi Bari Weiss, according to Bowles’ new book, Morning After the Revolution.

→Sixteen Republican senators have sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service demanding an investigation into whether the nonprofits supporting National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—including Tides, the AJP Educational Foundation, and WESPAC—have violated IRS rules regarding the behavior of 501(c)(3)s. The letter, dated May 9, cites a recent lawsuit against AJP Educational Foundation (covered in our May 2 Big Story) accusing SJP of providing material support to Hamas, though it doesn’t, unfortunately, cite Tablet or The Scroll’s reporting on the subject. Signatories include Joni Ernst of Iowa, Marco Rubio of Florida, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Legacy of the Maalot Massacre, by Hillel Kuttler

Fifty years ago today, Palestinian terrorists attacked a school in northern Israel, taking hostages and murdering 22 students. The memories endure for those who survived, and the lessons learned in 1974 resonate anew for a country facing another hostage crisis.

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Today’s Back Pages is an excerpt. Read the full version here.

The Gates of Gaza

Israel must abandon the failed idea that technological wizardry will guarantee its security

by Michael Doran and Can Kasapoğlu

On April 29, 1956, two assassins, an Egyptian and a Palestinian, ambushed Ro’i Rothberg, the security officer of Kibbutz Nahal Oz. Luring him into the fields, they shot him off his horse, beat him, and shot him again, ending his life. They then dragged his lifeless body as a gruesome trophy back to Gaza, where it was desecrated. Unlike Iran and its proxies today, however, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Gaza at the time, did not ransom Israeli corpses. The day after Rothberg’s murder, the Egyptian authorities transferred his mutilated remains to United Nations mediators who, in turn, passed them back to Israel for burial.

Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan delivered the eulogy at the funeral. Steely eyed and unsentimental, Dayan attributed Rothberg’s death to the victim’s own lack of vigilance, which, he suggested, was symptomatic of a laxness in the whole society. Craving peace and normalcy, the Israelis were allowing themselves to imagine that their neighbors shared the same aspirations. “Let us not cast blame on his murderers today,” Dayan said. “It is pointless to mention their deep-seated hatred for us.” There was nothing the Israelis could do to make the Gazans willingly accept the establishment of the Jewish state. “Ro’i [Rothberg]—the light in his heart blinded him to the gleam of the knife. The longing for peace deafened him to the sound of the murders lying in wait.”

The residents of Nahal Oz, Dayan said, carry “the heavy gates of Gaza on their shoulders, gates behind which hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands pray that we will weaken so that they may tear us to pieces—have we forgotten that?”

On Oct. 7, when Hamas paragliders sailed over Israel’s 40-mile “smart fence” with its state-of-the-art radar systems, remote control machine guns, and underground sensors, they encountered on the other side no meaningful forms of military resistance from what is often accounted to be the fourth most powerful military force on Earth. Instead of being greeted by tanks, helicopters, and heavily armed brigades, the Hamas invaders found themselves among young revelers at the Nova music festival, whom they slaughtered like lambs.

Following the attack, both friends and foes of Israel greeted the absence of any organized military response, which lasted for many hours, with incredulity. As news spread of lightly armed Hamas forces penetrating beyond the immediate border areas to major Israeli population centers like Ashkelon, everyone wondered: What happened to the IDF?

The answer is that, over the prior two decades, Israel’s military had deliberately remade itself by stripping away exactly the kinds of conventional force assets—large combat formations, overwhelming firepower, and heavy armor—that could be expected to repel a large-scale cross-border attack. Israel had replaced its old army with a new one, based on new theories of warfighting that had become current in the West since 9/11. In place of its former doctrines and force structure, Israel had adopted a more modern military approach favoring a “small and smart” force reliant on precision airpower, special forces, and technology-centric intelligence. As a result, almost without exception, Israel’s leaders failed to foresee not only Oct. 7, but also the kind of war the military is now fighting: not quick, surgical strikes lasting for several days at most, but a multifront conflict requiring the taking and holding of contested land positions over the course of months and possibly years.

For seven months now, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been fighting simultaneously on seven fronts (in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen). In Gaza they have deployed large, mechanized formations into urban areas. With respect to the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, they have readied themselves to do the same should circumstances demand it. No one planned for this kind of war. As a result of this lack of vision and forward planning, Israel does not have the right force structure, defense technological industrial base, or alliances to ensure a longer-term victory.

Some part of the debate inside Israel around these realities surfaced in early April when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote a letter to the prime minister withholding his support for a $9.5 billion purchase of a squadron of F-35 aircraft and a squadron of F-15 aircraft. Smotrich refused to approve the purchase until the government convened the finance committee to examine the security budget. “The war challenges many basic assumptions in the security budgets and requires renewed thought. Following the war, the defense establishment requires huge budget additions and the Finance Ministry’s position is that fundamental assumptions and priorities need to be revised accordingly,” Smotrich wrote.

Unfortunately for Israel, weapons systems, force structures, and established alliances cannot be remade in a day. In that respect, the military paradigm resembles a network of railway tracks with a limited array of switches. The tracks assist the IDF in moving forward, but they also constrain it, sending it down predetermined lines regardless of whether those lines lead to the destination that is most desirable strategically. Laying new tracks will cost Israel time, measured in years; money, measured in untold billions of dollars; but also lives, measured in the thousands.

***

Some of the flaws in Israel’s “small and smart” paradigm came emblazoned with a “Made in Israel” stamp, but just as many were imported from the West, particularly from the American war colleges where Israel has long sent its professional officer corps for training. The Israelis have borrowed liberally from the Americans and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who, for some two decades before the Ukraine war, endorsed the belief that large-scale and prolonged wars between states were a thing of the past.

The “war on terror,” with its focus on substate actors clearly influenced this thinking, which persisted even as Russia intervened in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, in Syria, together with Iran, in 2015, and in Libya in 2017. It persisted even as China engaged in the largest and fastest military buildup in history. “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia,” says the U.S. National Security Strategy, published by the Obama administration in May 2010. “[W]e want to see a true strategic partnership between NATO and Russia, and we will act accordingly, with the expectation of reciprocity from Russia,” stated NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept. This document remained the authoritative statement of NATO strategy until 2022, when the alliance began to depict China, Russia, and Iran as more threatening.

So long as “partnership” was the watchword when describing the West’s relations with China, Russia, and Iran, then it seemed obvious that the scale of warfighting would shrink. “State-on-state conflict will not disappear, but its character is already changing,” stated an authoritative British strategy document in 2010. “Asymmetric tactics such as economic, cyber and proxy actions instead of direct military confrontation will play an increasing part, as both state and nonstate adversaries seek an edge over those who overmatch them in conventional military capability,” it continued. In other words, warfare as we commonly imagine it—that is, as two big armies facing off against each other for months or years on the battlefield, like we see in Gaza and Ukraine today—had all but disappeared. A series of running battles, short and sharp, had replaced it.

Note the causal explanation in the quote above. Big wars will not happen, so the thinking went, due to the technological superiority of the Western countries. The assessment rests on two key assumptions, namely, that technological advantages deter states; and that technological superiority itself can be the sole determinant of victory in war. In recognition of this assumption, we will name this military paradigm—the one that most NATO powers and the Israelis adopted—“Star Wars.”

The Star Wars paradigm fosters the misguided belief that the new renders the old obsolete. Emerging technologies, such as algorithmic warfare, eclipse traditional warfighting assets, like tanks and howitzers. Because it replaces traditional combat formations, which are bulky and expensive, with small, agile forces, bureaucrats, ever on the search for ways to cut budgets, found the Star Wars paradigm inherently attractive. Generals, for their part, were drawn to the paradigm, because the new tools, in addition to their inherent effectiveness, were also much sexier than the traditional instruments of war. Generals gravitated to conferences in Silicon Valley, where they secured lucrative consulting careers, after retirement, with high-tech companies. If given the choice, who wouldn’t prefer to log their training hours in virtual reality simulations rather than dragging howitzers through the mud in the freezing rain?

Indeed, the new Silicon Valley tools were supposedly turning the howitzer into a weapon of yesteryear—in part by enhancing deterrence through improved intelligence. According to the Star Wars paradigm, technologically inferior forces had no chance of winning against technologically superior powers, because the great electronic eye in the sky never sleeps; it sees all. On the computer screens of high-tech militaries, enemy forces would stand out like sharks in a well-lit aquarium: fearsome in appearance but visible from all sides and at all times. Technological advancements generated an intelligence officer’s wet dream: total battlefield transparency married to flawless information superiority over the adversary.

Then came the paragliders over Israel’s smart fence. If one designed a military paradigm specifically with the intention of duping the Israelis, one could have done no better than Star Wars. The paradigm played to their vanity. It told them, subliminally, that the activities at which they naturally excelled (special operations and clandestine intelligence collection), the institutions that they most revered (Mossad, the Air Force, and Special Forces), and all the ventures that made them as rich as Europeans (high-tech startups)—are precisely the elements that gave them, like Samson, superhuman strength. The Air Force, intelligence services, and special forces have long been the glittering stars of the national security culture of the "Start-Up Nation." The Star Wars paradigm taught that it is the stars who win the wars—and virtually no one else was necessary.

***

The healthy alternative to the Star Wars paradigm, which has so visibly and spectacularly failed to assure Israel’s security, is “Mad Max.” This alternative paradigm states that new and old weapon systems will merge, thanks to innovative concepts of operations. Mad Max understands that the 21st century battlefield is home to T-64 tanks, which fought their first battles in the early 1960s, as well as state-of-the-art cyber-electronic warfare. Mini drones that are commercially available across the globe can spot for Cold War-era artillery.

Never underestimate technologically inferior adversaries, the Mad Max paradigm counsels. High-tech tools and weapons will never be the sole or even the primary factor determining the winner of wars. This dictum is especially true for the wars of the Middle East, where great powers external to the region determine the balance of power on the ground.

Because war remains today what it has always been, a political activity, we cannot gauge the true advantage of any weapon—be it new and technologically advanced or old and rusty—without first considering the political-military strategy that it serves. Victory comes not to him who kills the most enemy soldiers or who fries the most motherboards but to him who converts what transpires on the battlefield into the most beneficial political arrangements. Losers on the battlefield frequently win wars, by bleeding giants until they are too exhausted to continue fighting. For example, in Vietnam, the second Iraq War, and Afghanistan, the U.S. repeatedly outmatched its adversaries militarily but lost the wars, nevertheless.

The digital revolution has enhanced the powers of technologically advanced countries in many ways, but it has also exposed them to new risks while also delivering surprising new tools to underdogs. Even the poorest of powers, thanks to the internet and smartphones, now enjoy a bonanza of open-source intelligence that just a few years ago was not available to even the richest of states. Cheap drones purchased off the shelf can offer startling reconnaissance capabilities to Ukraine against Russia. Cyber-enabled supply chains and GPS present an otherwise ragtag group like the Houthis opportunities to disrupt global commercial shipping. The list goes on.

The Star Wars paradigm also rests on the assumption, often unstated, that taking and holding territory has somehow become a secondary part of warfighting. While it is certainly possible to name wars that have been won without territorial conquest, they are few and far between. Almost inevitably, the magnitude of such victories is small, because victors who impose their will from over the horizon—from the air, sea, or through economic leverage—lack the physical presence on the ground that is necessary to shape a new political order.

The Mad Max mentality cultivates a heightened sensitivity to the phrase “on the ground.” With minor exceptions, armies translate battlefield victories into lasting changes either by seizing territory or threatening persuasively to do so. In the brave new digital world, traditional warfighting assets—large combat formations, replete with artillery, rocket systems, engineering units, and heavy armor—will not disappear, because only they can take and hold territory decisively.

Under the influence of Star Wars, Israel neglected its role by allowing its land forces to atrophy. In 2018, Brigadier Roman Goffman, who was then the commander of the 7th Armored Brigade, took the extraordinary step of airing his concerns about this issue openly before the senior leadership of the IDF at a command conference. “Chief of Staff,” Goffman said, referring to his senior most commander, General Gadi Eisenkot, “I first want to tell you that we [in armored units] are ready to fight. There is one problem. You don’t activate us … [T]here is a very problematic pattern that is developing here, namely, the avoidance of the use of ground forces.”

Eisenkot sat in the front row of the audience flanked by the top leaders of the IDF. Behind them sat hundreds of senior officers who greeted Goffman’s remarks with smirks. But he continued undeterred. The nondeployment of ground forces, he argued, “ultimately affects the will to fight. What makes us into combat commanders over time is friction with the other side.” Absent friction with the enemy, he continued, the military enters a state of “clinical death.”

On Oct. 7, the Israelis tasted what Goffman meant by “clinical death.” The Israeli military had at its disposal a glittering arsenal of exquisite weapons, including a large squadron of radar-proof F-35s, whose capacities previous generations would have considered to be the stuff of science fiction. As it turned out, however, none of these weapons was of the slightest use against terrorist bands, armed mainly with Kalashnikovs, who were intent on murdering, raping, and kidnapping civilians.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/gates-of-gaza