What Happened Today, Special Edition: Israel at War Day 9

October 16, 2023

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The Big Story

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned Israel over the weekend not to launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon, as the Iran-backed militia continues to strike targets within northern Israel amid Israeli preparations for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. In exchange for Israeli “restraint,” Austin offered “an American commitment to put American pilots and American planes into the war if Hezbollah attacked first,” according to a report in the Hebrew edition of Ynet News. Austin and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken further conveyed to the Israelis that the United States “will find it difficult to support a military operation in Gaza that involves widespread harm to civilians”—a near certainty in a densely packed urban environment such as Gaza City, where the governing authority, Hamas, has urged civilians to ignore Israeli evacuation orders and remain in their homes for the battle ahead. The big picture, then, is that the United States appears to be trying to constrain Israel’s response to last Saturday’s attack and deter the Israelis from attacking core Iranian assets, including Hezbollah.

The report in Ynet News seemingly contradicts other messaging from the Biden administration, which has publicly supported Israel’s stated aim of wiping out Hamas and claimed that the U.S. carriers are there to deter Hezbollah (and, through it, Iran) from opening up a second front in Israel’s north. In a 60 Minutes interview broadcast Sunday evening, President Biden, though saying it would be a “mistake” for Israel to “occupy Gaza again,” conceded that “taking out the extremists,” “Hezbollah up north” and “Hamas down south,” is a “necessary requirement” for Israeli security. 

Biden, apparently, is confused as to his own administration’s position, at least on Lebanon. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was nearer to the mark when he asserted, at a press conference last Tuesday, that “we moved the carrier to send a clear message of deterrence to other states or non-state actors that might seek to widen this war.” A clear message of deterrence to whom? Not “Iran,” but “other states.” “Other states,” of course, includes Israel, which would be consistent with the message reportedly delivered by Austin to the Israelis. 

The emerging U.S. posture—hit Hamas if you must, but don’t “escalate” by striking Hezbollah, even as Hezbollah strikes targets in Israel—is a prime example of what Michael Doran and Tony Badran have described in Tablet as “the bear hug.” On the one hand Washington provides enough military support to Israel to defuse any criticism that it is abandoning its longtime ally, while on the other hand it uses this “cooperation” to restrict Israel’s ability to independently operate against Tehran and its allies—a group the Biden administration, like its Democratic predecessor, is attempting to engage as part of its longer-term goal of “rebalancing” U.S. strategy in the Middle East by empowering Iran.

Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/realignment-iran-biden-obama-michael-doran-tony-badran

IN THE BACK PAGES: Norman Samuels explains that Israel’s intelligence failure wasn’t merely an “intelligence failure”—it was a symptom of the confusion of Israel’s leadership.

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The Rest

→You might have heard talk in recent days about the Israeli “siege” of Gaza. No, not the same “siege” that critics had been describing for the past 15 years (the joint blockade maintained by Egypt and Israel since Hamas seized power in 2007), but a real textbook siege now that Israel has cut off electricity, water, and fuel to northern Gaza in recent days in preparation for its ground invasion. Sounds barbaric, right? As Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch told the AP, “Collective punishment is a war crime. Israel is doing that by cutting electricity, water, food, [and] blocking aid from entering the Gaza Strip”—a sentiment that has been repeated ad nauseam over the past week. 

The reality is more complicated. Urban combat by nature is brutal, imposing steep costs on both the attacker and the civilian population. Despite restrictive rules of engagement, the U.S.-led, coalition-backed sieges of ISIS’s urban strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, led to the deaths of at least 10,000 civilians and the displacement of about 1 million more—not to mention nearly 2,000 killed among the attacking forces. Because urban operations, which inherently favor the defender, are so deadly for offense, besieging forces have wide latitude to attempt to reduce the strength of the defending force—including through temporary isolation, starvation, and other forms of forced deprivation—as long as civilians are not deliberately targeted for no military purpose. As West Point legal scholar Sean Watts explained in his 2022 article “Siege Law,” “the legal truth, difficult for many to accept, is that a harsh legal regime applies to sieges. It is law best understood, interpreted, and applied through military operational realities, especially the isolation imperative.” 

How does that apply to Israel and Gaza? As Rosa-Lena Lauterbach wrote on the website of West Point’s Lieber Institute for Law & Land Warfare: 

In light of the current force and scale of attacks committed on Israel’s territory by Hamas fighters coming from the Gaza Strip, gaining control over the situation via siege presents as a viable military measure. … An effective complete siege strategy may significantly support efforts to stop Hamas’s armed forces from crossing over into Israel again while weakening them at the same time. Cutting electrical power further supports efforts to interrupt communication between the armed forces. The Gaza Strip’s population density and the overall challenges of urban warfare prove an obstacle to identifying military targets, making a preliminary hermetic seal of the area one of the few workable routes of gaining control over the situation. As a temporary measure, the complete siege could thus adhere to [international humanitarian law]’s standards.

Read more: https://lieber.westpoint.edu/siege-law/ 

→Stat of the Day: 600,000

That’s how many Palestinians have already evacuated to southern Gaza, according to the United Nations. On Monday, however, the IDF’s top spokesman said that Hamas was still blocking Palestinians from leaving areas targeted by Israel’s military operation. While Israel’s attempts to clear Palestinian civilians from an active war zone has, predictably, been labeled “ethnic cleansing” by some critics in the West, Israel announced on Monday that it was planning the evacuation of its own civilians living within two kilometers of the Lebanese border due to continued rocket attacks and indications of potential cross-border incursions by Hezbollah. The move comes after the government already relocated thousands of civilians from the area of southern Israel near Gaza last week. 

→The top Catholic Church official in the Middle East, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, offered to trade places with the Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. However, the cardinal noted, “You can’t talk to Hamas. It’s very difficult.” Indeed. Hamas is believed to be holding 199 civilians hostage, according to the latest update from Israeli authorities, including about 20 U.S. citizens, and the terror group has threatened to begin executing them in retaliation for Israeli air strikes on Gaza. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan announced on Monday that he had spoken on the phone with Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, about negotiating the hostages’ release, though Fidan did make any further details about the negotiation available. A spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Monday that Hamas is ready to release the hostages but that doing so would “require preparations that are impossible under daily bombardment from the Zionists.”

→The U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA announced on Monday that Hamas members illegally confiscated fuel and medical equipment from an UNRWA facility in Gaza. Axios reporter Barak Ravid confirmed the story with an Israeli source, who said that “Hamas members stole 24,000 liters of fuel and a large amount of medical equipment.” But wait! Shortly after making the announcement via an X post, UNRWA deleted the post, then posted an “URGENT UPDATE” regarding “reports on social media”—that is to say, reports citing the agency’s own social media posts—“of looting of an UNRWA warehouse.” The new post goes on, “UNRWA would like to confirm that no looting has taken place in any of its warehouses in the Gaza Strip.” 

What happened here? It’s impossible to say for sure, but there are a few things we know. One is that UNRWA has been accused in the past of acting as a front group for Hamas. A March joint report from U.N. Watch and IMPACT-se found, among other things, that the agency employed teachers who praised Hitler and provided educational materials to Palestinian students that endorsed martyrdom and jihad against Israel. We also know that Hamas regularly diverts humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians for its own military purposes and that obfuscation of this fact is central to claims that the Israeli siege of Gaza constitutes a war crime. Perhaps a poor, naive UNRWA social media staffer didn’t get the memo and accidentally posted something true, only to be corrected by superiors. The New York Post reported last week that the Biden administration had sent more than $730 million to the agency. 

Read more here: https://nypost.com/2023/10/10/biden-admin-funneled-730-million-to-un-group-despite-its-personnel-calling-for-violence-against-jews/ 

→Quote of the Day: 

One can seek out the ideological roots of Hamas’s strategy of brutality in 20th-century decolonization movements or in theologies of Islamic renewal. But that history is mere background decor to the essential point—that this is a brutality that explodes against peace processes as much as against threats of annexation. No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse or grant Israeli Jews safety from the kind of wild, joyful hatred displayed on October 7.

And that brutality has now made itself too dangerous to be tolerated.

That’s journalist Haviv Rettig Gur in today’s Times of Israel article “Hamas Does Not Yet Understand the Depth of Israeli Resolve.”

Read the rest here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-does-not-yet-understand-the-depth-of-israeli-resolve/ 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Nazi Antisemitism and Islamist Hate, by Jeffrey Herf

A review of recent scholarship on the shaping of the modern Middle East in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and how Islamist hate has roots in antisemitism.

More Than a Hot Meal, by Flora Tsapovsky

Israeli restaurants and hotels offer free food and shelter for displaced civilians—as well as grieving families and soldiers preparing for battle.

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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.

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‘The Konceptsia’

Intelligence failures are never about the details. In Israel’s case, the operational and conceptual failures that led to Saturday’s massacre are even more disturbing.

By Norman Samuels

A central purpose of intelligence is the avoidance of surprise. Label an event like Saturday’s massacre a “surprise attack,” and the next step will naturally be the search for the source of the “intelligence failure.” Israeli government spokesmen will reply that it is too early and too distracting to focus on that question while we are at war. From the standpoint of intelligence analysis, the answer is, yes and no.

A full accounting of how Hamas crossed the Gaza border and massacred over 1,200 men, women, and children with very little apparent opposition will certainly require data and answers that may not be available to analysts for years. But another “surprise attack” may well be in the making right now, and bureaucrats may already be busy covering their tracks. Inconvenient and limited as the answers will be, therefore, we should not hesitate to ask tough questions now about the failure of the intelligence and military organizations to perform the functions for which they exist: to anticipate grave threats and protect the people.

One way to begin answering those questions is to look at a number of other major “surprise attacks” in modern history which have also been blamed in good measure on “intelligence failures”: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11 in America, and the Egyptian-Syrian attack in the Yom Kippur War—which is the most relevant case study for us.

Perhaps the most obvious and important point to be made about all three events is that there was already a tense, hostile background in place; the “surprise” lay in the specific timing, location, and strategy of the attacks. Both the U.S. and Israeli political and military leadership certainly knew the broad dangers they faced; the job of intelligence in all three cases was to identify the when, where, who, and how. While the failure of the intelligence leadership was calamitous, it was hardly exclusive to them.

In the current situation, Israel’s military operational failures were every bit as shocking, and perhaps even more consequential than its “intelligence failure.” Israeli fighter jets based two minutes flying time from the ruptured Gaza fence took six hours to appear overhead. Israeli soldiers were shot and abducted in their beds on army bases. A large, well-advertised public gathering of thousands of young Israelis, held right on the Gaza border—an event which may have in fact been the trigger for the attack—had no apparent security.

Which brings us to our first point: Intelligence and military organizations function within the overall perspectives of the larger society to which their members belong; they help shape those perspectives, but they are also its captives. They look at the world through the same glasses—rose-tinted or otherwise—that the rest of us do. The view through those glasses is also inevitably expressed in strategic concepts—what Israelis in 1973 referred to as the “Konceptsia.”

In 1973, the “Konceptsia” included a general agreement among Israel’s intelligence, military, and political leaders on at least the following ”facts”:

No. 1: Israel was surrounded by enemies, but was strong enough to survive with adequate warning.

No. 2: Egypt was the prime enemy, but still smarted from its 1967 defeat and would not attack unless it had the means to neutralize the Israeli air force.

No. 3: Syria was too weak to attack alone and would therefore only attack together with Egypt; a spectacular dogfight over Syria in September between the Syrian and Israeli air forces resulted in the downing of 13 Syrian fighter planes and no Israeli losses, suggesting the futility of such an attack.

No. 4: In 1967, Israel had—almost miraculously—fought off the combined armies of the Arab world; the Egyptian soldier was found to be technologically ill-equipped. In battle, the Egyptian units turned and ran.

No. 5: Israel maintained constant physical surveillance on all fronts and, it was believed, had high-level spies and other intelligence sources at top levels in the Arab countries, whose information, however selectively received and prioritized, seemed to reinforce the Konceptsia. Secret intelligence and espionage by their nature involve lies and deception. Can you trust your sources, especially foreign ones—whether they are spies within enemy organizations, or representatives of ostensibly friendly nations or allies?

Taken together, these different “facts” generated a sense of confidence, perhaps a sense of superiority (ethnic? cultural? chutzpah? gross underestimation of the enemy?), which formed the Konceptsia—the outlook and the operating assumptions which were widely accepted by Israel’s intelligence and military leadership, and formed the background to the intelligence failure which came very close to destroying the Jewish state.

The rest of the autopsy of Israel’s “intelligence failure” in 1973 is detail, even pilpul. The mistakes in evaluating information from spies, in correctly evaluating information from the United States, the military readiness in the north, the role of Russian geopolitical strategy and Russian advisers in Egypt and Syria, while all real enough, are understandable only within the ideological womb of the Konceptsia.

It is more concrete to examine technical failures, both then and now, and these failures are certainly very real and serious. There is satisfaction in pointing to specific mistakes, and in holding individuals responsible for errors that cost lives. But the background assumptions and outlook of a country’s military and political leaders are the keys to understanding its “intelligence failures.”

So what was the Konceptsia in Israel on Shemini Atzeret, 5784? The following suggestions, hasty and subjective, should ring a bell:

No. 1: We have the most powerful military and the most capable intelligence in the Middle East; we have the most advanced technology; we are a financial and corporate powerhouse; we are rich and we live well.

No. 2: No Arab nation can pose a military threat to Israel; Iran is a grave indirect threat through Hezbollah, but we can deal with them diplomatically and militarily. Nuclear threat? Not yet.

No. 3: We can control the West Bank through police surveillance and nightly raids; we can pacify and bribe West Bankers and Gazans by work permits and limited economic benefits.

No. 4: Oh yes, Hamas: They are in the category of classic terrorist groups, capable of terrible but limited attacks, and we have repeatedly beaten them to a pulp in the past.

No. 5: Rockets, hmmm, yes, huge numbers in Lebanon, lots in the south, but we have the Iron Dome and, if need be, the air force, equipped with the latest F-35 fighter planes from the U.S.

No. 6: America has our back, and is not just concerned with its own interests.

No. 7: The internal political situation, mass demonstrations in the streets, ostensibly about the role of the courts: The country split into ethnic, religious, and economic factions with deep roots in Israel’s history.

When these variables overlap, as they did in 1973, and as they do today, attempts at clear analyses can quickly degenerate into bureaucratic battles and conspiracy theories.

Just a few examples: When Egypt engaged in major military maneuvers in September 1973 near the Suez Canal, which looked a lot like practice for crossing and invading, America reassured Israel that these were innocent training exercises. The U.S. then built credibility with Israel by providing the date by which the exercises would end. However, the goal of American policy at the time was to shift Egypt from the Russian camp to the American one—a very complex game. America’s goals were therefore to supply both sides with information, keep a grip on Israel, which was a vulnerable dependent, yet help the Israelis enough so that the Russians would not come out winners. The U.S. also regularly warned Israel not to strike first, and thereby alienate “world public opinion” and interfere with America’s other regional plans and agendas.

Another example: If Egypt would not attack without the means to control Israel’s air force, as the Konceptsia insisted, then special attention had to be given to shipments at Russian and Egyptian ports which looked like airplane fuselages; reassuringly, few were found. In this case, Israel’s intelligence was entirely correct. But that was because the Egyptians had switched their planning to building up anti-aircraft missile and rocket forces instead of aircraft, and the much smaller shipping packages flowed to Egypt unnoticed.

Still another example: Israeli military intelligence and the Mossad ran their own agents and programs inside Arab countries like Egypt and Syria, and, like security agencies everywhere, they were reluctant to share information—using the desire to maintain secrecy to maintain their monopoly on the information they obtained from their agents. So, military watchers provided increasingly alarming field reports of Egyptian and Syrian movements, while others relied on American assurances, and a “highly reliable” spy embedded in Egypt’s leadership who had provided excellent and confidence-building information over a period of years—until, at the key moment, he didn’t.

The larger point of these examples is that intelligence hardly exists in a vacuum. It must be interpreted and verified before it can be used. When the dominant Konceptsia is set in stone, or becomes a self-reinforcing loop, even “obvious facts” will not make it to the operational level. While the details of who noticed or failed to notice what in any particular instance may seem scandalous or unforgivably stupid in retrospect, their role in the disasters that ultimately happened is likely to have been small.

“Surprise attacks” are therefore more than simply the products of “intelligence failures.” They signal confusion at the level of societal leadership. Are we once again underestimating the technical capability and bravery of the enemy? What are America’s real interests in the region, and how are they being expressed? Is repeated war going to provide lasting security? How fragile is Israeli society, and how reliable is our support from American Jews?

As an old man, steeped in Jewish history, skeptical of technologic and diplomatic magic, and noting that God seems to get distracted now and then from the welfare of his people, I worry that these questions weren’t asked often or directly enough by Israel’s social and political leadership—and I fear that the answers may continue to be painful.