Israel’s Message: No Going Back
by Seth Mandel
Menachem Begin
and Benjamin Netanyahu are as unalike as two prime ministers of the same party
could possibly be. But there are certain points in their stewardship of the one
and only Jewish state when prime ministers will all sound alike, regardless of
party or ideology. And Israel has reached one of those moments, as Bibi and his
war council insist that Israel and Israel alone will decide when its mission in
Gaza is complete and what happens next.
Israel is
treating this war as an Osirak moment.
In 1981 the
Israeli air force pulled off its most famous secret mission. On June 7 of that
year, Israeli pilots successfully bombed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at
Osirak, near Baghdad.
It was an
extremely difficult task. Israeli pilots had never flown a mission that far
from home—650 miles. And the explosives had to hit their target and detonate at
the right depth to ensure the core was destroyed. The pilots returned to Israel
safely, defying the odds that any number of things could have gone wrong on the
way.
Begin knew the
world would react in horror to Israel’s bombing of Iraqi territory, and that
there was no guarantee the mission would succeed. He agonized over it. “For
months I had sleepless nights,” he told the American Jewish philanthropist and
Republican confidant Max Fisher. “Day after day I asked myself: to do or not to
do? What would become of our children if I did nothing? And what would become
of our pilots if I did something? I couldn’t share my anxiety with anyone. My
wife would ask me why I was so disturbed, and I couldn’t tell her. Nor could I
tell my son, whom I trust implicitly. I had to carry the responsibility and the
burden alone.”
Begin told his
advisors, after reading off all the protestations from world leaders, “I’ll
share a personal secret with you. Whenever I have to choose between saving the
lives of our children or getting the approval of the Security Council and all
those other fair-weather friends, I much prefer the former. But keep that to
yourselves.”
Yesterday
Netanyahu, his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and his
rival-turned-war-minister Benny Gantz all pushed back on the specific criticisms of
various countries one at a time. French President Emmanuel Macron was told in
no uncertain terms he’d made a factual and moral error in suggesting Israel had
targeted civilians; the Biden administration’s plan for the transfer of a
post-Hamas Gaza to the Palestinian Authority was rejected; British leaders were
encouraged to stand firm in the face of anti-Israel pressure; and a group of
Muslim leaders representing, among others, Iran and Saudi Arabia, was told that
Hamas was their problem too.
Israel will
“stand firm against the world if necessary,” Netanyahu said.
The reason for
the drawing of such red lines was made clearer this morning in a Washington
Post report on the ramifications of
the intelligence discovered since Oct. 7:
“Some militants
carried enough food, ammunition and equipment to last several days, officials
said, and bore instructions to continue deeper into Israel if the first wave of
attacks succeeded, potentially striking larger Israeli cities. The assault
teams managed to penetrate as far as Ofakim, an Israeli town about 15 miles
from the Gaza Strip and about half the distance between the enclave and the
West Bank. One unit carried reconnaissance information and maps suggesting an
intention to continue the assault up to the border of the West Bank, according
to two senior Middle Eastern intelligence officials and one former U.S.
official with detailed knowledge of the evidence.”
Hamas planned and
trained for over a year before launching the attack. It collected intelligence
on the Israeli border towns from drones and real estate postings and Gazan day
laborers with permits to work in the communities who then returned home each day.
Hamas leadership spent months planting fake stories and hints of the
organization’s new pragmatism and turn away from violent confrontation.
The aim seems to
have been to spark a regional war in the near turn that would, in the long
term, allow Hamas to bring down and possibly replace the Palestinian Authority.
The most chilling
quote in the piece comes from former FBI analyst Ali Soufan: “If you’re in
prison, you study the prison security system. That is what Hamas has been doing
for 16 years. Their on-the-ground intelligence was way better than anything the
Iranians could have given them.”
For decades, the
phrase thrown around peace negotiations was “the status quo is unsustainable.”
But of course it was sustainable, and so it sustained. But now it
genuinely is unsustainable, which is why it has been
shattered. And Israel’s united front is dead set against letting the
international community guilt-trip Israel into gluing all the pieces back
together. Israel has taken action it sees as being in the same vein as the
Osirak strike. There is no guarantee of success, but there is also no going
back.
