fighting the war as if there are no negotiations, and
negotiating as if there is no war
Avi Melamed

It is dangerous to be found in the company of God's enemies

Operation Iron Swords

The HAMAS launched a large scale surprise attack - “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” - on Saturday 07 October 2023 involving aerial, sea and ground operations from the Gaza Strip. Hamas invaded and overran military bases and border settlements. Israel responded with a massive bombardment - “Operation Iron Swords” - of the blockaded coastal enclave, often described as the world’s largest open-air prison. Israeli sources estimate at least 1,000 Palestinians managed to infiltrate into Israel through four different areas. It was the first time since 1948 that these developments are on the Israeli side because they are usually in Arab areas. This was the biggest escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the last 50 years.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant laid out Israel’s war plans and objectives in the Gaza Strip, speaking at a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting in Tel Aviv on 20 October 2023. He said the war will have three main phases.

1. Gallant said “We are in the first phase, in which a military campaign is taking place with [airstrikes] and later with a [ground] maneuver with the purpose of destroying operatives and damaging infrastructure in order to defeat and destroy Hamas”. The air part turned out to be unusually long. The bombing had been going on for two weeks. In the first five days alone, more than six thousand tons of air bombs were dropped on the enclave.
2. He said the second phase will be continued fighting but at a lower intensity as troops work to “eliminate pockets of resistance.”
3. Gallant said “The third step will be the creation of a new security regime in the Gaza Strip, the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip, and the creation of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel and the residents of the [area surrounding Gaza],” he said.

While time was on their side, the IDF tried to achieve maximum results through airstrikes, because the ground phase is contact battles in which losses will have to be suffered. Israel needs a peremptory victory on the ground: its neighbors will watch the battles very closely. In case of failure, there may be a temptation to enter into conflict. Two American aircraft carrier groups are sent to the region precisely as an argument not to succumb to such temptations.

"If they (Hamas - editor's note) show the same ingenuity in defense as they did during this terrible barbaric attack, then you will see suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, ambushes, booby traps. And the urban environment, again But it couldn’t be more complicated—even after most civilians leave, there are still a lot of civilians. <…> This could very quickly turn into Mogadishu on steroids,” warned former CIA director and head of US Central Command David Petraeus .

"Biden said that occupying Gaza would be a big mistake. But is there an alternative? If you inflict colossal damage on the region, and then return it to the same people who raised terrorists there, what will you achieve? Yes, militant activity will decrease. But only for a while,” the American general was sure.

One unnamed NATO defense minister told CNN that Israel’s allies “completely respect their right to go after Hamas,” but had merely urged caution. So it’s not ‘Don’t do it,’ but it is ‘Think about what happens and have a strategy, not just a tactical maneuver.’ We expect Israel to act within international humanitarian law, but we understand that they’re dealing with an enemy here,” the official said, echoing public comments from other Western governments.

Hamas said it had 200 hostages and that 50 more were held by other armed groups in the enclave. It said more than 20 hostages had been killed by Israeli airstrikes. The number of people held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip has risen to 212, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Brigadier General Daniel Hagari said. The IDF military spokesman said earlier that the army had confirmed information about 100 missing persons.

Hamas said it won’t discuss the fate of Israeli army captives until Israel ends its “aggression” on the Gaza strip. “Our stance with regards to Israeli army captives is clear: it’s related to a (possible) exchange of prisoners, and we will not discuss it until Israel ends its aggression on Gaza and Palestinians,” Hamas official Osama Hamdan, speaking from Lebanon, told a televised presser. Hamas had suggested the hostages could be swapped for 6,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

There were about 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli prisons prior to Hamas’s attack on October 7. Since then, officials and rights groups said Israel had arrested some 4,000 labourers from Gaza who were working in Israel and is holding them in military bases. Separately, it had also arrested 1,070 other Palestinians in overnight army raids in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. since the beginning of the war, 727 wanted persons have been arrested throughout the Judea and Samaria Division and the Bekaa and Emekim Division, over 480 are associated with Hamas.

Amos Harel reported "David Meidan, who served as coordinator on abductees and missing persons in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, estimated over the weekend in an interview with Haaretz that Hamas has an interest in releasing the women, children and elderly people abducted. He added that the window of opportunity left for such a deal is “extremely limited. We need to end it within a week.”

Shortly after Israel started pounding the Gaza Strip, the US State Department sent a directive warning US diplomats against using three specific phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm”, according to a Huffington Post report, which was confirmed by the Washington Post. Washington meanwhile tweaked its commitment to Israel’s “right to respond”, upgrading it over the past few days to a “duty to respond”.

The Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu continued to employ an unapologetic rhetoric, invoking biblical references to sell his war to the ultra-right not just in Israel but also in the US, where he is enjoying the support of Christian Evangelists, a majority of whom identify with the global Zionist movement for a ‘Jewish homeland’. Their belief comes from the end-of-the-world interpretation of the bible leading to the second coming of Jesus Christ. There will be a war, a final war, Armageddon, and it will be pitting Israel and its allies against the Arab world, against the communists, against those who have a different worldview to that of Israel. Donald Trump claims that he fulfilled their agenda of moving the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

The propaganda that went with the Six-Day War in 1967 was a wake-up call for evangelical Bible-believing Christians, particularly in America. And it was exploited as the fulfilment of Bible prophecy. The Jews regained Jerusalem for the first time in 2000 years. So you had people like Billy Graham, Jimmy Carter and others saying, this is the Bible coming true. So the evangelical movement in America really woke up at that point and they began to read the Bible as if it was a Bible prophecy coming true. Christian preachers know that if they can present their teaching and their interpretation of the Bible as something that’s dogmatic and about to happen, then they’ve got people’s attention.

Christian Zionism is actually the dominant form of Zionism. It has been since before the Zionist movement emerged in the 1870s, 1880s – there were Christians calling for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine from the 1820s, 1830s and the Balfour Declaration with the demise of the Ottoman Empire that Britain's entry, if you like, into the Middle East having defeated the French was to colonise Palestine. Christian Zionism predates Jewish Zionism by at least 50 years and today dominates the Zionist movement . For every Jewish Zionist, there are 20 or 30 Christian Zionists.

It’s a kind of a dualism, Manichean worldview, the good guys and the bad guys, God is on our side. And the bad guys are whoever we want to take out. If you believe that there’s going to be a war of Armageddon, that we are on God’s side, Israel is on God’s side, and anyone who opposes us is on the enemy’s side. If the civic and religious leaders demonstrate their commitment to Israel and their belief that Israel is a fulfilment of God’s purposes, then that shapes the worldview of their constituents, their parishioners, and their members, who in turn will elect politicians.

The prominent American writer Thomas Friedman said 26 October 2023, if the matter of Israel concerns you, you must feel more concerned than at any time since 1967. In that year, Israel defeated the armies of 3 Arab countries; They are: Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, in what became known as the Six-Day War.Today - Friedman adds in an article in his weekly column in the New York Times - Israel is waging a “war on six fronts.”

Friedman means the six-front war as a war in which Israel faces parties that do not belong to specific states, nation-states, social networks, “ideological” movements, West Bank communities and Israeli political factions. He describes this war as "the most complex war I have ever covered." But one thing is crystal clear to the American writer, which is that Israel cannot win the six-front war alone, unless it and the United States succeed in forming an international alliance, according to him.

He expresses his regret over the existence of a coalition government in Israel headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, "who cannot and will not be able to show the necessary determination to support such an international coalition." In Friedman’s opinion, this determination is represented in declaring an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and reforming Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority, so that it becomes a legitimate and credible Palestinian partner, capable of ruling the Gaza Strip in the post- Hamas era and approving a broader solution to the conflict that establishes two states, including Including the West Bank.

According to the author, the six fronts seem hidden, but they are easy to identify.

1. The Hamas movement has an arsenal of weapons that it manufactured and deployed itself, and used it to launch a naval attack on Israel and it launched long-range missiles towards the coastal city of Eilat. As for Israel - where a coalition of "extremist Jews and racist Jews" took power - it began to act in ways that actually helped strengthen the fronts against it.
2. The second of these fronts is the one in which Israel confronts Iran and its other proxies. They are: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Islamic militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthi group in Yemen.
3. By the third front, Friedman means the world of social networks and other digital publications, which hum about who is good and who is evil.
4. The fourth front is the intellectual-philosophical conflict between the global progressive movement and Israel, as the author of the article sees it, expressing his belief that some elements of that movement have lost their moral orientation on this issue. He cited as an example the numerous demonstrations witnessed by American universities that blame Israel and believe that Hamas is engaged in a “legitimate struggle against colonialism.”
5. The fifth front is inside Israel and the occupied territories, where extremist Jewish settlers attack Palestinians, and then hinder security cooperation between the Israeli military establishment and the Palestinian National Authority.
6. The sixth front is within Israel itself, and most of it is among its Jewish citizens. That front has disappeared from the scene for the time being, but it lies just below the surface. It is a clash driven by Netanyahu's permanent political strategy at home, which is based on the theory of divide and conquer, according to the expression of the article, the author of which confirms that the current prime minister has built his entire political career on pitting the factions of Israeli society against each other, which has led to the erosion of the kind of societal unity necessary to win the war. .

Friedman outlined his opinion on what Israel should do, saying, “This is a territorial dispute between two entities claiming the same land and it should be divided as equally as possible between them. Such a settlement constitutes the cornerstone of any success for Israel against Hamas, so if you are for the two-state solution, you are my friend, and if I was against the two-state solution, so you are not my friend,” he said.

Israel attacked in three columns. Two of them, roughly of equal strength, each with 200-300 vehicles of all types, advanced along the main axes. One drove south from Israel along the coast, covering up to 2km (1.2 miles) in width to reach Jabalia. The head of that column soon reached the last open ground before the Shati refugee camp. The second main column cut across the Strip south of Gaza City. When it reached the sea, it turned north along the coast and has now stopped and dug in just before the harbor. Elements of this column advanced into the area leading up to al-Shifa Hospital. The third, smaller, column moved in from the Erez checkpoint towards Beit Hanoon. Unlike the two main forces whose basic job was to take ground and clear Hamas fighters from it, this group seems to have had two purposes: to deny Hamas the possibility to flank the main columns, move around them and attack from the sides, and also to draw fighters to an additional open-ground front.

Most of the Israeli units were dug in and encamped in a similar fashion: armed vehicles with their backs to buildings that have obviously been cleared of tenants and occupied by the Israeli army, with as much open area in front of them as possible to deter Hamas incursions.

A large group of vehicles was inside Israel, close to Nahal Oz, one of the sites of the Hamas attack on October 7. The fact that this battle group has not moved at all since deploying confirms it to be the strategic reserve, a force that stays close to the battlefield ready to dash forward if needed. Usually, it races into battle when a major unit encounters difficulties and needs to be helped out, or when reconnaissance shows a sudden opportunity — a sector where enemy defences are weak so that a surprise decisive attack may be successful.

Al-Shifa Hospital became a pivotal role in the efforts Israel made over forty days to wrest control of Gaza from Hamas, and Israel’s seizure of it was an important step that could determine the pace and extent of its war with Hamas.

IDF forces’ advance in the northern Gaza Strip so far and the level of the resistance presented by Hamas provide a more optimistic picture than what emerged from earlier military projections. So far, the pace of Hamas’ collapse has been faster than expected. while Hamas counterattacks were taking a toll, they were unable to stop the military’s progress. The army is working closely with the air force,

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced 16 November 2023 a “next phase” of the operation in Gaza, during a situational assessment overviewing the military’s progress, particularly with the latest activity in the Al-Shifa Hospital complex. "I arrived today at the headquarters of the division whose special forces also operate inside the Shifa hospital,” Gallant began his situational assessment alongside the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Deputy Chief of Staff and other senior officers.

"The more we expand this operation, increase the pressure on Hamas and erode more headquarters, damage more tunnels, eliminate more operatives, and bring down more heads of organizations, the greater the chance of returning our abductees, because this enemy only understands power and we are explaining what power is.”

The new operation came shortly after the UN Security Council called for “truces and humanitarian corridors” in the Gaza Strip, in its first decision since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Since last October 8, Lebanese Hezbollah began an upward trend in its operations in southern Lebanon, targeting Israeli military sites and observation points along the border extending for about 140 km. During the first three months of the confrontation, Hezbollah says it carried out nearly 700 strikes against Israeli targets, including 48 Israeli military sites and points and targeting 17 settlements on the border, from Ras Naqoura in the west to the occupied Syrian Golan in the east.

For its part, the Yemeni Ansar Allah group (Houthis) announced its involvement in the confrontation with the aim of pressuring an end to the aggression against the Gaza Strip . The Houthi attacks included bombing operations on the south of the occupying state using ballistic and mobile missiles and drones. The movement announced a ban on the passage of Israeli ships from the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Sea, and launched attacks on Israeli ships using naval drones and sea missiles, and detained at least one ship. On December 9, it announced a ban on the passage of all ships of all nationalities heading to and from Israeli ports if they did not enter the Gaza Strip’s needs of medicine and food.

The Houthi attacks have led to what resembles a naval blockade in Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea, as major shipping companies stopped the passage of their ships through the Red Sea, such as the Danish companies A.P. Moller-Maersk, the Italian MSC, and CMA-CGM. " French. While some companies raised fees on goods they transport to and from the Middle East, such as the German company Hapag-Lloyd, which prompted the United States to create an international coalition in an attempt to deter the Houthis.

Colin P. Clarke, a Senior Fellow in the Program on National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wroten ian article in Foreign Affairs magazine, that the Israeli army was enterring a new phase of the conflict. What began as a conventional war may turn into something completely different, a counter-insurgency campaign. The counterinsurgency approach depends on special operations forces, precision strikes and targeted raids, and “for the Israeli army to retain the territory after clearing it of Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ) fighters”. Hamas would rely on its network of underground tunnels, making it easier to target Israeli soldiers conducting foot patrols.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said, "In this type of combat, the center of gravity is the civilian population. If you push them into the arms of the enemy, you are trading tactical victory for strategic defeat." It appears that Israel has no intention of winning “hearts and minds,” and that officials, especially Netanyahu and his far-right allies, are ignoring the political aspects of this conflict, presenting Hamas with an opportunity to fill the power vacuum and consolidate and entrench itself in Gaza. Militaries that adopted an “iron fist” approach to counterinsurgency by focusing almost exclusively on killing insurgents were successful in less than a third of the cases analyzed, which is less successful than approaches that also focused on mitigating Grievances of the civilian population.

Daniel, in his famous prophecy of the seventy weeks, foretells that the end of the Jewish nation shall be with a flood, or (agreeably to the language of prophecy) a hostile invasion, and that their land shall be laid utterly desolate.