Israel-Gaza War: Day 163 - Q&A

 

Before October 7, you participated in anti-Netanyahu protests over his judicial putsch, which intended to concentrate power in his own hands. Are you taking part in the renewed anti-government protests such as the one last night?

No.

Presently, there are two streams of protest. One calls for early elections intended to end Binyamin Netanyahu's government. The other is to pressure his government to concede to Hamas's demands for a hostage deal.

The two streams have melded into one.

And since I am against any hostage deal that releases busloads of terrorists, I will not demonstrate against the government. Moreover, I am not comfortable protesting in the streets against Netanyahu in wartime.

A core group of demonstrators has been trying to provoke the police by illegally blocking traffic. It is as if we are not at war, as if the police are not working long hours, as if we are not in Ramadan.

Protesters are being manipulated. Many have not thought out the consequences of a mass prisoner release. They don't know that today's Hamas leaders in Turkey, Qatar, and Gaza are primarily alumni of Israel's prisons whom Netanyahu or one of his predecessors released in previous hostage-taking deals.

As much as I want Netanyahu to leave the political stage, I will not lend a hand to strengthening the enemy in wartime. Besides, he can only be removed if elements in Likud are willing to take him down. However, he has largely purged his party of internal opponents. Yaov Gallant, the defense minister, is the only one who has openly challenged him. And Gallant is culpable for October 7 no less than Netanyahu since he – ultimately – did not quit after publicly warning that Netanyahu had undermined our deterrence with his judicial putsch. When push came to shove – Gallant caved.

Netanyahu could be dislodged if the Hardal messianic parties (of Ben Gvir and Smotsrich) and the non-Zionist Haredi ultra-Orthodox parties essential to his coalition pulled their support. These two camps could fall out over Haredi draft dodging. For now, they have no interest in bringing Netanyahu down.  

You voted for Yair Lapid in recent elections. How does his support for releasing terrorists from Israel's prisons in a hostage deal sit with you?

Badly. Lapid has been clear. He wants to trade some of the most notorious terrorists in Israeli prisons, many serving multiple life terms, for the hostages, living or dead. He says, "No deal will be an easy deal, but a deal that will bring the kidnapped home is worth the price…There is no victory without them returning. We can't move forward without them being home."

So, I would find it hard to back him when Yesh Atid runs next. I think the alpha and omega of victory is defanging Hamas and making sure it can't govern the Strip or take over the West Bank. We can't overcome the Hamas Idea because it is embedded in what it means to be Palestinian, but we can keep Hamas (and the other armed groups) from posing a military threat. And doing so would send an unmistakable signal to Hezbollah.

Western governments and the prestige media profess to support Israel's right of self-defense. On Day 163 of the October 7 War, do you believe them?

Leaders and editorialists have convinced themselves that Israel can supernaturally overcome Hamas and Islamic Jihad without harm to Palestinian non-combatants (who are the group's primary backers, cannon fodder, and human shields). Israel can somehow win, goes fabulist thinking, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire and pulling out of Gaza, by turning the Strip over to a PLO 2.0, and by enabling the creation of an armed sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank that a bridge or tunnel would link.

This is delusional. We need to be far more creative than a PLO 2.0. I favor a trusteeship for Palestine funded by the Gulf States. One that would build Palestinian political institutions and develop a new Palestinian political culture.  

I ask myself why the West and Big Media oppose Israeli defensive measures like building a buffer zone between Gaza and Israel. They oppose cutting off Rafiah from Egypt (the point where all the tunnels cross into the Sinai); they oppose, in short, anything that would actually secure Israel from further attack.

At best, they are lying to themselves.

Should Israel be doing a better job in humanitarian aid?

Israel is constantly held to a double standard not applied to other member states of the UN. Hamas is responsible for the people of Gaza, not Israel.

Yet, Israel continues to allow the flow of food and fuel to the Strip even though this undermines our effort for regime change in Gaza. We do this to abate enemy suffering. We know if the situation were reversed, they would starve those they had not butchered.

Hamas and other Gazan actors either hijack humanitarian deliveries or engineer them into confrontations with Israel. International aid intended for free distribution is being sold. Palestinian society has little history of self-help because that would undermine its culture of victimization. And since the UN is barred from permanently resettling Palestinian refugees even within Palestine, the Sisyphean cycle of aiding the Palestinians never ends.

I have little doubt that sea-borne aid from UNICEF will also wind up being sold or controlled by clans or Hamas.

The best way to help Gazans is to help Israel overcome Hamas so that food, fuel, and material can once again flow in from Israel as they did before October 7.

So, instead of conspiring with Iran behind the scenes and leaning on Israel, which the Biden administration has been doing in secret talks in Oman – it should be sending a clear message that the US supports Israel's efforts to defang Hamas.

Ideally, Jerusalem should have a plan in place for who runs Gaza after we leave. But that would be too much to expect from Netanyahu, who habitually kicks complex problems down the road.

Finally, what did you make of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's call on Netanyahu to resign? And his claim that the good Palestinians and good Israelis want peace but that Hamas and Bibi and the settlers are in the way.

I was chagrined that Schumer pretended he doesn't get that the Palestinians don't want a state alongside Israel. He is right that Netanyahu should go, but his intervention's impact will be counterproductive. It helps Netanyahu stay. Some settlers are fanatics, and some settlements are genuinely problematic but in the final analysis, the crux of the problem is Palestinian intransigence.

Isn't it curious that Schumer's call on Mahmud Abbas to resign got no attention? That's because everyone understood his critique of the Palestinians was just a cover for his attack on Netanyahu.

Why Schumer (who is unarguably a friend of Israel) played along with the psychological warfare orchestrated by the Biden WH is anyone's guess – perhaps fear that the Democrats will further hemorrhage Muslim, woke, and African American voters, constituencies that surveys show have an antipathy toward the Zionist enterprise. If the  Biden-Harris ticket loses to Trump, it will be because Joe Biden abandoned the border with Mexico, led from the left, and having failed to inspire confidence, did not have the courage to step aside, giving a moderate Democratic governor a chance to lead the party against Trump. 

Biden showed courage and decency in backing Israel at the start of the war, and Israelis are grateful for that. He was a profile in courage. He just did not have the stamina to go the distance.