In all probability, none of the wars in recent memory will be studied or written about more than Hamas’ 24-hour strike deep into the military might of one of the region’s most powerful armies and its most feared intelligence services.
With unprecedented precision, Hamas could execute a meticulously created plan under cover of total radio silence. Despite the blockade, the eyes in the skies and the spies on the ground, nearly 1,000 fighters, fully armed, quietly moved out of Gaza, undetected, without communicating with one another. No modern or electronic methods of communication were allowed. As they left the confines of Gaza, the commandos knew they were now on their own, on a do-or-die mission. Each unit in the group, on motorcycles, moved to hit their preset bank of targets: Israel’s military checkpoints, army barracks and centers of heavily armed settlements, killing off or capturing any armed resistance, leaving behind only debris whose images will send shockwaves to an Israeli population deceived into believing their military firepower and expensive intelligence apparatus will ensure peace for them. The dead, the captured and the debris left behind were proof that to get peace and security, Israelis will need to go far beyond reliance on mere brute force.
By the end of the first wave of attack, Israel lost 900 lives and more than 2,000 wounded, with more than 150 taken prisoners. Beyond that, the image of Israel as an impregnatable fortress, with an intelligence organization that sees and hears everything, supported by an invincible army, lay in tatters. The political forces in Tel Aviv didn’t know how to respond nor how they would be hit next. The mission’s level of training, planning and execution, like its military, psychological and single-day human cost, was unprecedented, as will surely be its political cost. Within 48 hours, 87% of those asked blamed the political leadership and 50% considered the attack worse than the 1973 Yom Kippur attack by Egypt and Syria.
In all the wars that Israel has fought since its creation in 1948, it has never been humiliated and defeated with this level of precision and speed. Hamas’ commando unit proved to be the dream of every military general looking to create small, highly trained, fast-moving and lethal fighting forces working as out-of-communication independent groups. And we do not need to go far to know who trained these lethal fighters. This is the new caliber of the youth in the region. Clearly, Israel and its allies have found more than their match and must now think differently and far from military might. But will they?
Was this type of development predictable? Yes, it was. Those who understood the region’s youth and what they aspire to and are capable of could see it happening. One didn’t need to be a prophet to see where it was all going.
In August 2014, I was invited to attend a conference at the University of Cambridge in England organized by the Saudi-based Gulf Research Center. In a workshop to discuss Yemen, I was seated next to an official from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The irony of an Israeli official being present in a conference discussing Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) affairs, and specifically a workshop on Yemen organized by Saudis, was not lost on me. Nevertheless, it was a good opportunity to learn and perhaps teach.
As I argued, time is not on Israel’s side in a part of the world that is growing fast in both numbers and technology, and Israel needs to change its course away from reliance on its military might alone. My interlocutor was confident that Israel would lead the region, and soon, he assured me, we would see Israeli flags flying in every Arab capital as Arab regimes realized how safe they would be with Israel on their side. But that was exactly the point Israel missed, I told him. Israel’s confrontation is not with Arab regimes; it’s with the Arab people, who are two distinct entities, neither representing the other. Israel must choose its partners well to live in peace in the region. Because Israel’s future wars will not be with regimes that can be easily defeated but with people whom it will never be able to defeat.
Fast forward and here we are. It’s not an Arab regime Israel is at war with. But with 2 million people who have been imprisoned in Gaza and many millions more around the Arab world and beyond, rooting for those in Gaza to win.
Apart from the shock and awe effect, what has this commando operation achieved for the Palestinians?
Hamas has demonstrated in no uncertain terms that Israel’s military might is only a temporary affair that can and will eventually be defeated. And that the pain of war will no longer be borne by one side alone. As I already pointed out, the region’s power centers are shifting fast in favor of movements that are not restricted by traditional political structures but operate with a different set of rules.
While the dynamics on the Arab side are changing, Israel and its supporters are dangerously entrenched in the past, completely unable to change.
Consider their old and new positions as they face their most serious challenge yet:
-Netanyahu promises a “full-scale war” on Gaza.
-Biden, giving Netanyahu the green signal, promises American support is “rock solid and unwavering.”
-The Pentagon promises to make available whatever “Israel needs.”
-The EU condemns the victims and expresses full support for the occupiers.
-The U.K. Condemns “attack on Israel.”
- French President Emmanuel Macron says, “I strongly condemn the current terrorist attack against Israel.”
With all that green light, Gaza civilian centers are bombed, homes destroyed and people killed.
I am still trying to figure out what’s new about all that. When Netanyahu promises an unprecedented response or his defense minister orders a complete siege of Gaza, the question is, what exactly will Israel do to Palestinians that is unprecedented? Bomb Gaza to kingdom come? That will not be unprecedented. Will they impose a complete siege on all Palestinians, occupy Palestinian lands and evict Palestinians from their homes? None of that is unprecedented. Palestinians have been living under these inhuman conditions for decades.
This brutality against Palestinians is 75 years old. In that period, Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat and later Mahmoud Abbas, negotiated, compromised and signed on recognition of Israel. In return, those who negotiated became marginalized as Palestinians lost their homes, farms, lands, lives and livelihoods. In the past 30 years since the Oslo Accords that were supposed to create a Palestinian state, the number of Jewish settlements has quadrupled, bringing the total number of settlers to 413,000 in the West Bank alone. With that level of land grab and eviction Palestinians are exposed to, there is nothing more for them to lose.
And when one is that far down, any change is a step up. What Israel and its backers continue to fail to understand is that the only way to defeat your enemy is to make sure your enemy has a lot to lose. Because the enemy that is impossible to beat is one you have stripped of everything, one who has nothing more to lose. Such that he becomes one very determined enemy, as this war clearly demonstrated. And it doesn’t matter how distorted your powerful media presents your enemy or what image of him is portrayed. Because on the battlefield, you know your enemy's reality, and you know his true capabilities and determination, undistorted.
Beyond creating that new dynamic in the military and political battlefield, Hamas has scored big by taking over 150 prisoners. It has already made clear that no compromises will be made on the prisoner exchange. Israel holds more than 5,000 prisoners, many without trial. Hamas will not accept anything less than an “All for All” prisoner exchange, skyrocketing Hamas’ popularity even further into the stratosphere. Because alternatively, seeing the human cost their families paid, Hamas cannot afford to compromise on the All for All principle. Hamas’ political survival might depend on bringing Palestinian prisoners back home. But while Hamas’ prisoner exchange position puts Israel in an embarrassing situation, it puts the Israeli prisoners Hamas holds in a hazardous situation vis a vis their own government.
In the 1980s, many of us following Israel’s wars inside Palestine and Lebanon were shocked to learn about the military protocol when it was exposed. Under the so-called “Hannibal Protocol,” Israeli soldiers were ordered by their own government to kill any Israeli soldier captured by the enemy. The standing order was given under the rule that “a dead soldier is better than a captured soldier” because it made negotiating an exchange unnecessary or very low priority. That type of protocol wasn’t something new in military warfare. In World War II, it was adopted by the British. However, the British order was to destroy French military hardware captured by the Germans. What was new was that in the Hannibal Protocol, Israel was actually ordering its soldiers to kill their captured fellow soldiers.
As I watched how the Israeli air force massively targeted specific areas of Gaza despite the possible existence of their captured prisoners there, I remembered the Hannibal Protocol. I wondered whether Israel reactivated the protocol to avoid the need to negotiate a prisoner exchange that would release all the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. My suspicion was confirmed when the Israeli Defense Ministry announced that the bombing of Gaza would continue regardless of the danger it posed to captured Israelis! Yes, the Hannibal Protocol has been activated. Which puts Hamas in a strategically challenging position. To save its Israeli prisoners from being targeted by the Israeli government in the massive bombing of Gaza!
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s order to actually reactivate the Hannibal Protocol on Israeli citizens captured by Hamas demonstrates a dangerous level of desperation, confirmed the immediate arrival of the U.S. aircraft carrier “Gerald Ford” in the Mediterranean in a show of force to underline U.S. President Joe Biden’s warning to other regional players, meaning Hezbollah and Iran, from getting involved. And the speedy dispatch of U.S. munition to help Israel. Can the U.S. afford to get directly involved in the fight? The rational answer is a big “NO.” Not with the ongoing war Biden has been conducting against Russia using Ukraine and certainly not with the one also being planned against China using Taiwan. Rationally, the last thing the U.S. wants now is a distraction from the two fronts Biden is focused on. However, regarding Israel, all rational thinking disappears in U.S. policymaking. No American politician concerned about their political future will dare challenge any decision to give Israel All-American blood and treasure. Besides, Biden has repeatedly expressed his firm belief that the Zionist entity in Palestine is an important military outpost for the U.S. and NATO, without which building more aircraft carriers and military bases will be necessary.
That kind of U.S. involvement goes exactly with what Netanyahu hopes to achieve. We should expect to see Israel intensifying its Gaza bombing to put more pressure on other regional powers to become directly involved and, starting with Hezbollah and possibly Iran, in a faceoff that will eventually force America’s hand in the conflict. Netanyahu thinks that hitting Gaza with the brutality we saw and pulling in Iran and Hezbollah will result in America carrying out its threat to attack both on Israel’s side, thus enabling a defeat of all Israel’s enemies in a major regional conflict. This is why we have been witnessing an increasing exchange of barrages on the Lebanese border between Israel and Hezbollah, with the latter stepping back from falling into the trap Netanyahu is setting up. Whether other players can stay above the fray, with each only supporting their side in the fight between Israel and the Palestinians, is a matter to be seen. We have already seen that the region has witnessed a new dynamic force that can hopefully induce others to realize that their war machines only destroy, not build bridges, and building the latter is less costly, in blood and treasure, than the former.
