Israel has done the impossible: It has painted itself into two corners at the same time.
By mismanaging the conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon, Israel has put itself into two no-win situations.
The Hezbollah rocket attack on the Golan Heights Druze village of Majdal Shams, killing 12 children and wounding dozens of others, is the latest evidence of this. There must be a response, but Israel has to figure out how to hit back forcefully without triggering a full-scale war.
Neither war should ever have reached those corners. That indicates the real problem: The same Israeli leaders, political and military, who presided over the failure to stop the barbaric Hamas invasion of Oct. 7, 2023, are still in power. They are the same ones who have let the conflicts on the two borders drag on for nearly 10 months.
Instead of finding a way out, Israel plays into the hands of its enemies. Israel’s military and society—actually the same things, since the army relies on reservists—are not built to carry on wars for so long, much less wars on two fronts. Hamas, Hezbollah, and their sponsors in Iran know that. What Israel needed was a plan to wrap up the Gaza conflict in two or three weeks.
Would that mean the destruction of Hamas and the elimination of the terrorist group for all time? Of course not. Given the failures of the government and military in allowing Hamas to arm itself for years with Qatari money funneled knowingly through Israel, and Iranian weapons smuggled across and under the Egyptian border along with huge tunneling tools that can’t be hidden from even the simplest prying eye, such a goal of “total victory,” as outlined by Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was never attainable. Even so, Netanyahu further glued himself to that goal with his bombastic pep talk speech to the US Congress in Washington.
The “total victory” manta has trapped Israel into an open-ended conflict against a terror group that already won the war with its attack on Oct. 7.
Hamas has cemented its place in Arab lore as the most effective anti-Israel force since the 1947 partition created the state of Israel. Make no mistake—Hamas is responsible for the atrocities—murder, carnage, rape, and kidnapping—on Oct. 7. Israel is to blame “only” for its failure to prevent the assault, and then its failure to free as many hostages as possible, declare victory, and get out of Gaza while there was still a chance of maintaining world sympathy and support.
That support would have been crucial to get out of the other corner—the war in Lebanon. And a war it is—more than nine months of Hezbollah drone and rocket barrages and Israeli counterstrikes have made Israel’s north uninhabitable and created tens of thousands of internal refugees—a term that used to apply only to Syria during its civil war—in both Israel and Lebanon.
There is no objective reason why Israel must face the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists alone. Every time they fire a rocket or launch a drone, they are violating UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed in 2006, imposing a cease-fire and requiring Hezbollah to move away from the border, back to the Litani River.
It should have been possible to enlist world support in stopping the Hezbollah barrages before Israel’s north burned. Who knows, perhaps Hezbollah would have acted on its own pledge to stop attacking Israel when the Gaza war ended.
Instead, Israel’s getting dragged into a months-long conflict gave time to the Iran-linked pro-Hamas groups around the world to ratchet up their protests, turning public opinion away from Israel and toward the beleaguered Palestinians—even though all of this is the fault of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
So now what?
There are ways out of this, but not with the present Israeli leadership. Netanyahu is constrained politically by the most extreme of his coalition partners, who demand an all-out war in both Gaza and Lebanon. The latter would no doubt trigger a Hezbollah missile attack that would kill many Israelis and cause considerable damage to property and infrastructure. Israel would survive, and might even “win,” but the price of such a victory would be crippling.
Cooler heads counsel signing a hostages-for-prisoners deal with Hamas and pulling Israeli forces out of Gaza, even temporarily, and then deal with the Hezbollah menace. It might still be possible to get some world support for that.
Even then, the problems on both fronts would not go away, and without international intervention, future conflicts would be all but inevitable. Hamas would remain in place with many of its attack tunnels intact, and as of now there is no mechanism to keep Hamas from rearming. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is said to have 150,000 missiles to aim at Israel—however the current round ends, the Lebanese terrorists will still have plenty of them left.
Only if the world wakes up and realizes that the target of these terrorists is not Israel alone, but the West as a whole; and the perpetrators are not only local terrorists, but Iran—only then might world powers mobilize to put a stop to this dangerously escalating conflict.
But even that scenario is unlikely unless there is a change of political and military leadership in Israel. The team that allowed Oct. 7 to happen, and then mishandled the wars on both fronts, cannot be trusted to extract Israel from this trap with minimum damage.
That might be the most painful element for Israelis—they can’t trust their government and military to do the right thing. Once upon a time, not so long ago, that trust was a given.
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