Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023 | 2 a.m.
“Crazy, crazy, crazy!” were the words of an Israeli friend on the phone, describing Saturday’s massive Hamas attack that is still playing out. An attack that was deliberately conducted on the day after the 50th anniversary of the surprise Arab attacks that began the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
It was the shocking implausibility — and the personal immediacy — of what had happened, that shook my friend to her core. Many others told me this was worse than 1973, which mostly took place in the Sinai or on the Golan Heights — because this attack happened inside Israel proper, and was mainly aimed at civilians. Everyone I reached in Israel either had personal connections with someone killed or injured, or had immediate relatives or friends who have been called up by the military since the attack.
How was it possible, they all asked, that hundreds of Gazan terrorists on motorcycles, bicycles and foot could cross a supposedly well-protected border, kill at least 700 Israelis in a day, and injure more than 2,000? How were they able to take scores of people back to Gaza as hostages — including U.S. citizens — long before help arrived?
How is it that Hamas militants could run wild without any immediate Israeli military response? I have watched phone videos of Israeli children cowering before Hamas gunmen who had just killed their sister, as their mother screamed “this can’t be real.” And of a young Israeli woman being dragged away between two gunmen on a Hamas motorcycle, kidnapped from a mass desert concert near the Gaza border at which at least 260 young people were slaughtered. Israelis are desperate for answers.
This failure of Israeli intelligence and security is an earthquake that is likely to precipitate upheaval inside Israel and in the wider Middle East region. The horrors behind these questions are too overwhelming for the answers to be postponed until the end of the fighting, especially if Israel hopes to rescue the hostages and crush Hamas.
I put these queries to Boaz Tamir, a tech executive with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most thoughtful Israelis I know. He was a young tank commander in the Golan who was temporarily blinded when the Syrians attacked in 1973, but managed to hold the line.
A week ago he delivered a speech on the lessons to be learned from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which he recalled how his brigade commanders were all wiped out.
“There was a reason we found ourselves alone there facing overwhelming forces,” Tamir told his audience. “The Israeli political leadership and the top-tier military brass committed the sin of hubris, displaying a failure to acknowledge the boundaries of their power. We were betrayed by those who sent us into (war).”
Yet, he added, “The Yom Kippur War generation managed to block the attack because it knew what it was fighting for.”
Today, Israelis are enraged at the hideous killing of older people, children and families, yet the public is split over what kind of country they want and whether they are fighting for a democracy or a wannabe authoritarian/religious regime.
However, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu will need a united country and a painfully clear-eyed strategy to wage an as yet unclear war to rescue hostages and put down Hamas. A massive ground operation in Gaza risks not only trapping Israeli troops in preplanned Hamas killing zones, but also resulting in the murder of scores of Jewish hostages.
Meantime, Israel must maneuver to avoid a wider war with Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon that have 150,000 mostly Iranian missiles, especially as their vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system proved unable to block all of the estimated 4,000 rockets and missiles fired by Hamas. Nor does Israel want the Palestinian West Bank to explode into a third uprising, with guns.
Yet the political and military blinders that enabled the Hamas militia to cause unprecedented casualties inside Israel could lead to further disaster, if they are not removed.
The Netanyahu government, noted Tamir, was focused militarily on the Iran military threat, and on efforts to expand West Bank Jewish settlements and pushing through a so-called judicial reform that would remove the last check on annexing the West Bank with its 2 million Palestinian residents.
“The entire strategic mindset,” Tamir said, “was that we had invested $1 billion in technological barriers (to seal off Gaza), so we didn’t need many military to guard them. We thought we had the best intelligence in the world, but that was a big strategic mistake.”
The near total reliance on technological means ignored the possibility that Hamas could use simple means to knock out the limited number of soldiers guarding the entry to Gaza.
Moreover, said Tamir, the assumption of Netanyahu’s government was that the Palestinian status quo could be “managed forever because of technology.” That, as I have written repeatedly, was a flawed expectation.
I expected the explosion to come in the West Bank, due to increased settler violence and open government talk of annexation. Instead, it came from Hamas (probably with organizational help from Iran) using hideous but simple means.
Going forward, this former soldier warns, the Israeli government needs a totally different mindset if it is to avoid entangling Israel in a wider war it cannot win. “We have to understand we were too arrogant, and need more critical thinking,” he said. “And you can’t ignore the Palestinian question.”
Critical thinking has been anathema so far on the Netanyahu team and it’s hard to imagine there’ll be much improvement even if opposition parties join a wartime unity government. It is hard to imagine that team relinquishing its attacks on the pro-democracy movement, even though that movement has stood down for now to fully join the war effort.
Yet without a different mindset, it’s hard to imagine how the Netanyahu government will rescue the hostages and crush Hamas without widening the conflict.
“No one could write such a script as yesterday,” Tamir said wearily. “Reality exceeds all imagination. It is very hard to watch it.” May sane and critical thinking prevail.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer .
