Netanyahu’s Necessary Resolve

I wouldn’t be Benjamin Netanyahu for shekels.  But if I were him, I hope I would be able to act with the same resolve he has shown. 

In the aftermath of 7th October, once the dust has settled, heads will roll, and Netanyahu’s is likely to be among the first.  As Prime Minister at the time he bears ultimate responsibility for the massive intelligence failure that facilitated the slaughter.  I don’t know if the doctrine of ministerial responsibility holds any more sway in Israel than it does here; Labor governments, in particular, now pay it little more than lip service.  But I imagine, under normal circumstances, Netanyahu would be expected to resign, failing which he would be rolled.  That he has not done so, in my view, is not that he is desperately hanging on to the perks of office, but that, despite what individual Israelis think of him, they recognise he is the best man to prosecute the war against Hamas.

Nonetheless, the knives are now out for him with a vengeance. Here is a sample, from The Australian:

Israel was in danger of losing more support globally if it continued its war in Gaza, Foreign Minister Penny Wong warned in an interview on Tuesday.

Speaking at a business summit in Sydney, she said that the world was “rightly sympathetic” to Israel after the terrorist attack on October 7.

“The world was rightly sympathetic and in solidarity with Israel,” she said.

But she said the world was now horrified with the loss of innocent life in Gaza and warned that Israel was in danger of losing more public support if it continued its actions.

Not that Wong’s vacuous advice will cut any ice in Jerusalem, but the waning of President Biden’s support, driven no doubt by the need to get re-elected in November, is more worrying.  Biden has said Israel’s planned incursion into Rafah without a plan to evacuate a million Gazans would be a ‘red line’. As he put it:

He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas. But he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken. He’s hurting … in my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel.

It seems the figure of 30,000 Gazan lives lost is a tipping point for Biden and his administration.   It seems an unspecified number of civilian casualties would have been tolerable, but we have now passed that point. Here from a Dow Jones report, by Stephen Kalin, in The Australian:

The U.S. has repeatedly sided with Israel during Security Council votes on the war in Gaza launched by Israel in response to the attacks by Hamas …

In recent weeks, however, as the death toll and suffering in Gaza has become intolerable and Israel has threatened to invade Rafah…, 

So, here we are back to the spurious ‘proportional response’ argument, a favourite of Wong.  But here’s the point: what Biden, and all the other ‘Israel has a right to defend itself but …’ brigade, do not understand is that this is not a punitive mission, to which the restrictions of a ‘proportional response’ might apply.  This is a war for the survival of the State of Israel. 

The best way to describe the logic underlying the proportional response argument is that what happened on October 7 was nothing more than just another fixture in some macabre ongoing sporting competition, albeit one rather more deadly than, say, cricket.  Hamas always wins the toss and elects to bat, killing a number of Israelis.  Once the Israelis have killed a proportional number of Gazans, the umpire blows the whistle, calls a draw, and the teams retire for refreshments and training until the next fixture.  The only problem is that Israel never knows when the next fixture is scheduled for.  Oh, and that it never actually wanted to play in this league in the first place. 

A Times article reprinted in last Weekend Australian claimed that ‘The US President believed that by backing Israel to the hilt, he would be able to restrain his old acquaintance as he unleashed retribution on Hamas for the terrorist atrocity that killed more than 1200 Israelis’.   These authors have got it wrong.  Netanyahu is not unleashing ‘retribution’.

Let me re-iterate, this is not a punitive expedition.  Israel is fighting for its survival, and it is entitled to do so to the maximum extent possible under the rules of war.  Those rules do not specify an acceptable limit of civilian casualties.  They say that purely civilian areas, such as hospitals and residential areas are protected, but that any military objective, even one which contains civilians, may be targeted.  That said, the attacking force would have to satisfy itself, even be able to convince an international tribunal, that the military gain from any individual attack justified the associated casualties.  For example, that the target could not simply be bypassed and isolated.

That degree of discretion becomes problematic when the enemy deliberately shields its personnel and weapons within the civilian infrastructure, and one of its acknowledged strategies is to facilitate maximum civilian casualties in order to alienate support for its adversary.  Precisely what is happening.

To add some context, during World War Two, the West, as we know it, was also fighting for its survival.  During that war, some 50 million to 70 million people were killed, most of them civilians.  Poland alone lost, reportedly, about 5.5 million civilians.  The USSR lost somewhere between 5 and 10 million.  Germany lost 1.5 million to 3 million.  Japan did well, losing only some 800,000. That victory took six years.  Israel has been fighting for its existence for 75 years.   And Arab deaths over this time pale into insignificance compared to the carnage of World War Two.

Given that he probably no longer has a political career to worry about, Netanyahu is probably best placed to handle the opprobrium that is currently unleashed upon Israel.  He will do what is necessary.  And the Israelis can thank God for that.

I don’t know how much sleep Netanyahu loses over 30,000 Gazan deaths – a disputed figure in any case, but that is not the point.  However, I’m guessing he would temper his natural humanitarian concern with the knowledge that many, maybe most, of these civilians are not entirely ‘innocent’, despite the fact that they do not actually carry weapons.  They elected Hamas and, reportedly, a majority of them still support Hamas.  They allow their children to be indoctrinated and recruited by Hamas and they celebrate their deaths as ‘martyrs’.  Still, I am sure he deplores these civilian deaths and would prefer they did not happen.  And that he will take all practical measures to prevent them.

But that’s not his greatest moral dilemma.

As well as internationally, Netanyahu is under pressure domestically over the natural desire of families to have the remaining hostages returned.  The international community don’t seem to care that much about them.  Release of the remaining hostages is almost an afterthought in the pronouncements of those such as Wong. For many years the doctrine in the West was that ‘we will not negotiate with terrorists’.  Meaning that hostages were at the mercy of their captors.  That the only hope for hostages, short of being released by their captors, was to be freed in a rescue mission, a risky operation in which some, or all, of the hostages might be killed.  That doctrine has been weakened in recent years.   But it seems Netanyahu has revived it, and is now employing it in Gaza.  That requires extreme mental toughness, and it is on this issue that I return to my original point that I would not want to be in his shoes.  I do concede that this situation is much more fraught than that which applied, for example, at Entebbe in 1976, where the hostages were concentrated in one place and the Israelis knew where they were.  But if you accept that, through your decisions, you must take the lives of some enemy civilians in order to achieve your strategic objective, you must also accept that you will incur losses within your own innocent populace, just as President Zelensky has done in the Ukraine.  That’s the burden of leadership.

Recently, US Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, said that Netanyahu is the greatest obstacle to peace in the area.  What he means by ‘peace’ is ‘business as usual’.   That is the ‘proportional response’ position.

If I were Netanyahu and somebody urged upon me the need for a proportional response, my reply would be, ‘Proportional response?  Of course, not a problem.  Let me know when I get to six million’.