The eleven month anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel passed two days ago and in two more days we will reach the twenty-third anniversary of the September 11th Attacks on America.
Both these events have become so infamous that they are now among the tiny handful that can easily be identified merely by the date on which they occurred, and they are both likely to be remembered for their world historic significance. The 2001 attacks unleashed a long series of devastating Middle Eastern wars, and last year’s Hamas attack now threatens to do the same, perhaps drawing in the United States. There are differences as well as some significant parallels, but taken together they may have combined consequences that are too controversial to be widely discussed.
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From almost the first hours after the huge October raid by Gaza militants, Israeli officials and their media allies had declared that the attack was Israel’s own 9/11, and I believe that in many respects that analogy is a very apt one.
Back in 2001, the newly installed administration of President George W. Bush had paid little attention to foreign affairs and almost none to the Middle East, with its focus overwhelmingly upon domestic political projects. Bush had actively courted Muslim support during his 2000 campaign while promising Americans that he would pursue a “humble” foreign policy. All of these plans were transformed in a single day as tens of millions of Americans watched the towers of our World Trade Center collapse and the newscasters reported that the Pentagon had also been attacked and seriously damaged.
Not since the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 had America suffered such an enemy assault on its own soil, and nearly 3,000 Americans were dead, so major military retaliation was inevitable. But with our top leaders reeling in dismay and confusion, uncertain exactly how to respond, a tight network of fervently pro-Israel Neocons situated in various sub-Cabinet positions quickly sprang into action. These individuals took advantage of the sudden, unexpected crisis to convince their superiors to undertake a long-planned agenda of regime change operations and wars across much of the Middle East and other portions of the Muslim world, a project largely intended to reshape that region for the benefit of Israel.
The 9/11 Attacks themselves had inflicted relatively minor injury upon America. But the gigantic, ideologically-driven overreaction promoted by extremist elements of the Bush Administration severely damaged our national interests and global reputation, inflicting losses vastly greater than anything that a few hijacked jetliners could possibly have done.
The Hamas raid against Israel seemed to follow a remarkably similar trajectory. At the time it occurred, Israelis were entirely focused upon domestic issues, especially a very bitter ideological battle over judicial reform between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political opponents, with almost no one paying any attention to the simmering conflict with the Palestinians, least of all the ones in quiet Gaza. Just as the American people and its leaders had assumed that our country was protected from any significant foreign attack by two wide oceans, the Israelis had put their faith in the elaborate, high-tech defenses they had erected around the besieged Gaza enclave at the cost of a half-billion dollars, believing that these were completely impenetrable.
Thus, when the successful attack came, more than a hundred times larger than any previous Hamas incursion, it struck like a bolt out of the blue, and the Israeli government response was totally disorganized and completely ineffective, with panic-stricken, trigger-happy IDF troops accounting for a large fraction of all the resulting civilian deaths, as Apache attack helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved. More Israelis died in that 24-hour period than had fallen in all the major military battles of the country’s previous half-century of wars, while well over 200 Israelis were captured and carried back to Gaza, with Hamas intending to trade them for the release of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners long held by Israel without charges or trials.
The crucial myth of Israeli military invincibility that had been constructed at enormous effort over three generations was shattered within hours, as was the even stronger myth of the brilliance of Israeli surveillance and intelligence capabilities. For more than seventy years, the powerful, well-equipped conventional armies of nearby Arab states had regularly been defeated by the Israeli military, but the latter had now been totally humiliated by a rag-tag force of lightly-armed Islamic militants.
In per capita terms, Israel’s human losses were some fifteen times greater than what America had suffered from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so Israeli military retaliation was inevitable. But just as America’s massive, ideologically-driven overreaction after 2001 inflicted enormously greater damage on ourselves than the attacks had ever done, Israel’s own ideologically-driven response has been equally ruinous.
America committed huge, devastating blunders in the aftermath of 9/11. But as the world’s sole superpower, with a population of nearly 300 million and protected by two oceans, our national existence was obviously never at risk. By contrast, Israel is a small country of only seven million Jews living in a sea of much larger, hostile neighbors, so its margin for error is far smaller. I think that the disastrous, self-destructive actions of the Israeli government over the last eleven months have raised serious doubts about the near-term survival of the Jewish State less than eighty years after it was first established.
The reason for Israel’s massive overreaction seems obvious. At the time of the attack, Netanyahu was already reviled by half the Israeli population, including a large majority of its elites. The gigantic military disaster that occurred on his watch immediately dropped his approval rating to single digits even before evidence appeared that most of the unarmed civilian dead had apparently been killed by the IDF due to his own government’s incompetent response. So he recognized that once his retaliatory war ended and peace was reestablished, he would almost certainly be driven from office; and with numerous serious corruption charges hanging over his head, he would probably end his life in a prison cell.
I think that a classic line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth probably summed up Netanyahu’s dilemma and his resulting strategy:
I am in blood Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
Thus, his personal situation required him to enormously broaden and lengthen his new retaliatory war in hopes that an eventual sweeping victory, perhaps resulting in a greatly expanded Israel, might lead his citizens to forget or forgive his corruption, blunders, and initial military disaster.
Aside from occupation duties and long-term guerrilla conflicts, Israel’s actual wars since 1948 had been extremely brief ones, accommodating the needs of an army that largely consisted of reservists mobilized for short periods. At the time the IDF began its attack on Gaza, the widespread assumption had been that the punitive campaign against Hamas would only last a few weeks if even that. But the Hamas fighters were well-entrenched in an extensive network of tunnels and could not easily be dislodged, so Netanyahu took his project in an entirely different direction, converting it into a war against Gaza’s more than two million civilians.
He hoped that a massive, relentless bombardment aimed at destroying Gaza’s homes and civilian infrastructure combined with a starvation blockade would kill enough Palestinians that the remainder could be driven out into Egypt’s Sinai desert, probably then followed by a similar ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. The removal of all the Palestinians and the permanent annexation of their lands would result in the creation of a purely Jewish Greater Israel, and if Netanyahu achieved that century-old Zionist ambition, his place in Israeli history would be assured, along with his likely political survival.
But most of the Gazans were the descendants of refugees whom Zionist militants had expelled from Palestine during the previous ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba. Therefore, despite the bombing and devastation they stubbornly refused to once again become homeless international exiles, thereby frustrating Netanyahu’s sweeping plans, while the Egyptians were just as opposed to suddenly receiving a couple of million destitute refugees expelled into their territory. As a consequence, Israel’s very one-sided war against Gaza’s civilian population has now dragged on for more than eleven months, with no obvious end in sight.
Such an exceptionally long war has naturally had very damaging effects upon Israel and its economy, severely impacted by the continuing mobilization of so many reservists. The lack of any clear military victory or signs of an approaching conclusion has also led 500,000 or more Israelis to flee overseas, a massive blow since so many of these individuals were the country’s best-educated and most productive citizens. For the last decade or two, Israel had proclaimed its successful high-tech industry as the engine of country’s economic future and boasted about the flood of investment capital for its startups, but wartime uncertainty has caused a huge outflow of such capital and personnel, with 46,000 businesses having closed by July. Proud Israelis had famously boasted that their Middle Eastern country was “a villa in the jungle,” but nearly a year of fruitless warfare was leading to the villa’s increasing decrepitude and partial abandonment.
Moreover, the continuing Gaza fighting and the very graphic images of Palestinian death and devastation distributed across the world on social media soon drew in the involvement of other regional powers, at least to a limited extent.
The fervent Zionists who were Netanyahu’s crucial political base had long coveted southern Lebanon as a God-given portion of their intended Greater Israel. The IDF had invaded and partially occupied that territory several times over the decades until finally being defeated and driven out by the newly formed Hezbollah Shiite militia, with that organization having now reportedly accumulated an arsenal of some 150,000 missiles and rockets as a very powerful deterrent. The terrible plight of the Gazans attracted Hezbollah’s strong sympathy, so it mobilized its forces on the border, threatening military intervention, while engaging the IDF with cross-border rocket and shelling attacks, suffering bombing strikes in return.
Over the years, Hezbollah had built up formidable ground forces and with much of the IDF military engaged in the Gaza fighting, these attacks and Hezbollah’s very visible presence terrified Israeli civilians living in the north, who feared the sort of sudden Hamas-type invasion that had killed many of their southern counterparts. This led some 60,000 of them to flee their homes, becoming internally displaced Israeli refugees, constantly demanding that their military attack Lebanon and drive Hezbollah away from the border. But although there has been endless talk of such a pending Israeli ground attack on Lebanon, Netanyahu and his military advisers were aware of the severe defeat they had suffered at Hezbollah’s hands during their previous 2006 invasion, so they took no action aside from various assassinations and other provocations aimed at goading Hezbollah into the sort of major attack that might draw in American forces.
Meanwhile, in a very unexpected development, the determined Houthi Islamic militia of distant Yemen declared their full support for the suffering Palestinians and imposed a blockade of Red Sea shipping, threatening to attack any vessels bound for Israel or having an Israeli connection until Israel lifted its own siege of Gaza and allowed the starving Palestinians to receive food and medical supplies. This successful Houthi operation soon eliminated nearly all seaborn traffic to Israel’s main port of Eilat, which was driven into bankruptcy, further damaging the Israeli economy. A powerful American task force was soon dispatched to attack the Houthis and reopen the Red Sea, but it failed miserably, with the headlines recently declaring that “The Houthis have defeated the US Navy.” This represented a huge embarrassment for our own carrier-based naval strategy.
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Despite these serious setbacks, Netanyahu continued to double-down. The 10/7 attacks and the heavy Israeli civilian casualties had galvanized America’s pro-Israel billionaires into extraordinary support for the Jewish State, and with the presidential election approaching, their political influence was at its height. While the Biden-Harris administration shipped Israel enormous quantities of munitions and declared its unwavering support, Republican Donald Trump and independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were even more fulsome in their pro-Israel public statements. Israel’s political strength was further demonstrated a few weeks ago when Netanyahu was invited to address a joint session of Congress and received an unprecedented 58 standing ovations by the bipartisan audience, more than one each minute. Some observers not unreasonably suggested that this foreign leader now actually exercised greater control over the American political system than Biden, Harris, Trump, or anyone else.
So in a colossal roll of the dice, Netanyahu has sought to ignite a large regional war, using his political influence to draw in the American military and use it to destroy Iran, Hezbollah, and all his other most powerful regional rivals, thereby establishing effective Israeli hegemony throughout the Middle East. Almost immediately upon his return from DC, he assassinated a top Hezbollah leader in Beirut with a missile strike and also deeply humiliated Iran’s newly elected president by assassinating the political leader of Hamas as the latter attended the inauguration ceremony in Tehran. These killings were obviously intended to provoke the sort of major military retaliation that could be used to draw America into a war.
Netanyahu’s plan seemed exceptionally risky. Experienced military experts agree that the huge missile arsenals of both Iran and Hezbollah could easily saturate and overwhelm Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome defensive system, laying waste to the country’s cities, thereby destroying most of the Jewish State and perhaps triggering the flight of much of its surviving population. Although neither of those adversaries possess nuclear weapons, analysts have noted that their conventional warheads could destroy Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor complex, blanketing much of the country with deadly radioactive contamination, which would substantially achieve the same result. So even if American attacks destroyed Israel’s enemies, Israel itself would probably suffer a similar fate. These sorts of pragmatic considerations help explain why top former Israeli national security figures have declared that Netanyahu is leading Israel to its doom.
