Something very unusual is happening in Israel. Senior military officials have begun voicing criticism of how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is conducting the war in Gaza. Israeli media has been reporting on a weekend security meeting at which the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Gen. Herzi Halevi, criticized Netanyahu’s lack of a clear strategy. Pointing out that the Israeli military had reentered northern Gaza — an area it had claimed to have cleared in January — Halevi warned that unless there was a plan to set up some kind of non-Hamas government in these areas, the IDF would have to keep repeating these kinds of operations, endlessly.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has gone further, publicly criticizing Netanyahu by pointing out that “the day after Hamas will only be achieved by actors who replace Hamas” and declaring that he would not permit Israel to try to govern Gaza directly. The New York Times has reported on others within the Israeli military making similar criticisms. As Anshel Pfeffer writes in Haaretz, these briefings to the media have been synchronized “as part as what can only be a coordinated briefing against the prime minister.”
The reason for these extraordinary dissents at a time of war is that Israeli officials have begun to realize what U.S. officials have been warning them about for months: that without a strategy to create stable governance in Gaza, they will face a continuing insurgency just as the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is evidence it’s already happening. Israeli forces have been forced back into Jabalya twice and have returned three times to Zeitoun. The IDF’s recent and controversial raid on the al-Shifa Hospital was the second effort, showing that their initial success was not lasting. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted last Sunday: “We’ve seen in areas that Israel has cleared in the north, even in Khan Younis, Hamas coming back.”
Much has been written about whether the Israeli military is being careful or callous in its concern for civilian casualties when carrying out its attacks in Gaza. But the larger point has to do with its counterinsurgency strategy. In the United States’ only successful counterinsurgency campaign in recent memory — the 2007 surge in Iraq — its strategy was designed to protect the civilian population, isolate the insurgents and then crush them. To that end, Army Gen. David Petraeus worked tirelessly with Iraq’s Sunnis — the community spawning the insurgency — to win them over, give them a stake in Iraq’s government and thus isolate the insurgents and militias. He then used lethal force against those militias. This is almost the inverse of Israel’s strategy, which has been first and foremost to go after Hamas, guns blazing, with very little regard for winning the hearts and minds of Gaza’s civilian population.
Netanyahu’s argument against postwar plans and operations is that the war isn’t over and “there is no alternative to military victory. The attempt to bypass it with this or that claim is simply detached from reality.” The prime minister has repeatedly said he would continue the war until he achieves total victory, by which he presumably means either a surrender by Hamas or its total eradication.
From early on in the war, the Biden administration has believed that Netanyahu’s strategy was flawed because there was no way to defeat Hamas militarily without a political strategy to isolate it and offer an alternative that had some credibility and legitimacy. That was why the White House wanted to begin discussions with the Palestinian Authority and a group of Arab states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to make plans for reconstruction and governance in a non-Hamas Gaza. Netanyahu will not consider any such plans.
Netanyahu refuses to talk about the postwar because he knows that his own postwar future is bleak. Many Israelis continue to hold him responsible for the policies that led to the Oct. 7 attack. Were new elections to be called, he would likely lose office — and then face an ongoing prosecution as well as potential inquiries about the failures that led to Oct. 7. All of this can be pushed off as long as the prime minister insists on a Hamas surrender, which he will not get but will keep the war going indefinitely. It is a strategy not designed to secure Israel’s future but rather his own.
