Visualizing a Path to "Day After" Through Israel's Multi-Dimensional Challenges.
@ The front line of global conflict between civilization and medieval nihilism. Looking for real peace outside the failed "land-for-peace" framework.
Citizens’ Improvise & Exercise Responsibility. Startup Society.
1/1-1/12/24 in West Bank, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv. Understanding the implications, stakes and status of war efforts & peace prospects approaching 100 days; is there light of opportunity behind the 10/7 horrors?
Participated in community security assessments in Judea/Samaria with young IDF soldiers moonlighting from their bases—stepping in for government @ designing, arranging funding/procurement/delivery logistics & installing security solutions. Startup Society.
Conversations with anguished fathers who want their sons back, mourning mothers whose sons died in booby-trapped tunnels looking for hostages. Visited w Rabbis on ethics of mission/hostage balance & implications for government legitimacy. All-day 1:1 Knesset meetings and follow-up with Ministers; leadership contenders; regional governors; MKs; fmr Ambassador/historian; author/journalists. Introduced by former senior Israeli intelligence for private meetings w/ Palestinians who see themselves oppressed by their own Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders; potential participants in a new Palestinian leadership entity.
In Short: Israel needs to decisively restore security for its 250,000 displaced families neighboring both Gaza and the Northern border with Lebanon. What the war cabinet sees as a “seven front war” is only in the middle of the beginning. And Israel itself is the front line of civilization in a global battle against medieval nihilism of political Islam, orchestrated by the edge-of-nuclear Iranian puppet-master. Must sustain unity of purpose over personal political ambitions in looming inquiries, elections—disunity among Am Israel has been celebrated and exploited by enemies on 10/7 as throughout history.
One potential path forward could be for Israel to embrace its own Arab minority citizenry to develop a new concept of practical peace for Gaza & West Bank, understanding that all the inhabitants of Israel —Jews, Arabs, Christians, Druze—share common asymmetric vulnerability to organizations of terror, whether sheathed in jihadist ideology (Hamas, Hezbollah, PIJ) or bald anti-semitism and rejection of the Jewish state of Israel (PA). Jew hatred has endured over millennia, from the days of the Patriarchs. No Western-imposed “state solution” will end it; nor will “co-existence”. Israel’s inhabitants must ultimately live together, under one regime of law and order.
The strategic path for the “Day After” could be to “end the occupation”: suspend military law in favor of Israeli civil laws (with local Palestinian community self-governance); impose strict sanctions for violence; and eliminate violent sharia doctrine from educational and religious systems.
Impressions
Israel is in mourning and struggling in multiple dimensions: militarily, spiritually and, below the surface, politically. Plenty of anger and recrimination suspended for national survival—for now—but inquiries, reckoning and new elections loom large. Some positioning I heard on the issues seemed more geared to what officials thought voters want to hear than what might be best for the nation. Careerism in democratic nations is a fundamental shortcoming we’ll be seeing in many countries this year. Beyond all else, GenZ soldiers are leading the nation forward with great resolve and confidence in the justice of Israel’s cause.
The war cabinet is barely functioning, leaving PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant conducting the war essentially alone, while they simultaneously juggle diplomacy to shore up security in the North and East (the West Bank); attend funerals; tend to hostage families; deal with baseless accusations of “genocide”; field U.S. demands for a “Two State Solution” for the “Day After”; and of course position for their own political futures.
What does “winning the war” even look like? Everyone understands that if 250k displaced Israelis neighboring Gaza and Lebanon can’t safely return home, the war(s) are lost, Israel effectively shrinks, and attacks on the country will continue. Hamas needs to be put out business for violence or governing—a practical necessity and understood to be a Saudi precondition to formalizing normalization with Israel and providing capital for Gaza’s reconstruction—and Hezbollah needs to be pushed North in Lebanon as previously agreed.
A full-scale conflict with Hezbollah, with much greater firepower and 300 miles’ tunnels up to Beirut, would be much more costly and difficult for Israel. While President Biden has been exceptionally supportive, his administration, and the U.S. national security establishment, are unlikely to risk directly facing Iran if U.S. forces were called to “have Israel’s back” on that front. Tensions are also building in the West Bank, as prosperous Palestinians who worked in Israel run out of money & Israel withholds payments to the PA to avoid diversion to terrorists. There is a real risk that the Israeli/US-equipped and trained PA police might turn their guns on Israel, especially if they too aren’t paid.
Israeli politicians in survival mode are understandably not ready to consider future policy toward the Palestinians or handling Blinken’s demands for the “Two State Solution”, even less so with polls indicating that Israeli voters have lost patience with “land-for-[no]-peace”. There must also be a more creative initiative for U.S. policy than lobbying Abbas to “revitalize” the PA so it can administer Gaza—PA leadership’s understanding of “re-vitalization” seems to be merging with “brothers in resistance” Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. What is the State Department thinking?
Political Islamists are playing the long game of global jihad, cynically using the Oslo process as cover for violent rejection of Israel and Jews “from the River to the Sea”. Hatred among the descendants of Abraham pre-dated by millennia the 1948 War of Independence (Arab “Nakba”), subsequent wars and peace efforts, while the Jewish people have continuously lived in Judea. Terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah will be defeated, and, Israel—without compromising its unique Jewish character—offers Palestinians and other inhabitants better lives than they would enjoy anywhere in the Muslim world. This would be living together, more than “peaceful coexistence”, but it wouldn’t need to risk the demographic control of the Jewish homeland by the Jewish people.
There will eventually be an opportunity to show Blinken a re-imagined concept for peace updated for the current most urgent need—in Gaza. Can the Arab inhabitants find leaders who renounce violence and disregard the self-destructive practice of rejecting and killing other tribes, specifically Jews? The Abraham Accords process paves the path. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have held fast and said to be preparing billions of dollars of investment commitments to rebuilding Gaza. But Gaza must not be permitted to become a multi-billion dollar terror base.
Guided by former senior Israeli intelligence professionals, I spent many hours with Palestinians who are fed up being used as tools for “the resistance”, rather see the benefit for their people in living and working constructively in Israel. These Palestinians expressed fears of “the enemy within us”: PA thugs and 11 security forces, PA/Islamist extremists of all stripes. In East Jerusalem, Palestinian Israelis report finding themselves buffeted with conflicting allegiances to their own community (tribal) leadership, the PA, Jordan, and Israel. What ever else they represent, Israeli and West Bank Palestinians are both hostages of their own leaders, no different than Gazans used as human shields by Hamas. It will take courage for these rational Palestinians to stand up to their hateful culture, but at least some appreciate that’s their best option.
The Palestinians need an entirely new administration, populated by technocrats who are interested in actually helping their people instead of exploiting them for the money and honor of killing Jews. While I was talking about the idea with a governor in Judea & Samaria on January 4, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant published a “Day After” plan affirming that Israel will retain security oversight in Gaza as it does in the West Bank, but has no intention of involving itself in civil administration there. He referred to an unspecified "Palestinian entity" for that purpose, definitely not Hamas or, by implication, the PA. Sorry Mr. Blinken, there is no “revitalizing” the Arafat/Abbas PA; they have poisoned the minds of two generations of Palestinians.
While Netanyahu, for his part, has kept talking about a Two State Solution he inherited without ever believing in it, he has not yet revealed to the world the stunning positive developments that have quietly taken shape in the West Bank in recent years, including miles of brand new roads and utilities; cross-cultural entrepreneurial and cultural initiatives available to neighboring Palestinian and Jewish communities.
These are “Facts on the Ground”. The Palestinian communities want to plug-in, but the PA won’t allow it. Has Blinken or anyone of significance in his State Department (or most “pro-Israel” American Jewish organizations) ever seen what’s going on in the West Bank outside of the PA’s terror center in Ramallah, or are they simply reading social media posts speciously claiming Israeli “settler violence”?
The PA occupies its own people and uses them exactly as Hamas does. The PA is the problem, not the solution.
No-[M]as: No Hamas, No Abbas—An all new Palestinian administrative entity would be comprised of people who demonstrably stop underwriting, inciting, and financing terror; respect the rule of law; appreciate the rights and dignities accorded to all inhabitants of the land in Israel’s Declaration of Independence; and immediately revamp the Palestinian educational curriculum to prepare the next generation for the 21st Century instead of the 7th. One can understand how grieving Israelis could be skeptical now that a group of such Palestinians would be willing to risk defying the PA, however, I have reason to believe that at least some of the children of East Jerusalem Palestinian-Israelis educated in the Israeli system—and headed to bomb shelters with the rest of Israel—may be ready to prioritize their Israeli identity and good lives.
If a Palestinian-staffed entity coalesces and proves itself capable of administering the rebuilding and re-positioning Gaza on a civilized track, it could also in due course assume administrative responsibilities for Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Israel could then “end the occupation”, by suspending military rule in the West Bank, applying Israeli civil law, with local community self-governance and development rights for everyone.