At the very least, Israel must take some preemptive political and diplomatic steps

Will Israel get back into the preemption game? (Photo: Shutterstock / Wirestock Creators)

Negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release were reaching a peak at press time, with tensions higher than usual knowing that the prospect of a regional war with Iran and Hezbollah was contingent on the outcome of the talks.

Israel’s response to Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attacks was initially dubbed “Operation” Swords of Iron, but this was no outpatient visit. It’s lasted almost a year. No matter how, when, or if it ends, Israel’s government has been besieged: by American pressure to accept dictates on how to conduct the war; a scourge of anti-Semitism worldwide; and a flurry of legal efforts to delegitimize Israel and issue arrest warrants for its top elected officials and IDF brass.

The potential for a Harris-Walz administration to take a more combative approach to Israel is real, while new governments in the UK and France have also been wagging fingers.

Except for the 1967 Six Day War, and the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, Israel has shown reluctance to mount preemptive military attacks, but the time may have come when it has little choice. At the very least, Israel must take some preemptive political and diplomatic steps, including some straight talk to repel the various pressures against it.

Here are a handful of steps Israel must consider:

End the Fiction of Two-State Solution

Any Likud MK will tell you that Israel must maintain a semblance of a peace process with the Palestinians to retain international legitimacy and fend off a new intifada that could make Operation Swords of Iron look like a minor skirmish. Over the years, I’ve had discussions with members of Europe’s diplomatic community who will admit that a two-state solution is farfetched but stubbornly refuse to consider alternatives. The barbaric October 7 attack, which proved, among other things, just how porous and indefensible Israel’s borders can be, is now Israel’s best argument against ceding any territory to Palestinian entities whose religious beliefs oblige them to destroy Israel.

Israel fumbled its golden opportunity to declare sovereignty in Judea and Samaria in 2020 when it had the support of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Ambassador David Friedman. It’s not too late to at least apply Israeli civil law to the communities that are home to more than 500,000 Jews. This could be done without a formal annexation. It is our G-d-given land, and if we don’t express our beliefs in the face of false Arab claims, why should anyone in the international community believe us?

Will Israel risk a wave of boycotts, sanctions, and delegitimization if it takes that step? Well, what do you think’s happening now? Is every airline that halted flights here doing it out of safety concerns, or is it at least partially a political protest? How about the investors who have pulled their money out of Israel? How about the fierce anti-Israel demonstrations in every European capital and major US cities? All this has happened with Israel taking the nice-guy approach. It could get worse, but how much worse, compared to what Israel loses by not asserting itself?

Israel’s argument should be that the Arab citizens of Israel remain welcome as long as they abide by Israeli laws, but that a two-state solution is off the table. Much of Gaza is uninhabitable. Stop pretending that the residents can return to their homes and launch a diplomatic blitz to prod the international community to resettle them elsewhere. Perhaps the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria will get the message and follow suit.

Stop Counting on the International Community

In a “normal” year, I might have written this column on vacation in Nahariya, six miles south of Israel’s border with Lebanon. That trip is off for now, but mine is a fleeting disappointment when I think about the estimated 100,000 Jews who fled and boarded up their homes in the North and left their apples, cherries, pomegranates, and wine grapes to rot on the vine. There is talk that Jews will never return to evacuated communities such as Kiryat Shmona.

I don’t believe that, I think we are more resilient. But while the news is bleak, Jews are moving back — in force, but in some cases reluctantly — to the communities in Gaza from which they fled after October 7. That’s because the IDF has taken care of business in Gaza. The job is unfinished, but more than a semblance of security has been restored to the South.

While the decision to evacuate the North at the start of the battle made sense, northern border residents have now been in exile for almost a year. That’s tantamount to ceding that land to the enemy. Why encourage their acts of aggression?

Israel has two choices. Rather than acceding to constant demands from the international community, Israel should demand that they enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and declared the 18-mile-wide band from Israel’s northern border to Lebanon’s Litani River a demilitarized zone, with only Lebanese government troops, and not Hezbollah guerrillas, allowed in. Hezbollah is in complete and longstanding violation of those terms and possesses five to six times the number of missiles it had in 2006.

The rules of war and peace the international community devised with good intentions after the world wars of the 20th century don’t work in the 21st century, when legitimate nations are forced to fight guerrilla forces hiding underground and using human shields. If the world won’t enforce Resolution 1701, then Israel should also not be obliged to abide by it and therefore should be allowed to exercise any military action it deems necessary to distance Hezbollah from the border and enable Jewish residents to move back.

There Is No Substitute for Human Intelligence

Israelis of all political persuasions have been impatiently waiting for the war to end so that a postwar commission can be formed to investigate the failures that led to October 7 and to assign blame. The resignation of Major General Aharon Haliva, chief of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, will take effect this Wednesday, but there are plenty of other heads yet to roll, including from the political echelon.

Even if Israel holds new elections and cleans house in the IDF and the security services, nothing will change if the replacements adhere to the same misconceptions that led to the current sad state of affairs. October 7 showed Israel that ground sensors and aerial observation will only go so far if you aren’t paying attention to them, or if your worldview convinces you that the enemy is deterred because suitcases of money soften their ideology.

Israel was (allegedly) able to target Ismail Haniyeh in Iran and Hezbollah’s top military commander Fouad Shukr in Beirut because it recruited squealers among their enemies. It’s known in the military parlance as HUMINT or human intelligence. Israel’s enemies will never be deterred, even if the only weapons they have left are the rocks from the rubble of their former homes.

At press time, security arrangements along the Philadelphi Corridor were still up in the air. Israel blundered badly when it withdrew from that corridor as part of the 2005 Gaza disengagement, and in the last month alone, has discovered and destroyed 50 tunnels along that 15-mile strip used to smuggle arms and other goods between Gaza and Egypt.

If Israel abandons this strip again, under US pressure, that will be one sure sign that they have learned nothing from recent history.

Never Negotiate with Terrorists

This is a sad one, and I write this with a heavy heart, but the time has come to update the so-called “Hannibal Doctrine,” an IDF directive entitling troops to use whatever force is necessary to prevent a hostage-taking situation. The Hannibal Doctrine is named after the ancient Carthaginian general, who fought Rome for more than a decade and poisoned himself when he faced capture and realized he had no viable escape route.

This doctrine is very controversial in Israel and has been rewritten, shelved, and sometimes reapplied on occasion — including on October 7 — to try to prevent any more abductions than had already occurred. The Hannibal Doctrine is intended to prevent the enemy from taking hostages as bargaining chips to obtain the release of terrorists from Israeli prisons.

The Hamas command structure that devised the October 7 attacks on Israel that killed 1,200 Jews included a cadre from the 1,027 terrorists released in the 2011 deal that freed just one kidnapped Israeli soldier — Gilad Shalit.

The plight of the hostages has been heartrending. Israel has achieved partial success, negotiating for the release of or rescuing almost half the hostages Hamas captured on October 7.

However, the hostage crisis is the new impetus for the ritual Motzaei Shabbos demonstrations in Tel Aviv, demanding that Israel “bring them home now,” even though there’s nothing Israel can do unilaterally. The right to demonstrate is part and parcel of a democracy, but these demonstrations have been going on for almost two years, and are becoming more violent, disruptive, and inciteful. This past weekend, a demonstrator called to assassinate Netanyahu if he wins the next election.

Israel’s enemies televise these demonstrations, and Arab bloggers disseminate them widely on social media to show that Israel is rife with dissension and ripe for the picking.

The government, no matter who heads it, must level with the people. Tell them we will do everything in our power to prevent hostage-taking, and everything we can do to locate and free them, but the days of negotiating with terrorists and hostage-for-prisoner exchanges are over. The halachah of redeeming hostages is contingent on the political realities, especially during wartime, and must take the above-mentioned considerations into account.

Maybe the enemy will get that message, too, and desist from kidnapping and holding Jews for ransom once they understand that they will have nothing to gain from doing so.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1025)