[Hac-announce] Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times--Why Israel Is Acting This Way

[Manny Sholem Ratafia]

Tom Friedman, as usual, is insightful and convincing in this 
editorial.--Manny

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/opinion/international-world/israel-hamas-war.html 



Opinion
<https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>


  Why Israel Is Acting This Way

Oct. 14, 2023


By Thomas L. Friedman <https://www.nytimes.com/by/thomas-l-friedman>

Opinion Columnist

With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was 
thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have 
two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate 
actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from 
Gaza now — /after/ Israel had withdrawn from their territories.

And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah 
killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas 
brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli 
civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to 
soldiers.

That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to 
challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s 
existence in the region.

And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across 
relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.

In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can 
just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a 
little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state 
has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former 
Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes 
to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions 
about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”

So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/8/4/new-israeli-air-strikes-on-lebanon> 
of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout 
the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city 
and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families 
and neighbors paid a very personal price.

The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan 
Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/8/27/nasrallah-says-he-did-not-want-war> 
on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war 
ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two 
Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this 
magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation 
would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable 
and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take 
a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted 
in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East 
over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.

Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status 
quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is 
in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas 
developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of 
Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash 
aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, 
with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.

Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s 
government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls 
that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was 
taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was 
taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves 
by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that 
justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last 
Saturday.

The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw 
how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly 
by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by 
President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being 
left behind.

So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never 
gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop 
with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your 
babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you 
to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all 
Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”

Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in 
the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel 
believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy 
Hamas’s latest craziness.

Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago 
<https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1989/8/18/journey-through-a-troubled-region-pifrom/> 
to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez 
al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of 
Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in 
the city of Hama.

Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for 
days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as 
flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the 
process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told 
me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was 
asked about it: “People live. People die.”

Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between 
Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish 
that it were, but it’s not.

This Israel-Hamas war is part of an evolving escalation of craziness 
that has been underway in this neighborhood but getting more and more 
dangerous every year as weapons get bigger, cheaper and more lethal.

Like Biden, I stand 100 percent with Israel against Hamas, because 
Israel is an ally that shares many values with America, while Hamas and 
Iran are opposed to what America stands for. That math is quite simple 
for me.

But what makes this war different for me from any war before is Israel’s 
internal politics. In the past nine months, a group of Israeli far-right 
and ultra-Orthodox politicians led by Netanyahu tried to kidnap Israeli 
democracy in plain sight. The religious-nationalist-settler right, led 
by the prime minister, tried to take over Israel’s judiciary and other 
key institutions by eliminating the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to 
exercise judicial review. That attempt opened multiple fractures across 
Israeli society. Israel was recklessly being taken by its leadership to 
the brink of a civil war for an ideological flight of fancy. These 
fractures were seen by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and may have stirred 
their boldness.

If you want to get just a little feel for those fractures — and the 
volcanic anger at Netanyahu for the way he divided the country before 
this war — watch the video that went viral in Israel two days ago when 
Idit Silman, a minister in Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, was tossed 
out of the Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Tzrifin when she went to visit some 
wounded.

“You’ve ruined this country. Get out of here,” an Israeli doctor yelled 
at her. “How are you not ashamed to wage another war?” another person 
told her. “Now it’s our turn,” the doctor can be heard screaming in a 
video published on X 
<https://twitter.com/EylonALevy/status/1712121406262063571>, formerly 
known as Twitter, and reported by The Forward 
<https://forward.com/fast-forward/564354/israeli-cabinet-ministers-heckled-hospital-visits-wounded/>. 
“We are in charge. We will govern here — right, left, a nation united — 
without you. You’ve ruined everything!”

Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally 
impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the 
same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good 
Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war 
plan. It is one thing to /deter/ Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite 
another to /replace/ Hamas and leave behind something more stable and 
decent. But what to do?

Finally, though, just as I stand today with Israel’s new unity 
government in its fight against Hamas to save Israel’s body, I will 
stand after this war with Israel’s democracy defenders against those who 
tried to abduct Israel’s soul.

-- 
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
— Charlie Chaplin

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