Herzi Halevi, the top brass and the "Palestinian state" agenda, Part 2
The US demand that "...air force bombardment is out of the question, even in areas ...from which Hamas has attacked the IDF," gave Herzi Halevi the opportunity to open a new front against the IDF ground forces. He started using Hamas as his proxy force to thin out the IDF ground forces.
For the past year, especially, the Biden Administration's antics will have filled the rear-view mirrors of many social critics in the United States. It is perhaps understandable if, in such critics' assessment of Israel, the role of the Biden Administration appears larger than it actually was, relative to factors not necessarily that prominent in the United States. Caroline Glick and American social critic, Victor Davis Hanson, agree on the Biden Administration’s role in the Israel-Gaza War. Hanson says:
The war continues despite all of the incredible achievements that IDF forces have accomplished over the past fifteen months the war continues. Our toll of war dead keeps rising despite all of our accomplishments in Gaza, because Hamas is still in power and they're still able to recruit, thanks to the United States government under the Biden Administration.
Unlike Hanson, Glick, from her vantage point in Israel, is better able to consider other factors beside the Biden Administration’s negative interference. Yet, despite seeing things that Hanson does not, and sometimes being right on the money, there is not much that Glick can do with it. Hence:
The second reason that they're able to continue to maintain power and to kill our forces is because IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, according to many, many ground forces commanders, both currently serving in Gaza who have been talking to reporters on condition of anonymity and also many former retired IDF generals who are looking at the situation from outside with their mouths just agape and shock over the incompetence that Herzi Halevi, the Chief of Staff has been demonstrating in his leadership of it. He came from one of the commando units from Sayeret Matkal and he is constitutionally incapable of seizing and controlling territory. The commandos come in, they do the job, they leave, and that’s what he keeps getting IDF ground forces to do in Gaza.
Although there are some serious traitors amongst former members of Sayeret Matkal, there are also exemplary leaders. Even some of the most disgraceful former members of this esteemed fighting force were far from “constitutionally incapable of seizing and controlling territory”, as Glick asserts. Ehud Barak, for example, was perfectly capable of seizing and controlling territory, having also served as both a tank regiment commander and an armoured brigade commander. The problem with Herzi Halevi is not that he was from the commandos, but that he is from a defeatist ideological mould, and he is a traitor.
Ehud Barak, Gadi Eisenkot, Dan Halutz, Moshe "Boogie" Ya'alon, Benny Gantz, and Aviv Kohavi in their time each did everything he could to manufacture ground force irrelevance, principally by avoiding ground operations in favour of air strikes, by the operational belittling of the ground forces, by systematically dismantling the ground forces, and by exposing them to unnecessary danger. Professor Karsh writes of how under Gadi Eisenkot and Dan Halutz, ground force non-deployment took priority over IDF casualty figures:
During that [Second Lebanon War (July 12–August 14)], Hezbollah fired some 4,000 rockets and missiles on Israeli towns and villages – the largest attack on the Jewish State’s population centres since the 1948 war – killing 45 civilians, inflicting massive destruction and economic damage, and driving tens of thousands to flee their homes to the southern parts of the country. By contrast, the IDF hardly ventured more than a few miles from the border during the 34 days of fighting – in stark contrast to the 1982 invasion that swiftly swept across this area and reached Beirut within five days. It was only on August 11 – a month after the outbreak of hostilities and a few hours before the passing of Security Council Resolution 1701 ending the war – that the government authorised a poorly conceived and executed ground manoeuvre that ended inconclusively after three days at the cost of 33 lives of the war’s 119 military fatalities. In fact, as early as July 22, IDF head of operations and future chief-of-staff Gadi Eisenkot recommended ending the war within a day or two, while Chief-of-staff Dan Halutz thought it should end by the beginning of August. Either way, the ground manoeuvre would not have taken place. (pp15-16) (My emphasis)
Aviv Kohavi reduced the IDF ground forces to the bait with which the air force catches Hamas.
In line with this fixation with airpower, the purported ground manoeuvre (code named ‘Lightning Strike’) – prepared in the event of a major Gaza conflagration – was not aimed at the conquest of the strip or parts of it, but rather was a decoy to lure hundreds of Hamas terrorists into certain strategic tunnels (dubbed ‘the metro’ by the IDF), only to have them killed in their hideouts by massive airstrikes. (p18)
Ehud Barak applied himself with vigour to the task of destroying the IDF ground forces' hardware and shutting down its fighting units.
Within days of his appointment as chief-of-staff, [Ehud] Barak reportedly claimed that Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War (Jan.-Feb. 1991) had removed the likelihood of war on Israel’s eastern front for the next 3–4 years, thus allowing the IDF to undergo a far-reaching process of downsizing and reorganisation. By the end of his tenure in Jan. 1995, ...the IDF’s inventory of main battle tanks (MBTs) had dropped from 4,488 to 4,095. Six years later, as Barak ended his year-and-a-half term as prime minister and minister of defence, this order of battle had dropped to 3,900. By the spring of 2013, when he finished a 6-year stint as defence minister under prime ministers Olmert and Netanyahu, the IDF’s MBT inventory had plunged to 2,442, of which only 480 were top of the range. This was accompanied by a corresponding decrease in the IDF’s fighting formations: from 16 divisions in 1991 (6 regular, 10 reserves) to 12 divisions (6 regular, 6 reserves) in 2013.
Particularly marked was the decrease in the IDF’s armoured forces – which had spearheaded the 1956 and 1967 victories and defeated the Egyptian-Syrian 1973 surprise attack – from 12 divisions in 1991 to 7 divisions in 2013.
[...]
While Hezbollah and Hamas’s military build-up continued apace, the IDF’s armoured corps shrank on [Moshe] Ya'alon’s watch by another 1,000 tanks, while 2,500 army personnel were dismissed, some 100,000 reservists were released from reserve duty, and compulsory service for men was shortened from 36 to 32 months (with a further reduction to 30 months envisaged in 2020). Even the 7th armoured brigade – the IDF’s most illustrious regular tank force that had participated in all of Israel’s wars since 1948 and took the main brunt of the Syrian assault in the 1973 war – was on the brink of closure, only to be saved by a wave of public outrage. (pp11-12)
While the top brass conspicuously favoured the Air Force over the ground forces for operations, Herzi Halevi, during the current war, held back the Air Force, not in favour of the ground forces, but in favour of Hamas! Already on 1 January 2024, David Isaac, referring to a report in Israel Hayom the previous day that the US demanded, “Even artillery fire, tank fire or air force bombardment is out of the question, even in areas where civilians don’t live and from which Hamas has attacked the IDF many times,” reported in JNS that Herzi Halevi was scrambling to deal with the fallout, quoting him as saying:
“The rules of engagement do not tie anyone’s hands, they are there to protect us also from ourselves, and to work correctly so that we will be very effective in hitting the enemy, and very, very controlled [to avoid] hitting ourselves,” adding “No change was made in the aspects of engaging when presented with a direct threat to the security of our forces.” (My emphasis)
The attitude of the top brass towards not only the ground forces, but also to the elected representatives of the people and to religious Jews, was on full display in a leaked report of the previous day's Cabinet meeting, from which Isaac quotes Minister of Settlements and National Missions, Orit Strook (of the Religious Zionism Party) asking Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano directly, “Is it true that there are pilots who are refusing to bomb for reasons of conscience, and aren’t giving support to the ground forces?” (My emphasis) To this Toledano replied:
“In my eyes, this is a terrible question. The short answer is that there is no such thing, simply, no. The longer answer is that the air assistance to the ground forces in the war is unprecedented. I am sure that if you ask the commanders in the field, you will get the same answer.” (My emphasis)
This is the kind of answer that immediately puts a Muslim or an ex-Muslim on high alert, because it has a ring of tawriyah to it. When Toledano said, "no such thing", what "thing" did he mean, exactly, and what "thing" was Orit Strook meant to think he meant? Did he mean: there was no such thing as pilots who refused to bomb; there was no such thing as conscientious objection; there was no such thing as no support to ground forces; or there was no such thing as support to ground forces. He could have meant any of these, but Strook was clearly meant to think he meant there is no such thing as no support to ground forces.
Benjamin Netanyahu's swift response to Toledano's reply is even more revealing, for it was a shut-down to prevent any follow-up question. Netanyahu, Israel's master of the dark art of ambiguity, obviously knew that Toledano actually meant there is no such thing as support to ground forces, and even that such a state of affairs was "unprecedented". Netanyahu's interjection, “The answer to the question is correct, [but] regarding your characterization of her question—it is inappropriate for you to tell the minister what you think of her question,” adds his own layer of ambiguity to cover Toledano's ambiguity. Whereas it appeared that Netanyahu was coming to Strook's defence, he was actually coming to Toledano's defence. Even JNS's David Isaac fell for it. Benjamin Netanyahu can stand up to the top brass very well when it looks like he's standing up to the top brass.
The US demand that "...air force bombardment is out of the question, even in areas ...from which Hamas has attacked the IDF many times," gave Herzi Halevi the opportunity to open a new front against the IDF ground forces. He started using Hamas as his proxy force to thin out the IDF ground forces, and has been doing so for over a year.
This is what Caroline Glick does not see when she complains:
Why have we been in Beit Hanoun piling up battle losses over the past several weeks even though we took over Beit Hanoun three or four times in the past, the same with Jabalia, etc.? Because Herzi Halevi keeps ordering the removal of IDF forces once we take over territory. Why? Because, because, because, reasons, because, he doesn't understand ground combat, because he thinks that Israel shouldn't occupy Gaza. (My emphasis)
Even if Caroline Glick is unable to appreciate the significance of this last throwaway reason for Halevi’s conduct, she must surely be able to see that believing that Israel should not occupy Gaza is of an entirely different order to a failure to understand ground combat, even before we get to the relative merits of either. Not being able to see this is simply bizarre. But it gets even more bizarre when she is unable to join believing that Israel should not occupy Gaza to the immediate next dot in the same breath:
He has been the primary reason also for maintaining Hamas's grip on power, because he has refused to take responsibility for distributing food and water and medicines to the civilian population of Gaza. If the IDF doesn't do it, and then Hamas does it. The whole idea that there's a third party that will take over control of Gaza is a joke because it's either Hamas or it's the IDF. It's always been a zero-sum game: either them or us. (My emphasis)
The word “also” reveals the depth of her cognitive processing. In her mind, believing that Israel should not occupy Gaza is discrete from maintaining Hamas’s grip on power. The fact that these two points pertain to the same individual still does not link them for her. The result is that she misses the point of her own argument and, there being nothing more to say, abandons it to get back to the food distribution debacle.
Here, too, she misses the significance of her own points. The second order of business of any totalitarian regime (the first being to strike terror into the hearts of everyone) is to seize control of the means of survival of the population, that means control over food, i.e., becoming God (“Give us this day our daily bread”). The quickest and most effective way of doing that is by engineering a famine. Lenin and Stalin did it in Ukraine, Mao did it in China. Where they do not engineer a famine, they seize control of and monopolise all food supplies. You want to eat? Here’s a gun. Go kill them. The Biden Administration had no interest at all in the so-called “humanitarian aid” reaching “the civilian population of Gaza”. Their priority was that the aid enters Gaza. It would defeat their purposes if the aid went directly to the people, for in that case Hamas would lose their grip on power and Israel would have to occupy Gaza. Halevi had, and still has, every reason to ensure that food is handed directly to Hamas.
There is a very big difference between your family’s next meal from Hamas down the block, and $5 million plus a plane ticket out if you can smuggle a captive to an IDF that isn’t there. The terrorists would not be the only ones after your blood. When the three female captives were released on 19 January, where were the starving Gazans? The crowds were clearly well-fed and in good health. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, not the Islamist Resistance Movement, or the Jihadist Resistance Movement, enforced the Islamic doctrine of commanding the right and forbidding the wrong. They also rewarded such observance with good food. The lesson from this is not that there was no genocide in Gaza—to anyone not distracted by hasbara that would have been obvious; the lesson here is that everyone is Hamas. This, too, has been obvious all along to anyone not fixated on “innocent civilians” or worried about disloyalty to their friend Ahmed. It is astonishing how many Israelis were fooled by Gazans denouncing Hamas and praising the Jews on camera, while surrounded by IDF soldiers.
Caroline Glick, consequently, misses the full extent of Herzi Halevi’s damnation. He has been committing treason on multiple levels: firstly, the Chief-of-Staff of the IDF has been at war against his own ground forces, practically lining them up for Hamas. It is simply Ehud Barak’s peacetime ground forces degradation policy by other means. The entire sweep of post-1973 traitors for decades has been to go out of their way to emasculate the IDF’s ground forces so as to make the “occupation of Palestinian territory” impossible. Ground forces can occupy territory; air forces cannot.
“So anxious was the military leadership to avoid a ground operation that at the Cabinet meeting that approved the operation, Chief-of-Staff Benny Gantz and then-Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi went out of their way to reassure the Ministers that Hamas had no appetite for a major confrontation, on the one hand, and to scare them off a land invasion, on the other. The destruction of Hamas and the reoccupation of Gaza, they warned, would be a multi-year, painful effort that would spread chaos and mayhem across the strip; exact hundreds of Israeli and thousands of Palestinian lives; require some NIS10 billion ($2.8 billion) in direct costs (and nearly three times as much in reconstruction costs); spark mass riots in the West Bank and among Israel’s Arab citizens; and endanger the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties. Asked on July 15, following Hamas’s rejection of the Egyptian ceasefire initiative, whether the IDF was capable of conquering the strip and at what cost, Gantz told the cabinet that he would rather hold this strategic discussion on another occasion.” (p17)
Several Chiefs-of-Staff also served as Ministers of Defense: Ehud Barak (twice, plus Prime Minister once), Shaul Mofaz, Moshe Ya’alon and Benny Gantz, where they, in addition to Yoav Gallant, managed to do immense damage to the IDF through their control of military procurement. Ehud Barak, for example, not only systematically attrited the IDF’s ground forces, but also degraded the economy’s capacity to supply those forces. The nation has Barak to thank for the Biden Administration being able to wield so much power over Israel during the current war. Ehud Barak, in his various roles, effectively forced a Palestinian state onto Israel, just as Herzi Halevi is doing now. Major General (Res.) Ya’ir Golan, another child of the depressed generation, right after the latest IDF deaths in Northern Gaza, had the following exchange in a television studio:
Ya’ir Golan: It cannot be that we are fighting for no political purpose, for nothing substantial and to no end. IDF soldiers are being killed for nothing in the Gaza Strip.
Presenter: You said that soldiers are dying in vain in Gaza?
Golan: Yes, plain and simple. Where there is no political end, when there is no clear definition of what the end is, when there is no effort whatsoever to bring the war to an end— It is the obligation of the government to bring the war to an end; not just continue to draw blood for nothing— then yes. Every additional soldier that dies inside the Gaza Strip is a death in vain. (My emphasis)
When Ya’ir Golan, Benny Gantz, Gady Eisenkot, Yoav Galant and their like complain that the IDF cannot withdraw from Gaza “without a plan for the day after,” what they actually mean is, “without a plan for a Palestinian state the day after.” On the one hand, they demand that the war must end, but on the other, they effectively demand it must not end, unless it ends in a Palestinian state. Their pontificating about soldiers dying in vain is the sickest joke. The Biden Administration is responsible for many terrible things in this war, but they are not as responsible for the ineffectiveness of ground operations in Gaza as Caroline Glick would make them out to be. The Biden Administration did not poison these people’s minds. They did that to themselves long before Biden.
Secondly, Herzi Halevi was not “refus[ing] to take responsibility for distributing food and water and medicines to the civilian population of Gaza”. If “he thinks that Israel shouldn't occupy Gaza,” and he is in a position to make sure that Israel doesn’t occupy Gaza, and if he is already getting IDF soldiers killed “over and over and over again,” then facilitating food going to Hamas is a trivial matter.
Thirdly, Herzi Halevi is not incompetent. He is very, very competent. He is just not doing what the wider citizenry assumes him to be doing. While Halevi refuses to hold territory and keeps moving the troops out of areas cleared, he makes it impossible for anyone who does have captives and wants to hand them over to the IDF, to strategise and put the logistics in place to do so.
To break Hamas’s control over food without starving anybody except those underground, and, as a bonus, cut out the middle man, the IDF could do worse than to go over Halevi’s head, literally. No more trucks into Gaza, from anywhere. Starting after a long-enough blockade, if the IDF were each day to air drop thousands of small food parcels over three or four randomly selected areas of, say, 1 sq Km, at random times and unannounced, Hamas’s control over food ends immediately. Nobody knows where or when the next day’s drops will take place, which would spread the mujahideen thin and force them to remain on the surface. No doubt, the population will make sure that their heroes do not starve, but Hamas will no longer control access to food. If Herzi Halevi, Benny Ganz, Ronen Bar, and co. start rattling off reasons why this will not work, then we can be confident that it is the right thing to do.
On October 7th we saw what happens when it's them [Hamas ruling Gaza] and since then we have had this leadership in the IDF General Staff under Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, who refuses to allow it to be us [who rule Gaza].
How is it even within Halevi’s power to allow or not allow? Does this journalist not hear herself? She says the words, but appears not to grasp that she is describing a usurpation of power. It is an extremely serious matter, all the more so in that every retired Israeli General considers himself entitled to have the country run according to his conviction. That they all happen to express the same conviction points towards a class component to what has been transpiring. Pretending that Jews can’t be traitors leaves a mountain of ills to fester. That is one Jewish malaise. Another is the unshakeable instinct that the Jews need a strong, but benevolent, outside protector whom they must always be in awe of and never displease. Here, again, Caroline Glick delivers:
[With Donald Trump assuming office], we can finally secure our victory. We can annihilate Hamas even as it rebuilds its strength. We have the ability to do that. We have the soldiers to do that. We have the will to do that and and we will do it.
So, in fact, it is not just that the Biden Administration had tied Israel’s hands behind her back. With that administration now gone, those hands are supposedly free. Yet they still cannot act. They need another administration that must now allow them to act. It was never really about an administration tying Israel’s hands behind her back; it was about Israelis tying their own hands behind their backs. They will not do anything without Donald trump’s prior approval, and then only on his terms. For Israel to not presume her sovereignty in action is to presume her nation a subject people, a colonised people. Neither Panama, nor Greenland has a military force, yet both of their governments are telling Donald Trump how it’s going to be. But it gets worse:
And, you know, and President Trump has promised he's going to end the arms embargo.
No! Wrong! Dead wrong! This is sliding right back into the pathetic helplessness of the Jew kicked around in the old Yishuv. Cling to the hope that a great, benevolent outside lord will keep his promise to take pity on us. This is dire. The lesson since 1973, brought home at catastrophic cost since 7 October, is that we must assume that the arms embargo will continue, even be intensified. Start from there, rather than fall right back on a foreign president’s promise. Here Caroline Glick shows herself as not only trailing behind the Israeli people, but behind the government as well. Times of Israel reports on the awarding of contracts to the Israeli military industry to achieve sovereign independence in future military procurement, quoting Defense Ministry Director General Eyal Zamir as saying, “We initiated this historic move before the war but accelerated it during it. Under both agreements, initial capabilities will soon gradually expand until we achieve full independence in both areas.”
Of course, this does not mean that the Israeli government will show such fortitude in the face of Trump, or even that it will respect and uphold Israel’s sovereignty internationally. They might want to prove to Trump what good Jews they are by first asking his permission before taking sovereign actions, which of course means that those are not sovereign actions, but the actions of a timid, subject nation, and Donald Trump despises timidity in leaders.
Part 3/... (concludes)
Picture credits:
IDF
Comments:
On 24 January 2025 at 16:58, Ben Dor A. wrote:
Dear Anjuli Pandavar
Another superb 👌 analysis.
Below are a few reasons why you are 💯 correct about the Trump strategies in the ME:
"Mrs. Muslim Brotherhood Wears Prada: The Comprehensive Islamist Activity Of Sheikha Moza, Mother Of The Qatari Emir, And Her Support For Islamic Terrorism , Antisemitism ,The Muslim Brotherhood And Hamas"
January 16, 2025 | By N. Mozes*
https://www.memri.org/reports/mrs-muslim-brotherhood-wears-prada-comprehensive-islamist-activity-sheikha-moza-mother
Qatar, The Emirate Of Wahhabism And Terrorism: 2024 Editor's Picks – Top Reports And Clips From The Qatar Monitor Project (QMP)
https://www.memri.org/reports/2024-editors-picks-top-qatar-reports-and-clips
"The infernal Qatari strategy
While Donald Trump threatens the enemies of Israel and civilization, Britain licks their sandals.
https://www.jns.org/the-infernal-qatari-strategy/
"The art of the deal or the rout of the real?"
https://www.jns.org/the-art-of-the-deal-or-the-rout-of-the-real/?utm_source
It's all about petro-dollars:
https://www.zawya.com/en/wealth/wealth-management/qatar-investment-authority-buys-new-york-hotel-for-623mln-jrl40n2t
https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/08/28/qia-buys-park-lane-hotel-from-witkoff/
"Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s indication to U.S. President Donald Trump that the kingdom will invest $600 billion in the United States is good news for Israel, Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told JNS."
https://www.jns.org/riyadh-to-invest-600-billion-in-us-per-official-saudi-media/?utm_source
We live in interesting times.
Best Regards
Ben Dor A.