The Annexation of Territory in War: Answer to Dr Meir Finkel, Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

2. The occupation of territory gives the IDF a clear asymmetrical advantage. Brigadier-General Dr Finkel has already shown, in his example of the Lebanese villages, above, that he considers asymmetrical advantage something to be given away, only to die to regain, only to give away again, only to die to regain again, only to… Here Dr Finkel makes an astonishing claim:

Only the IDF can occupy territory, clear it of the enemy, defend it against counterattack, use it to reduce the threat of infiltration, and hold it as a bargaining chip for diplomatic negotiations. None of Israel’s enemies can occupy territory and hold it for more than a few hours.

Dr Finkel seems to have forgotten about the 365Km² known as the Gaza Strip. In 2005, Hamas’s enemy cleared itself out without Hamas firing a shot. In 2006, Hamas occupied the territory, cleared it of the enemy’s collaborator, defended it against counterattack, and used it to reduce the threat of infiltration. It occupied the territory and held it for eighteen years. For those entire eighteen years, it used the territory to attack Israel relentlessly, and humiliating Israel by forcing her citizens to scurry into bomb shelters any time of day or night in their own land, in other words, effectively "clear it of the enemy" without occupying it.

More than four months after the massacre on October 7, vast areas around Gaza and south of the Lebanese border remain "cleared of the enemy", Hamas and Hezbollah effectively occupying Israeli territory without occupying it, their enemy having done most of the clearing for them. To the Muslim mind, and especially the Palestinian, Israel is too humiliated to dare take either Gaza or south Lebanon back, a major encouragement for them to press on with their jihad.

In the latter case, Hezbollah, like Hamas, having occupied south Lebanon through Israeli capitulation, assembled a formidable array of weapons on the territory "to reduce the threat of infiltration", defying international law, UN resolutions, and a UN military force on the very territory they've taken from Israel, all right under that enemy's nose. Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah has humiliated Israel for eighteen years straight. Yet we are to understand that, "None of Israel’s enemies can occupy territory and hold it for more than a few hours."

Gaza and south Lebanon post-2006 have been one continuous victory celebration for Israel’s enemies. Hamas used Israel's inability/unwillingness to re-take Gaza to press their propaganda advantage with charges of “open-air prison”, “civilian casualties”, “most densely-packed territory on earth”, etc., and Israel lost these propaganda onslaughts time after time after time, creating perfect conditions for eighteen years of terrorising the surrounding Israeli homes with barrages of rocket attacks. With that kind of Israeli track record, why should Hamas not have thought they would get away with invading Israel and slaughtering thousands of Israelis? What was there in their entire eighteen-year experience of attacking Israel from Gaza and Lebanon, that would have caused them to reflect on whether busting through the border and going on a killing orgy was perhaps not the best idea? Such considerations do not warrant as much as a footnote in technocratic Dr Finkel's essay.

“This asymmetry is especially important when it comes to firepower,” writes Dr Finkel, but firepower is not the only asymmetry. The real, and determining, asymmetry is in favour of Hamas. That is the asymmetry of propaganda. Within twenty-four hours of perpetrating the massacre on October 7, the propaganda war started swinging decisively to Hamas’s advantage. In the months since then, that asymmetry has only increased. Despite Hamas's unspeakable barbarism on October 7, it has the United Nations and almost the entire world behind it. Hamas has the government of the United States under Joe Biden holding its own ally, Israel, back. Think about that. Palestinian propaganda has busted the US’s “ironclad commitment” to Israel. The Palestinian propaganda war is not new. It has been developing over eight decades, since the UN made them refugees in perpetuity. And while the current propaganda tsunami was being readied, what was Israel doing? Hasbara!

So absurd has this propaganda asymmetry become, that everything Israel proves as fact is immediately and universally ignored and drowned out, while everything the Palestinians assert, no matter how preposterous, is immediately and universally imbued with paramount importance. Veracity is the essence of hasbara and Palestinian propaganda has made veracity itself irrelevant. No matter what firepower asymmetry Israel possesses, Palestinian propaganda asymmetry has rendered that firepower as deadly to Israel as it is to the Palestinians.

Dr Finkel advises his readers as follows:

Territory captured in a future war must be cleared of military infrastructure. Residents should not be allowed to return until Israel’s desired diplomatic arrangement is achieved, even if this means the IDF maintains a security zone for months or years in the enemy's territory.

I hope to have shown that this is a fatally flawed conception. For Israel to achieve peace, the passage should read: “Territory captured in a future war must be cleared of military infrastructure. Residents should not be allowed to return, ever. Israel’s war outcome must be annexation. The IDF will enhance the security of the new Israeli territory against incursions from any adjacent enemy territory following these steps as laid out.”

3. Warfare changes constantly, both globally and regionally. Dr Finkel says that when the current Israel-Gaza war broke out, “Israel was perceived as the stronger side against Hamas, [and] the limitations placed upon it were severe. The Western world expected Israel to defend its citizens solely with active defence systems and counter-fire, without resorting to ground action.” Dr Finkel’s choice of words in formulating this reason is inane. The Western expectation, quite obviously, has nothing to do with limiting weapons and tactics, and everything to do with preserving the Palestinian capacity, real or imagined, to form a state. Dr Finkel complains of the West “expect[ing] Israel to defend its citizens solely with active defence systems and counter-fire,” when he has himself criticised, and quite rightly so, the IDF for adopting the same defence restriction:

The transition of enemy behavior to a pattern of stand-off bombardment of Israeli territory, and the development of an Israeli response of counter-fire and active defense implemented in limited "rounds" in Gaza, almost completely removed the occupation of territory from Israeli military and public discourse. This diminished the IDF’s focus on maintaining the military capability meant to implement occupation: the ground maneuver.

Dr Finkel is quite right to criticise restricting Israel’s capacity to defend herself, but fails to see that Israel’s real weakness lies in restricting herself to defence, while her enemy retains, indeed, insists on, the right to attack (their euphemism of choice is “resistance”). The world agrees with this “resistance”, including, if we are to come right down to it, the October 7 massacre, a “transition of enemy behaviour” that the IDF was unprepared for and that Israel’s capacity for ground manoeuvre could not prevent.

This purely technocratic conception of “transition of enemy behaviour” is what leads Dr Finkel to the asinine “Warfare changes constantly, both globally and regionally” heading of this part of the discussion. That the enemy might have a strategy, what that strategy might be and whether the perceived changes point to a change in that strategy, are not raised. It escapes Dr Finkel that Israel has been perceived as the stronger side against the Palestinians not from October 7, but from the moment the Palestinians were invented in 1964 specifically in order to bring about such a propaganda inversion.

“The Arabs” throwing five armies against a tiny country of Jews is not a good look if you want to turn the world against those Jews. How much more so, should Jews finally wake up to the real war of well over a billion Muslims arrayed against 15 million Jews, and start noticing the global jihad in action across a vast network covering Al-Azhar, Qom, the World Muslim League, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is but a chapter), the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp., the United Nations, the European Union, an army of NGOs and the United States State Department and practically every mosque, madrassa and Islamic centre in the world. This self-imposed blind spot relates to the major weakness in Dr Finkel’s perspective, discussed above, but it is the defining blind spot of the entire Jewish nation post-1967.

Over a billion Muslims arrayed against 15 million Jews are odds that promise definite victory and would make mass jihad recruitment against Israel from around the globe very easy. But as history has abundantly shown, unshakeable conviction of supremacy does not make up for cognitive impairment, moral bankruptcy and technical incompetence. In this technological age, the brute force and stunning savagery of centuries past will no longer cut it. Without the aid of the kufaar, Muslims cannot defeat the morally and technologically superior kufaar. You can only pull a 9/11 once. It was time to conceal the 1.5 billion to 15 million ratio. Enter: the Palestinians, a fake nation whose creation would cast Israel as the bully. From that point on, Israel's conflicts came to be seen through optician's test lenses. Slot in a different lens and see something different: Israeli occupation; jihad against the Jews; antisemitism; Zionism; Arab-Israeli conflict; Western imperialism; settler colonialism, apartheid, "narratives" often chopping and changing between these as the pressures wax and wane.

The Jordanian occupation of Judea and Samaria from 1948 to 1967 and its aftermath, as well as the Mount Dov (Sheba'a Farms) dispute, both highlight the same delicate interplay between sovereign national territory and Muslim land, between secular considerations of international relations and Islamic religious imperatives, between Arabs as citizens, Arabs as clan members, and Arabs as Muslims. Add into this cauldron of overlapping, semi-antithetical allegiances a group of Arabs that is all of these and the negation of all of these, the so-called "Palestinians," the result is endless pretexts for rekindling the conflict, an ever-reconstituting time-bomb. Asher Kaufman, writing in the Palestine-Israel Journal regarding the Sheba'a Farms in the formerly-Syrian, now Israeli, Golan Heights on the border with Lebanon, clearly illustrates the depth of misunderstanding of this Gordian knot:

So long as this [Shaba'a Farms] issue remained within inter-Arab affairs, it had no volatile implications and left no impact on "regional security." Yet, once Israel entered the picture, the anomaly over the farms acquired a new dimension related to the Arab-Israeli conflict and this neglected piece of land evolved, almost overnight, into a sacred territory and a test case of national pride for all parties involved. (My emphasis)

It is clearly not a "case of national pride" when the two original nations to the paper conflict, Lebanon and Syria, for decades either ignored it, neglected it, or washed their hands of it. Even Israel entering the picture caused no rift between the original parties, yet animated them both against Israel. There are two possible explanations for this curious behaviour. The superficial reason is that both Lebanon and Syria are Arab, there it is an Arab-Israeli conflict. When Israel's most significant regional enemies include Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, then it is clearly misleading to talk of an "Arab-Israeli conflict".

Kaufman himself alludes to the deeper reason, but is careful only to skim the surface without penetrating it. "This neglected piece of land evolved, almost overnight, into a sacred territory." Nothing "evolves, almost overnight". If it occurred almost overnight, then it revealed what had been concealed or ignored all along, that it is indeed sacred territory: Jews had taken it from Muslims. It needed an organisation free from national pride, the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, otherwise known as Hezbollah, the Party of Allah, to bring to the fore the hidden dimension of sacred territory, rather than "add a new dimension". The sacred territory had to be restored to Muslims lands not only because the Jews had "occupied" it, but because Israel herself was sacred Muslim territory that had to be stored to Islam. The fact that, "from early 1968, the area became a war zone between Israel and Palestinian guerrilla organisations," offered the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon the convenient pretext for "entirely alter[ing] the focus on the region" to one than now animated Muslims as far away as London.

The same shift is evident elsewhere. When Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria, no Muslim had a problem with it and they certainly did not call it occupation. No one demanded that Jordan ends its occupation to make way for a Palestinian state, which is quite sensible, as there never was a Palestinian state on that, or any other, territory. The Arabs under Jordanian occupation happily accepted Jordanian citizenship. But when Israel ended the Jordanian occupation on 1967 and retook control of her original Mandatory Palestine territory, suddenly her presence was an "occupation." She had to end her "occupation" to make way for a nonsensical Palestinian state, because the nonsensical Palestinian state was the best cover that anyone could come up with to conceal the Islamic imperative to "drive them out from where they drove you out," (Qur'an 2:191).

Non-Arab Iran, that avowedly detests both nationalism and the nation-state, zeroed in on Jerusalem to contrive an annual Al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) and to name its most prestigious armed force the IRGC-Quds Force. It had nothing to do with Israel per se, and everything to do with their bid for the jihad leadership in restoring sacred territory to the Muslims.

I hope to have shown that the occupation of territory in war, as far as Israel is concerned, is not only, or even mainly, a military/technical matter, but one of religion and of propaganda, for which Israel was and remains woefully unprepared. Dr Finkel demonstrates the very hasbara that led to this unpreparedness when he says, “Israel will have to utilise all means at its disposal to defend itself.” This is the same Israel that he says has "a clear asymmetrical advantage [that] is especially important when it comes to firepower."

This conception that all that Israel can ever do is “defend itself” fundamentally accepts that anyone and everyone has the right to attack Israel, a right beyond Israel’s ability to question, let alone challenge. If such thinking is hardwired into the Jewish psyche, then that is Israel’s biggest problem by far, because her mortal enemy, the one ordered by God to kill every single Jew on earth, will never stop attacking. And I fear that defending themselves being the only option open to Jews might be an axiom by now hardwired into them. In other words, a Jew is someone who gets attacked. That's just the natural order of things.

Quoting David Nirenberg, my friend Andrzej Koraszewski draws our attention to the following passage that explains much of what underlies Dr Finkel’s conception.

If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. ‘Anti-Judaism’ thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.

Koraszewski continues, “Dara Horn writes that this dynamic forces Jews to adopt a defensive mode of constantly proving that they are not evil, or not so evil, or not all so evil, or even simply that they have a right to exist. Unfortunately, this tragic cast of mind lies at the heart of Dr Finkel's essay, for he sees Israel's only chance for peace lying in "gain[ing] internal and international legitimacy," a short way of saying that Israel must prove herself, "not evil, or not so evil, or not all so evil, or even simply that they have a right to exist."

The Brigadier General penned his words on 14 February 2024, four months and one week after the massacre on 7 October 2023 interrupted the eleven month attempt to deny Israel's elected government internal legitimacy. Those four months and one week witnessed the most sustained and egregious campaign to destroy Israel's international legitimacy, including the corrupt government of a basket-case, racist country hauling Israel before an international court on charges of genocide. And to top it all, thirty-five years ago to the day, the Islamic Republic of Iran fired its first shot in its jihad for global (not regional) domination: finding a citizen of another country, Salman Rushdie, guilty of what is not a crime in his country, and mobilising the Muslim ummah around the globe to carry out Rushdie's "execution". Sadly, the Brigadier General is a very long way from solving the problem of Hamas.

To be fair to Dr Finkel, the Western mind has great difficulty in understanding that there are entire peoples in the world who do not share our Western ideals, for whom life is a struggle of dominate or be dominated, for whom helping a stranger is an act of sheer stupidity, who would sooner kill their own daughter than lose "honour", and for whom peace without domination is not even a concept. The Western mind finds it hard to believe that what all of mankind has in common is little more than the impulses nature has bequeathed us, and insists that we all regulate our impulses, and that we all regulate them in the same way.

Narrowing this down to Israel, secular Israelis, by and large, not only fail to comprehend the religious mind, be it Muslim or Haredi, but dismiss that mind as not worth comprehending, and become extremely impatient with anyone who takes the trouble to do so. These are already two powerful intertwined paradigms. Overlay this with the ideological straightjacket that has dominated Israeli politics, academia, the media, the economy and public discourse since the end of the Yom Kippur War, then it becomes somewhat more understandable how an IDF General could write an essay such as this and sincerely believe that it makes a positive contribution to society.

Picture credits:

Mr. Edward J. Krasnoborski and Mr. Frank Martini, Department of History, U.S. Military AcademyHonza.havlicek (talk) - Israel 1949-1967.svg1948 arab israeli war - May15-June10.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8507106

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1631737

US Govt - Truman Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70571571

Zvikorn - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85363862

Unknown author - Downtown Express, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7505851

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114734

Government Press Office (Israel), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22807331

David Rubinger - This is available from National Photo Collection of Israel, Photography dept. Goverment Press Office (link), under the digital ID D327-047.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90236003

Ilan Bruner (אילן ברונר) - This is available from National Photo Collection of Israel, Photography dept. Goverment Press Office (link), under the digital ID D327-039.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34360333

Six_Day_War_Terrritories.png: User:Ling.Nutderivative work: Supreme Deliciousness (talk) - Six_Day_War_Terrritories.png, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12031202

ChrisO - http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/profile/israel.pdf (heavily modified), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1851514

Matthews, Matt - http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/download/csipubs/matthewsOP26.pdf, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18410304

Shifra Levyathan, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7571352

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1474398

Khamenei.ir, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82897939

The funeral of the victims of the Kiryat Shmona massacre on April 12, 1974, in the city. Dan Hadani/IPPA/National Library of Israel.

Comments:

On 26 February 2024 at 16:37, Ben Dor A. wrote:

Dear Anjuli Pandavar

Thank you for publishing your 3rd essay on the issue of Annexation.

It's not only the misconceptions of the military and the political Leadership of Israel that failed us miserably for decades but also and mainly the judicial system that tied our hands behind our backs whenever dealing with the influx of illegal aliens, the war on terror and countless other issues.

Best Regards 

Ben Dor A.