The mind reels at the impressive string of recent operations against Hezbollah. It seems even Hollywood screenwriters need to update their scripts, as reality has surpassed any fictional scenario.
The sequence of actions – from the double pager operation on consecutive days, through the elimination of part of Hezbollah's top brass and the Radwan force on Friday in Beirut, to the precision airstrikes of unimaginable power – has brought some color back to our cheeks. We will undoubtedly face more low points and difficult moments, but let's take a moment to rejoice and feel proud. This series of operations has managed to astonish not only Hezbollah but also Israelis who were desperately in need of strength and ingenuity.
But the magnitude of the success is accompanied by shock because when we see our performance against Hezbollah, the failure against Hamas becomes even more glaring. How we needed the same intelligence prowess, creativity, and tactics against Gaza and Hamas. But it wasn't there. Not just on Oct. 7 itself, but also afterward. One of the reasons for this is that we forgot to define Gaza and Hamas as an enemy. We didn't forget – we simply didn't want to. We did everything to avoid seeing them as a Nazi-like enemy.
A few years ago, in November 2017, politician Moshe Feiglin appeared on a television panel with Res. Brig. Giora Inbar. Feiglin, a junior officer in the IDF, asked Inbar, a senior IDF officer, a simple question: "Who is the enemy, the tunnel or Hamas?" Inbar stammered, hesitated, stammered again, and after brief consideration, confidently answered: "The tunnel." And that, friends, is the story.
The State of Israel, guided by the political echelon and senior military ranks, did not want to define an enemy. Because an enemy isn't fun. An enemy is only when there's no choice, and pragmatic partners are preferable. In recent years, Hamas stopped being THE enemy in Gaza. Sinwar was painted as a pragmatic figure, and Hamas was portrayed as a realistic partner who had too much to lose to enter into a confrontation with Israel – the Qatari money and the entry of workers from Gaza, for example.
In the last two years, the enemy was actually the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In recent operations, just before the catastrophe, the State of Israel and the IDF tried their utmost to create a substantial and operational separation between Hamas and the PIJ. In some operations, they made it clear on every platform that Israel had no intention of harming Hamas, and that the entire target bank was the PIJ's.
Everything was there before our eyes – the training, the fence demonstrations, the exploitation of humanitarian aid, the incendiary balloons. Everything. But we didn't want enemies. And if a certain organization or country isn't an enemy – why collect valuable intelligence on them? Why build a broad and precise target bank? So we do it, but on a small scale. Not in the thorough and brilliant way we're seeing against Hezbollah. The question that needs to be asked is where our blind spot is today.
For example, a hostile and dangerous entity sitting right on Highway 6 – the Palestinian Authority. Does the IDF have an orderly mapping of the threats from the PA? Does the defense establishment know the distribution of weapons in its possession? Does the massive IDF have orderly information about the training PA soldiers undergo? Are there operational plans for a scenario where they turn their guns on us? Is there intelligence penetration into the PA ranks? Or perhaps we see the PA as a semi-partner with a wink? Despite the occasional self-interested cooperation that exists, is there moral clarity towards the PA – or are we still feeding ourselves illusions?
The State of Israel defined Hezbollah as an enemy, and it became an enemy that deterred us to the point where we didn't dare move a tent it had placed in our territory on Mount Dov. We had to reach a year-long war situation to employ military might – but we had prepared it for a long time, with clear moral clarity about who the enemy is. The fear of defining an adversary and enemy, stemming from our desire for normal life, sometimes achieves exactly the opposite. This is another part of the conception that needs to be corrected.
