Israel Seen: This Week’s Daily Reports

• • A Military Assessment of the Israel-Hamas Conflict – Grant Rumley and Neri Zilber
    In the 11-day conflict, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) employed their forces in novel ways, with mixed results. They fired rockets at an unprecedented pace and range, often launching dozens at a time at the same target from different locations in Gaza in an attempt to saturate Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. In all, 4,300 rockets were launched, compared to 650 rockets fired over 22 days in 2008-2009, 1,500 over 8 days in 2012, and 4,500 over 50 days in 2014. Yet improvements to Iron Dome largely negated the heavier barrages, as the system maintained a 90% interception rate.
    Efforts to target strategic infrastructure – offshore natural gas platforms, the Dimona nuclear facility, and airports – failed as well. The sole exception was an early strike that hit a gas storage tank near Ashkelon. Various drones were shot down. Unmanned bomb-laden submarines were destroyed prior to launch.
    Israel brought mass firepower to bear through the coordination of joint forces, and did so faster and with more pinpoint intelligence than previously seen. The IDF showed an immediate willingness to target senior militant commanders in their homes and installations, including brigade commanders and rocket specialists.
    Grant Rumley is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, where Neri Zilber is an adjunct fellow. (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)
• • Gaza Reconstruction? Welcome to La-La Land – David Rosenberg
    Calls for beginning reconstruction efforts in Gaza began just hours after Hamas’ war with Israel came to an end last week. But if the history after Israel’s last big conflict with Hamas in 2014 is any guide, most of the aid pledges being made now will never materialize. Or, it will be misspent. Many of the homes destroyed in the previous war have yet to be rebuilt, although there seemed to be resources to build shopping malls, elaborate mosques and the “metro” network of tunnels.
    Whatever reconstruction occurs now will probably be turned into rubble again in a few years because Israel and Hamas are locked into a pattern of recurrent wars. Gaza is a bad investment. Moreover, talk of any kind of serious Gaza reconstruction that could form the basis for a functioning economy is a joke. Gaza is far too small to ever function as a stand-alone economy.
    If it hasn’t grown as fat, lazy and self-serving as the Palestinian Authority, Hamas isn’t in contention for any good-government awards. Just as importantly, armed struggle is much, much higher up than economic development on its to-do list. The only local industry Hamas has encouraged is rocket-building. (Ha’aretz)
• • Rushing to Rebuild Gaza Will Reward Hamas – Jonathan S. Tobin
    President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken think they can aid the people of Gaza without helping or even rewarding Hamas. They cannot. As the international community learned after it devoted billions of dollars to reconstruct Gaza after the 2014 war, it was virtually impossible to ensure that the money helped ordinary Palestinians rather than their Hamas tyrants. There has never been an example in history of cash pouring into a totalitarian regime that could be kept out of the clutches of the rulers.
    Most of the building material that was let into Gaza after 2014 went into rebuilding the terrorist group’s military infrastructure. There is no reason to believe the next round of rebuilding will go any differently.
    Every step towards normalizing Hamas, rather than isolating and defeating it, is a signal to a Palestinian people who have been sold such fantasies for the last 100 years that their long war to defeat Zionism is not yet lost. Rebuilding Gaza will enable Hamas to assert that there were no long-term consequences for their actions. It will also make peace even more impossible by indicating to the Palestinians that they don’t have to surrender to reality and accept Israel’s permanence and legitimacy.
    It’s hard to resist arguments that appeal to our sympathy for those who are caught in the crossfire created by Hamas terrorism. Nevertheless, the best thing Biden can do to actually advance the cause of peace is to not spend a cent on rebuilding the terrorist state in Gaza. (JNS)
• • Israel vs. Hamas: A “Just War” Analysis – Paul D. Miller
    Pro-Palestinian protesters and mobs unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic violence against American Jews in recent days, apparently under the theory that American Jews are responsible for Israel’s actions and violent reprisal is justified. That amounts to a strange understanding of “just war” theory.
    Hamas is a terrorist organization that deliberately murders civilians and says it wants to destroy Israel. On the other side, Israel has a right to defend itself, full stop. Israel was fighting to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilian populations.
    As a scholar who recently wrote a book on just war theory, I have carefully weighed the evidence and believe Hamas to be unjust, appallingly wrong, and morally abhorrent. Hamas’ American apologists are making excuses for terrorism.
    Hamas is in the wrong no matter what you think of the Palestinians’ cause. If you sympathize with the Palestinians, you should hate Hamas. Hamas is the greatest enemy of the Palestinians.
    In 2021, Israel does not occupy the West Bank or Gaza, having withdrawn from those territories in 1995 and 2005, respectively. It recognized the Palestinian Authority as the governing authority of Palestinian territories and engaged in repeated negotiations to end the Israel-Palestine dispute. Israel did not initiate the recent round of violence. Under these conditions, the Palestinians are not fighting for self-defense, and political violence is not remotely a last resort for their cause.
    The writer is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. (Providence-Institute on Religion and Democracy)

• Who Won the Gaza War? – Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror interviewed by Eliezer Shulman
  Former Israeli national security advisor Yaakov Amidror says talk of winning the war with Hamas in Gaza is misplaced. “The purpose of all the Gaza operations over the past 15 years has been to hurt Hamas and restore quiet to people living in the south – not to topple the terror groups or conquer the Strip. Israel didn’t embark on Operation Guardian of the Walls with the goal of winning. The goal was to inflict maximum damage on Hamas’ military capabilities in hopes of establishing deterrence.”
  “The Six-Day War is considered Israel’s most successful war. But just a year later, there was the War of Attrition, and six years later, Israel found itself in the Yom Kippur War. So where was the deterrence? From a military perspective, the [2006] Second Lebanon War was a catastrophe, but the north has been quiet ever since.”
  “In the current round…Hamas didn’t catch Israel unprepared in any area. It failed to inflict significant damage…and Hamas proved unable able to land any blows by sea, air, or through the terror tunnels….In summary, they notched zero successes and suffered a severe mauling.”  (Mishpacha)

• Who’s Guilty of What in the Hamas-Israel Conflict? – Charles Lane
  Shooting more than 4,000 unguided explosives toward civilian populations in Israel violates all the norms of warfare. That’s more than 4,000 war crimes. Hamas stored rockets, and launched them, in or near civilians or civilian structures, just as it did during the 2014 war with Israel. This, too, is a violation of the laws of armed conflict.
  Israeli wrongdoing, if any, occurred in the context of a generally professional military operation that was carried out in response to Hamas rocket attacks. Hamas’ campaign against Israel and its civilian population, by contrast, consisted of nothing but war crimes, from beginning to end. (Washington Post)

• The U.S. Needs a Plan for Gaza – Jennifer Rubin
  The Biden administration has not yet spelled out how it will rebuild Gaza without re-empowering Hamas. President Biden suggested the Palestinian Authority could oversee the effort. That’s an obvious nonstarter: The authority does not control Gaza, and it’s also more corrupt, less effective and less respected (by all sides) than ever before. Moreover, how can the international community invest billions in Gaza while it remains under the thumb of Hamas?
  If Hamas is left in power with war-fighting capacity, in the not-so-distant future it certainly will build more rockets, fire them indiscriminately and prompt a furious Israeli response that will destroy whatever was built. Hamas is a brutal terrorist regime that desires an endless war. If Hamas were motivated by concern for the Palestinian people, would it have launched rockets into Jerusalem, where eastern Jerusalem Arabs were as likely to be killed as Jewish residents? (Washington Post)

• The Arab World Must Demand the Disarmament of Hamas – Qanta Ahmed
  By painting itself as a plucky victim, Hamas is trying to convince the Arab world – and Muslims in the West, like me – that we should be on its side. But the reality is that the terror group’s ever escalating appetite for conflict does nothing to serve the Palestinian cause.
  Hamas has evolved into a much more formidable and aggressive force. The enormous numbers and range of Hamas’ missiles confirm this. Funding from Iran has allowed Hamas’ structure and ranks to start resembling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ combat units.
  It is time for the Arab world to stand in defense of human values by repudiating Hamas’ shameful use of Palestinian people as human shields. The moment Hamas, hiding in its tunnels, elected to bombard a civilian population in a sovereign state, they abandoned any semblance of ethics, any remnant of Geneva conventions, and any right to decry Israel’s actions. Hamas violates all of Islam’s codes of just war which expressly forbid the targeting of unarmed civilians, women, children, the elderly and the disabled.
  If the conflict is ever to end, Hamas must not only be muzzled, but fully defanged. Israel deserves support from the Arab world in its legitimate efforts to safeguard all peoples in its sovereign territory. It is time the Arab world demanded the disarmament and neutering of Hamas.
  The writer, a British-American physician, is Associate Professor of Medicine at NYU Langone Health. (Spectator-UK)

• For Israelis, One More Battle in a Forever War for Survival – Clifford D. May
  Today, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah and the Islamic Republic of Iran declare: “The Jewish state does not deserve to live!”
  Those who claim to care about Gazans ought to say to Hamas and Islamic Jihad: “Look, guys, there is no military solution to this conflict! So, you’ll just have to tolerate – among the more than 20 states that identify as Arab, and the more than 50 that identify as Muslim – one tiny state in which the Jewish people exercises self-determination on part of its ancient homeland.”
  For Israelis, “Never again” means defending themselves in battle after battle in a “forever war,” ignoring those who insist that fairness requires more Jewish funerals. For the rest of us it should mean, at a minimum, not aligning with Jew-haters attempting to precipitate another Holocaust.
  The writer is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). (Washington Times)

• Anti-Semitism in America – Gerard Baker
  There’s something especially unsettling about the newest eruption of the oldest hatred – anti-Semitism. We live in an age of heightened awareness of ethnic and racial victimhood, but in the quarter-century the FBI has kept records, hate crimes against blacks have declined by more than a third between 1996 and 2019. By contrast, the number of anti-Semitic crimes – which are, proportionate to the share of Jews in the population, much more frequent than anti-black crime – has scarcely changed.
  In the past, most of the anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S. have been the product of the usual depraved minds: white supremacists or sick individuals deciding to take out their pathologies on the group most often blamed for society’s flaws. But mostly they haven’t occurred as the kind of street-level response to geopolitical events that is too common among political activists in Europe. This latest outbreak, however, has come about in direct response to the recent conflict in Gaza.
  The wider political and cultural environment is what makes this outbreak of anti-Semitism especially unsettling. The latest conflict in the Middle East has been made to fit the binary classification of the human race into oppressor and victim on the basis of identity. The wide penetration of this notion into the consciousness and discourse of prominent elected figures is new. (Wall Street Journal)

• Violent Attacks on American Jews Prove “Anti-Zionism” Is Anti-Semitism – David Harsanyi
  Last week, a wave of Jew-hatred broke out in the U.S., with attacks by men waving Palestinian flags in Los Angeles and New York. If there were such attacks against Muslims, the media would rightly speak of nothing else right now. These weren’t clashes between pro-Israel demonstrators and pro-Palestinian demonstrators. These were attacks by the latter on whatever Jews they could find. And they should prove the falsehood of the narrative that “anti-Zionism” is distinct from anti-Semitism.
  Israel is in the business of protecting Jews, in a world that has repeatedly and dramatically threatened the lives of Jews and/or failed to protect them. It’s an especially tough task when your neighbors are continually plotting to murder your people. (National Review)
• See also Anti-Zionism Isn’t Anti-Semitism? Someone Didn’t Get the Memo – Bret Stephens (New York Times)

• Despite Gaza Bloodshed, Few See Abraham Accords Derailing – Sean Mathews
  Plans are still quietly underway for the upcoming opening of the Israel-Gulf Cooperation Council Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Dubai, UAE. The chamber was established in February, after the Abraham Accords. While the voices condemning the Abraham Accords are loud, there are other voices.
  “People call us from the Gulf, and also Morocco saying, ‘Be careful, it’s dangerous. Be safe and let’s hope it will be finished soon and we can go back to our activities and everything we want to do’,” Henrique Cymerman, president of the Israel-GCC Chamber of Commerce, told Al Jazeera. Eitan Na’eh, head of mission at Israel’s new embassy in Abu Dhabi, said 130,000 Israelis have visited the UAE since normalization.
  Ibrahim Al-Assil, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said, “Normalization was driven by national security needs and economic aspirations. They didn’t attempt to solve the Palestinian conflict, nor can they….The Abraham Accords will lose some momentum, but I do not expect them to change because the rational behind them and goals that drove them are still there.”
  A controversial Emirati cleric and vocal supporter of normalization with Israel, Waseem Yousef, recently tweeted, “Hamas launches rockets from within civilian neighborhoods and when the response comes, Hamas cries, ‘Where are the Arabs and Muslims?’ You have made Gaza a graveyard for the innocent and children.”  (Al Jazeera)

• Winning the Gaza Ceasefire: “Reconstruction or Rockets” – Robert Satloff
  In the post-conflict period, the U.S. should frame the next phase as “reconstruction or rockets.” Given the swell of global sympathy for the people of Gaza, urgent humanitarian relief should proceed immediately. But reconstruction is a different story. This time, rebuilding Gaza should be conditioned on intrusive monitoring measures that deny the group the ability to rearm and reconstruct its tunnel network – lessons learned from the failed oversight efforts that followed the 2014 conflict.
  Financial support for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank should be paired so that the PA’s policy of restraint and cooperation is rewarded, not Hamas’ policy of violence and confrontation. For every dollar of reconstruction assistance to Gaza, a dollar of development aid (not PA budgetary support) should flow to the West Bank to help bolster Abbas.
  The writer is executive director of The Washington Institute. (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

• Hamas’ Forever War Against Israel – Haviv Rettig Gur
  Hamas has spent a decade building major new warfighting capabilities meant to challenge Israel on new and unexpected fronts. All proved ineffective or outright useless. It just spent 11 days watching as Israel systematically demolished much of its military infrastructure. Its crack naval commando force failed to produce a single significant attack. Its anti-tank missile crews were identified and destroyed so quickly that Hamas ordered them withdrawn from the battlefield. Strike drones were intercepted with efficiency. Israel also targeted a long list of mid-level commanders.
  In the mid-1990s, two IDF major generals, Meir Dagan and Yossi Ben Hanan, traveled together to Vietnam where they met Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who spent decades as his country’s defense minister. He told them: “The Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, ‘You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?’ I told them that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them.”
  Israeli Jews do not see themselves as an artificial colonialist entity. They believe they are a people with nowhere to go and facing an unappeasable foe. Israeli Jews are unified and mobilized by Palestinian pressure and believe they are defending their home. Hamas is constantly clarifying to Israelis the dire consequences of their acquiescence to international demands. (Times of Israel)

• The “Hamas Caucus” in Congress Supports a Designated Terrorist Group – Jonathan Schanzer and David May
  If it was not for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, Hamas rockets could have killed hundreds or even thousands of innocents. Yet, somehow, the group has found a small gaggle of congressional apologists in Washington, which is odd given how much terrorism is reviled by both Democrats and Republicans alike. Hamas, now a full-fledged proxy of Tehran, was designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. in 1997, as it has been in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere around the world.
  It’s also odd for American lawmakers to ignore Hamas’ crimes against their own countrymen. Hamas has killed at least 25 Americans in Israel since 1993. Some were drive-by shootings on teenagers; others were suicide bombers who detonated their explosives in crowded buses and cafes. One was a car-ramming of a 3-month-old in Jerusalem in 2014.
  President Biden understood the deadly nature of Hamas when he was a senator and helped spearhead the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006, which prohibits American assistance to the Palestinian Authority if it is “effectively controlled by Hamas.”
  Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where David May is a research analyst. (Washington Examiner)

• Back to Iran’s Nuclear Future – Editorial
  Israeli agents pilfered a massive collection of technical documents from an Iranian warehouse in 2018. The Institute for Science and International Security’s David Albright and Sarah Burkhard, who have received extensive access to this nuclear archive, provide new details about Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program in their book Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons.
  The authors say there are as many as two dozen sites in Iran “highly relevant to the IAEA in determining…whether nuclear weapons efforts have ended or in fact are ongoing.” Inspectors have visited only three of these sites and found traces of processed uranium.
  Arms-control agreements are only as good as the verification allowed. If international inspectors don’t have instant and comprehensive access to declared or undeclared nuclear sites, there’s no way to know whether they are complying.
  The Administration seems eager to accept even a flawed deal as a way to liberate the U.S. from its entanglements in the Middle East. But this will empower Iran and its proxies and make it more likely America is dragged back in. (Wall Street Journal)

• Hamas is no liberation movement in search of a Palestinian nation. Instead, it seeks the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire on its ruins.
• How do we know? Because senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar has said so: “Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state….Our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic.”
• The most recent bout of fighting – in which thousands of rockets have been fired – is inspired by the idea of freeing the Holy Land from Israel.
• On 10 May, Hamas bombed the Holy City as Israelis were celebrating Jerusalem Day. This armed attack on the nation’s capital left Israel’s government little choice but to respond robustly. After all, what else can be done when terrorists try to kill your citizens?
• There is no difference between Hamas’ commitment to Israel’s destruction and the Islamists’ plans for the West. To imagine that Hamas can be appeased or deflected is to make a big mistake.
• What has made this latest conflagration particularly traumatic for Israeli Jews is the tidal wave of violence unleashed by some of Hamas’ Arab compatriots. Cities once considered showcases of Arab-Jewish co-existence have been rocked by mass violence and vandalism. Jewish residents were attacked in their homes by Arab neighbors with whom they had co-existed peacefully for decades.
• Some attribute this uptick in violence to supposed longstanding discrimination, but that idea couldn’t be further from the truth. Why? Because the riots came after a decade of unprecedented government investment in Arab neighborhoods and businesses, including a $4.6 billion socioeconomic aid program.The writer is emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London and director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.