Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clueless about post-war Gaza. His putative plan is devoid of intellectual content, like Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War.
Let us examine his words. Netanyahu declared that Israel would maintain indefinite “overall security responsibility” in Gaza after Hamas is removed from power.
Does than mean Israel will indefinitely deploy military and police forces accountable to the Netanyahu administration in surveilling, detaining, and punishing Gaza residents? Will military courts and military prosecutors be established for Gaza? Will the military operate Gaza prisons and jails? Will Mossad and Shin Bet set of office in Gaza to gather and analyze intelligence and to assassinate terrorist suspects? Will the military be responsible for disarming the entire Gaza population? Won’t Israel’s de facto military rule provoke another insurrection or suicide bombings in retaliation culminating in renewed warfare?
Reduced to rubble, post-war Gaza is likely to resemble Libya after Gaddafi— rule by multiple pillaging, rampaging, murderous militia forces destabilizing to Israel itself.
Israel sports many talents, but political genius is not one of them. Avner Cohen, a Tunisia-born Jew who was an Israeli official in Gaza dealing with religious affairs during 1970s and 1980s, lamented that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”. He observed the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then evolved into what is today Hamas — a militant group that now calls for Israel’s destruction. Cohen argued that “instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas”.
Netanyahu testified before Congress championing war against Iraq confidant that the invasion would turn neighboring Iran into a democratic paradise.
“I think the choice of Iraq is a good choice, it’s the right choice.”
“It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out but when should it be taken out; it’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran but how to achieve it,” Mr. Netanyahu said six months before the Bush administration began the “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad.
”If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Mr. Netanyahu said then. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
The American-educated Israeli leader, who had already served a term as prime minister, suggested that Iran was so ripe for revolt that just seeing American television shows could do the trick — even if he had some trouble recalling the name of one of the programs he proposed using as a weapon. Mr. Netanyahu recalled that he had once advised senior officials at the Central Intelligence Agency “that if you want to advance regime change in Iran, you don’t have to go through the C.I.A. cloak-and-dagger stuff — what you want to do is take very large, very strong transponders and just beam ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Beverly Hills 2050’ and all that into Tehran and into Iran, because that is subversive stuff. They watch it — the young kids watch it, the young people. They want to have the same nice clothes and the same houses and swimming pools and so on.”
Contrary to Netanyahu’s staggering forecasting blunder, the United States invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam made Iran a theocratic hegemon in the Middle East de facto controlling Iraq, among other things.
What about “From the river to the sea” chant of Palestinians? It is an immaterial adaptation of the handiwork of Netanyahu’s Likud party: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
I don’t mean to single out Israel or Netanyahu for political obtuseness or folly. Politicians are characteristically sociopaths devoid of the philosophical depth and wisdom required to architect peaceful, prosperous societies earmarked by separation of powers. Nothing in the history of politics or political science rivals the Federalist Papers which intellectually underwrote the United States Constitution—a miracle unlikely to be repeated in a million years if ever.
That is why the world is in a mess and civilization is in retreat. Gaza is the tip of the iceberg.