David Weinberg, a journalist that I respect, doesn’t blame Netanyahu for the way in which he is fighting the war. He blames the IDF:
Substantial responsibility for the current stalemate rests with the IDF leadership, which has not sufficiently prepared the army for full-scale ground warfare against the enemy. This has greatly limited the military options at Netanyahu’s and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s disposal.
Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz and his team have openly and unabashedly chosen in recent years to downsize and de-emphasize the ground forces, investing instead in the air force, cyber capabilities, far-reaching intelligence gathering and special operations capabilities. As a result, Israel doesn’t have enough well-trained and properly equipped troops, or truly well-developed battle plans, for re-conquering the Gaza Strip and crushing Hamas.
IDF budgets have been invested elsewhere. As a result, the armored corps and heavy combat brigades don’t have enough advanced armored personnel carriers to protect troops in close-quarters battle, and the main battle tanks are not fully equipped with the advanced Trophy and ALWACS defense systems.
By the army’s own admission, the training hours of regular army brigades for intense urban warfare have been greatly curtailed in recent years, and this is even truer for the reserves. Integrated combat exercises, combing infantry with armored, artillery, engineering and air units — training that is complicated and expensive — have been truncated even further. It’s actually a miracle that the Israel Defense Forces fought as well as it did in Gaza last month.
Furthermore, the quality of military intelligence on Gaza has plummeted since the disengagement. Israel just doesn’t have enough information on Hamas hideouts and weapons stores to mount a thoroughly effective and overwhelming attack. If the IDF had better information, Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif and his terrorist colleagues would all definitely be dead.
The fact is that when asked to present the cabinet with a plan for conquest of Gaza and decapitation of Hamas leadership, the army presented a half-baked plan and did so only half-heartedly, and then leaked estimates of projected Israeli casualties that were sure to frighten everybody off. The cabinet ministers got the message loud and clear that this was not a realistic option.
He goes on to blame Obama as well:
A gigantic gob of responsibility for the current stalemate also rests with U.S. President Barack Obama, who has warned Israel against deepening its ground incursion in Gaza and has pushed Israel into giving Hamas a political payoff to end the fighting. This has greatly limited the options available to Netanyahu and the cabinet.
Every administration statement about Israel’s “right” to defend itself has been counterbalanced by hyper hand-wringing about Palestinian suffering, statements of horror about one or another Israeli bombing, demands for an end to the “blockade” on Gaza, and nasty side-swipes at Israel like the brief ban on flights to Ben-Gurion International Airport and the delay of a Hellfire missile transfer to the Israeli Air Force.
Instead of leading a global diplomatic offensive that champions Israel’s “obligation” to protect itself and its need to crush Hamas, the Obama administration has acted to narrow Israel’s options and to save Hamas. The administration has played a central role in preventing Israel from finishing the fight against Hamas with a resounding, unequivocal triumph.
In conclusion he empathizes with Netanyahu:
The result is a hamstringed Netanyahu: Trapped between his own hesitant, ill-prepared military and a strategically confused ally in Washington. That is why I pity Netanyahu, not so much blame him, for Israel’s current conundrum.
In this context, it is worth recalling that Netanyahu is ultimately a victim of toxic Oslo-era policies, and that for many years he was scorned for predicting precisely the situation Israel now faces.
Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ridiculed Netanyahu when the latter warned that Oslo would lead to missiles on Ashkelon. Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon mocked Netanyahu as a scaremonger when the latter warned that a terror state would rise in Gaza after disengagement.
Labor leaders called Netanyahu reckless and irresponsible when he tried to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal more than 15 years ago.
The hard Left called Netanyahu an obstacle to peace when he blocked the release of additional Hamas terrorists from jail (the so-called fourth tranche), and opposed the Hamas-Fatah unity government. Now that a broad scale Hamas plot to undermine and overthrow Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank has been exposed, even Abbas knows just how lethal Hamas is to his own survival, never mind to Israel’s.
And of course, every other politician in Israel was quick to blame Netanyahu for the downturn in U.S.-Israel relations over the past six years. By now, everybody must recognize that Obama is mainly responsible for this. The President has a worldview which does not truly include fighting global evil — especially of the Islamic kind and even when it is directed against America, never mind Israel.
This inevitably has led to real differences of opinion between the U.S. and Israel; or “daylight” between the countries, as Obama once approvingly termed it.
Nevertheless, he recommends a number of things that Netanyahu should do:
After spreading around fault for the current impasse and giving Netanyahu hefty benefit of the doubt, it is nevertheless time to demand that the prime minister act to overcome the difficulties.
Netanyahu must whip the IDF into shape and snap it to order. It is Netanyahu’s responsibility to ensure that the military will be minded and more prepared to win an unfaltering victory in the next round against Hamas, or against Hezbollah.
The army shortcomings will take time and money to fix, in addition to wholesale command changes. But even now, Netanyahu can and should push for a middle-of-the-road military offensive; an IDF attack aimed at finding and killing or capturing as much of the Hamas military leadership as possible, without having to reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu must also rally his own ministers and the Jewish world to stand firm against Obama’s prejudicial advice. Hamas is the villain and not a legitimate political force; Israel shouldn’t aid in the reconstruction of Gaza as long as Hamas remains in power; and Israel must not negotiate away its freedom of military action against Hamas leaders and assets, under any circumstances.
Similarly, Netanyahu should reject the ruinous rush to resurrect and re-empower the unreliable Abbas, or to withdraw in his favor in the West Bank. No pressures from Obama (or from Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid) should move Netanyahu in this deleterious direction.
@ yamit82:
thanks for this perspective which makes sense to me. After all, I thought that there was a big investigation of the last lebanon war and that now the IDF has upgraded its abilities. to claim the same again makes no sense. It appears to me that politics is always the key to the problem whether through the admin of the IDF or through decisions as to what the IDF should do when a war is declared. the IDF appears subject to the negligence, incompetence and corruption of the politicians who run them. BB has been in charge long enough NOT to be pushing blame on the last guy. what they did wrong he should have rectified, both militarily and politically but I think his name is status quo and dont rock the boat whereas Israel needs a leader on behalf of the Jews. The kind of leader who can come up with the 6 day war preemptive attack, the entebbe rescue, etc. someone who can change the paradigm of libel and lies through action rather than apologies.
David M. Weinberg is a known BB acolyte, paid for or otherwise, he writes for what has been euphemistically called BB’s Pravda, a free paper owned by billionaire Sheldon Adelson and created to help BB politically against an antagonistic leftist and entrenched Israeli media and press.
Anything he says re: our political situation re: BB should be viewed as suspect and in light of who pays him and why.
Do not forget that it’s BB who is PM and not the chief of staff. Let’s not forget that BB has been PM for over 5 years and that it was BB who chose his friend and long time mentor Ehud Barak to be DM for over 4 years and it’s been reported that he still is the primary military unofficial military adviser to BB.
Ya’alon is a lightweight with no political backing or support. he is totally dependent on BB to protect his flanks and back, not a smart place to be. Sharon dumped him and for good reason. It took him over 4 years to quell the intifada and he misread everything on the playing field. Too conservative and too hesitant. Intellectually he was in favor of ceding the Golan for a peace agreement with Assad when he was head of military intelligence, and was then lauded by our intellectual and military elites. If he had succeeded where would we be today???
Benny Ganz is an American stooge especially after spending his last posting as the Military attache in Washington. Nobody comes back here without being corrupted if they hadn’t been before. Ganz was the Commander who allowed a Druze wounded soldier to bleed to death at Joseph’s tomb during BB’s first term in 1998. He called for Help from Arafat’s security people to extricate our wounded soldier instead of sending in the IDF to save our guys…. Shows you who Ganz is. General Galant was picked to be the IDF COS but a phony scandal by some in opposition to Galant prevented his appointment at the last moment and Barak picked Ganz. BB opposed buy Barak got his way.
Every adviser hired or appointed by BB in the last 5 years has been fired or has left with bad blood between BB and themselves.
BB is a paranoid and can’t work with anyone for long and none is loyal to him and he is loyal to no one. Barak is molded in similar fashion. They are both psychopaths and sociopaths…. A toxic mix especially for leaders in a democratic open society.
The IDF must be reigned in by real a political senior professional officers and there must be intensive objective staff work to present the civilian leadership with several viable options to any situation presenting itself to the government. This according to all reports has not been the case and the recommendations of past post war commissions have apparently not only not have been implemented but they have been apparently ignored-leaving open the probability of more post operation investigations and commissions of inquiry, when this operation ends.
Blaming all the shortfalls and deficiencies of this operation against Hamas on the IDF is disingenuous at best and deceitful at worst because you can’t separate BB from the failures of this operation and the IDF leadership.
Since when are Tanks and Armour, primary weapons in tightly packed urban warfare? After we lost 7 soldiers in a direct hit on an old American supplied APC M-113 that I used in Korea in the early 60’s, and it’s made of aluminum; our reservists refused to enter them in combat. Rightly so. They are death traps for current anti-tank rockets held in the thousands by Hamas fighters.
Weinberg is full of shit when he claims we don’t have good Intel in Gaza. The offing of 4 main military leaders in two days shows we have good intel and our detecting 33 tunnels with precision alludes to the fact that we already knew where to look. Why they were not taken out before is a valid question not yet answered and it can be laid at BB’s feet as well as most of the unnecessary Israeli casualties because 13 of our guys were killed from attacks out of some of those tunnels. Why weren’t the Hamas leadership bumped off before or in the beginning of this operation???
I suppose in another few weeks after Hamas has expended all or most of their rockets and the shooting ends BB and his stooge advocate Weinberg will claim Israel victorious and how smart they were to allow Hamas to deplete their rocket stockpiles costing us few casualties. 🙁
The truth is even worse. The post Oslo Israeli military staff is selected on a political basis and trained to perform political actions. ONLY.
They failed miserably during Lebanon II and again now, by design. The “cease fire’ in neutral and negotiate doctrine has virtually destroyed Tzahal.
BUDGETS: Huge sums go into that black hole, but political decisions siphon much of that.
Our people must realize that the cadre in control, civilian and military are a mortal danger to us all.
And BTW. Iran is home free.