The Promise of Offensive War, The Perils of Containment

By Hugh Fitzgerald | June 18, 2024

The Bidenites are trying to impose a deal on Israel that, if accepted, will prevent the IDF from finishing off the last four Hamas battalions in Rafah, and still leave thousands of Hamas fighters in northern Gaza who though their larger units have dissolved, have been trying to regroup. Should the Americans prevent Israel from achieving its goal of totally destroying Hamas as a military force, this would allow the terror group to claim that it has been “victorious” in the war because, despite everything that the IDF has thrown at it over eight months, it would still be standing, so that it might eventually repeat the attacks of October 7, as it has promised, “again and again.” Fortunately, Hamas now insists on major changes to the deal enunciated by Joe Biden; it demands both an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and a total withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza, something that neither Israel nor the Bidenites can possibly accept.

Hillel Frisch discusses here the lessons of the IDF campaigns in both the south against Hamas, and in the north against Hezbollah, which he argues shows that going on the offense “pays off” for Israel, while containment has only brought disaster. “Yes to Victory; No to Containment and Defeat,” by Hillel Frisch, JNS.org, June 16, 2024:

Since 2002, we have seen repeatedly in Judea and Samaria, and again in 2005 with the disengagement from Gaza, how going on the offense pays off, while containment in the hope of stability results in massive losses in lives and resources, to the point of threatening Israel’s very existence. A comparison of eight months of war in the north and the south have hammered home this lesson once again.

Assessing the effectiveness of going on the offensive compared to adopting a policy of containment and restraint using past examples is a relatively simple exercise. In Judea and Samaria, Israel went on the offensive in 2002 against the war of terror [the Second Intifada, in which more than 1000 Israelis were murdered] that Yasser Arafat initiated two years earlier. Israel reconquered the major towns in the West Bank that had become sanctuaries for terrorists organizing murderous suicide bombings against Israelis in buses and restaurants and shootings in wedding halls and synagogues, most of which took place within Israel’s Green Line. Since the end of that operation, Israel has followed up on an almost daily basis with raids against terrorists and would-be terrorists.

The results are indisputable. The terrorist toll dropped from some 450 deaths in 2002 to 50 in 2006 and has more than halved since then—a bloody toll without doubt, but one that Israel has nevertheless learned to live with and even to prosper alongside….

Data provided by the IDF’s Home Front Command provides ample proof of the relative efficacy of the two strategies: The number of times air raid sirens were sounded to warn of incoming attacks on both these fronts in the past eight months of war reflects, at least partially, the growing costs in the north, where Israel has adopted a policy of containment, as opposed to the sharply reduced costs in the south in the Gaza border communities.

In Sderot, the major urban center closest to the Gaza border, the number of warnings declined from 86 in the first month of the war (Oct. 8-Nov. 7, 2023) to 12 in the month ending on June 2. In Kiryat Shmona, the urban center closest to the Lebanese border, the number of warnings increased from 13 in the first month to 78 in the eighth month of the war. Most of the residents of Sderot have returned to the town and both its schools and local college have re-opened. Kiryat Shmona, on the other hand, has become a ghost town and its inhabitants have become internal refugees. The offensive war against Hamas compared to the policy of containment applied to Hezbollah explains these differences….

All of the Israelis who were evacuated from northern Israel because of Hezbollah rocket barrages still cannot return to their homes. But in the south, 70% of the residents who had earlier been evacuated because of Hamas rockets have now been able to return to their homes, as those attacks have much diminished.

Israel, with or without a war cabinet, has to make clear to the Bidenites that in assenting to the latest deal proposed by the Americans, Israel has gone as far as it can. Farther, many of us believe, than it should. If Hamas persists in its new demands — that there be an immediate and permanent ceasefire (which would include a cessation of any cross-border fire from the IDF), and a complete withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza — that blows up the deal. And the IDF, seeing how containment as a strategy has not worked, and led to such disasters as the Second Intifada and the Hamas attack on October 7, as well as the parlous situation today in the Hezbollah-besieged Galilee, should — as Hillel Frisch argues — recognize “the folly of containment and the virtue of offense.” And go on, as a famous British Zionist once declared about another war, to “Victory, Victory at all costs, Victory in spite of all terror, Victory however long and hard the road may be, for without Victory there is no survival.”