Excerpt below:

This past July, Geoffrey Corn, a law professor at Texas Tech and a former judge advocate general in the U.S. Army, joined the Israel Defense Forces on a tour of the Rafah border. Within hours of Hamas’s attack, on October 7th, 2023, Israel began bombing Gaza. But until May, 2024, just a couple of months before Corn’s latest visit, the city of Rafah remained relatively intact. The site of the only border crossing with Egypt, Rafah was already one of the most densely populated cities in Gaza, packed further by the flight of Palestinians from the north. In February, when it became clear that the I.D.F. was planning to invade Rafah, it was estimated that 1.5 million people were living in the city.

Read the full article in the New Yorker.

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It has become conventional wisdom after Oct. 7 that Israel for years had the wrong policy toward Gaza. While the unfathomable catastrophe of that day has rightly forced a critical examination of all the factors that led to it, it’s arguable that Israel’s broad pre-Oct. 7 policy toward Gaza, in contrast to its strategic conception and military preparation, was at least understandable, if not correct. In contrast, there has been less criticism of Israel’s policy toward Hezbollah in Lebanon over the past two decades. Not only does the policy toward the northern front raise even more troubling questions than Gaza, but also, now more than ever, it looks like a major strategic failure.

Ever since Hamas took control of Gaza by force in 2007, Israel has fought several small wars with the genocidal terrorist organization, in response to rocket attacks from the Strip: in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021. There were also shorter Israeli military campaigns against the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in 2022 and 2023. In each of these conflicts, Israel would have been justified to enter Gaza and destroy Hamas in self-defense, but never felt so compelled—until Oct. 7.

It has been frequently reported that Israel, or at least its military intelligence agency, had a faulty strategic conception, the so-called “konceptzia,” that Hamas was deterred for now and more focused on governing Gaza than on attacking Israel. Many pundits in the Israeli and American media, who are overwhelmingly hostile to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, contend he was driven to prop up Hamas over the years with the help of Qatari money in order to divide the Palestinians and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Netanyahu, who has waged several wars against Hamas, has repeatedly denied this claim. While there have been plenty of leaks in the media already, Israeli military and government probes are expected to reveal what the military intelligence’s konceptzia was, what was motivating Netanyahu and other Israeli political and military leaders, and what contributed to the IDF inadequately preparing for, and/or ignoring signals of, a major Hamas attack.

In the meantime, it’s worth exploring why Israel did not invade Gaza and uproot Hamas from power years ago, based on the premise that Oct. 7 was not inevitable.

The threat from Gaza, however challenging, appeared increasingly manageable to most Israeli military and civilian leaders, despite the short wars with Hamas and PIJ. This misplaced confidence appears to have been partly driven by an overreliance on technology and missile defense. The 2011 deployment of Iron Dome, Israel’s 90%-plus-effective, short-range air defense system, seemingly minimized the rocket threat. With Iron Beam—a laser version that will be at the very least a powerful supplement to Iron Dome—soon to be deployed, Israel believed it was poised to have an even better counter to rockets fired from Gaza. One Israeli military expert told me a few years ago that once Iron Beam was deployed Israel won’t care what happens inside Gaza.

Hamas’ subterranean (tunnel) threat, which already seemed significant a decade ago, was thought neutralized with the installation along the border of underground sensors and barriers. Israel also believed it had neutralized the threat of a land invasion by installing an expensive fence with sensors and cameras. Moreover, the Israeli Air Force continued to operate at will in Gaza, often successfully killing Hamas and PIJ commanders and destroying terrorist infrastructure with precision strikes.

Secure in the belief that these measures had militarily neutralized the Hamas threat, Israel’s civilian and military leaders were mostly averse to destroying Hamas and removing it from power in Gaza.

Israel remained loath to reoccupy Gaza, which it occupied in 1967 and from which it withdrew in 2005, out of concern that any attempt to do so would result in significant Israeli military casualties. Worse, it would bog Israel down in an unwanted occupation of Palestinians in what was viewed as a secondary or tertiary theater compared to the far more potent and immediate threat of Hezbollah to its north and Iran’s nuclear program. Also, Israel had tried its hand at shaping domestic Arab political arrangements in Lebanon in 1982, where it failed spectacularly, and its leaders opposed trying it again ever since. Further, Israeli leaders understood that such an effort in Gaza would be met by fierce international opposition. Indeed, it faced such opposition every time it launched a military campaign in retaliation for Hamas or PIJ firing rockets.

Moreover, when it comes to who could or would responsibly rule Gaza post-Hamas without threatening Israel, there simply never were serious candidates. Egypt did not want Gaza back after losing it to Israel in the 1967 war. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat wisely sought every inch of Sinai and not one inch of Gaza in Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel four decades ago. After the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) spectacular rout at the hands of Hamas two years after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Israeli governments increasingly doubted they could rely on the PA to govern the Strip. The PA’s endemic mismanagement, corruption, and radicalism helped spawn overwhelming support for Hamas among its West Bank populace, and its financial rewarding of terrorism is especially anathema to the Israeli political right.

So Israel resigned itself to what some of its leaders call “managing the conflict.” That has meant “mowing the lawn,” or periodic military campaigns to degrade Hamas and PIJ after they conducted—or planned to conduct—rocket barrages, and facilitating economic assistance, in recent years from Qatar, when necessary. This wasn’t really a strategy, but a policy of making lemonade out of the available lemons. If Israel had no clear endgame it’s because none existed, beyond perhaps waiting for Hamas to collapse one day. Still, the success of this approach depended on a basic, eminently achievable condition: the IDF’s ability to defend the 32-mile Gazan border. Of course, on Oct. 7, the IDF utterly failed to do just that, for reasons reported and to be determined.

Nevertheless, events since Oct. 7 largely corroborate Israel’s previous reluctance to topple Hamas from power in Gaza.

First, international support for Israel even after the savagery of Oct. 7 has cratered. Consider, for example, how President Biden has sought for months to prevent Israel from going into Rafah and finish off Hamas. Other Western leaders lost patience with Israel’s military campaign long before.

Second, Israel’s caution over casualties has been borne out. Israel has lost over 280 soldiers in its seven-month ground incursion into Gaza, with over 1,700 wounded. Those numbers are lower than expected but still remain a very heavy toll for a small country of 9 million. IDF deaths are the equivalent of almost 10,000 Americans, more than twice the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq over eight years and more than three times those killed in Afghanistan over 20 years.

Third, Israel will need at least an additional year to continue to kill or imprison Hamas fighters once the intense fighting ends following a Rafah campaign. It also will need to maintain overall control of security of the Strip for an indefinite period.

Fourth, there’s no consensus or agreement on who should rule Gaza. Israeli leaders have been mum about who they think should govern the Strip, and have spoken of a long period of “deradicalization” before any putative non-Hamas Gazans can take greater control. Some, such as my colleague IDF Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror, former national security adviser to Netanyahu, attribute that partly to the “day after” not yet having arrived. As for Washington, although the Biden administration reportedly wants Gulf Arab states to be involved in the reconstruction and maybe even the security of postwar Gaza, it is unclear, assuming it goes anywhere, if the plan even intends to exclude or suppress Hamas.

Perhaps Israel could have pursued a middle course between acceptance and expulsion of Hamas governance in Gaza. It might have conducted more proactive actions against Hamas over the years to further degrade its military capabilities and prevent its smuggling activities. That would have required Egyptian help to halt, or at least minimize, the smuggling—to which Cairo clearly had turned a blind eye and from which it apparently has benefited financially. Perhaps Israel could have better controlled how international funding for Gaza was spent, to minimize Hamas using it for its terror infrastructure. It is unclear if any of these steps would have been realistic in light of U.S. policy toward the Palestinians (the exception of the Trump administration’s term, which paradoxically reinforced Israel’s inclination to stick with the status quo), and the IDF brass’s attachment to its technology-centered defensive posture.

In contrast, what is far more strategically problematic, yet less discussed, has been Israel standing by as Hezbollah vastly augmented its arsenal from about 10,000 rockets at the end of the 2006 war to today’s 150,000-200,000, plus several hundred precision-guided munitions and an array of Iranian-made attack drones. Few if any countries can match this arsenal, and it’s an order of magnitude greater than Hamas’ estimated 20,000 rockets and missiles stockpile on Oct. 7. Indeed, it is the more powerful Hezbollah in Lebanon, whose border with Israel had been generally quiet from 2006 until Oct. 7, that poses the far more potent strategic threat to the Jewish state, both in the damage it can inflict and the protection it offers Iran’s nuclear program.

A 2018 report by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, an organization I head, stated that a vast majority of Hezbollah’s rockets are unguided and short-range, intended to be used “indiscriminately against northern Israeli towns and cities. But, unlike in 2006, Hezbollah now also has several thousand medium-range rockets and several hundred precision long-range missiles capable of striking targets throughout Israel.” At the outset of a conflict with Israel, Hezbollah would be capable of firing at least 3,000 rockets per day, and then settling in on 1,000-1,500 per day. In the 2006 war, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets per day.

This is a far greater challenge for Israel than Hamas, and Jerusalem has had no easy answer to this Hezbollah threat. In a war, Hezbollah could overwhelm the air defense capabilities of Israel, a small country with little strategic depth, causing unimaginable damage to strategic targets and population centers. Israel would have to determine which strategic sites and cities to protect and which to leave vulnerable and evacuate.

In fact, even short of a full-blown war, since Oct. 7, Israel already has been forced to evacuate tens of thousands of Israelis living near the Lebanon border. To prevent or mitigate such a catastrophe, Israel would be compelled to attack Hezbollah with tremendous force by land and air. Israel’s defensive posture in the north since 2006 has led to what had been unthinkable: Hezbollah imposing a depopulated zone inside Israeli territory.

The magnitude of Hezbollah’s capability has helped deter Israel, or give it pause, from attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. Indeed, Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal exists precisely to defend Iran and its most valuable nuclear assets by threatening to let loose against Israel should it ever target them. And now Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear threshold state, which is an unmitigated strategic disaster for Israel that could threaten its very existence. By playing it safe in Lebanon, Israel ended up in a worse situation on both fronts.

Years ago Israel could have launched a military campaign, not to destroy Hezbollah but to materially degrade its military capabilities. Israel would likely have needed to use ample ground forces and air power. It could have legitimized such an initiative upon enforcing United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701, which marked the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. UNSCR 1701 prohibited “armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL,” and called for “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that … there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese State.” Those words—“the Lebanese State” and “the Government of Lebanon and UNIFIL”—should have made it clear from the get-go that an Israeli offensive campaign would be necessary not long after 2006. Instead, UNSCR 1701—and the accompanying U.S. policy of strengthening Lebanese state institutions—became a fig leaf for Iran to boost Hezbollah’s rocket and missile capability on Israel’s border.

The civil war in Syria, which started five years later, solidified Israel’s strategic blunder in Lebanon. As Israel’s other neighbor to the north disintegrated, opening the door to an even larger Iranian footprint in the country than had already existed prior, the Israeli Air Force began targeting Iranian assets either in Syria or en route to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The IAF had virtually a free hand in Syria, an operational freedom that has continued even after Russia, with the Obama administration’s acquiescence, established a military footprint in the war-torn country in 2015.

In August 2015, a few weeks after the signing of the Iran nuclear agreement, which seemed to some senior IDF leaders to take a war over Iran’s nuclear program off the table for a number of years, the IDF, under Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, took the unusual step of publishing what the IDF called the “campaign between the wars” strategy. As Eisenkot wrote in 2019, after he retired, the new strategy “strives for proactive, offensive actions” intended to: “Delay war and deter enemies by constantly weakening their force buildup processes and damaging their assets and capabilities,” and “[c]reate optimal conditions for the IDF if war finally does come.”

This proactive strategy, of attacking Iran and Iran-backed forces to minimize their footprint in Syria and block their transfer of advanced capabilities to Hezbollah in Lebanon, was an implicit recognition of Israel’s huge failure in Lebanon. The IDF did not want Syria to become a much larger version of Lebanon. So Lebanon was put on hold, even as Hezbollah’s capabilities grew—along with U.S. investment in the country. The IDF’s “campaign between the wars” has been successful. Through hundreds of actions over the past decade, the IDF has prevented many transfers of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah in Lebanon, destroyed significant Iranian capabilities to manufacture weapons in Syria, and materially restricted the footprint in Syria of Iran and its militias. As an illustration of Iran’s ambitions in Syria, Tehran sought to amass 100,000 militia fighters in the country, but reportedly has only a fraction of that.

Israel didn’t apply to Lebanon the approach it took in Syria, where many outside actors were involved in a generally chaotic and conducive theater torn by a vicious civil war. While it would have certainly faced U.S. and international opposition, it would have been far less costly for Israel to conduct against Lebanese Hezbollah a version of a “campaign between the wars” shortly after 2006. With every passing year, the risks and costs of Israeli military action against Hezbollah have grown.

Israeli generals seemed convinced, or convinced themselves, that they could postpone facing this dilemma. They cited the mostly quiet Israel-Lebanon border as evidence that Hezbollah was in fact deterred. They often pointed to Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah admitting right after the 2006 war that had he known a Hezbollah operation against Israel, which killed three IDF soldiers and abducted two more, would “lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude … would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.” Maybe Hezbollah was deterred, or maybe Iran simply restrained its key proxy as it built it up to become critical dry powder in case Israel attacked Iran nuclear facilities—or both. Either way, the net result was still a drastic spike in Hezbollah’s military capabilities over the years. Hezbollah’s enhanced lethality, coupled with increased American opposition to the “destabilization” of Lebanon—a de facto U.S. protective umbrella—in turn succeeded in forcing Israel to avoid launching campaigns inside its northern neighbor. At the very least, then, it can be said that the deterrence was mutual, which meant a net loss for Israel.

The current war of attrition which Hezbollah started with Israel after Oct. 7 possibly suggests Israel might have taken action against Hezbollah years ago without triggering a major war. Still, aside from the assassination of Hezbollah (and Hamas) commanders, Israel’s current efforts are mostly limited to destroying Hezbollah fighters and infrastructure within a few kilometers of the Israeli border. A major effort to degrade materially Hezbollah’s wider and more extensive capabilities would involve a far larger battlefield.

Apparently, there was no serious intention among Israeli civilian or military leaders over the past two decades to conduct such a campaign in Lebanon. Amidror attributes this partly to Israel losing its preemptive instinct.

Of course, Israel can’t go to war all the time, despite the myriad threats it constantly faces. Political leaders in this democratic country always need to balance addressing threats and ensuring security over the long term with the near-term need to maintain social stability, economic vitality, and growth. Indeed, Israel’s economy and wealth grew substantially since the Second Lebanon War; GDP was $158 billion in 2006, and more than tripled by 2022 to $525 billion, while GDP per capita grew from $22,494 to $54,930. That growth, while welcome, brought with it more complacency.

Until Oct. 7, Netanyahu, who has served as prime minister for most of the time since 2009, took pride in his keeping Israel mostly at peace and growing its prosperity. The opposition parties weren’t pushing for a preemptive campaign to degrade Hezbollah in Lebanon either. In fact, when a left-right coalition government ruled in 2021-22, it signed a maritime deal with Lebanon, with its then-Prime Minister Yair Lapid lauding the deal saying it “staves off” war with Hezbollah.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has sought to restore its shattered deterrence and security against the Iran-led axis, in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza (for now), with Lebanese Hezbollah and its massive arsenal its chief guardian. Iran is on the verge of crossing the nuclear threshold as it advances its weaponization program. Israel will soon face the decision whether to initiate a major military action to degrade Hezbollah in Lebanon and remove it as a strategic threat, and whether to attack militarily Iran’s nuclear program. Israel will need some American backing—politically at the U.N., and militarily by supplying it with some of the weapons it will need for such campaigns, and to help mitigate the scope and intensity of the blowback. Of course, Israel will need to take into account that the Biden administration, whether it lasts another eight months or five years, will oppose such an endeavor. Indeed, the administration has been very vocal against any conflict with Iran or Hezbollah.

Despite some similarities, the Hamas and Hezbollah challenges to Israel were not the same prior to Oct. 7 and required different policies.

In Gaza, Israel opted not to destroy Hamas but to “manage the conflict,” whereby it degraded Hamas’ military capabilities occasionally during military operations or limited wars. This strategy helped lull Israel into a false sense of security that resulted in the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. With Hezbollah, which controlled a larger area in Lebanon than Hamas did in Gaza, and is far more essential to Iran’s security and regional strategy, Israel did not even try, in the years after 2006, to degrade its capabilities through a significant military campaign, or campaigns. Instead, Israel chose to do little inside Lebanon, mostly focusing on limiting the growth of Hezbollah’s capabilities through a decadelong campaign in Syria.

Oct. 7 will go down as a catastrophic intelligence and military failure. However, Israel allowing the Hezbollah threat to metastasize over the past two decades appears to have been a colossal strategic blunder, the cost of which could even dwarf that of Oct. 7. For Jerusalem, the Lebanon bill is past due.

Michael Makovsky, PhD is the President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), and a former Defense Department official.

Originally published in Tablet Magazine.

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Featuring:

LtGen Richard Natonski, USMC (ret.)
JINSA Hybrid Warfare Policy Project Member; JINSA Gaza Assessment Policy Project Member

LTC Geoffrey S. Corn, USA (ret.)
JINSA Hybrid Warfare Policy Project Member; JINSA Distinguished Fellow

Jonathan Ruhe
JINSA Director of Foreign Policy

The post Watch Webinar with LtGen Richard Natonski, USMC (ret.) and LTC Geoffrey S. Corn, USA (ret.) on Gaza Lessons Learned appeared first on JINSA.

United States Missile Defense Agency, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

With a ceasefire announced in Gaza, it’s crucial to apply the lessons-learned to a likely future conflict with Hezbollah, and likely Iran, in Lebanon and beyond.

As The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) has laid out in a comprehensive report, this looming war will be unprecedentedly destructive. Hezbollah’s arsenals are an order of magnitude more potent than anything in Gaza, including at least 130,000 rockets and missiles that will do what Hamas conspicuously has yet to accomplish – namely, overpower Israel’s world-class multi-layered air defense network.

President Biden’s welcome decision last Thursday to replenish interceptor stocks for Israel’s short-range Iron Dome air defenses – which were called upon more than ever in the latest flareup – is only a small glimpse of what Israel will need to defend itself in the next war. In addition to Iron Dome, Washington must ensure adequate U.S.-Israel coproduction of David’s Sling and Arrow air defense systems that will be crucial for defending against Hezbollah’s and Iran’s much more sophisticated, powerful and longer-range projectiles, including precision munitions.

Since Hezbollah’s last war with Israel in 2006, Iran has assiduously rebuilt its primary terrorist proxy into a genuine juggernaut. Hezbollah now possesses more firepower than 95 percent of the world’s conventional militaries, and more rockets and missiles than all European NATO members combined. As is the case with terrorist groups in Gaza, the vast majority of these are unguided short-range rockets, though Hezbollah likely has several times more of these than the estimated 30,000 short-range rockets and mortars in Gaza at the start of the last round of conflict.

Hezbollah also has thousands of more powerful unguided medium- and long-range rockets, many of them ranging all of Israel, compared to several hundred at most in Gaza that can reach central Israel, including Tel Aviv, and only parts of the north. These longer ranges allow Hezbollah to disperse its arsenal throughout Lebanon, including Beirut and Beqaa Valley, covering much greater area than Gaza.

And unlike anything in the arsenals of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah wields dozens or hundreds of precision missiles. Tehran also tries to proliferate technology to convert Hezbollah’s plentiful unguided rockets into precision weapons, and it assiduously attempts to make Syria, Iraq and Yemen into additional launchpads. Because Iron Dome focuses on projectiles threatening built-up areas, Israel’s challenges will grow proportionally with the precision munition stocks of Iran, Hezbollah and other proxies around the region.

This encircling “ring of fire” from Lebanon and elsewhere could overwhelm Israel’s multi-layered air defenses with barrages larger than anything yet seen. To be sure, Iron Dome held its own in recent Gaza conflicts. It did so even as the rate of incoming fire increased from 200 rockets daily in 2014 to as many as 400-500 per day in 2021, including 130-rocket barrages, and even as fully half of the recent rocket launches threatened populated areas (up from 20 percent in 2014).

But Hezbollah will launch as many as 3,000 rockets, missiles and drones daily at the outset of the next war – nearly as many as in the entire 2006 and 2014 wars – and at a sustained rate of around 1,000 per day, threatening to oversaturate not just Iron Dome but Israel’s other air defenses as well.

And finally, Hezbollah gained valuable battlefield experience since its last war with Israel. It learned brutal combined-arms warfare in Syria, including in dense urban cauldrons like Aleppo, and now boasts advanced UAV, air defense, anti-tank, subterranean and other capabilities. Unlike Gaza terrorist groups, whose threats of cross-border incursions were minimal in the last conflict, Hezbollah will deploy these assets not just defensively throughout Lebanon, but also offensively in concerted ground invasions against northern Israel.

The ensuing conflict will greatly strain Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF) and population. The IDF will have to prioritize countering launchers, suggesting more than 1,000 airstrikes daily in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and perhaps farther afield, compared to roughly 200 daily in the latest bout of fighting. In all probability, the IDF also would conduct an immediate combined-arms ground operation into Lebanon on a much larger scale than in 2006 or in Gaza in 2014.

With air defenses shielding IDF installations, Israel’s critical infrastructure and cities will depend on passive defense measures and luck. Thousands of rockets and missiles will target industrial, electricity, water and transportation chokepoints, and Israel’s densely-populated coastal heartland. The result could be mass casualties, enormous physical destruction and severe disruptions to basic services.

Though damage to Israel likely will be unprecedented, this conflagration will resemble Gaza and Lebanon conflicts in one key respect. Like Hamas, Hezbollah illegally and intentionally puts civilians in harm’s way, emplacing its extensive military assets near and underneath apartments, schools, mosques and hospitals.

When IDF operations target these sites, Hezbollah will exploit the widespread misunderstanding of the law of armed conflict, disingenuously portraying Lebanese casualties and damage as the result of disproportionate and indiscriminate Israeli firepower – all while Hezbollah launches tens of thousands of unguided rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians. Unlike with Gaza, the war’s sheer intensity will undermine continued IDF precautions, like “knock on the roof” and telephone warnings, that exceed the law of armed conflict’s requirements.

Like Hamas, Hezbollah will try to delegitimize Israel because it knows it cannot prevail militarily. As in 2006 and 2014, its adversaries will try to generate political and popular pressure on Israel to terminate legitimate operations prematurely.

Both before, but especially during, this incredibly intense large-scale war, U.S. support for Israel’s freedom of action in legitimate self-defense against shared threats from Iran and its proxies will be more important than ever. This includes ensuring Israel has the necessary tools for its ongoing interdiction campaign against Tehran’s proliferation of precision missiles and other game-changing capabilities to Hezbollah and proxies in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

The United States and Israel also must ensure sufficient co-production of Iron Dome systems and interceptors to mitigate Hezbollah’s sheer mass of unguided and short-range rockets and artillery, as well as David’s Sling and Arrow air defense systems to counter Hezbollah’s and Iran’s longer-range and precision arsenals, including drones and ballistic and cruise missiles.

Because this next war will be fought in the court of public opinion as much as the battlefield, American leaders also should proactively educate media and international audiences – including the United Nations – on the law of armed conflict, the IDF’s adherence to it and its willful distortion by Hezbollah, Hamas and U.S. adversaries. This will be crucial to ensure ultimate Israeli success in a major conflict against shared Iranian threats, and to mitigate the appeal and effectiveness of similar strategies against legitimate U.S. military operations in the future.

LtGen Richard Natonski, USMC (ret.), former Commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Command, serves on the Hybrid Warfare Task Force at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), where Jonathan Ruhe is Director of Foreign Policy.

Originally published in Breaking Defense

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iStockphoto.com/ Credit: Moshe Einhorn

Hamas is playing a dangerous game. The terror organization is illegally and indiscriminately firing Iranian-provided rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It hopes to provoke Israel into reacting as Israel has before: with short-term, withering Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military action that delegitimizes Israel while perversely strengthening Hamas.

The threat emanating from Gaza in Israel’s south has, to date, appeared far more manageable than Hezbollah’s massive, highly sophisticated missile arsenal on its northern border. This may no longer be the case. The attacks Israel has endured this past week are different in intensity and sophistication than past attacks, indicating that Hamas’ arsenal is more dangerous than ever before.

These developments may lead Israel to throw out the normal playbook and choose to eliminate Hamas’ capability to perpetuate this threat. And while a broader military campaign to achieve this strategic objective would almost certainly trigger widespread international condemnation, Israel would be well within its rights under international law based on this ever-present threat.

The effectiveness of the Iron Dome defense system has protected Israeli civilians and allowed Israel the strategic space to avoid a much more destructive ground offensive in Gaza to eliminate the Hamas threat. However, the capability of Iron Dome is not unlimited, and Israel cannot afford to confront a missile threat of equal magnitude on both its southern and northern borders. At what point will the IDF tell Israeli leaders that destroying Hamas’ capability at its root source is the only viable option to secure and defend the nation?

This all leads to critical questions of international law: What right does Israel have to respond to this threat, and what measures are justified in response? The answer is clear: Israel has the same right that every sovereign nation has to defend itself from unlawful attacks. Hamas’ efforts to exploit the explosive civil unrest in Israel by unleashing this rocket barrage—portraying itself as a defender of the oppressed and launching rockets against Israeli civilians as a purported show of solidarity in an effort to win Palestinian and international sympathy—is a blatant act of unlawful aggression.

To be sure, the Israeli response must itself comply with international law—it must include the obligation to use only proportional measures to defend itself. But international law does not restrict Israel to a mere tit-for-tat response; rather, it is the nature of the threat that dictates what self-defense actions are necessary and proportional in any given scenario. This means Israel may already be justified in the determination that the time has come for a much more extensive military campaign to destroy Hamas’ capability for future attack.

The destructive effects of combat, especially in urban areas like Gaza, is difficult to watch without a deep sense of pity for innocent civilians caught in the fray. Hamas knows this. Hamas also knows that media focus on such destruction is not only logical—it is the most evocative information related to the entire conflict. The public, digesting images of dead families and toppled buildings in Gaza, instinctively concludes that Israel acted in wanton disregard for civilian safety—or worse, intentionally targeted noncombatants.

Creating this international public perception of Israel as the unjustified, and illegal, aggressor is Hamas’ strategic objective. Hamas deliberately embeds military objectives within Gazan homes, schools, hospitals and even high-rise buildings used by journalists because civilian casualties are the most valuable weapon in its strategic arsenal—a weapon employed to perpetuate the distorted image of Israel as an oppressive, brutal Goliath. For Hamas, combat is the supporting effort to its information campaign; as long as it comes out standing, it wins.

What Hamas is exploiting is a deeply embedded confusion between cause and responsibility that allows for spread of distorted legal narratives. Israeli attacks may cause damage and destruction, but the responsibility for the tragic impact on Gaza civilians belongs exclusively to Hamas. This is because the terror organization pervasively and illegally exploits the presence of civilians to shield its targets and complicate IDF attack decisions. And Hamas knows that no matter the attack decision the IDF makes, it wins: If the IDF exercises restraint, Hamas wins a tactical benefit, but if the IDF launches the attack, Hamas wins a strategic information benefit by exploiting the attack’s collateral civilian impact.

Hamas’ exploitation of the widespread misunderstanding of international law undermines the legitimacy of the law for all nations, not just Israel. When the law-abider faces strategic condemnation for following the law while the lawbreaker reaps rewards, the law’s efficacy is eroded. And the irony is palpable: one party to the conflict—the IDF—seeks to mitigate the risk to Gaza civilians and their property as best as it can under the circumstances; the other party to the conflict, Hamas, not only deliberately attacks Israeli civilians, but intentionally exposes its own civilians to the deadly consequences of the hostilities it provokes itself. In truth, it is Hamas—and only Hamas—that is illegally attacking civilians. But it is always Israel that is condemned.

So Hamas should be careful what it asks for. At some point, Israel may decide to endure the international criticism based on false factual and legal narratives and defend itself as most law-abiding nations would: by destroying Hamas’ ability to threaten Israel in the future. If that happens, it will be Hamas that bears responsibility for any tragic suffering that results.

Geoffrey S. Corn is the Gary A. Kuiper distinguished professor of national security law at South Texas College of Law Houston, a distinguished fellow with The Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s (JINSA) Gemunder Center and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. Rachel E. VanLandingham is professor of law at Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles, a Gemunder Center expert and a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel.

Originally published in Newsweek

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Featuring:

IDF MG (ret.) Yaakov Amidror
JINSA Distinguished Fellow

IDF BG (ret.) Michael Herzog
International Fellow, Washington Institute

Erielle Davidson
JINSA Senior Policy Analyst

The post Watch Webinar with IDF Gens Yaakov Amidror and Mike Herzog on Recent Attacks Against Israel appeared first on JINSA.

Photo: Ludovic Courtès via Wikimedia Commons.

The Biden administration has sought to differentiate itself from its predecessor in many arenas, foreign policy included. Yet it has endorsed a self-evident truth acknowledged by the Trump administration, and indeed that of President Barack Obama: something is broken at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

For too long, a body intended to impartially promote human rights has instead granted legitimacy and impunity to some of the world’s greatest abusers. By moving to rejoin the Council, the Biden administration must now push for significant reforms that promote accountability for major violators, end the disproportionate targeting of Israel, and shore up credibility for a body that has too-often failed the most vulnerable.

The Trump administration decided to withdraw from the UNHRC in 2018, calling it “a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights.” While recognizing its faults, the Biden team is instead seeking a seat at the table, “to ensure that this important body lives up to its purpose.”

The Council indeed has a laudable founding mission. It was designed to “address situations of violations of human rights, including gross and systematic violations,” and to do so with, inter alia, “impartiality, objectivity and non-selectivity.” Candidates to the UNHRC should have their contribution to “the promotion and protection of human rights” taken into account, while elected members “shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.” A member that “commits gross and systematic violations” may be suspended, following a vote.

Sadly, the Council’s function has rarely come close to matching its aspirations. Indeed, many observers believe it has made a mockery of its founding ethos.

The 15 countries elected to the UNHRC this past October include a number that are anything but icons in the protection and advancement of fundamental human rights. Among these are China, which both the Trump and Biden administrations determined has committed genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang; Russia, which independent UN experts accused of poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny; and Cuba, run by a government that continues to repress the fundamental freedoms of its own citizens. They joined other serial human rights violators already on the 47-member Council, most notably Venezuela, whose inclusion speaks volumes about the delta between the Council’s hyperbole and what it really represents.

The Council’s secret ballot elections incentivize this obscene status quo, empowering General Assembly members to privately vote for candidates without having to publicly justify their support. This feeds into an opaque system that has allowed some of the world’s most heinous regimes to sanctimoniously assume an undeserved perch at the UNHRC, from which they work to undermine the Council’s founding mission.

A favored target of this coterie is Israel, the only country with a dedicated, permanent agenda item at the Council. This mechanism ensures that Israel’s human rights record is examined in a one-sided manner at every Council session.

But the obsession does not end there.

According to the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch, Israel has racked up more condemnatory UNHRC resolutions than any other country — a total of 90 to date. For comparison, the mass-murdering Syrian regime, whose brutality sparked a devastating conflict that is estimated to have killed more than 380,000 people since 2011, has faced 35 such resolutions. North Korea was subject to 13, and Iran only 10. Countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Cuba have thus far not attracted a single similar condemnation.

This is not to say that criticism of Israel is per se invalid. But such a dramatic discrepancy can be explained only by a systemic bias against Israel, which undermines the Council’s credibility writ large.

In a 1940 address, former US Supreme Court justice and Attorney General Robert Jackson aptly described “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”

There is an analogous danger inherent in the power of the UNHRC to “pick” the states it chooses to criticize. It is this power that the Council so flagrantly abuses, and that the Biden administration, in seeking to re-engage with the body, must strive to redirect. Like a credible prosecutor, the facts of human rights violations must dictate the Council’s priorities, not the desire to target a specific state. Unless the Council alters its distorted prioritization of effort, its function will continue to be viewed as a manifestation of political expedience. In contrast, a focus on the most egregious violators of human rights will enhance both its legitimacy and efficacy.

A critical first step in this effort must be for the Biden administration to work to eliminate the UNHRC’s secret ballot election system. By casting votes on the record, General Assembly members will have to face public accountability for supporting the ascent of notorious human rights abusers to the Council. The administration should also push to scrap the Council’s special agenda item targeting Israel, which is perhaps the most glaring illustration of its selective — if not vindictive — enforcement. There is no valid reason for Israel to be thus singled-out. There is, of course, an invalid reason: the Council’s sub rosa motivation to use its authority to constantly undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

President Biden’s team, like prior administrations, recognizes that the UNHRC has fallen short of its founding mission. It has chosen engagement over ostracization as the tactic to positively influence the Council. The administration must now leverage this power to ensure the UNHRC undergoes substantial structural reform. Nothing short of this will come close to aligning the aspiration of advancing human rights with reality.

Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former military attorney and intelligence officer, is the Gary A. Kuiper Distinguished Professor of National Security Law and Director of the Center for International Legal Practice and National Security at South Texas College of Law, Houston, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy.

Originally published in The Algemeiner

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From movies to tell-all books, America loves its special operators. But a crushing pace of operations and an ever-expanding definition of what constitutes a “special operation” has spread Special Operations Forces far too thin, making it more important than ever to narrowly define SOF missions. President Joe Biden’s Interim National Security Guidance is an important step towards refocusing military policy from counterterrorism in the Middle East to strategic competition against China.

But issuing the interim guidance itself does not solve SOF’s problems. It is possible for Biden to create a smarter and more sustainable military footprint overseas, but strategic success requires adapting America’s model for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency while changing how it utilizes SOF.

Biden’s strategy for the Middle East seeks to “right-size our military presence to the level required to disrupt international terrorist networks, deter Iranian aggression, and protect other vital U.S. interests” so that America can redirect military resources toward increasingly dangerous threats like China.

After the historic shock of 9/11 attacks, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in the Middle East became the top challenges for American defense planners. Faced with terrorists or insurgents that quickly struck civilians and then hid amongst them, America’s leaders became enamored with special operations raids and drone strikes.

The US has tried to tear itself away from the “global war on terror” before, beginning with President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” that never materialized. Then came the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy and 2020 Irregular Warfare Annex that prioritized the Indo-Pacific. Now Biden’s strategic shift indicates that the primacy of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency within U.S. national security is ending.

However, withdrawing troops will neither end regional conflicts nor eliminate America’s exposure to terrorism. Demands for the unique capabilities SOF provide are not going to subside even as America draws down its boots-on-ground presence in the Middle East.

Going forward, it will be a challenge for the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) to balance ongoing counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations while also preparing to engage China and Russia in the legally and strategically murky “gray zone” between war and peace.

For much of the past two decades, special operators have functioned as an unconventional force supported by conventional forces, with SOF often in the leading role. Combat against near-peer forces would likely invert this relationship, requiring SOF to fulfill missions in support of the broader joint force, allies, and partners.

Sustainable Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency

Even if US forces withdraw from Afghanistan or the entire Middle East, terrorists are not going away. President Biden, therefore, intends to maintain some focus on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, even while downsizing military engagement in related conflicts. Adopting a model less focused on kinetic combat, and more focused on what’s affordable and sustainable for the long haul, will reduce the military’s role and contribute to better security outcomes. The 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism, which calls for “all available instruments of United States power to counter terrorism,” is a point of departure for the new administration’s own sustainable plan. SOF raids and airstrikes can garner outsized attention but also have an imperfect record of transparency. To best address the 9/11 commission’s troubling findings, the US should continue to develop its potent portfolio of non-military capabilities.

Diplomacy and National Counterterrorism Center analysis should shape counterterrorism and counterinsurgency programs, with civilian law enforcement and intelligence agencies often taking the lead. Policymakers must clearly define their priorities limiting efforts against only the terrorist groups most threatening to America, its interests, and its partners. A resource-sustainable strategy requires proactive collaboration, assigns clear roles to departments and agencies to avoid inefficient redundancy, and pushes partners and allies to take more ownership of global counterterrorism missions. Most importantly, a resource-sustainable counterterrorism model frees up ever-more Special Operations Forces to reorient against state actors and their proxies.

Adapting Special Operations Forces

Effectively countering China, Russia and other malign states requires policymakers to adapt the role of SOF. While narrowly focused counterterrorism and counterinsurgency will remain an enduring effort, SOF have not historically focused on these missions. Roger’s Rangers mastered indigenous-style raiding tactics in the Revolutionary War – what theorists today would call a “hybrid” conflict involving both guerrillas and regular forces, including Washington’s Continental Army and its French allies. President Kennedy authorized the Green Berets to counter Soviet-backed insurgencies, and one of SOF’s major Cold War roles was to prepare resistance movements in allied nations at risk of being occupied by Moscow. It was joint failures in 1980’s Iranian hostage rescue attempt and superficial success in 1983’s invasion of Grenada that built momentum behind USSOCOM’s creation — not terrorism.

Only after 9/11 did SOF become fully absorbed with “direct action” raids against terrorists and insurgents, as USSOCOM became the supported command in the global war on terror, rather than a supporting element in a primarily conventional campaign. The military services are most adept inside the box of conventional operations, but SOF core activities will be indispensable to successful future campaigns across the spectrum of conflict. Last month, lawmakers acknowledged this by creating a new sub-committee to oversee SOF.

Reducing CT activities will improve SOF capacity to compete below the level of armed conflict, respond to crises, recover kidnapped Americans, and build readiness for war in a highly contested and disordered operating environment.

To prepare for strategic competition, America needs to adapt its counterterrorism and counterinsurgency missions. SOF will be vital in operations against China and Russia while remaining crucial against enduring threats in the Middle East. Bluntly, there is no war the U.S. military can win without effective Special Operations Forces.

Lt Col Stewart “PR” Parker is a Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) 2020 U.S. Military Leaders Program participant and is currently assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command. Ari Cicurel is a Senior Policy Analyst at JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy.

Originally published in Breaking Defense

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