Current Affairs

Its hard to feel sorry for Netanyahu, he was warned repeatedly that Israel was breaking International Law, but did not do anything to manage the events happening in the West Bank or Gaza. You would expect a but at this point, but there isn’t one. The international community had warned Israel in a thousand different ways that they were going about this war in the wrong way, but instead Netanyahu fed off his own narrative – that if there was going to be a charge from international bodies, then it would feed into his last line of defence, which is that any outside actor that charged him with war crimes was anti-Semitic.

However, historians, politicians and diplomats who had warned the Prime Minister of Israel that the word anti-Semitism had become a “call” against those making an honest appraisal of the situation in Gaza, was at best weak. The accusation of anti-Semitism has become negated by an extreme who have used the language to justify slaughtering the innocent in both Gaza and the West Bank. The image Israel has today is probably at its most unsavoury for generations, but those defending the state have run out of arguments and fallen back on criticism as being anti-Semitic.

The Prime Minister arguing that the charges of war crimes against himself and the Defence Minister is of course anti-Semitism. But Netanyahu, has become just another voice in a throng of thousands who have used the excuse of anti Semitism as a reason to justify their actions.

Bassem Yousuf, the satirical and cynical Egyptian comedian has argued that the word anti-Semitism has lost its “power,” and argues that the encroaching army of Jewish supremacists who have used this expression has led to ridicule. Chuck Schumer, a staunch supporter of Israel and a practising Jew, has been branded an anti-Semite for a speech he made, which has led to questions of what is anti-Semitism? The failure of an extreme Jewish minority to manage their language is farcical and the inability of those arguing for absolutes and then being faced with a barrage of criticism, have only one answer for their critics – beggars belief.  

James Rosen Birch, writing in New Lines Magazine detailed all that could have gone wrong for the IDF, leading up to the October attack on Israel by Hamas. He argues that Israel’s inability to manage a conventional war was at the forefront of Israel’s failure to come to the rescue of soldiers and civilians who were either killed or taken hostage. The reliance of the IDF on technology and the political argument of the government to prioritise settler safety in the West Bank was key to the failure of the state to react to Hamas’ incursion in southern Israel. Further failures were realised by the governments over dependence on the latest electronic security architecture aimed at keeping Gaza a prison. All aspects of the failure stems from the states over reliance on technology and these failures were compounded by bureaucratic cuts to the armies budget, so much so, that the army did not have the resources to move troops to the front line.

Where Israel goes from here is worrying for the state. It has lost a lot of its mystique that it is a young dynamic power that could be an engine to new military technology. The reliance of the state on advanced technology and the technicians who created the defences that imprisoned the Gazan’s, had corrupted the ability of the army to fight a conventional war. For the past thirty years the army had not fought a conventional war and had been fighting a police action, which is mainly centred on the West Bank. Its intelligence bugged homes and made certain that all communication was routed through an Israeli exchange. The failure of the state to manage its intelligence and intelligence assets was undone by its over reliance on technology, because the Israeli state had been caught in a number of stings by Hamas, which exposed the techniques of those gathering intelligence. But the main reason for Israel’s failure to gather the intelligence of Hamas’ operation against Israel, was Israel’s inability to believe that Hamas could learn from Israel’s own statecraft in intelligence.

Of course there are a number of other reasons that Israel had failed to manage its response in Gaza, but the political arguments have been deafening from the government. Instead of state craft, there has been blanket shelling and bombing of Gaza. AI has played a large part in the indiscriminate targeting of the civilians in Gaza; whether it is monitoring telephones or just profiling the Gazan population, there has been a failure to realise that the interconnectivity of the enclave, which left the Palestinian women and children vulnerable to the AI approach used. Israel’s over reliance on a digital platform has led to the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the much famed telephone calls to evacuate have become confused with the targeting of Hamas targets, which has led to mass casualties of women and children.

Starvation has been a key argument of the Israeli government, their arguments at the beginning of the war to “not provide the Gazan’s a damn thing,” has been compounded by Israel’s blocking of aid to the enclave. Israel now controls the Rafah crossing, which has closed down the main route for aid to get into Rafah. Further aid entering Gaza has been subject to settlers vandalising the produce that aid trucks are taking into Gaza. The Palestinians in Gaza have been starved of food, water and electricity, which has led to the statement coming from the ICC that Israel is complicit in war crimes. The UN in Rafah have closed down their main humanitarian relief hub, as they did not have the resources to feed the Palestinian population.   

Sanad is a verification service used by Al Jazeera, it found that 24 hospitals were either damaged or had been put out of use. Mass graves at the hospitals have been found and this itself challenges the Israeli narrative that they are fighting a moral war with the utmost care. Other arguments can be found about the savagery of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and that is the destruction of schools and universities throughout the strip, whether UN run or otherwise. Reports of torture have been circulating since the start of the war and a special BBC report into the barbaric conditions that Gazan’s found themselves in hospitals as prisoners, has led to amputations and deaths. The report that Dr Adnan al Bursh, (a surgeon who would not leave his patients), had been held by Israel since December, had died in Israeli custody, which has shaken the international community around the world.

Though Ian Bremmer argues that Netanyahu has been elected and the war crimes themselves cannot be categorised in the same way as Hamas’, who have also been named in the ICC report. the difference is that the language both sides have used has been interpreted as genocidal, and the damage that has been done by both sides to civilians, does need to be questioned. This makes Netanyahu, Gallant, Yahawa Sinyar and Haniyeh complicit in a war that is ugly, there is a call for a warrant to be released and ultimately a case brought against the main protagonists in this war.

Senior officials from the US administration, including the secretary of state, the national security adviser, and the CIA director, have all visited Israel and warned Netanyahu that they opposed Israel’s determination to use starvation as a a tool of war. If the Biden administration are arguing with the Israeli leader during election season, their arguments have fallen on deaf ears in the Israeli cabinet, who have continued their blockade of aid coming into Gaza. Though Russia, Israel and USA are not members of the ICC, it does carry some weight and the inability of the Israeli inner sanctum to listen to the advice coming from a key ally, is also a realisation that Israel has to find a means to fight this war in a more conventional way.

Netanyahu, is in trouble, his inability to manage a war that has been damaging for the state and the arguments that the state faces, is falling on deaf ears. His inability to temper the emotional outcome has led to a less nuanced approach that could have led to an outcome that found an argument that the world would support. The once highly thought of Israeli military machine has been compromised by its inability to manage this war successfully and the intelligence failures of the state have compounded the states ability to manage the initial failures of intelligence, with the failure of the state today to manage the outcome of this war. That Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been named in the ICC report is itself a realisation that Israel has over stepped its remit and failed to manage a crisis with a modicum of deftness, that the state and Netanyahu have fallen back on the argument that Israel is facing an anti-Semitic world that just does not understand a conflict that has been going on for seventy years, beggars belief.