Israel's withdrawal from Gaza echoes in US withdrawal of Afghanistan - opinion

The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza removed 8,500 Israeli citizens and soldiers from the enclave. Twenty-one Jewish communities within the Gaza strip were uprooted. The final resting place of those Israelis buried within the Strip proved to be anything but final, as their bodies were exhumed for reburial inside Israel; the loss felt by those by whom they were mourned renewed. Synagogues were razed and the agricultural infrastructure used by Jewish communities in the Strip to make the desert bloom and to attain self-reliance were smashed by Palestinian-Arabs hell-bent on pursuing perennial reliance on the international community and wanton self-immiseration; to be weaponized against the Jewish state.

The government that oversaw Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza failed to provide appropriate housing, employment or compensation to too many displaced Jews who needed to rebuild their broken lives. Unilateral withdrawal, a gambit served up by a prime minister of the Israeli right and feted by many on the left as one that would grant Israel greater international approval – a naive hope if ever there was one – fashioned a permanent rend within Israeli society. No international legitimacy followed. No domestic consensus was forged. 

Some gambit. 

This commemoration of the disengagement coincides with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the scenes resulting from that policy are internalized and judgment best rendered by Americans, it is appropriate to highlight those aspects of unilateral withdrawal that are particular to the state and the citizens of Israel, contrasting as they are with the experiences of most democracies, with a view to ensuring that even as others may have the luxury of pursuing such a policy, Israel has no such option.

Typically, when democracies withdraw from a stronghold, the majority of their civilians observe the fallout from afar. The home front is rarely impacted directly. When Israel withdraws, its conscripted military, its citizen-soldiers and its home front feel the effects of withdrawal in their daily lives, for years and generations to come. The folly of unrequited concessions for peace reverberates in Israeli backyards and living rooms; literally and figuratively.

Israel’s unilateral withdrawal tilled the very soil that once stymied terror into a fertile launchpad for hostilities against the Jewish state. By negotiating no pact of peace with its enemy, Israel entreated all manner of aggression, particularly the rocketing of its communities. In the little more than three years between the disengagement and Operation Cast Lead (2008), the number of Israeli citizens living with steady rocket bombardment rested at one million, including residents of Beersheba, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Netivot.

Today, despite three additional defensive operations by the IDF against Gazan terror, Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014) and Operation Guardians Of The Walls (2021), the reach of those rockets has dramatically increased. Added to the aforementioned population centers are areas as far north as Haifa. Jerusalem – the city so ‘sacred’ to Hamas that they fire rockets toward it deliberately and indiscriminately – is regularly targeted, as are the cities in the Dan bloc, including Tel-Aviv. 

Reprehensibly, it is only once those rocket barrages fall in the greater Tel Aviv area that the IDF stirs in any meaningful way. Absent that, successive Israeli governments have decreed Israel’s citizens of the South be little more than the “Jews” of the Jewish state – a separate collective sentenced to suffer a double standard; overlooked and ignored. At the time of this writing, rockets were again fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli civilians there. 

Over five million Israeli citizens, two-thirds of the Jewish population of the Jewish state, now face a reality wherein terrorist organizations determine the timing and intensity of when they will be terrorized. Were that dynamic superimposed onto an American map, if the US began absorbing rocket fire from her eastern flank, all states up to Colorado and all citizens therein, would find themselves in the firing line. 

Also particular to Israel is that the price of wrong-headed policies is paid not by professional men or women-at-arms who elect to join the military, but by its civilians and its citizen-soldiers. 

The IDF certainly benefits from exceptional professional officers, but the bulk of its wartime manpower is made up by its reservists. These are men and women who serve as conscripts and then continue to report for annual duty as part of the social contract. They are proud to do so. If called to war, however, with all of its attendant dangers, those wars should be as swift and overwhelming to the enemy as possible, in pursuit of a clear strategic outcome.

A smudging of that social contract emerged when the term “mowing the lawn” was coined by Israeli strategists some years ago to describe policy toward Gaza. The term was applauded for its pithiness and wisdom. But neither the phrase nor the policy it describes were ever wise and the subject matter is ill-suited to cheap sloganism. 

The reservists mobilized to carry out the policy are Israel’s professionals and entrepreneurs. They are Israel’s fathers and mothers. Only utterly detached governments could view a policy that drafts such individuals from their boardrooms to the battlefield – with a frequency more intense than that of World Cup soccer tournaments – as reasonable. 

Drafting the same individuals to face down the same enemy with the same lack of conclusion; who return from the battlefield escorted by the same foreboding sense that they will soon return to the same fray within the coming few years is not a serious policy. Men and women, drafted by the tens of thousands, cannot be asked to place their lives on the line in pursuit of “mowing the lawn,” a clear legacy of the disengagement. 

The author was drafted into two such inconclusive campaigns. He has no wife and no children and so listened carefully to the conversations of his fellow reservists as they wished their first child goodnight in 2012 and their second child the same in 2014. These men have too much at stake to be disrupted so dramatically, as do those who await their return from combat. 

STRATEGISTS OFTEN argue that the pursuit of conclusive military outcomes requires large-scale campaigns that yield large-scale casualties. As a result, the still only effective method of destroying terror organizations, a sustained incursion by the ground forces, is avoided at almost any cost. Witness again the sullying of the social contract. It is the task of the military to defend the citizenry, not the other way around. Since the disengagement, Israel’s citizenry has borne increasingly more of the brunt of what emanates from the Gaza Strip and they have been designated to do so in order to spare the military. The appropriate dynamic has been inverted and must be righted once more. 

All military casualties are painful, but a ground force as casualty-averse as Israel’s has become, risks no longer being a ground force at all. Gradually, it will become something of a police force, best used in matters of law enforcement, not in war fighting. The IDF has long traded on the power of deterrence. Yet where Gaza is concerned, it is clear that not only has Israel lost much of its deterrence – tragically it is Israel that has now become deterred. 

Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza provided Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad with the space and time to expand, plan and execute. Israel’s weakest enemy has evolved into a strategic threat. A game Hamas, if joined by Hezbollah or another, will stress test to the maximum Israel’s ability to defend herself on two fronts simultaneously. 

Many invoke the disengagement as evidence that Jewish populations in Judea and Samaria may also be uprooted in exchange for a viable peace. Such opinions ought to be viewed askance. They ignore the lessons of the past and of the present. Far more congruent with the consequences of the Gaza withdrawal is the realization that unilateral withdrawal has not and will not work. Repeating the errors of Gaza in Judea and Samaria will simply repeat and expand the list of crises Israel faces. It’s societal rift will deepen and likely turn violent. Vacated territory will become a larger hotbed for terror. Israel’s main population areas will be not at the furthest limits of its enemy’s firepower but in the near ground and when Israel defends itself, it will garner only greater international criticism, sanction and censure; and it will have to draft ever more of its citizens to fight the same conflict against a never-changing enemy. 

Some speak of the demographic threat to Israel to justify further withdrawal. Even if real, such an eventuality is far from upon Israel. Israel would be wiser to avoid present kinetic threats than to pursue policies that defer to perceived threats that may never actualize. Rejecting further concessions would be a good first step. 

How to resolve Gaza is unclear. But one teaching from Israel’s experience that must be internalized by all is that the policy of unilateral, territorial concession is unworthy of consideration. It merely lays the ground for engagement with a bolder, better equipped and more proximate enemy; one that will harass and harm Israel for as long as the Jewish state exists. What other democracies do, Israel shall not emulate. 

The author is the co-founder and CEO of the MirYam Institute. Follow his work at www.MirYamInstitute.Org