Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to have found the formula that will allow the IDF the fighting time needed to fully eradicate Hamas. All this rests on the basic principle of unprecedented determination and unity on the part of the IDF and public opinion not to stop the operation in Gaza until Hamas is eliminated. The method is to condition a ceasefire – also not final – on the release of the hostages; Allow local pauses of one hour or some allotted time (in fact, Secretary of State Blinken also failed on the issue of pauses); and Netanyahu's assertion in an interview with ABC News that Israel will retain security responsibility in Gaza indefinitely. This is an umbrella that, if adhered to by the cabinet, would allow the IDF to end the operation, for which it was clear that several months were needed.
The Americans themselves are meeting Israel's formula with spokesman John Kirby's statement this week that "obviously no matter what it looks like there [in Gaza] until October 6, it can't look like it did until October 6." This means that Hamas must be neutralized. Military, governmental, however it is defined. On the other hand, the discourse that developed this week about the "day after" with Yair Lapid leading the PA party as the ruling force that will succeed Hamas is really early. The statements made by Lapid and his colleagues are nothing more than a reflection of the position of the American administration.
Meanwhile, the strength and success of the IDF in the fighting in Gaza City add confidence to the political leadership. If the failure of October 7 is worse than that of '73, then the IDF's recovery and operational success vis-à-vis Hamas are the big difference compared to the Yom Kippur War. Because in '73 the initial surprise continued into operational stagnation with many failures, frustrations and enormous casualties; And in the end, victory without victory. If it is possible to enter the heads of the political and military leadership today, it is clear that they see momentum and a cumulative force that wants to exhaust itself in Lebanon. Make a perfect makeover. But the Americans are already negotiating "almost" directly with Hezbollah, through the head of Lebanese intelligence. They are apparently talking about releasing a certain type of abductees, while at the same time intending to weaken Israel's leadership.
IDF forces on the Lebanese border, photo: Reuters
The Biden administration is looking for threads that will enable it to get along with the Democratic Party, which is divided internally around Israel. It's a piece of cleft. When your base, which is the Wookist left, screams in the squares that Israel must be eliminated and in rallies sponsored by socialist democrats celebrate the October 7 massacre, while centrist and liberal voters in the party are supporters of Israel, the leadership is in big trouble. So much so that Alan Dershowitz wrote an article in which he argued that the virulent anti-Israel hatred of the left is likely to cause millions of Jews to flee to the Republican Party.
So they talk about pauses and "settler violence." As far as international public opinion is concerned, Israel passed a serious hurdle when an attack to assassinate a senior Hamas figure and several terrorists killed several dozen more in Jabaliya. Israel's military and propaganda momentum is such that such an event has not left its mark, certainly not inside Israel. The other sign that arouses suspicion among the Americans is that at the same time as the ground operation was launched, Israel suddenly launched a very aggressive campaign to oust the prime minister. What happened? Netanyahu is merely leading the campaign with Gantz, Galant and Lt. Gen. Halevy in a successful manner that is different from anything we have known in the past, since '73, through Olmert and Halutz's faltering war in 2006. Only the grief and pain will not leave everyone who breathed on 7 October.
For the appearance of déjà vu
Thoughts that come up here and there about "encouraging emigration" or waves of refugees from Gaza are raw material for Hamas. Still, it's interesting to recall that we used to be in this movie
As part of the talk and talk that accompanies the ideas of "the day after," Ram Ben-Barak, from Lapid's party, suddenly brought up the old idea of encouraging voluntary emigration of Gaza refugees. When talking about weapons of mass destruction, hopeless masses of residents are like material in the hands of Hamas. In the past, there was talk of transfer on the extreme right. But Israel really once initiated a project in the spirit of what Ben-Barak proposes. I heard about it firsthand from a friend who used to be a senior official in the Foreign Ministry.
The person who initiated the voluntary transfer was Prime Minister Levi Eshkol after the Six-Day War. This was published in the past with partial information in two articles in Haaretz. This former foreign service friend was surprised that the story had been published, and that it was no longer secret.
Documentation: Gazans make their way south | IDF Spokesperson
"I took testimony from someone who dealt with this issue, it was at the request of a close aide of Menachem Begin (when he was prime minister). I gave the testimony in a written document, without a signature. I know that Eshkol appointed a team headed by an officer with the rank of colonel, one of the team members was police officer Shlomo Ben Elkana. He was the one who gave me the details, I drove to his house," the former official said.
"I told him I was an employee of the Prime Minister's Office, and if he was willing to talk to me. He sat for a long hour and I wrote down. The main issues I remember: Eshkol decided after the war that Israel had accepted too many Arab residents under its rule. All this when it was clear that there was no deportation. This is not an option; residents must be persuaded to leave the Gaza Strip of their own good will. It means 'inviting' them to countries of immigration when that country provides three components: work, housing and education. As far as whoever it is relevant is concerned, they had to give up property here. There were those who sold property that wasn't theirs, and the authorities didn't know how to check it. In any case, they went mainly to Paraguay. We gave the staff who handled it Paraguayan passports, so that they left the country when they were already Paraguayan citizens. There have been other countries involved in this issue, such as Costa Rica. It was run by two travel agents, one Jewish in Tel Aviv, the other Arab in Haifa.
"I don't remember the number of departures; Several thousand came out. After a while, precisely when it began to succeed, suddenly this project was finished. The staff member who spoke to me hinted that there was some corruption here." The former Foreign Ministry official says the murder of an Israeli embassy employee in Asunción, Edna Pe'er, in May 1970 is directly linked to this migration operation. The murder is defined as an attack by two Fatah terrorists. "But it was a case where one of the Gaza migrants came to Paraguay, and things there in terms of work were not orderly. He got a gun and entered the embassy, looked for the ambassador, and eventually killed Edna Pe'er. She was one of the first to be killed in the Foreign Service."
Churchill and the Refuseniks
The British prime minister believed that the rejectionist controversy that shook Britain was well absorbed into the consciousness of Nazi Germany. Hitler was convinced that the French did not want to fight either
In 1933, the famous public debate took place at Oxford University, in which students voted overwhelmingly in favour of refusal. The so-called "polemic of the king and the fatherland". The message pointed out by the students at the event was that "we will not report for the service of the king and the homeland." This was in the midst of the wave of pacifism that attacked England in the aftermath of World War I.
Winston Churchill, Photo by GettyImages
Winston Churchill wrote after World War II how Japan and Nazi Germany recorded the events of insubordination in the Oxford Polemic. This changed their thinking about Britain, and Hitler began to see British society as "decadent, degenerate. The Oxford debate changed many of the calculations of Germany and Japan (about war)." Churchill argued that the debate and its outcome encouraged some of Hitler's actions. But the student whim did not, in the eyes of the British warlord, diminish the responsibility of the Conservative Party, which throughout the years largely supported the policy of appeasement that reached its peak under Chamberlain.
When Adolf Hitler took the time after Poland's defeat to plan an attack on France in 1940, his generals were very concerned about the large French army, with its air advantage and armor, which was partly more advanced than the Germans. Hitler ruled: The French don't want to fight. He got this feeling from the fact that France had not attacked for nearly a year, from the subversion of the Communist Party, from the reduction of defense budgets, and especially from General Gamelen, who had developed a specialty in wines and a special sensitivity to singing.
No permission to compare
While the entire Jewish people are preoccupied with the horrors that brought Jews back to the days of pre-Zionism and pre-statehood, the gatekeepers of Holocaust remembrance reject the comparison
It began with Danny Dayan pointing out the surprising observation that not everything is the Holocaust. The matter will need to be investigated further. Then the Chairman of Yad Vashem was filled for a moment with holy wrath with comic overtones. While the entire Jewish people is preoccupied with the horrors that brought the Jews back to the days of pre-Zionism and pre-statehood, something taken from Ukraine in 1919 and the Holocaust, and the streets of the United States, Britain, Germany and France are engulfed in flames of anti-Semitism, Danny Dayan grabs the little boy in the neighborhood, Gilad Erdan, and scolds him for wearing the yellow star at the United Nations. So too does the giants of the spirit of the past, Prof. Anita Shapira.
His name is Nissim Greenberg. He did not end the war as he appears in the picture as a handsome warrior. He fought as a soldier in combat engineering in the Suez Canal sector and was severely wounded. After recovering, he wanted to return to combat service. "He was a kind of Hercules," his daughter told me, but later his life was filled with trauma and suffering
This week he received an interview, apparently by invitation, on the radio, because Yad Vashem remains mute, while prestigious institutions around the world are required to make a moral statement. We understood from him that preparatory classes are not the Warsaw ghetto. But all in all, his main talk was once again to target the Holocaust and avoid any comparisons and associations. He regretted a sack. Cetnik took from him the phrase "another planet" regarding Hamas' actions. But Danny Dayan ends up keeping the Holocaust in his safe, as if it were the family's jewelry.
Lost generation
Mishnah: This week I discovered by chance the identity of the '73 fighter who appeared on the cover of my book. He was wounded in the war, and later died at an early age. But his daughter has an important message
50 years ago, at the height of the Yom Kippur War, "In the Camp" photographer Avi Simhoni took a portrait of a soldier on the front writing home. The postcards from the front are a phenomenon taken from another era. In the reality of today's front in Gaza, Israel Post decided to relaunch a project of "Postcards from the Front". There have been requests from the field, the postmen claim.
To promote the idea, they chose the same photograph from that October, in '73. I was interested in this for one reason. This is the same photograph of a soldier that was printed on the cover of the book "The Lost Generation" (Yedioth Books), which I wrote about the Yom Kippur War. The person who helped me look for photographs for the book at the time was Gabriella Weissman, who was responsible for the collection of photographs in the IDF archives a decade ago. I was looking for a picture that would reflect the period without the usual war icons. The picture of the soldier writing home caught my eye, because like mythological photographs from 67 or '1973, I saw in the face of the soldier with frizzy hair the image of the soldiers of <>.
I never thought who this soldier was. This week, after they put me in touch with his family, I spoke with his daughter, Gilat. Behind his character there is a whole world, there is a very specific character. His name is Nissim Greenberg. He did not end the war as he appears in the picture as a handsome warrior. He fought as a soldier in combat engineering in the Suez Canal sector and was severely wounded. After recovering, he wanted to return to combat service and joined an armored reconnaissance battalion in the north. He died at the relatively young age of 47. Gilat told me on the phone that she was glad that her late father Nissim was commemorated like this, after everything he had been through.
"He was a kind of Hercules, as if omnipotent. That's how his friends described him," she said, "He really loved the country and wanted to fight." During the war, his first son was born, and he managed to return to the alliance and immediately returned to battle. "But later in life was full of frustration and anger towards the authorities," Gilat said. In fact, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and shell shock. He lives with a lot of medication. He did not acknowledge his mental state, denied the state of shock. "The soul remembers the trauma," Gilat said, "His life was accompanied by sadness, shame and fear. The real war was with the rehabilitation department and the medical committees."
If Gilat has any message to convey, it's about the treatment of shell shock. She joins several serious people who testified that the IDF in the years after the Yom Kippur War was just beginning to learn how to deal with the phenomenon. Moti Ashkenazi said at the time that he intuitively felt something like this developing between soldiers in his company, and his first action as company commander was to keep the company together after they left the front. Nissim Greenberg was undoubtedly a late victim of the Yom Kippur War. His story was not found in the secret protocols released this year.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us