Israel’s military has a crisis even if it refuses to admit it

 

Credit: Al Jazeera

By James M. Dorsey

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Israel’s once-vaunted military faces an uncertain future.

Not just because the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is set to judge Israel's Gaza war conduct and the issuance by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of arrest warrants for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

But also due to assertions that the military is unable or unwilling to enforce discipline, questioning of the military’s capacity to investigate itself, a long-held US-supported holy grail of the military’s self-perception as “the world’s most moral army,” and the rise of an officer corps infused by religious ultra-nationalism.

In addition, several recent books by Israeli veterans of the Gaza war belie the military’s moral claim and document the traumatic fallout of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, as well as 15 months of combat in the Strip.

Israelis, pointing to the military’s tactical successes in seriously weakening Hamas and Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, obliterating the Syrian military, and striking effectively at Iran and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, may dismiss international efforts to hold Israel and its military accountable as the product of a world that is fundamentally anti-Semitic.

That argument will not hold sway when, not if, Israel finally launches an inevitable inquiry into what led to the attack that sparked multiple wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, and Israeli strikes against Iran and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Mr. Netanyahu, who has refused to accept responsibility for the policy, intelligence, and operational failures that led to October 7, has successfully delayed an inquiry until the Gaza war ends.

The delay means Israel and its military have yet to be presented with the entire bill for their war conduct.

Already, the delay has contributed to Israel’s conviction in the international court of public opinion and the proceedings in international courts.

The violations of international legal norms evidenced by the targeting of hospitals, schools, and alleged ‘safe zones’ for Gaza’s largely displaced population, the selfies posted by Israeli military personnel on social media documenting their violations, obstruction of the flow into Gaza of humanitarian aid, and Israel’s refusal to negotiate an equitable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, make Israel’s condemnation in the international court of public opinion an open-and-shut case.

No doubt accurate Israeli assertions that Hamas embeds itself among Gaza’s civilian population and diverts some of the sparse humanitarian aid that makes it into the Strip fail to justify Israel’s war conduct and kill ratio.

Even so, rather than address the military’s structural problems and question a policy that produces escalating violence instead of security, Mr. Netanyahu and Israel’s political and military elite have placed an uncertain bet that President-elect Donald J. Trump will give them the rope they need to maintain business as usual.

Mr. Netanyahu and the elite are also betting that their sledgehammer strategy will reinforce the seemingly mounting Gazan rejection of Hamas. A recent opinion poll suggested that Hamas would lose any election in the Strip.

Palestinians pay an unconscionable price in death and destruction, while Israelis are only beginning to reaslise the cost of Mr. Netanyahu and the elite’s bet.

This week, a Brazilian court issued an arrest warrant for a visiting Israeli soldier on charges of Gaza war crimes, in an indication of what may be coming down the pike.

A Belgium-based group has filed similar complaints against Israel’s military attaché in Brussels and a soldier traveling in Sri Lanka.

Last month, the military warned dozens of soldiers against traveling abroad after some 30 soldiers who fought in Gaza had war crimes complaints filed against them.

Amos Harel, Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s military correspondent, argued that Israel’s current devastating siege and pounding of northern Gaza is the result of the military’s structural problems and the government’s failed policies, including its refusal to accept a ceasefire that would end the war.

The almost three-month-long siege of Jabaliya and its refugee camp “looks more like an operation done out of inertia… Without (a ceasefire) agreement, it's likely that the operation will spread to other parts of the northern Gaza Strip, involving a systematic removal of the civilian population from the entire region,” Mr. Harel said.

If anything, Mr. Harel argues that what he describes as inertia is the result of Israel’s failure to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas and creating space for a Palestinian administration of Gaza that would be subservient to Israel.

“Hamas controls the humanitarian aid supplies, making money off it and imposing its rule over most of the population. Its military recovery is limited, and at this point, it does not pose a real threat to communities along the Gaza border, despite a slight increase in the firing of rockets from the northern Gaza Strip,” Mr. Harel said.

Israeli media reported that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second major militia in Gaza, has expanded to as many as 23,000 men under arms, primarily new recruits,, contradicting government claims that the war had definitively decimated the group’s military rank and file.

Mr. Harel’s ‘inertia’ is a misnomer for a military that has been brutalised by more than half a century of occupation of Palestinian lands that is designed to humiliate, coerce, and intimidate and that recruits a significant segment of its officer corps from ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative government-subsidised pre-military religious schools run by militant rabbis.

Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vlach

A recent Haaretz investigation of Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach tells the story based on interviews with his subordinates, who were willing to speak out.

A graduate of the Bnei David pre-army preparatory yeshiva or religious seminary that at one point featured a quote on its wall by one of its instructors, Rabbi Joseph Kalner, charging that “all secular Jews are traitors, and the state can do anything to sanction them, including putting a bullet through their head,” Mr. Vach commands the military’s 252nd division.

The investigation described how Mr. Vach has so far gotten away with setting his own goals and rules of engagement in Gaza in violation of official government policy and the military’s rules and codes.

The investigation exposed the arbitrariness and banality with which soldiers under his command killed Palestinians because “there are no innocents in Gaza.”

Moreover, he has sought to remove some 250,000 Palestinians from northern Gaza on the principle that “only by losing land will the Palestinians learn the necessary lesson.”

To be sure, in doing so, he may be adhering to an undeclared government policy.

Mr. Vlach enlisted his brother, Col. (res.) Golan Vach, the commander of the military’s Pladot Heavy Engineering Equipment unit, populated by young ultra-nationalist, vigilante West Bank settlers, often described as hilltop youth.

Col. Vlach’s unit "was a team of soldiers and civilians who look like hilltop youth. The force's sole objective was to demolish Gaza," one officer said.

Furthermore, Gen. Vlach advised his troops to harass humanitarian aid convoys to ensure that trucks would not enter northern Gaza in support of a population subjected to inhuman conditions.

 

Israeli politicians reinforce the inclinations of the influential ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative segment of the military’s officer corps.

This week, coalition members of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee called on Defense Minister Israel Katz to order the destruction of all sources of water, food, and energy in northern Gaza to ensure Hamas' defeat.

In a letter to Mr. Katz, the lawmakers asserted that the siege of northern Gaza does “not enable achieving the war objectives as defined by the government, which is the dismantling of Hamas' governing and military capabilities."

The lawmakers demanded that the military kill anyone moving in northern Gaza and elsewhere in the Strip who "doesn't come out with a white flag."

The Vlach brothers are but one example of the military’s failure to enforce discipline,  adheree to international and Israeli military norms, and credibly investigate violations.

Last year, media investigations revealed that the military was using Palestinians as human shields to protect soldiers and inspect suspected booby-trapped tunnels.

Israel repeatedly justifies its targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by asserting that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields by embedding itself in civilian infrastructure.

Credit: Btselem

At the time, the military said it banned the use of human shields and was investigating alleged incidents.

This month, Mr. Harel, the Haaretz correspondent, reported that the military continued to use human shields.

The list of military investigations called into question by critics goes on and on.

An anthropologist, Lt. Col. (res.) Asaf Hazani described in the latest book by Israeli veterans of the Gaza war soldiers’ insensitivity to the Palestinians’ plight through the “insane gaze” in some of their eyes. The book focuses on the early stages of the war.

Many of the soldiers were traumatised by the carnage they encountered on October 7 in the wake of the Hamas assault on Israeli communities bordering on Gaza and the subsequent fighting in urban areas of the Strip.

Asaf Hazani’s book, s as "One Way or Another the Sword Shall Devour – Anthropology in War: A Field Diary."

Mr. Hazani said it was "as if a thin veil covered their eyes. ... They looked through you. The main point is that those eyes don't allow interaction... That gaze can explain both Israel's insensitivity to the suffering in Gaza and the aggressive method of war adopted by the IDF," the Israel Defence Forces, Mr. Hazani said.

He added that the war "challenges us on the question of the limits of what is human, ours and theirs."

The military reported this week that 28 soldiers had committed suicide since October 7, 2023, a sharp increase compared to the two preceding years. The military further said that thousands of reservists had stopped serving in combat roles due to mental stress.

Mr. Hazani suggested that Israel’s insistence on continuing the Gaza war was not just a result of Mr. Netanyahu’s prioritization of his personal interest to salvage his political hide but also of a traumatised military. A prolonged war offers many soldiers an escape.

In one instance, Mr. Hazani describes a unit that insisted on remaining active because the one time the unit took a break since October 7, the soldiers "lost it. … (their) options are to escape into carrying out missions or to go crazy."

Mr. Hazani dates Israel’s failure to achieve its war goals to the period after the six-day ceasefire in November 2023.

“The fighting in Gaza started to look like…a long-term occupation, only bloodier. The friction with the population increased, and with it the enemy's actions. The enemy, whom we didn't encounter in the first stage and was described as contemptible or despicable, became a professional adversary that exploited our weak points and waged guerrilla warfare," Mr. Hazani said.

It's a reality that Israel risks confronting for years to come. The Gaza war highlights the toll it has already taken on the military and Israel itself.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.