209 - Masterful Crisis Leadership Needed to Navigate Hamas' Elimination without Irreparable Damage to Israel

Doing Unto Others

            Israel’s existential crisis demands exemplary, magisterial, leadership. Can Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, much tarnished and compromised by catering to the “crazy” anti-Arab bigots to his far right, soar in this time of acute need to unaccustomed heights of leadership integrity? Nelson Mandela did so after emerging from decades of prison. Abraham Lincoln rose from obscurity to defeat separatist slaveholders.  Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted his destitute, despondent, citizens up from deepest despair.  Can Netanyahu thread the needle of responsible retaliation through the red eye of righteous revenge?

            “Listen to me,” Nelson Mandela told a fired-up mob of African antagonists anxious for enemy blood a year before South Africa’s independence from white domination. “I am your leader…I am going to give you leadership. As long as I am your leader, I will tell you, always, when you are wrong.” And so must Netanyahu seek Hamas’ elimination, but in a just form.

            Abraham Lincoln, amid the civil war that was tearing these supposedly United States asunder, and causing untold miserable deaths, proclaimed at Gettysburg that  “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln labored mightily to keep the nation together, with its founding ideals intact and slavery abolished.

Franklin D. Roosevelt urged Americans in the midst of perilous economic collapse to “fear only fear itself.”  “This is preeminently the time,” he said in his inaugural address in 1933, “to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly… I am convinced that..These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

            Cataclysmic crises demand extraordinary examples of uplifting and emboldening leadership. If none exist, opportunities are missed to provide new paths for an embattled and fearful citizenry. That is why Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has given such unifying and charismatic guidance to his people, bombarded daily by Russians.  Without his leadership—his ability to set the leadership bar very high – Ukrainians (and the West) will have lost heart and any appetite for resisting the Russian surge first toward Kyiv, today surrounding Avdiivka, continually from the air around Odesa, and everywhere along the eastern and southern borders of the front.

            Near Gaza, Hamas took horrific dastardly advantage of Israeli hubris and complacency, plus Israel’s misguided reliance on flawed electronic intelligence gathering technologies, to kill, rape, maim, and capture vulnerable Israelis (and Americans, Thais, Nepalis, et al) while they danced, slept, ran, and cowered. More Jews were massacred than in any single incident since the Holocaust. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken forthrightly declared on Saturday:  Israel’s retaliation is “legitimate” and necessary. President Biden called Hamas’ inflictions “absolute evil,” and promised to stand strongly with Israel as it sought to destroy Hamas so that no similar outrage could ever again recur.

            Can Netanyahu now rise above his thoroughly transactional and hitherto immensely self-serving governance postures to lead Israel both in its revenge against Hamas and its need to cleanse the region of any movements capable of murdering innocent Israelis?  Israel since Oct. 7, if not forever since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing fanatic in 1995, has endured decades of existential crises without its leaders – Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu (for sixteen years now) – being willing politically to address long-standing problems of sustainability.  Israel can only truly sustain itself as a land carved out of existing settlements by the exercise of military vengeance and wise and compassionate statesmanship.

            Is Netanyahu capable of rising to Rooseveltian, Lincolnesque, and Mandelan heights, and not rhetorically?  Can he lead his people and the rest of the world sensibly and strategically through this enormously fragile time of danger and destruction?

            Statesmanlike leadership –something akin to compassionate vengeance or a finely calibrated but potent reprisal -- has been lacking in the Middle East, especially in recent months when Netanyahu has tilted dramatically to the Mizrahi dark side in order to save himself and his own personal importance. By consorting for power with convicted criminals and other dubious characters of the Israeli extreme right, and by giving them major influence over policy results affecting the West Bank and Palestinians, Netanyahu sold his own and Israeli’s fundamental soul.  (His and their actions also eroded what was left of Israel [and Zionism’s] moral core.)

            Extirpating Hamas is a necessary goal. It is one that global public opinion appreciates. So does attacking Hamas in order to retrieve hostages.  Hopefully a (time-limited?) siege of Gaza, with the drastic cutting off of water, electric power, and new food supplies will also accomplish those primary goals. As Nicholas Kristoff articulated so well yesterday, Hamas has consistently put forward “weak and myopic leadership.” He also calls the Hamas militants not freedom fighters but “misogynist oppressors of their own people” who prevent Palestinians from advancing.

            But an indiscriminate pummeling of Gaza, with colossal collateral human damage, will hardly gain Israel the respect and applause it needs in this time of nakba – catastrophe. The UN and every global humanitarian organization has already condemned the compelled transfer southwards in Gaza of 1 million or more Arabs, forewarned of an Israeli ground assault. Enforced evacuation of hospitals has also been condemned.

            Hamas could forestall the most devastating impacts of Israel’s retaliatory assault of Gaza by releasing all of its hostages unharmed instead of hiding them in tunnels under Gaza City. Washington and other outsiders are attempting to reach Hamas to retrieve the hostages. But only intelligent maneuvers and statements by Netanyahu, on behalf of Israel, could propel such a result. Hamas is not apt to understand the Mandelan-like sensibility of letting go the hostages.

            Netanyahu can combine revenge with compassion by articulating the compelling moral as well as the strategic case for “eliminating” (his words) Hamas while simultaneously trying strenuously to spare ordinary Gazans so that they can in future live somewhere alongside Israel. The relentless massacring of ordinary non-politicized Gazans assuredly cannot create a future free from killing.  Netanyahu needs to give Gazans a path forward. In so doing, he can more easily win the battle against Hamas while keeping the Abraham accords alive and, laser-like, reminding the region and the world that Iran – the funder and wire puller of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis; the destabilizer of the Arab Gulf area: and the provider of drones for Russian use against Ukraine, is the key problem -- not Israel.

            Netanyahu has never previously demonstrated an ability to lead in ways that are now required and demanded if Israel is going survive and prosper. Nonetheless, just as Winston Churchill responded courageously and dramatically in the time of Britain and Europe’s greatest existential demands, so Netanyahu – if steadied and held personally close by former chief generals Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot, now members of his war cabinet – could become Churchillian.

            President Biden has tried, again with effective leadership, to steady and guide Netanyahu.  His leadership has been exemplary in this as in other crises. Behind the scenes he must lean even harder on Netanyahu.  He must encourage Netanyahu publicly to disavow his extremist anti-Palestinian cabinet colleagues and to seek to transform the war cabinet into a consensus operation. That will mean abandoning the attempt to dilute the powers of the Israeli judiciary (which almost lost him the services of innumerable military reservists) and attempting – a new role for Netanyahu – to unite Israel’s political left and right. Netanyahu needs to promise to backpedal on official support for illegal Jewish occupations throughout the West Bank.  He probably can articulate no certain path towards a two-state solution (abandoned by Yasir Arafat in 2000), but he needs to promise more even-handed assessments of Palestinian needs while still “eliminating” Hamas’ leadership hierarchy.

            The Economist advises “By clinging to its identity as a state that values human life, Israel becomes stronger.”  Too true, and too obvious. Will Netanyahu take note?

            These are all tough requirements for sustainable peace and stability.  But the terrible slaughter of untold thousands, the crippling of many more, and everyone’s humiliation, must be turned into better outcomes for all of the peoples in Israel-Palestine.  That is what exemplary leadership is for, especially in times now as existentially difficult as any Roosevelt, Lincoln, or Mandela ever encountered.