214 - Winning Wars Demands Consummate Leadership: Can Israel Meet the Challenge?
Ukraine's Leadership Succeeds
Just wars are won by leaders as well as whole nations, their militaries, their munitions makers, and their propagandists. Those requirements are especially acute when winning an information war is as important and decisive as winning a shooting war. That is why the existential struggles in Ukraine and Israel so mightily depend on qualities of leadership. Victory means mobilizing internal combat abilities as well as external support and acceptance.
The Israeli and Ukrainian conflicts are dissimilar. In the second, a very large sometime world power with a massive army and air force invaded, unprovoked, a much smaller neighbor in order to satisfy imperial aggrandizing goals and a vain dictator’s distinctly personal ambitions. Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty and very survival.
In the first conflict, a smallish 9 million sized Jewish nation carved out of the old British Palestinian mandate and originally impelled by the Zionist urge to establish a homeland where, post-Holocaust, Jews from everywhere could be free and safe, was resting quietly on its laurels when Hamas leapt over barriers and slaughtered and abducted innocent Israel citizens from settlements just outside of the Gaza Strip. Palestinians had been crowded into the Strip and separated from the larger part of Palestine extending east to Jordan and north to Lebanon after Israel won bitter wars against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Arab world.
Both conflicts have terror at their cores: Hamas has always been a terroristic Palestinian movement financially and ideologically backed by Iran and opposed not only to Israel (and Jews) but also to the Palestine Liberation Organization that has long ruled the rest of Palestine and was party, under Yasir Arafat, to the Oslo Accord.
Putin is a terrorist, too, as his surprise invasion of Ukraine demonstrated. He had already (in 2014) taken Ukrainian land and millions of people in Luhansk and Crimea. Thus his 2022 invasion of the rest of Ukraine was just an extension of terror as much as the Hamas barbaric attack on its overweening and controlling neighbor was an act of absolute evil and terror.
Leadership quality becomes absolutely critical in situations such as those created by Putin and Hamas’ massacre of civilians (including women and children living in liberal kibbutzim) and the kidnapping of hostages. Clearly, making the anti-terror case for Ukraine is easier, and winning the information war against Russia also strikingly simpler. But even in the latter case, unusually excellent leadership qualities were and are required.
From the first hours of the Putin’s invasion, President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately established himself as a Churchillian leader of courage and integrity. Israel desperately needs those same leadership ingredients now.
Zelensky said he needed weapons, not an air ticket to safety. He rapidly represented the nature of a Ukraine that was not going to accept bullying by a much larger and more formidable power and would defend itself to the last partisan. He mobilized his inexperienced maquis and aroused the citizenry of Ukraine to mount a formidable resistance. Of equal importance, he was able by sheer force of character and by exuding integrity, to solicit support from the West, especially from the United States, Britain, Europe, and nearly all of NATO. Absent a Zelensky-like figure, all would have been lost.
In other words, structure and contingency were important in initially saving Ukraine from conquest and from Putin’s re-Sovietization initiative, but inspirational, believable, leadership of an uncommon kind was required. To this day, the kind of gifted leadership that Zelensky delivers remains absolutely essential in continuing to repulse the Russians and – much harder now – gaining substantial support from Washington and the rest of the West.
Progress in Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia has been slow this year. Both sides have lost and are losing hordes of men; Russia still manages to bombard Ukrainian cities behind the front lines with missiles and suicide drones. Ukraine has struck numerous retaliatory blows, but the battle to save Ukraine is now one enormous slog, like the Somme in World War I, with no end in sight. That makes Zelensky’s ability to keep winning the information war enormously trying. His leadership abilities are being tested daily and nightly as Ukraine slides into the second winter of its profound discontent.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has few of Zelensky’s talents. And there are no obvious Churchills waiting in the Israeli wings. Presidents Yitzhak Rabin and even Ariel Sharon led Israel forward, on behalf of the entire nation; we cannot be sure that Netanyahu – even now – is taking decisions for all of Israel so much as for himself. His only hope of redemption and of boosting Israel in the information war is to make a dramatic break with his recent personal capitulation to the extreme right-wingers within his cabinet. If he could bring himself to jettison cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and to promise the end of illegal settlements in the West Bank, he and today’s Israel might have a chance of altering the message that Israel’s long marginalization of Palestinians and the two-state solution has cost post-Rabin attempts to bring Israel in from the cold. President Biden is now trying to resuscitate that long lost forlorn two-state remedy for the Israeli-Palestinian nightmare.
Given bombings and massive casualties within the Gaza Strip, a reopening of Abraham Accords negotiations with Saudi Arabia and a strengthening of now threatened ties to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Morocco can also occur only when a Netanyahu or his successor reverses the anti-Palestinian and “Judah is ours” thrust of the Israeli state. After perpetrating hideous atrocities, Hamas would have reduced sympathy even among Arab nations and monarchies if Netanyahu and Israel could only reject the entirely hostile policies of its recent past. Netanyahu has been prime minister for sixteen years; to be equal to Israel’s contemporary and forever existential crisis, he needs to break with the maneuvers that have kept himself narrowly in power and out of court for all of these years. If only he were prepared to learn from Zelensky, Israel might be able both to annihilate Hamas and to emerge from the destruction of Gaza understood and tolerated, even if unloved.
If only...