A new peace will dawn on the Middle East between Israelis and Arabs
National Post, 21 April 2024
The time for fighting the last peace is over. The current fight — even amidst war — is for a new peace
“Israel failed.”
That was the blunt message of Naftali Bennett, the prime minister of Israel in 2021-2022 before Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the premiership. Addressing the Canada Strong and Free Networking conference in Ottawa, Bennett was scathing in his assessment of Israel’s intelligence, military, strategic and political failure before and after Oct. 7, 2023.
That is most noteworthy. Benny Gantz, a member of Netanyahu’s national unity cabinet, travelled to Washington last month against Netanyahu’s wishes to demonstrate that the prime minister does not even represent the entirety of his own war cabinet. Now his predecessor arrives in Ottawa, during wartime, to denounce, vine and branches, Netanyahu’s strategic and political program.
Bennett spoke the day before Iran launched its missile and drone strikes on Israel, but that was already expected. Commercial aircraft had already announced plans to avoid Iranian airspace due to the expected attacks.
The Iranian strikes were almost entirely intercepted. President Joe Biden advised the Israeli government to “take the win,” which did not go over well in all quarters. A trustworthy friend whose advice on strategic matters in Israel is always valuable, David Weinberg, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that Biden’s reported advice “is outrageous and dangerous nonsense.”
“Compounding his failure to deter Iran from directly attacking Israel,” Weinberg wrote. “Biden has now added to the potential further collapse of any deterrence against Iran by declaring that he seeks no confrontation with Iran and will not participate in any Israeli retaliatory strike at Iran. This is strategic insanity of grandiose proportions!”
“Take the win,” is infelicitous phrasing to an ally under attack, but Biden was not wrong to see positive elements in Saturday’s events. The attacks were repelled by Israel with support from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. That Arab countries would side in a military operation with Israel against Iran is no small thing.
America has been leading efforts to integrate military cooperation in the Middle East for many years. After the Abraham Accords in 2020, Israel was able to participate more directly in that integration. The fruit of that repelled the Iranian attack.
It is becoming ever more clear that the overarching strategic and diplomatic goal of Israel is to advance a new framework for the Middle East, not to become ever more fearsome in the old framework. Bennett’s criticism of Netanyahu is not from the old Israeli left, which is weak to non-existent now. It is from a new Israeli centre.
Bennett is on the “right” of Netanyahu in that he thinks Israel should have finished off Hamas in Rafah months ago. But he is to the “left” of Netanyahu when he argues that a humanitarian corridor should have been negotiated with Egypt in order to avoid progressing by pulverization only.
Generals are often said to be fighting the last war. Netanyahu is still fighting the last peace.
He was first elected prime minister in 1996 campaigning against the Oslo Accords. That was twenty-eight years ago and he has been insistent ever since that prosperity and security do not require peace with the Palestinians, much less a Palestinian state.
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