Hillel Frisch is professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University, Israel and former Senior Researcher in the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies. Amongst his latest studies are “Rethinking the “Arab Spring”: Winners and Losers,” Middle East Quarterly (2021) “The Palestinian Military, Two Not One,” Oxford Handbook on Military and Security Studies (2021), “Jordan and Hamas,” Handbook on Jordan, 2019, and “Assessing Iranian Soft Power in the Arab World from Google Trends,” The Journal for Interdisciplinary Middle Eastern Studies 2019.
Analysis of Google searches shows Israel has greater freedom of action than it may imagine in view of the focus on the potential regional ramifications of the conflict between Israel and Iran over the Palestinians and Gaza.
An analysis of Hezbollah casualties indicates that it relies on recruitment from the Shiite periphery and faces difficulty recruiting fighters from Dahiya and Greater Beirut, where most of the Shiite population resides. Therefore, Israel must crush the periphery and cause further migration to the Beirut area.
U.S. officials and former IDF commanders argue that technological measures could replace the need for an IDF presence along the Gaza-Egyptian border to prevent future arms smuggling by Hamas. However, past experiences, including the events of October 7, clearly demonstrate the fallacy of this claim.
Paradoxically, the more Israel pummeled Gaza, the vaster and deeper Hamas’ tunneling network became, thanks to cement, the paste that makes concrete possible and which is siphoned from civilian reconstruction. Israel must defeat Hamas and ensure that cement is used to enhance human welfare rather than terrorism.
President Biden’s veto on an Israeli victory over Hamas severely undermines his two-state strategy based on the creation of an Israeli-Arab state alliance against Iran and its proxies. An Israeli defeat and a Hamas victory will drive Saudi Arabia and Egypt to ally with Iran with disastrous political and humanitarian consequences.
Since 2002, we have seen repeatedly in Judea and Samaria, and again in 2005 with the disengagement from Gaza how going on the offense pays off, while containment in the hope of stability results in massive losses in lives and resources to the point of threatening Israel’s very existence. A comparison of eight months of war in the north and the south have hammered home this lesson once again.
The United States should desist from insisting that the end game of Israel’s war against Hamas focus on Gaza’s future. Failure to support Israel in dealing with Iran and its proxies as its end game might mean the difference between a stable Middle East led by US allies or an Iran-controlled region embedded in the competing axis.
Watch the recording of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center zoom event that took place October 30, 2023.
Given the very small dimensions of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, Hamas’ claims of around 500 deaths and a similar number of wounded cannot possibly be true. Such fake news fits squarely with overall casualty figures provided by the Hamas-dominated Ministry of Health during the conflict.
Security fears of the last 10 days of Ramadan are hardly justified. Ramadan has hardly been the most violent month in the past, and the last 10 days are not necessarily the most violent of the month. Conceding to this fear out of tactical considerations of an overburdened Israeli police does not justify the strategic costs that impinge on Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount and its capital.
Netanyahu has developed an explicit doctrine of war avoidance in preparation for total war should Iran achieve nuclear breakout. That explains his many concessions on the Palestinian and Lebanese fronts. Paradoxically, Iran is on the same wavelength in bolstering the missile siege around Israel. Will Netanyahu be flexible to change the doctrine in the event the missile siege around Israel becomes more threatening than the Iranian nuclear threat?
Israeli officials and the media continuously warn about the dangers of the upcoming Ramadan, on the assumption that Palestinians are more violent during that period. However, this assumption is highly problematic in analyzing the data on Palestinian violence during Ramadan compared with the rest of the year.
