Between Hamas and Israel - most Americans support Israel. But woe to us if we can call it an achievement. One-fifth of Americans support Hamas, a terrorist organization no different in essence from Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Is this a reason to celebrate? It's a reason to worry. And if we don't wake up, this could be just the tip of the iceberg.
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It's somewhat strange that this is the achievement Benjamin Netanyahu boasts about. He, of all people, was considered one of the greatest minds when it comes to American politics and U.S. Jewry. He lived there for years. He was American in every sense of the word.
He knows that the unwritten alliance between the U.S. and Israel exists not only due to interests but also due to common values. He knows that beyond all of the disputes, which no one doubt exist, after October 7, the U.S. proved that it was not only Israel's ally but its savior.
Yes, our situation was bleak. A terror organization had been building a murderous infrastructures for years, that required and still requires a much greater military effort than we anticipated, for its destruction. Israel needed supplies of weaponry on a scale much larger than that of the Yom Kippur War. The U.S. led by Joe Biden stood, and rightly so, alongside Israel, in its fight against terror.
But something is changing. We know there was a tremendous and terrifying failure that led to October 7. A strategic and military failure. The problem is that this strategic failure persists. We have not learned anything from previous wars even though the writing was on the wall.
Even the wave of anti-Israel and antisemitic protests that swept through the free world in general and the U.S. in particular, should have been expected. But we turned a blind eye and didn't see it coming. We had ears but didn't hear. And even when antisemitic incidents were taking place – our blindness continued.
We're now in an ongoing five-month-long strategic failure. Netanyahu should have known that this fight was not only a military but also a political one. It should have been clear to him that Hamas would pay a high price in a military confrontation, but the greater its defeat, and the more images of destruction and death would flood the media, the greater its political achievement would be. Who would have believed that one-fifth of Americans would support Hamas? And yet, here we are.
These are only the sidelines, we told ourselves, that are part of the ongoing conception that continues to undermine us. That’s wrong. These aren’t only the protesters. These aren’t just Bernie Sanders and the likes of him.
Now it's also Vice President Kamala Harris, with her frightening statement. She says loud and clear what many in the government think. She wants a six-week cease-fire. But she doesn't say it's a cease-fire for the sake of releasing the captives. She says it might allow for the release of the captives. Here, Harris also undermines Israel's strongest card for legitimizing its continued fighting.
So it's worth stating bluntly: Netanyahu insists on losing the U.S. He does everything possible to get into a confrontation with the Americans. He refuses any American initiative. Therefore, what was being said in the pro-Palestine protests, in the first act, and what Sanders said in the second act, Harris was now saying in the third act.
We should stop with this self-deception. What the U.S. sees, Israel doesn’t. We have endless justification to defeat Hamas, even at the heavy price of destruction and devastation in Gaza. After all, that's what the U.S. did in Mosul and Raqqa to defeat ISIS. But in our foolishness, and primarily due to Netanyahu's strategic blindness, we did everything to neglect the strategy that would have given us much more support.
We didn't have to wait for the protesters, for Sanders, and now for Harris to propose a ceasefire. We should have proposed it ourselves, in exchange for the release of hostages and demilitarizing the Strip. We could have stopped fighting not for six weeks, as Harris demands, but for only 48 hours to allow Hamas to send a likely negative response to a hostage deal.
And we could have repeated these proposals again and again. To recuperate. To strengthen our political position. But we chose the "hammer and anvil strategy," which even if justified militarily, is foolish politically when it's the only strategy on the table.
Harris is placing a huge warning sign in front of us. We can belittle it, or we can assume that just as Netanyahu led a policy of strategic blindness until today, he will continue to do the same.
But we can’t afford to allow ourselves the loss of American support. That would be suicidal. And we don't need Harris in order to declare a unilateral cease-fire on our terms to prevent such a demand from the U.S. government.
Ben-Dror YeminiPhoto: Avigail UziIt's not too late. And if Netanyahu is blind, we should hope that Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot present an Israeli alternative that would not give up on the military option, but would also have a serious reinforcement of Israel’s diplomatic efforts. But they remained silent. To this day, they haven't presented an alternative. They haven't moved away from this conception. Netanyahu is a cause for concern. Gantz and Eisenkot aren’t a cause for hope.