The correct narrative is that, on October 7, the "State of Gaza" launched a criminal war against the State of Israel. In wars between states, it is customary to exert economic pressure on the enemy state and even impose a siege on it. There is no obligation under international law to provide the enemy state with all its needs, at most it is forbidden to prevent others, such as Egypt, for example, from providing food to the enemy.
The second mistake is not exploiting the enemy's weaknesses. The purpose of war is to force the other side to act against its will. There are three main ways to take the ground out from under the feet of dictators. Israel has not tried to use any of these methods.
The first method is to apply economic sanctions that will cause the formation of an angry, bitter, and hungry crowd. Dictators are especially afraid of this situation, as demonstrated in the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Arab Spring, and most recently in Syria. The second method is to support an alternative government. Israel has blocked every initiative that would have led to such an alternative.
The third method is to make the enemy fear losing territory, a strategy that we have refrained from trying. Without any discussion, Israel decided that "only military pressure will achieve the goals of the war." This determination was a serious error, since military pressure is the strategy that Hamas has been preparing for these past 15 years.
The third mistake is the failure to initiate political dialogue. Immediately after the massacre, during U.S. President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, the Israeli prime minister was asked to answer just one question: What will happen to Gaza the day after? Netanyahu replied insultingly: "When we get to the day after, we will talk about the day after."
He would have been better off explaining that Israel has no territorial or political interest in Gaza, but only a security interest, which means ensuring the complete demilitarization of Gaza for years. Israel is therefore ready to discuss here and now with any Arab country and any Western country about the future government in Gaza. Any proposal that can convince us that Gaza will be demilitarized will be acceptable to us.
The greatest mistakes in history have been made when leaders defined goals without taking the time to conduct a critical and in-depth discussion about how they could be achieved. In 480 BC, Xerxes, the king of Persia, set a goal to conquer Greece. He assumed that, due to the size of his army, he could overwhelm the Greeks enough to achieve his goal. He ignored Greece's mountainous structure, the difficulty of feeding such a large army in a long war, the superiority of the Greeks in naval warfare, and more. The result was a humiliating defeat.
Military pressure partially achieves the first war goal, damaging Hamas’s military strength but it does not achieve the other two goals: returning all the hostages and toppling Hamas’s government.
Napoleon believed that his strong army would defeat the "inferior" Russian army, a victory that would allow him to achieve his goal: severing Russia's alliance with Prussia and England. He did not take into account the size of Russia, the harsh winter, and the possibility that the Russians would decide to retreat, creating scorched earth in their wake.
Hitler assumed that the "superiority of the Aryan race" over the "inferior" Slavic peoples was enough to conquer land in the East. The U.S. also repeated a similar mistake in the Vietnam War. Defense Secretary McNamara believed that American military superiority was enough to bring down North Vietnam. Going to war without a thorough discussion of the relationship between war goals and the appropriate means to achieve them is the classic mistake in history, and it happened to us too.
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Military pressure partially achieves the first war goal, damaging Hamas’ military strength but it does not achieve the other two goals: returning all the hostages and toppling Hamas’s government. Therefore, a different strategy is needed that works against the enemy’s weaknesses rather than against his strength.