Ending Israel's losing streak

by Caroline Glick May 31, 2010

These words are being written before the dust has had a chance to settle on Monday night's naval commando raid of the Gaza-bound Turkish flotilla of terror supporters. The raid's full range of operational failures still cannot be known. Obviously the fact that the mission ended with at least six soldiers wounded and at least ten Hamas supporters dead makes clear that there were significant failures in both the IDF's training for and execution of the mission.

The Navy and other relevant bodies will no doubt study these failures. But they point to a larger strategic failure that has crippled Israel's capacity to contend with the information war being waged against it. Until this failure is remedied, no after-action investigation, no enhanced training, no new electronic warfare doodad will make a significant impact on Israel's ability to contend with the next Hamas flotilla that sets sail for Gaza.

In the space of four days, Israel has suffered two massive defeats. A straight line runs between the anti-Israel resolution passed last Friday at the UN's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference and the Hamas flotilla. And in both cases, Israeli officials voiced "surprise," at these defeats.

Given the months-long build-up to the NPT review conference, and the weeks-long build-up to the Turkish-Hamas flotilla, that surprise cannot be attributed to a lack of information. What it points to rather is a cognitive failure of Israel's leaders - from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu down - to understand the nature of the war being waged against us. And it is this fundamental failure of cognition that has landed six soldiers in the hospital, Israel's international reputation in tatters and Israeli spokesmen - from Netanyahu down - searching for a way to describe a reality they do not understand and explain how they will cope with challenges that confound them.

The reality is simple and stark. Israel is the target of a massive information war that is unprecedented in scale and scope. This war is being waged primarily by a massive consortium of the international Left and the Arab and Islamic worlds. The staggering scale of the forces aligned against Israel is demonstrated by two things.

The Hamas abetting Free Gaza website published a list of some 222 organizations that endorsed the terror-supporting flotilla. The listed organizations hail from the four corners of the earth. They include Jewish anti-Israel groups as well as Christian, Islamic and non-religious anti-Israel groups. It is hard to think of any cause other than Israel-bashing that could unite such disparate forces.

The second indicator of the scope of the war against Israel is far more devastating than the list of groups that endorsed the pro-Hamas flotilla. That indicator is the fact that at the UN on Friday, 189 governments of 189 countries came together as one to savage Israel. There is no other issue that commands such unanimity. The NPT review conference demonstrated that the only way the international community will agree on anything is if its members are agreeing that Israel has no right to defend itself. The NPT review conference's campaign against Israel shows that the 222 organizations supporting Hamas are a reflection of the will of the majority - not a minority - of the nations of the world.

This war against Israel is nothing new. It has been going on since the dawn of modern Zionism 150 years ago. In many ways, it is just the current iteration of the eternal war against the Jewish people.

The Red-Green alliance's aims are twofold. It seeks to delegitimize Israel's right to exist and it seeks to make it impossible for Israel to defend itself. If these aims are met, Israel's destruction will become an historic inevitability.

Until US President Barack Obama took office, Israel's one steady asset in this war was the US. Until last year, the US consistently refused to join the Red-Green alliance because its leaders recognized that the alliance's campaign against Israel was part and parcel of the Red-Green campaign against US superpower status in the Middle East and throughout the world. Indeed, some US leaders recognized that the Red-Green alliance's animus towards Israel stemmed from the same source as its rejection of American exceptionalism.

Dismally, what the US's vote in favor of the NPT review conference's final anti-Israel and by default pro-Iranian resolution makes clear is that under President Barack Obama, the US is no longer Israel's reliable ally. Indeed, what the US's vote shows is that the Obama administration's ideological preferences place it on the side of the Red-Green alliance against Israel. No amount of backpedalling by the Obama administration can make up the damage caused by its act of belligerence against Israel at the NPT review conference.

If Israel's leaders were better informed, in the lead-up to the NPT conference they would have recognized a number of things. They would have realized that Obama's anti-nuclear conference in April, his commitment to a nuclear-free world, as well as his general ambivalence - at best - to US global leadership rendered it all but inevitable that he would turn on Israel at the NPT review conference. The truth is that Egypt's call for the denuclearization of Israel jibes with Obama's own repeatedly held views both regarding Israel and regarding the US's own nuclear arsenal.

Armed with this basic understanding of Obama's inclinations, Israel should have taken for granted that the NPT conference would target Israel. Consequently, in months preceding the conference, Israel should have stated loudly and consistently that as currently constituted the NPT serves as the chief enabler of nuclear proliferation rather than the central instrument for preventing nuclear proliferation it was supposed to be. North Korea exploited its status as an NPT signatory to develop its nuclear arsenal. Today Iran exploits its status as an NPT signatory to develop nuclear weapons. Unless the NPT is fundamentally revised it will continue to serve as the primary instrument for nuclear proliferation.

Had this been Israel's position, it would have been able to undercut US arguments in favor of signing onto the anti-Israel final resolution. So too, such a position would have prepared Israel to cogently explain its rejection of the final resolution without sounding hypocritical.

And that is the thing of it. The Red-Green alliance's aim at the NPT conference was to discredit Israel's deterrent capacity while delegitimizing its right to take preemptive action against Iran's nuclear facilities. Now, due to Israel's failure to make its case against the NPT in the months leading up to the conference, as Israel's enemies use the US-supported final resolution to claim that Israel's opposition to Iran's nuclear weapons program is hypocritical, Israel lacks a cognitive framework for responding.

The fact that Israel still doesn't get the point is made clear by the government's response to the decision. Israel's denunciation of the resolution makes no mention of the fact that the NPT regime itself has become the chief institutional enabler of nuclear proliferation today. So too, disastrously, in a clear bid to pretend away Obama's treachery, Israel actually applauded Obama for emptily criticizing the resolution he voted for. This Israeli response compounds the damage and ensures that the assault will continue and grow stronger.

As to the flotilla, the challenge it presented Israel was nothing new. Israel has been confronted by suicide protestors for a decade now. The fact that these pro-Hamas activists intended to commit suicide in order to discredit Israel on camera was made clear by the fact that the Turkish organizers named the lead ship Rachel Corrie - after the most famous pro-Hamas suicide protestor.

So too, the fact that Israeli forces boarding the ships would be met by trenchant, violent opposition was knowable simply by looking at Turkey's role in the operation. First of all, the Turkish government-supported NGO behind the operation is IHH. As the US government, the Turkish government in the 1990s, the Investigative Project on Terrorism and countless other sources have proven, the IHH is a terrorist organization. It has direct links to al Qaida and Hamas. Its members have been involved in terrorist warfare from Chechnya and Bosnia to Iraq and Israel. The notion that IHH organizers would behave like radical leftist anti-Israel demonstrators on university campuses is simply ridiculous.

Moreover, there is Turkey's behavior to consider. Since Obama took office, Turkey's gradual slide into the Iranian axis has sped up considerably. Turkey's leading role in the flotilla, and the Erdogan government's ostentatious embrace of IHH which just a decade ago Turkey banned from earthquake relief efforts in light of its violent, jihadist mission made clear that the Erdogan regime would use the violence on board the ships as a way to strike a strategic blow at Israel's international standing.

In view of all of this, it is clear that Israel's information strategy for contending with the flotilla was ill-conceived. Rather than attack Turkey for its facilitation of terrorism, and openly prepare charge sheets against the flotilla's organizers, crew and passengers for their facilitation of terrorism in breach of both Israeli domestic law and international law, Israel's information efforts were largely concentrated on irrelevancies. Israeli officials detailed all the humanitarian assistance Israel has provided Hamas-controlled Gaza. They spoke of the Navy's commitment to use non-lethal force to take over the ships.

And now, in the aftermath of the lethal takeover of the flotilla, Israel's leaders stammer. Rather than demand an apology from the Turkish government for its support for these terrorists, Defense Minister Ehud Barak called his Turkish counterpart to talk over what happened. Rather than demand restitution for the terrorist assault against Israeli troops, Israel has defended its troops' moral training in non-violent crowd control.

These efforts are worse than worthless. They make Israel appear whiny rather than indignant. And more depressingly, they expose a dangerous lack of basic comprehension about what has just occurred and a concomitant inability to prepare for what will most certainly follow.
Israel is the target of a massive information war. For Israel to win this war it needs to counter its enemies' lies with the truth.

The NPT has been subverted by the very forces it was created to prevent from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization ideologically indistinguishable from al Qaida. International law requires all states and non-state actors to take active measures to defeat it.

Israel is the frontline of the free world. Its ability to defend itself and deter its foes is the single most important guarantee of international peace and security in the world. A strong Israel is also the most potent and reliable guarantor of the US's continued ability to project its power in the Middle East.

This is the unvarnished truth. It is also the beginning of a successful Israel campaign to defang and neutralize the massive coalition of nuclear proliferation- and terrorism- abettors aligned against it. But until our leaders finally recognize the nature of the war being waged against our country, these basic facts will remain ignored as Israel moves from one stunning defeat to the next.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
A shocking story of Israeli survival
When the going gets tough, the not-so-tough call in the cliches. The world's "leaders" are shocked! — shocked! — when Israel defends itself. Actually, they're "shocked" just like Claude Rains, the police inspector in "Casablanca," was shocked to learn that gambling was going on in the casino at Rick's Cafe.

Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations who rarely sees Third World evil, shocking or otherwise, says he was "shocked" by the Israeli navy's stopping a convoy that was attempting to break through the blockade of Islamist terrorists in Gaza. The governments of Sweden, Greece and Jordan were so "shocked" that they recalled their ambassadors to Israel to get the inside dope to further fuel their "shock." Tony Blair, who is some sort of "peacemaker"-at-large in the Middle East, was "shocked," too. If he is, it's only because he hasn't been in the Middle East long enough to unpack his Gladstone. France was not just a little bit "shocked," but "profoundly shocked." There was so much "shock" in the air that the manufactured mourning became electric.

The convoy of six ships carried not only thousands of tons of supplies, but hundreds of "activists," and when the smoke cleared, a dozen or so activists — the count varied through the day — had been rendered inactivists capable of no further mischief. The European Union demanded an official inquiry, so profound was its "shock." The United Nations went into emergency session to recover from its own "shock."

These usual suspects went riding off in several directions even before they could mount their horses, but an investigation, official or otherwise, is not really necessary. Verdict now, facts later. The Associated Press, which once took pride in its reporting but is awash now only in activists and pundits, set out the story line: "Dozens of activists and six Israeli soldiers were wounded in the bloody predawn confrontation in international waters. The violent takeover dealt yet another blow to Israel's international image, already tarnished by war crimes accusations in Gaza and its three-year-old blockade of the impoverished Palestinian territory."

The account of the Israeli commandos tells a different story. The Mava Marmara, the lead ship in the armada, was told to change course and not land in Gaza. When it ignored the warning, Israeli marines and commandos boarded the ship, some by rope ladders from helicopters. A fierce fight erupted on deck, and only after taking casualties and fearing for their lives did the commandos fire back, trying to aim first at the feet of the "peace activists."

Israel is at war, fighting for its very existence, surrounded by hostile Islamic regimes, some more hostile than others. Not all the hostile regimes approve, or so they say, of the Islamist campaign of extinction of Israel by attrition. None of these hostile regimes will do anything to persuade, or compel, the Palestinians to give up the Islamist dream of destroying Israel in a second Holocaust. This is the reality in the Middle East, and everyone in Washington, London, Paris and the other capitals of the West knows it. Who could be shocked when the Israelis do what they think they must do to survive?

The facts on ground and sea are, as usual, ignored in the din of rioting in the streets and diplomatic argle-bargle, with the usual simplistic media telling of the story: The "activist" armada of "peace" ships was intended only to relieve the suffering of women, children and maybe even an occasional cute kitten or puppy. The less appealing but more accurate account is that the "activist" account is bunk.

Adequate supplies of food, medicine and other necessary goods are delivered regularly to Palestinians in Gaza — and by the Israelis. The government in Jerusalem quickly invited reporters to the Kerem Shalom crossing to see, and photograph, the convoys of trucks delivering these goods to Gaza. The Israelis even offered to transfer the goods from the "activist" boats as soon as they could be unloaded and inspected. The sponsor of the "activist" armada, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, is regarded by Israel as a radical Islamist organization, part of a global fundraising operation for Hamas. If the Israelis allow such flotillas to deliver supplies to Gaza, other ships will follow, not with rice and beans but with explosives, rifles and long-range Iranian Fajr-5 missiles.

But the attack of the "peace" ships was intended for an even larger and more important purpose — to undermine Israeli determination to continue the struggle for its survival. This won't shock anyone who's paying attention.

• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The flotilla fiasco
Obviously, many of those in the “Freedom Flotilla” were not engaged in a humanitarian mission. Had that been their prime motivation, they would have accepted Israel’s offer to escort them to Ashdod Port and arrange for the delivery of their supplies to Gaza, after security checks, over land. They also would have agreed without hesitation to convey a package from the family of the Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas for almost four years in Gaza, Gilad Schalit.

Obviously, too, many of those who sailed toward Gaza were not “peace activists.” While those aboard five of the vessels in the flotilla did not violently oppose the IDF soldiers who came to intercept them, the video footage released by the IDF in the course of Monday confirmed earlier official descriptions by Israel of soldiers being premeditatedly and ruthlessly attacked as they tried to board the largest of the vessels, the Mavi Marmara.

Inexplicably, only a small contingent of naval commandos was dispatched to take control of a ship carrying hundreds of activists. And the commandos came on board carrying paintball guns, apparently under the misconception that the takeover of the Mavi Marmara would be, if not a game, then certainly not a confrontation with an enemy.

The IDF’s intelligence was clearly deeply flawed. As the footage showed, the outnumbered, under-equipped and incorrectly prepared commandos found themselves not grappling with unruly peace activists or demonstrators, to whom they had been ordered to show “restraint,” but being viciously attacked before they had barely set foot on deck. The clips showed clusters of people swarming around each of the commandos, and beating them over and over with clubs and bars in scenes sickeningly reminiscent of the lynching of IDF reservists in the Ramallah police station 10 years ago.

There was footage of one of the “activists” stabbing a soldier, of a petrol bomb being thrown at the troops, a stun grenade. And the troops themselves reported being sprayed with tear gas, attacked with iron bars, knives and sticks, and of efforts, reportedly successful in at least one case, to grab the pistols some were also carrying. There were reports of gunfire directed at the troops, and of soldiers jumping into the sea to escape attack.

Soldiers were fighting for their lives, said the IDF spokesman, Avi Benayahu (in Hebrew). “It was a lynch. It was an ambush.”

The navy chief, Eliezer Marom, told an early afternoon press conference that the resulting toll of the dead and injured could have been “much worse,” that the confrontation could have ended even more unhappily.

But it also could have ended a great deal better. At this writing, Israel is facing a battle to maintain diplomatic relations with the flotilla-sponsoring Turks, condemnation from much of the Arab world, milder expressions of concern and criticism from Western nations, a concerted diplomatic campaign against it at the UN, and exacerbated fears of internal and regional violence.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak noted that the Mavi Marmara was under the control of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (the IHH), which he described as “a violent, extremist organization that supports terrorism.” Both he and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon stated with good reason that the entire “Freedom Flotilla” had been a deliberate “provocation.”

In such circumstances, facing such hostility, it is hard to fathom why the IDF so underestimated the challenge its soldiers would face, and thus erred so strikingly over both its choice of how to thwart the flotilla, and over the number of soldiers, and the equipment, it sent into the battle at sea.

That Israel would lose the “media war” – against what were largely depicted internationally as well-intentioned human rights activists trying to defy the Israeli blockade by bringing supplies to Gaza – was a given. Successive governments refuse to take the “second battlefield” seriously – criminally ignoring the imperative to allocate the appropriate resources so that Israel is equipped to effectively articulate its various challenges ahead of time, and in real time, in international, diplomatic and legal forums.

Israel is being further overwhelmed day by day in the newer world of social media: Those aboard the flotilla, and their supporters worldwide, are proving to be expert exponents of Twitter and other instantaneous social media channels (as my colleague Amir Mizroch details in an op-ed elsewhere in these pages). Official Israel, by contrast, could barely manage to depart from Hebrew long enough to manage a statement and an answer in English at its major press conferences during Monday.

Israel was also further hampered by the absence of its prime minister overseas. When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was finally heard later Monday, speaking to the press with Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper alongside him, his powerful descriptions of the way IDF soldiers were confronted on the Mavi Marmara – “they were mobbed, clubbed, beaten and stabbed,” he said – showed how effective a carefully articulated narrative can be.

But so much for the arenas in which Israel is routinely inept. What was so worrying about Monday’s performance was the military misjudgment and misassessment – and the potential impact on Israel’s deterrent capability of the failure to efficiently overwhelm the forces arrayed against it on what amounted to an enemy vessel.

Israel is concerned with eminently good reason about the smuggling of weaponry into Hamas-controlled Gaza. It may have felt it had no choice but to intercept a flotilla carrying it knew not what to the Hamas terror state. Why did it not anticipate that the activists and supporters of “a violent, extremist organization that supports terrorism” would act precisely according to type?
ANALYSIS / Israel has forgotten the lessons of the Exodus
Israel played into Hamas' hands by storming the boats of the 'Freedom Flotilla.'
Despite having its eyes wide open, Israel fell into a trap. Israel knew that the organizers of the flotilla wanted to present the Israel Defense Forces to the world as an army that does not hesitate to use force. The flotilla organizers wanted deaths, casualties, blood and billows of smoke. And this is exactly what Israel gave them.

Every child knows that the conflict here is one of consciousness, images, emotion and gut-feelings; not one of justice or logic. Therefore, Israel should have acted differently.

Israel's decision-makers should have revived memories of Israel's own history. It shows just how short a historical memory the prime minister, defense minister, chief of staff, and Navy commander all have. They don't remember the story of the Exodus ship in 1947.

The British Mandate authorities imposed a blockade on the shores ofthe land of Israel and Jewish leaders believed it was their right and their duty to break it. The Jewish immigrants on the Exodus decided to forcefully oppose every attempt to stop them. The Jewish leadership wanted to arouse the world's conscience and gain a victory in the battle for international sympathy.

In our day, Hamas leaders believe and act similarly. Without getting into the question of the justification or logic of the blockade imposed by Gaza and its residents, it was indeed clear that it was only natural that Hamas would try to break the blockade by force. They have been doing this by means of the smuggling tunnels and via the sea. It was clear that they saw it as their natural right to oppose attempts to stop the ships.

In 1988, when the PLO organized a ship named "The Return" to be sent to Israel with Palestinian refugees, Israel chose a different method to stop it. It sent Mossad agents and Naval commandos to Cyprus to sabotage the ship before the passengers had embarked. The ship was damaged but no one was hurt.

Israel should have considered a similar approach with the Gaza flotilla. But apparently the days in which Israeli agents could operate freely in friendly countries are gone.

There was another possibility. During Ehud Olmert's term as prime minister, Israel permitted a lone aid ship, filled with supplies and activists, to enter Gaza. The skies did not fall on Israel in the wake of this.

The Israeli government could have acted similarly this time. No disaster would have occurred. The boats would have landed, the supplies would have been unloaded and the activists would have disembarked.

So what? You may argue that this would have set a precedent. But I argue that if Hamas had tried to do the same thing again in the future, Israel would still have had the ability to operate differently and outsmart Hamas.

As a last resort, it would also have been possible to simply sabotage the motors of the boats, halting their voyage without having to seize control of the ships. Instead of this, the Israeli government preferred to take control of the ships by force.

Apparently Israel, which prides itself as having the best intelligence in the world, should have known better that there were violent elements aboard one of the boats, equipped iron bars, knifes and slingshots. Had Israel known this, it would have probably used more appropriate ways to storm boat, to avoid death and injuries. And that did not happen.

Israel has played into Hamas' hands. It's not the fault of the young soldiers who obeyed the orders of their commanders. The responsibility lies with the cabinet and the military planners.

No matter how one looks at the conduct of the Israeli government and the IDF, it is hard to understand how stupid and tragic it was. Time and again, Israel tries to prove that what can't be solved by force can be solved by more force. Over and over, the policies of force fail. The problem is that with each failure, the part of the world in which we would like to belong is losing patience with us.