GOLDSTEIN: Israel’s protectors condemn Netanyahu’s military strategy
There is a long history of Israel's military and security leaders fiercely criticizing the policies of Israeli governments
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A chronic allegation made by Jew haters is that you can’t criticize the military policies of the Israeli government in Gaza without being accused of antisemitism.
This is nonsense – criticism of those policies is not antisemitic.
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GOLDSTEIN: Israel’s protectors condemn Netanyahu’s military strategy Back to video
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Calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state, advocating for the murder of Jews and firing bullets at children’s day schools in Canada are antisemitic.
In fact, there is a long history of Israel’s military and security leaders fiercely criticizing the policies of Israeli governments. Obviously, they are not antisemites.
While these officials typically wait until retiring to condemn policies it was their duty to enforce, the latest confrontation occurred when Eyal Zamir – the current chief of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces – clashed with Netanyahu’s decision to re-occupy Gaza City.
Despite accusations from Netanyahu’s son that he was attempting a coup, Zamir argued re-occupying Gaza City would overextend Israel’s military, already exhausted from the war, now in its 23rd month, and that it wasn’t necessary for Israel’s security.
He also warned it will endanger the estimated 20 kidnapped hostages who are still believed to be alive.
Meanwhile, an open letter to U.S. President Donald Trump signed by 600 former Israeli military and security officials, including leaders of the Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel’s external and internal security agencies, urged him to pressure Netanyahu to end the war.
It was accompanied by a video by Ami Ayalon, a member of Israel’s opposition Labour party and the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000, saying:
“At first this was a just war, a defensive war, but when we achieved all military objectives this war ceased to be a just war” and is now “leading the state of Israel to lose its security and identity.”
In 2012, Ayalon convinced the then six living former heads of Shin Bet to be interviewed by Israeli film director Dror Moreh for his award-winning documentary, The Gatekeepers.
These were the hardest of Israel’s hard men in fighting terrorism.
They described how they carried out targeted assassinations of terrorists and their political masters and acknowledged innocent Palestinians were killed as a result, but they defended their actions as necessary to protect the Israeli public.
They described their use of mass arrests and coercive interrogation – condemned by human rights groups as torture – to gather intelligence, admitting it led to the deaths of detainees.
All of which made their views about how to insure Israel’s long-term security so startling.
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That’s because they blamed their own governments for failing to negotiate an independent Palestinian state with the Arabs immediately after the 1967 war, which created the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
They said Israeli governments were preoccupied with tactics to fight terrorism but lacked a strategy to end the conflict.
They criticized Israeli governments for continuing to expand settlements in the West Bank. (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, using the army to remove 9,000 Jewish settlers.)
They said Israel’s best chance for peace, the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, was foiled not by Hamas, but by what they painfully described as Shin Bet’s greatest security failure – prior, as it turned out, to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel.
That was the 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, a radical, Orthodox Jew, who, they argued, was incited by radical rabbis and members of Israel’s Likud party.
(Rabin’s widow alleged Netanyahu, the leader of Likud who was soon to become prime minister, contributed to this hostile climate, which Netanyahu denied.)
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Finally, they argued the occupation had brutalized Israel.
As the late Avraham Shalom, head of Shin Bet from 1980-86, described it:
“The future is bleak … where does it lead? To a change in the people’s character, because if you put most of our young people in the army, they’ll see a paradox. They’ll see it strives to be a people’s army … involved in building up the country. On the other hand, it’s a brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II. Similar, not identical … We’ve become cruel to ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population, using the excuse of the war against terror.”
As Ayalon prophetically warned more than a decade ago:
“Victory doesn’t dictate that we have to conquer Gaza or Ramallah or Nablus or Hebron. I think my son, who served for three years in the paratroopers, participated in the conquest of Nablus at least two or three times. Did it bring us victory? I don’t think so … The tragedy of Israel’s security debate is that we don’t realize we face a frustrating situation, in which we win every battle, but we lose the war.”
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