Unfiltered analysis of Israel's ongoing conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. This episode promises to unravel the complexities of Israel's military response to Hamas' brutal attacks, the potential of a reoccupation of Gaza, the risks and challenges, and the possibility of this being Israel's very own Pearl Harbor moment. Hear from Jonathan Panikoff, a former US career intelligence officer, and military affairs correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai, as they dissect the heart of the crisis.
Unfiltered analysis of Israel's ongoing conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. This episode promises to unravel the complexities of Israel's military response to Hamas' brutal attacks, the potential of a reoccupation of Gaza, the risks and challenges, and the possibility of this being Israel's very own Pearl Harbor moment. Hear from Jonathan Panikoff, a former US career intelligence officer, and military affairs correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai, as they dissect the heart of the crisis.
Do I think, in a case where Israel is getting overwhelmed and needs additional support, that you could see standoff missiles from the carrier group being fired by the group into Lebanon against Hezbollah-specific targets? If Israel needs that support, I do actually think that that's more possible.
Ron Ben-Yishai:We cannot live side by side with Hamat, a jihadist organization, an army. It is either them or us.
Dana Lewis:Hi everyone and welcome to another edition of Backstory. I'm Dana Lewis. On Backstory, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gaza under siege Israelis are now saying there are close to 200 Israelis that were taken hostage when Hamas attacked Israeli towns and villages and an outdoor concert. We talked to Jonathan Panikoff, a former US career intelligence officer, on how Israel was taken by surprise and what may be coming in this widening conflict as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are displaced in Gaza, as the Israeli bombing is relentless and a ground war imminent. But first military affairs correspondent Ron Benesai from Israel, who I've known since the 90s. Ron is tapped in Often. He is embedded with Israeli military forces. He's got awesome sources and he knows what he's talking about. Ron Benesai is a military affairs correspondent in Israel and he joins me now. Hello, ron, good to see you.
Ron Ben-Yishai:Good to see you, dana.
Dana Lewis:Ron, can you give me just a sense of what's happening there in terms of the anger in the military? You talked to a lot of high-level people. What are you hearing?
Ron Ben-Yishai:The reason anger in the military is there is an anger in all over Israel, among all the people of Israel, because there are very few that are not angry, and it is because of the brutality and the cruelness of the attack. We have been attacked by terrorist organizations before, and severely so.
Jonathan Panikoff:And.
Ron Ben-Yishai:Israel lost a lot of people, but this time it was a terror army committing atrocities that we have seen only in the pogroms in Europe or ISIS in Iraq, which means it was a military operation by Hamas, well planned and well executed, but it was huge. The purpose was to commit atrocities and this is something we have never seen before, and this made every Israeli, whether opposition or coalition, left or right, come to the conclusion that we cannot live side by side with Hamas, a jihadist organization, an army. It is either him either. It is either them or us.
Dana Lewis:What is Israel going to do? I mean, I understand you, even if you knew you were going to tell me in an interview. But okay, obviously there's going to be a ground operation and I don't need you to confirm that.
Ron Ben-Yishai:I don't know how grand it is going to be. Israel will try to do it as swift and as less costly in terms of casualty as possible With, because the window of legitimization that the world public opinion gives us and world diplomacy gives us and the American support gives us is quite narrow and it will become narrower and narrower very quickly when the operation, when they they encourage them into Gaza, will start and the world will start to see children and women running in the streets. You know the pictures, but the idea wants to do it and we want the idea to do it with the citizens as less casualty as possible. And this needs to be done, therefore, in a very creative way, based on very accurate intelligence and only enough. The Israeli intelligence is quite good, at least in detail. Sometimes they don't see the big picture, but they are quite good in the details.
Dana Lewis:You see a quick operation? I watched an interview by Nathali Bennett, the former prime minister, saying Israel is going to be there for months, maybe years. Do you see some disconnect there in terms of what you don't see it as a reoccupation going on for years?
Ron Ben-Yishai:Nath, I don't think that Israel wants to occupy Gaza. Why should we? But Israel wants to make sure, first of all, that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and their other smaller organizations, but even more extreme than the other two, lost totally their infrastructure, military infrastructure, military industrial infrastructure, and that they are not in hell between the Indoch rule, the Gaza Strip, anymore.
Dana Lewis:Who does, who do you hand the keys to Gaza? If the army could even do this.
Ron Ben-Yishai:No problem, no problem. There are enough citizens in Gaza that can take the governance into their hand. Not enough high ranking official, civilian official. They got their salaries from Abu Mazen, from the Palestinian Authority that dwells in Ramallah, but they can do it. They can do it. They rent the country, they rent Gaza before.
Dana Lewis:So could you see that the Israeli leadership Anyway?
Ron Ben-Yishai:they not. Let me stop. The problem is not, I'm not really worried, who will run Gaza after this. What I'm worried is that Hamat and the Islamic Jihad and the other terror organization will be eliminated, and when I say eliminated, preferably Hili, and after that Allah Akbar, as you know.
Dana Lewis:What do you see as the hazards ahead? I mean Gaza is, I've been the hazard is going into Gaza.
Ron Ben-Yishai:It's a big hazard. Gaza became a sort of terror base, a terror greenhouse, and going into there means a lot of trouble, but we have to do it. There is no.
Dana Lewis:There are little. It's like a Fallujah multiplied by.
Ron Ben-Yishai:Absolutely no, no, no, no. Fallujah was not a, for instance. They didn't build in Fallujah. The better comparison is a Mosul, not Fallujah. I've been to Fallujah and I've been to Mosul. The real place to compare to is Mosul because also in Mosul, they built an underground town to enable them to fight and move for their troops, their warriors, from one point to another and fight an incoming force. So Gaza is Mosul. I know you have limited time.
Dana Lewis:I know you have limited time. Two quick questions. One would be the intelligence failure by Israel. Some people have said this was Israel's Pearl Harbor. Do you suspect that at the end of this, in fact, they will find out in the inquiry that comes months and years from now, that in fact there were signs that there was an operation and there probably?
Ron Ben-Yishai:were signs. We know already that there were signs. The problem, like in many other cases, is the interpretation of the sign. When you are living with the concept that Hamah is a moderate Islamic religious operation, organization or party and all what it cared for is the well-being of the people of Gaza. When you are living in this state of mind, when you see them training, you say okay, they want to show that they are real Mukawama, which means resistance organization, and they have to show the people to make noises and shows as if they are. But they are really a government, a civilian government. That was our mistake.
Dana Lewis:Fast underestimation of their capability Not underestimating?
Ron Ben-Yishai:On the contrary, no, no, their capability were not underestimated. Their intentions were wrongly estimated.
Dana Lewis:Last question, as I promised, and that is that the Israeli defense minister just stood next to the American defense minister at a news conference. He was asked about Iran. He spoke of this triangle of evil of Hezbollah, hamas and Iran and he said he's not going to talk about what will happen to Iran later, but clearly he gave the smoke signal that Israel will deal with Iran at some point, because there's no doubt that Iran had its hand in this. Whether it pressed the launch button or not, it doesn't matter. It was the enabler for Hamas. Is that how you read this?
Ron Ben-Yishai:The Hamas. No, I think that Israel will deal with Iran only if Iran breaks to the nuclear weapon. That's the only time when Israel will seriously deal with Iran. As of other possibilities, israel, if we shall be attacked, or if Iran will try to arm Hezbollah, as they do all the time, as they did to the Hamas again, the modern equipment that the Hamas had and we knew that they have they got it all from Iran, but this is not a Casus belly for Israel. What will make Israel confront? As a matter of fact, we are confronting them directly in Syria. We are confronting them directly in Lebanon to some extent, but not in Iran. And also, yes, we are also confronting them in Iran, but this is a small war. The big war will go only, only will break out because of the nuclear issue.
Dana Lewis:Bron Benesha. I thank you.
Ron Ben-Yishai:My pleasure, my pleasure.
Dana Lewis:The North American Star program onVideo. One of the first wire as a former U S to host the. How do you think Israel just didn't see this coming?
Jonathan Panikoff:Look, dana, you're 100% right. They didn't. This was obviously intelligence failure. This was a security failure. This was a political failure. I think distinguishing those threads in the coming months is certainly going to be important. There'll be, I'm sure, a full-scale review on exactly what happened. That's obviously gonna have to wait until after the conflict. You are already hearing rumors and articles about maybe the Egyptians had highlighted something big was happening. Was there concern about troops being moved from areas around Gaza to the West Bank? I think there's obviously. Usually, when you have an intelligence failure like this, it's rare that it's just one thing, that there was some sort of smoking gun that was missed. Usually it's a combination of pieces not having been put together. But look, the Israeli intelligence community has phenomenal professionals and they will take on whatever lessons come from this. They will be hard lessons and they will improve.
Dana Lewis:Probably, if, coincidentally, they are comparing this just not only to 9-11 but also to Pearl Harbor. There may be a lot of parallels with Pearl Harbor, because there were warnings and there was intelligence, and I don't doubt that Israel probably had intelligence. It was the way it was analyzed or it was the way it was not acted on, and that's probably where we're going to go at the end of it. But look, let's move on, because you have written with great concern, and I share your analysis, that there is a very good chance of this spreading and it is not just going to be limited to Gaza. If it does spread and it could spread very quickly. Can you just speak to that?
Jonathan Panikoff:Yeah, absolutely. I think there's kind of a couple of different rings of spread that we're concerned about. So there's the most immediate ring around Israel the potential that Hezbollah decides to enter the conflict from the north, the potential that Palestinian militants in the West Bank decide to get involved as well. If Palestinian militants in the West Bank enter the conflict, it will be not dissimilar to those in Gaza. What Hamas has done, given their capabilities are similar.
Jonathan Panikoff:If Hezbollah enters the war, it completely changes the dynamic of the conflict. Hezbollah has precision guided missiles. Hezbollah will most certainly seek to take out Ben-Gurion Airport, many of the seaports, the Israeli gas fields. That will completely change the nature of the conflict in a way that the Israelis really haven't fought before. And I think it's also one of the reasons that you've seen the United States move the USS Jadal-Ford carrier group into the Mediterranean. And that is not about Iran, for example. That is about a threat gesture and trying to deter Hezbollah from striking Israel and becoming involved in the conflict.
Jonathan Panikoff:And look, there's reasons on both sides to believe that they may not actually want to. But if Hamas is really in trouble, if the Israeli ground operation that's going to come soon goes better than expected and Hamas is really struggling. It's not inconceivable that Hezbollah will enter the conflict to try and save Hamas a little bit. It's also not inconceivable that they have their own calculations that if Israel is really bogged down, they will say it is too good of an opportunity to pass up, that we don't know when we're going to get it again.
Jonathan Panikoff:If Hezbollah enters, then you have the potential of greater spread to a third ring, a ring that's further afield, that not only potentially implicates Israel but US allies in the Gulf. What will the Houthis, of whom the Iranians have much less control than any other proxy? What will the Houthis decide to do? This is a group that has battled and wants full control of Yemen, and it's been battling for a number of years now. Will it decide this is an opportune time to strike Saudi Arabia, to strike the Emirates? Will we see contagion, frankly, from a conflict that started from a fairly localized Hamas attack?
Dana Lewis:Let's talk about the North and Hezbollah, because you've talked a lot about it and thank you for leading us in that direction, because that's obviously the biggest concern of Israel's right now. There have been artillery exchanges from the Israelis outgoing and rocket attacks coming into Israel very limited amounts so far, but across the North there have been a number of them. Are they fired by Hezbollah? Right now we don't know. Are they fired by Palestinian factions within Lebanon? And there are many of those. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked if the US would intervene if the Hezbollah attacked Israel from the North. He wouldn't commit. How do you read that? And do you really see this aircraft carrier group? It's a group of ships, just not one carrier. Do you see America intervening with the Hezbollah or Lebanon? I mean, I find that a real stretch.
Jonathan Panikoff:I'm not so sure I hold that level of skepticism in this case. I think the President's been quite clear actually about US willingness to defend Israel. Do I think that it would be a preemptive move or that the moment Hezbollah attacks Israel, if that happened, us response? Absolutely not. Do I think, in a case where Israel is getting overwhelmed and needs additional support, that you could see standoff missiles from the carrier group being fired by the group into Lebanon against Hezbollah-specific targets, if Israel needs that support? I do actually think that that's more possible, in part because I fear that we are thinking too narrowly about what Hezbollah, a war with Hezbollah, will be like.
Jonathan Panikoff:In 2006, hezbollah's capacity was not actually that much greater than what Hamas is today. They couldn't barely hit Tel Aviv. They could certainly not hit any of the major infrastructure that Israel has, disrupt energy flows. Today that's completely different. Hezbollah has the capability to hit almost anywhere in Israel. The precision-guided missiles will not only hit the ports and the airport and the Leviathan gas field, but it will almost certainly hit strategic targets in Tel Aviv. It could easily hit the carrier, the IDF headquarters, the defense ministry headquarters, and so I think in that case we were talking about Israel that is really struggling in a way that they've never struggled before. Because of the amount of incoming, you could see the US come in. Is that a guarantee that they won't? No, but I don't think that it's as remote a possibility as it would have been, say, even a decade ago.
Dana Lewis:That's really interesting. The ground war looks like it's going to kick off in Gaza. Israel's trying to move some of the civilian population by dropping leaflets. Some of them will go. Hamas has told them to stay. What do you think are the obvious hazards of a ground war that former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett today said could go months or years? I mean that's a reoccupation. Others have said and I talked to an Israeli military analyst who I know quite well and is very well connected that he says no, it's got to be quick. Israel feels the pressure, the external pressure is building. They've got the moral high ground right now. They don't want this to go on for a long time. They want to get in there and do it quickly. But the goals remain to disarm Hamas, to make sure that they're not a military threat to Israel anymore and to remove Hamas from its leadership of Gaza. Those are lofty goals.
Jonathan Panikoff:So I think what you, as you described it, is absolutely perfect, because what you're essentially saying is there are inherent tensions in the goals versus the timeline that are being discussed. I think one of the reasons that Prime Minister Bennett made the comments is because to achieve those goals, to truly decapitate Hamas in a way that Israel hasn't actually in the 2006 war and the 2014 war, we could take months to years. The flip side is, the international community may have more patience this time because of the how heinous the Hamas attacks were and how destructive and how high the death toll was, but that patience is not going to last the same amount of months. I think it would be shocking if it did, especially as we say death tolls rise in Gaza, destruction rise in Gaza. Those images will come out and begin to inflame the Arab world.
Dana Lewis:And they are now.
Jonathan Panikoff:There's this inherent tension on these two goals of wanting to go quick but wanting to accomplish the objective, because these really people, I think, are irate in a way that I have not seen, and they're irate with Hamas. They're also irate with their own government. Everybody is putting it aside right now, but there's been multiple times of saying we're going to take care of Hamas. We're going to take care of Hamas. There was a strategy that Israel's Kulakar referred to as mowing the grass, that they were kind of decimating Hamas's infrastructure and capabilities, knowing that it would grow back.
Jonathan Panikoff:I think Israelis, even on the left, are not comfortable that that is a reasonable strategy anymore. They want Hamas to be taken care of. But, as you alluded to, that's going to take months and I think the problem is not just the international pressure but the hostages. And the hostage situation is something that even today is still not getting enough attention, because 150 or so hostages completely changes the complexity of the mission that the Israelis have to achieve. Tactically on the battleground it is harder to move around. You have the intelligence to know where the hostages are. Hamas has a tendency to co-locate hostages with its leadership to try to use that as leverage to have Israel not strike them, to co-locate them in tunnels, to prevent Israel from striking and collapsing tunnels. Those are all challenges that are playing in, that indicate a longer timeline, but one that Israel may not actually have.
Dana Lewis:You can imagine the spectacle. I think everybody in the back of their minds has this. Imagine if Hamas starts executing those hostages and putting out the video. Look, I've covered this conflict for a long time as a reporter. You've covered it from an intelligence point of view. Hamas wanted this. Hamas understood. They may not have understood how far they could get and how many they would kill and how many hostages they would take, but they knew that they would anger Israel and that there would likely be a ground invasion. Why did they want it?
Dana Lewis:There's a good article that appeared in the Atlantic, I think, just today. By taking the battle directly into Israel, claiming to be defending Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, hamas seeks to belittle Fatah and demonstrate the primacy of in its policy of unrestrained armed struggle over the PLO's careful diplomacy. Moreover, hamas and its Iranian patrons want to block the diplomatic normalization agreement that the United States has been brokering between Israel and Saudi Arabia. They may achieve undermining Fatah, which is the more secular, the more reasonable PLO faction that I mean. Eventually, israel needs to talk to somebody and maybe hand the keys of Gaza to if they remove Hamas. In larger geopolitical terms, iran may have switched all this on because they want to torpedo that deal with Saudi Arabia and normalizations of relations with Israel.
Jonathan Panikoff:I think okay, I think that's absolutely right and everything you're saying is part of this. I would also encourage your readers. There is a article in Foreign Affairs as well, by Matt Levite, who I should note as a friend and colleague at a different think tank the war Hamas has always wanted which addresses some of these issues as well. I think anybody that subscribes to the idea that Hamas had a singular reason for doing this, I think is going to be disappointed. I think there's multiple things that are true here at once. I think undermining FACTA is absolutely true. I think concern about normalization is absolutely true. I am more skeptical than some of my colleagues that this is about Saudi normalization specifically. I think it's about normalization as a whole, and the reason I'm skeptical is the planning for this attack had to take place at least a year before it was so complex and so intense, and more likely there was a Hamas official who came out and said, no, no, planning's been in the work for two years. That's a long before Saudi-Israeli normalization was on the table, but it's part of a broader normalization discussion. The UAE, bahrain, morocco had all normalized. That's why I do think it is about impeding the normalization that's happening there.
Jonathan Panikoff:I also think one thing that isn't getting enough attention is part of. It was probably about for Hamas. I've been struggling domestically two different ways. It's been struggling with a large segment of the Palestinian population in Gaza who hates Hamas and wants nothing to do with them, and it was getting frustrated by the lack of services, the lack of supplies, the lack of what Hamas was delivering as a government. And then, on the other side, you had extremists within the Hamas camp who were frustrated watching Palestinian Islamic Jihad and some of the other smaller militant groups in the Gaza Strip undertake attacks, even if they weren't particularly effective, and Hamas sitting idly by and Hamas saying it's finally time we've been planning for this. We need to go so that people don't actually go to more extremist groups.
Jonathan Panikoff:I think all of these things are part of the factors that drove Hamas to attack. I don't think it's just one thing. I think it's the domestic side, I think it's the normalization, I think it's FATA. I think all of these things are true. I also think, however, it's gonna be really interesting in the days to come. Did Hamas actually expect to be as successful as they were? There's a term called catastrophic success that we use sometimes, meaning that Hamas had three, four different ways to go into Gaza air, land, sea. They had multiple entry points. It's not unreasonable to think that Hamas expected to be stopped at many of these places, that it didn't actually expect to get through in all the ways and all the entry points it did, and by doing so the death toll and the hostage toll is actually much higher than it expected and that obviously can be used for great leverage for Hamas. But it does create more challenges potentially as well, because these realities are gonna be much more intense about their reaction and the ground operation to start and you.
Dana Lewis:I don't want you to agree with me again because then my ego's gonna get too big, but I'm joking. Can I ask you one other thing that has perplexed me for several decades covering the Middle East and being in Gaza and being in the West Bank? Why, and Netanyahu is at the top of this pyramid to constantly weaken the more moderate, secular Palestinian authority, which is someone that originally, when Yasser Arafat came and was based in Gaza I mean Fatah was ruling the show? And why has Netanyahu not taken the opportunity to strengthen the PLO and Fatah, rather than sitting there watching Hamas gets slowly more brutal, more bloody and more of a threat to the state of Israel?
Jonathan Panikoff:I think there's a couple of things going on.
Jonathan Panikoff:One was a strategic calculation that clearly today is absolutely wrong that Israel could contain and handle Hamas, so there was no great incentive to strengthen Palestinian moderates in the PA, in Fatah, wherever.
Jonathan Panikoff:I think the second part of this is that, for a number of Israeli leaders, not just Netanyahu but also other, their view has been frankly for a long time now that there isn't a reasonable partner on the other side, that, no matter how far back you go, negotiations always collapsed in on themselves for peace agreements for two states of illusion, whether it was obviously most prominently we think of Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, but even much more, almost a decade after that, with Ehud Olmert and negotiations he had that there's just no person to negotiate with.
Jonathan Panikoff:The problem in that sense, though, and thinking that is that what it's left is nobody to engage with, nobody to talk to, it's left the extremist to rise in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, and so it's easy, as we saw in 2007, when Hamas violently kicked out the Palestinian authority, the problem became the West. I think, and I I think one of the political mistakes that was made was in the West. We have a tendency to view elections as the be all and end all that elections are going to be how we demonstrate that we're moving in the right direction as a society and for progress or Western ideals.
Dana Lewis:And Hamas won that election in 2007.
Jonathan Panikoff:Yeah, exactly.
Dana Lewis:In 2006, and then they kicked out Fata in a bloody confrontation between Palestinians themselves in 2007. You're right. You're right.
Jonathan Panikoff:And so that's the fundamental challenge. So Hamas's view is we are the legitimate power we want, and so we're not going to be able to take the West Bank, but we are going to take Gaza. And so what would Israel saw from that, and what the US I think a lot of folks saw from that understandably is we have no interest in dealing with a terrorist organization in charge, so we're just going to try to contain it. Obviously, the containment strategy worked for a while until it didn't in the most vicious and heinous of terrorist attacks.
Dana Lewis:Interesting statistic and then I'm going to let you go. I was reading that the election in 2006 today in Gaza, more than 50% of the people living there there was a new generation never voted in that election. Never even knew who Fata was in Gaza. They know who they are in the West Bank, but never lived under Fata in Gaza. All they've known is Hamas and incredible right Incredible 100%.
Jonathan Panikoff:I think there was already a number of folks, myself included, who were incredibly concerned about the demographics in both Gaza and the West Bank. It's not only some of them who only know Hamas, but most of the folks who are young have no memory of the first in Tafada, let alone the second in Tafada, and you've got well over 50% of the population under the age of third. That creates a terrible dynamic. If you have no historical memory, then it makes it very, very easy to engage in the same sorts of actions again, to call for violence, to seek violence, to say that is the only way forward, especially if you haven't seen any progress, not only from Israel but, frankly, from the Palestinian Authority themselves and from Hamas, both of which are viewed as corrupt, inefficient and unwilling to provide the very basic provision of services that the Palestinian people are looking for.
Dana Lewis:Yeah, what an interesting thing to say the fact that a lot of people don't remember that there were these moments of violence in the, in Tafadas, that the peace process led to a lull in that and redeployment of Israeli forces out of these big centers in the West Bank Jericho, ramallah, hebron, or partially anyway, and the Gaza Strip, and that there was real hope at one point. Yeah, now you just have a new generation that just doesn't see any of that. But the calls for violence. Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Middle East program. Jonathan, real privilege to talk to you and meet you. Thank you so much, thank you for having me.
Dana Lewis:And that's our back story this week Give in to haters. There are many on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People who oppose peace try to whip up hatred and dehumanize each other and justify violence against innocent civilians. It's wrong. I believe there are good people I mean I know them in this conflict who have hoped for a future where both peoples can live in peace. Let's hope the majority get their voices heard over the extremists who try to torpedo chances for peace. The extremists have the wheel right now, but hopefully Hamas will be removed and a new beginning in Gaza is on the horizon. I'm Dana Lewis. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again soon.