Current Events: Israel At War Where We Are in 2024

Current Events, Episode 170

israel at war, EXPLAINED: where we are in 2024

january 7, 2024

BLOG VERSION below | PODCAST VERSION HERE

Diving into the start of 2024: the ground war in Gaza, escalating conflict with Hezbollah, the Houthis attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea, and a return to Israeli domestic politics with a major ruling from the Supreme Court.

Hi everyone, welcome to 2024, where there is so much to catch up on that it’s a little overwhelming. Today’s episode is a lighting round to get us back on track. There are a lot of pieces on the chessboard here. Israeli forces continue to battle deep inside the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Hamas fighters have been killed and huge amounts of infrastructure destroyed. But it’s nowhere close to being beaten. That is giving rise to demands — or hopes, or expectations, or suggestions — for a cease-fire on Israel’s part.

In the meantime, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, has outlined a post-war plan for Gaza. It assumes that Hamas will be beaten, and no longer in power. It’s a mix of Israeli security oversight, Palestinian civil control, and a group of countries to oversee reconstruction. It’s the first such plan to come from a high-ranking government official, but it’s not official. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ultra-right wing allies are totally opposed.

Meanwhile, conflict is heating up between Israel and the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, along the northern border with Lebanon. A couple of months ago this looked like a distraction that wouldn’t turn into open war. But there is now talk that Israel might be forced to invade southern Lebanon unless a deal can be found to push Hezbollah off the border.

Down to the south, a surprising player has entered the fight: the Houthis, another Iranian-backed terrorist group, this one in Yemen. The Houthis are shooting at cargo ships in the Red Sea, disrupting international trade, supposedly in solidarity with the Palestinians. The United States Navy has started firing back, and it’s likely the United States will get pulled in deeper.

And then there’s politics. The Israeli Supreme Court shot down part of the judicial reform legislation which had torn Israeli society apart this past year before the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared he will not resign for his failures over October 7. He argues that he has made Israel stronger — a claim that the vast majority of Israelis don’t believe. After three months of war the politicians are starting to snipe at each other.

So — how much longer can Israel fight inside Gaza? Will the war expand to include Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen? Will there be a cease-fire? Can an effective vision for Gaza “the day after” be fashioned? And what of politics? Israel’s but also the United States. President Biden needs all the support he can get for what is sure to be a nasty election season, and the Democratic left is angry with him over his support for Israel. So lots of topics to set us up for the start of 2024. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.

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So there’s a lot going on. We’re going to run through a whole bunch of topics which are likely to dominate heading into the new year here, so hold on tight.

First up is the ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza. It has been deadly and very dangerous. 173 soldiers have been killed so far, a terribly high number by Israel’s standards, mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties. And 129 hostages remain, of which Israel estimates that at least 23 are dead, their bodies still held for ransom. We don’t know how many Gazan civilians have been killed, but it’s undoubtedly in the thousands. Israel has been making steady military gains, uncovering and destroying Hamas’ vast military infrastructure: the extensive tunnel networks, weapons in private homes and under babies’ cribs, rocket factories in schoolyards, firing platforms in mosques. The other day Israel destroyed the tunnel system running underneath al-Shifa hospital, without damaging any of the hospital aboveground. Contrast that with Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s rockets falling on hospitals and other civilians in Gaza.

At the same time, the IDF is starting to scale back the intensity of the ground operation. Thousands of troops are being rotated out. It’s a signal of two things: that the IDF is expecting the war to continue for a long time, so they’re planning for a more sustainable level of involvement from its vast civilian-reservist army. And connected to that, it’s an economic sign: having so many reservists deployed and away from their jobs for so long is dragging down the economy.

Hamas continues to fire rockets at Israel everyday, and the fighting is fierce, but here, too, the intensity is less than it was several weeks ago. This suggests that Israel’s military pressure is working slowly but surely to degrade Hamas’ ability to attack Israel directly. There are even efforts to begin returning some of Israel’s displaced residents to communities that are at least 2.5 miles from the Gaza border. Everything closer is still mostly off-limits, but there are plans underway to begin reconstruction and repopulation in the future.

All of this bring us to the question of a cease-fire.

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Is it time for Israel to stop fighting? There are a lot of dimensions to a cease-fire: who is stopping, when, under what conditions, for how long, what happens if this, what happens if that, and on. A reason for a cease-fire could be that you have achieved your military objectives; or because you haven’t and assess that you can’t. Israel’s objective is to eliminate Hamas to such a degree that it can no longer pose a threat to Israel, and can no longer rule Gaza. Israel isn’t there yet; the question is whether it can still achieve that or not.

So we have two kinds of people calling for a cease-fire. The first is those who didn’t want Israel to fight in the first place, those who were demanding that Israel not strike back against Hamas, and, the second it did, demanding that it stop. But this group is disingenuous at best. There was a cease-fire in place between Israel and Hamas, which the terrorist group — not Israel — broke on October 7. Israel has a right and an obligation to defend itself. It’s hard to argue that a death sentence for Hamas isn’t reasonable given the atrocities they committed.

But then there is the second group, who support Israel’s right to self-defense but are sensing that Israel’s objectives might not be achievable. That is, it is unrealistic to expect to eliminate Hamas to the degree that Israel demands. And even if it could, it would require an intolerable level of destruction — turning a just war into a hugely disproportionate one. And they’re looking at the international pressure to cease-fire soon, and calculating that Israel won’t be given enough time by its friends and allies to achieve its aims. Either finish the job very quickly, or stop.

A cease-fire has its obvious appeal in stopping further warfare. But a number of things have to be taken into account. A cease-fire now would leave Hamas in place: still in charge of Gaza and still in fighting shape to continue attacking Israel. Forget those tens of thousands of Israelis returning to their homes near Gaza: that entire area of Israeli territory would probably be off-limits for the foreseeable future. So not only does leaving Hamas in power perpetuate a dire threat to Israel, but it’s a major propaganda victory: Hamas gets to declare that they not only survived Israel’s onslaught but defeated the Zionists on the battlefield, and successfully forced Israel to give up its own territory without Hamas having to hold on to it.

Now, it may not be possible for Israel to eliminate every last Hamas fighter. But they should be able to degrade the group enough that they can’t control Gaza, can’t attack Israel, and can’t rebuild once the war is over. But as Israeli officials keep saying, that takes time. And the Israeli public considers it intolerable to leave Hamas in place to attack again. There’s a little hypocrisy, too: the United States and other European countries have spent years fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS and other terrorist groups, and now they expect Israel to wrap things up in three months?

But there’s a bigger concern, too, about a cease-fire. Hezbollah.

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The question around a cease-fire with Hamas is this: what will Hezbollah do if they think they only need to hold out against Israel for three months? They are the world’s largest terrorist group, funded and armed by Iran. The entirety of southern Lebanon along Israel’s northern border is effectively Hezbollah’s private state. They are vastly more powerful than Hamas: Hamas has thousands of rockets, Hezbollah more than 150,000. Like Hamas, Hezbollah also has a massive tunnel infrastructure, but it's likely even more sophisticated than what's in Gaza. And where Gaza is flat, southern Lebanon is mountainous. It’s immensely more difficult to find the tunnel entrances, and then harder still to get an airstrike in there to destroy them. And again like Hamas, Hezballah hides amongst the civilian population, using schools and mosques and private homes to store and fire weapons.

Hezbollah has been striking Israel nearly every day since the start of the war, but things have been getting worse. Rockets, mortars, drones, and whatever else they can throw, and Israel responding with air strikes, tanks, and artillery. People are dying on both sides from the attacks Hezbollah is initiating. Last week Hezbollah fired an anti-tank missile at a Greek Orthodox Church inside Israel, injuring two Israeli Christian civilians. When the IDF showed up to evacuate them, Hezbollah fired again, wounding nine soldiers. 80,000 Israelis remain evacuated from their communities near the border. The IDF Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, says that Israel won’t return them until there is both security and a sense of security. That is, until the residents feel they are safe from continued terrorist attacks.

There is talk that Israel might have to invade southern Lebanon to push the terrorists away from the border. Israel did this in 1982 and again in 2006. As then, and as with Gaza, it would be another grinding, difficult, and terrible war. So part of the reason to defeat Hamas in Gaza is to scare Hezbollah off: to re-establish Israel’s military deterrence. That is, to demonstrate the catastrophe that awaits Hezbollah if they press on. But that brings us back to the cease-fire. If Israel is seen to be forced into a cease-fire after only three months, and before they’re able to destroy Hamas, and Hezbollah knows that it can easily survive three months of war with Israel, then will they just go for it?

Short of war, then, is there a diplomatic solution? Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, warns that time is running out. But one idea is a three-part deal apparently being suggested by the United States and France. Part 1 is that Israel would give up a few bits of land along the border that Hezbollah claims is Lebanese territory. Part 2 is that Hezbollah will withdraw its army to the other side of the Litani River, about 10 miles off of Israel’s border. Now, it’s already obligated to do this under a UN resolution, but, of course, it doesn’t and the UN has never enforced any consequences. And the third part of the deal is that a buffer zone in between the Litani River and Israel would be patrolled by the Lebanese Armed Forces.

So a major war would be averted. Hezbollah would be forced off the border. And Israel would give up a few slices of territory. But it’s got a lot of problems. First, it would be rewarding bad behavior: terrorism for land is not a good look. Second, Israel knows that the Lebanese military is no match for Hezbollah. There is no doubt that the terrorist group would pretty quickly infiltrate itself back into southern Lebanon. And third, Hezbollah doesn’t want to give up its prime real estate all along Israel’s border, with which it can attack Israel directly. They don’t want to look like they backed down and made a deal with the Zionist enemy. Like with Hamas in Gaza, the point is to make life along the border so miserable that no Israelis will live there, scoring a major win without having to fight a war.

So as usual, not many good options. The situation is tense, to say the least. Israel just assassinated one of Hamas’ most senior leaders, who was hiding out in Beirut. Hezbollah is taking it personally, vowing revenge. The Lebanese government is begging Hezbollah not to start a war, but they have very little power to influence the terror group. About half of Israelis polled are in favor of opening up a second front, a number which hasn’t really changed in the last couple months. But ultimately Israel doesn’t want a war. Neither does Lebanon. Neither does Hezbollah, which doesn’t want to get smashed. Still, things are quickly escalating.

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Now let’s head south — way south, about 1,200 miles below Israel. An unexpected player has entered this war in a big way: a terrorist group in Yemen called the Houthis. Think of them as Hezbollah in Yemen: funded, armed, trained, and ordered around by Iran. They jumped into this fight declaring their solidarity with the Palestinians, and to that end have been launching missiles at Israel, but now also at cargo ships in the Red Sea. This is a huge deal because about 15% of world shipping traffic and 30% of global container trade runs through there. It’s the key trade route between Europe and Asia, linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Without this route ships have to sail all the way around Africa. Several big companies, such as Maersk, have already suspended their operations in the Red Sea.

So who are the Houthis? They emerged in the 1990s as an Islamic military and political group aligned with Iran. The Houthis official slogan is “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, a Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam,” which, incredibly, was on the short list for the jingle for this podcast. The Houthis developed into an insurgency and in 2014 helped stage a coup that took over the country. This not only started a civil war but turned into a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and their allies in the Gulf, like the United Arab Emirates, got sucked into years of grinding warfare that wrecked the Yemen economy and killed thousands of civilians. By 2020 the Saudis had had enough, and the war was significantly scaled back. That gave some breathing room to opposition against the Houthis in Yemen.

All of this suggests multiple reasons why the Houthis jumped into the Israel-Hamas war. One is in support of Iran, as yet another terrorist front from which Israel has to defend. It’s also part of the wider Middle Eastern war for influence between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Another reason is domestic. Rather than this being about showing solidarity with the Palestinians, it’s about demonstrating their own power. Ari Heistein, formerly with the Israel Institute for National Security Studies, writes that, “It is likely that the Houthis engaged in their latest attacks on Israel and international shipping to show their public that despite Yemen’s economic collapse, they are making the country into an international player that cannot be bullied or ignored.”

The question is what to do about this. Israel is so far holding back and letting the United States lead a coalition of 10 countries sending ships and forces into the area. Juliette Kayam writes that, “Whereas the U.S. military need not play any substantial role in the war in Israel and Gaza, keeping the path to Suez open and safe is a global priority, and no other country can lead that effort.”

Last week U.S. Navy helicopters sank three Houthi boats that had shot at a cargo ship, and then shot at the Navy. But this kind of defense only gets you so far. You’d need a massive naval armada to protect all the cargo ships that sail through the Red Sea. And the cost imbalance is a huge disadvantage. Retired Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, points out that "shooting down hundred-dollar drones with million-dollar missiles isn’t going to stop them.” So things may well escalate to where the United States needs to carry out airstrikes against Houthi positions in Yemen.

What to do about the Houthis in the longer term is a trickier question. As Ari Heistein writes, there is “a fundamental difficulty in influencing the decisions of an actor that is guided by a radical and paranoid ideology, possesses military capabilities that provide significant leverage, and has little to lose.” So this is an area of the conflict to watch closely.

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Now politics. It’s hard to underestimate the extraordinary political pivot that has taken place in Israel the last three months. On October 6 the country was divided as never before in its history, at each other’s throats over legislation to reform the judiciary. Depending on who you asked, the reform was either essential for democracy or its death knell, an expression of the will of the people or outright dictatorship. On October 7, that partisan inferno came to a screeching halt. In a single instant Israelis went from tearing each other apart to total unity and focus. Where the military and politicians have faltered, Israeli society has banded together for the war effort.

But now, after three months of war, politics are starting to come back to the forefront. On January 1, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a decision rejecting a pillar of the judicial reform package pushed by Netanyahu’s coalition government. I don’t want to rehash all the details, I covered this in-depth back in February 2023, Episode 142.

In summary, last summer the Knesset passed a law eliminating the Supreme Court’s ability of judicial review — that is, to strike down a law that the Court deems unreasonable, even if it was passed by a majority. This is a huge power for the Court to claim, and controversial. The right-wing has long opposed the reasonableness test, arguing that it gives the unelected Supreme Court too much power — unelected justices shouldn’t be able overrule a majority of the people’s elected representatives. But its proponents argue that this veto is necessary for democracy. Without separate executive and legislative branches of government, it’s the only check and balance Israel has over total majority rule.

On January 1 the Supreme Court struck down this law. They refused to let the Knesset strip away this reasonableness test, and their ability to veto government decisions. But the ruling was passed by the slimmest of majorities: 8-7.

At any other moment this ruling would have thrown Israel into a massive constitutional crisis. Why? Because it creates a conflict of authority. Imagine a scenario where the current Knesset majority decides that it’s the best possible coalition that Israel could ever have, so there’s no need for elections anymore. Netanyahu and his ministers get to keep their jobs for life. The Supreme Court says that’s unreasonable and you have to hold elections. But the Knesset says no, we don’t recognize your ability to deny us anymore. So now what happens?

Or imagine that the government orders the deportation of all non-Jews from Israel. The Court says that’s unreasonable and you can’t do it, but the government orders the army to expel people anyway — who does the army listen to, the government or the Court? These are extreme examples but you get the idea: the constitutional crisis is that it isn’t clear who has what authority to do what kinds of things.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Netanyahu’s most right-wing ministers are going nuts. This was the opening salvo in their effort to take over and completely reform the judiciary. Netanyahu himself has in the past suggested he wouldn’t abide by a Court ruling striking down the law, insisting that the Court would never take Israel into “uncharted territory.” But now they did.

The war effort has so far tabled the constitutional crisis, but we’ll see how long that lasts. And anyway, Netanyahu has bigger problems.

In a December poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, only 15% of respondents said they wanted Netanyahu to stay on as Prime Minister after the war. And only one quarter think Netanyahu will be able to hang onto his coalition anyway. Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist National Unity party, got the most responses, 23%. Still, the Institute points out that on the right, there is no one else who even comes close to having Netanyahu’s level of support. So while the huge majority of Israelis are against him, he is still immensely popular on the right. But he’s in a tough spot. His political allies are extremists with very little of the public opinion on their side, are out of touch and ineffective, and have mostly resorted to making crazy pronouncements from the sidelines. Still, politically, Netanyahu is probably safe for now while the war is ongoing.

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Defense Minister Yoav Gallant unveiled an idea for postwar Gaza. No Israeli settlements, no Palestinian Authority in charge, and no pushing Gazan civilians out. Instead, Israel will retain overall security control — the IDF will be stationed along the borders, and will have the right to go into Gaza as it needs to for security purposes. Inside Gaza, civilian control will be from a multinational force designed to prevent Hamas from having power. Israel will have the right to inspect goods and materials going into Gaza. The United States, European, and moderate Arab countries will manage economic rehabilitation and civil affairs. Egypt will operate the main border crossing. And all the current Palestinian bodies that run things like water, electricity, and humanitarian aid, will continue, on the condition they cannot include any officials who were with Hamas.

This is just an opening bid to start putting ideas on the table. But Netanyahu’s allies have already condemned it. They want to re-occupy Gaza with Israeli settlements, and provide incentives for Palestinians to voluntary permanently leave the Strip. Both these ideas are deal-breakers for the international community and very unpopular in Israel.

Lastly, there’s American politics. Facing a tough re-election campaign against Donald Trump, President Biden needs to garner as much support as he can from the Democratic left. Unfortunately, the progressive wing of the party is angry over his steadfast support for Israel. So he’s been pushing Israel to slow down the Gaza campaign, and make other concessions. According to the poll from the Israel Democracy Institute, 2/3 of Israelis are opposed to changing the campaign. This is probably because they want to keep pounding Hamas until the group is eliminated, and the same poll shows that a majority of Israelis don’t think Israel is anywhere close. Interestingly, the poll breaks down between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis. 75% of Jews want to continue as is, while 56% of Arabs think Israel should give in to the United States’ demands.

So…welcome to 2024. Are you overwhelmed yet? I wish I could tell you we covered everything that’s going on right now. Even a best-case pie-in-the-sky scenario in which Israel and Hamas stop fighting and the remaining 129 hostages are returned, there is still the great danger of more extensive fighting in the north against Hezbollah. And then there’s the West Bank, where fighting, too, is ramping up against Hamas and other terrorist elements. The Palestinian Authority there is getting weaker, and there are worries about it losing control altogether. And, of course, Iran and its continued shenanigans looms over everything.

That’s all for now. As always I’m at jewoughtaknow.com and my email is jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Talk to you next time. Am Yisrael Chai — the Jewish People live.