IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz and Ehud Barak (Yehuda Lechiani)

Maariv is reporting (Hebrew) that Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak vetoed an appearance by new IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz before the Knesset’s subcommittee on covert intelligence operations.  This group, chaired by former IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, who is also chair of the security and foreign relations committee, periodically invites senior government officials to discuss highly sensitive military or intelligence issues.  It’s most recently invited guest was the prime minister himself.

Which makes it extremely bizarre that Barak would forbid the new chief of staff from appearing before the subcommittee.  It would appear that the tension and overt hostility between Barak and the previous chief of staff Gaby Ashkenazi is rearing its ugly head once again.

A confidential Israeli government source with extensive military experience tells me that the subject to be discussed at the hearing was the Israeli military option vis-a-vis Iran.  So one must ask oneself: why would Barak feel the need to prevent Gantz from speaking on this subject to the Knesset’s most senior intelligence oversight committee?  The only answer I can think of short of pure pettiness or political infighting (of which Barak is surely capable) is that Gantz, like his predecessor Ashkenazi, possibly opposes an Israeli attack on Iran.

If I’m right, then Barak may be trying to avoid the mistake he and Bibi made when the senior ministerial meeting convened in 2010 to approve such an attack.  The then chief of staff and Mossad head, Meir Dagan, tag teamed and single-handedly persuaded a majority to veto the assault.  If Barak had allowed Gantz to testify to the Knesset and to bad mouth the military option, then it would replicate the 2010 failure.

If this is Barak’s approach to the new chief of staff, it would seem to turn the position into a cypher.  Gantz would be little more than an errand boy for Barak, who would be calling all the shots.  Readers of this blog will know that I’m not a big fan of the qualities of leadership and strategic thinking of the IDF senior command.  And I’ve long advocated more civilian control over the military-intelligence apparatus.  But Barak is not what I had in mind.  His strategic thinking is as bad as the current IDF command and it derives from the army itself, where he was chief of staff at one time.  With Barak running the show, I think at least I’d prefer to have a strong IDF chief of staff to counter the defense minister’s worst impulses.  I fear that this is precisely the opposite of what may be happening.

The speaker of the Knesset Reuven Rivlin justified Barak with the rather strange statement which confirmed my own source’s view of the subject of the hearing:

The defense minister is right because what we’re talking about is a secret committee whose members are required to deliberate on decisive questions related to the subject of Iran and Israel’s security.

One wonders why Israel’s top military officer would be barred from deliberations about one of the most sensitive military matters confronting the State of Israel.  How can the Knesset speaker justify such a position as the one he’s taking?

Barak’s reasoning in deferring Gantz’s appearance was also strange: he argued that since the subcommittee was not an “official” Knesset body, that invitations to appear as a witness are optional, rather than mandatory.  Maariv pointed out that since the prime minister and Barak himself have appeared before the same body in the past, the argument doesn’t hold much water.  At any rate, Mofaz redacted his original invitation letter to Gantz so that the invitation came from the full committee (security and foreign relations) and not the subcommittee.  Gantz, who is obligated to appear before such Knesset committees, did appear and speak about the topic I mentioned above.

Barak himself rejected the claims made in the story and affirmed that Gantz testified as requested.

Shaul Mofaz strides into Transport Ministry (Biderman/Haaretz)

If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective,’ Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

‘Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable,’ said the former army chief who has also been defence minister.

Actually, this might’ve been even funnier if it’d shown Mofaz dressed al la George Bush in a flight suit about to take off from the roof of the Transport Ministry.

Thanks to Sol Salbe for this cartoon.

One of Haaretz’s veteran correspondents, Gideon Levy, writes yet another scathing denunciation of Shaul Mofaz‘s tenure as Israeli defense minister and before that, IDF chief of staff. Yesterday, I wrote about Akiva Eldar‘s portrayal of Mofaz’s brutality and ineptitude in both government posts. But if anything, Levy’s attack is more scabrous and doesn’t stop short of accusing Mofaz of war crimes:

During the eight years in which Mofaz headed the defense establishment – four years as chief of staff and four as defense minister – he did everything he could to derail any chance of an accord with the Palestinians. We are not only talking about his inhumane policy toward the entire Palestinian people, but also his systematic effort to destroy the Palestinian Authority and not leave a trace of it, lest Israel have a partner for peace. Mofaz is not only responsible for countless unnecessary victims, but also for the destruction of the infrastructure of moderate Palestinian leadership. From this perspective, the Hamas government and the impasse we now face are the direct result of his policy. The person who called for liquidating Yasser Arafat and ordered the bombing of the PA’s installations bears heavy responsibility for the rise of the Hamas alternative. If only for this failure, Mofaz should have paid the price with his cabinet seat long ago.

But there is also something else, which we do not discuss often: It is called morality…The heritage Mofaz left for the IDF, and via the IDF to society as a whole, is wholly based on the exercise of force and violence. During Mofaz’s days, force had no limitations. The IDF opened fire, bombed, liquidated and destroyed on an alarming and unprecedented scale. The moral image of Israel was completely distorted…The purity of arms became an annoying and archaic concept, the IDF almost completely stopped investigating incidents involving killing, and the finger on the trigger became frightfully light. Mofaz’s spirit of command prevailed over everything.

What is to be done with Mofaz now?…The mark of shame on his brow will only become evident to Israeli society in another generation. In the meantime, he should not be a minister. Here is a challenge for the interim prime minister: Leave Mofaz out and even explain why. Tell citizens that there is no place in your government for someone suspected of being responsible for war crimes…

Last February, Daily Telegraph reported that Mofaz was in high dudgeon over the fact that one of his senior IDF officers had to cancel a planned trip to Britain for fear of being arrested for war crimes:

The affair prompted an angry response from Israel’s defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, who…called on “countries that suffer from terrorism at home” not to take legal action against “soldiers and officers who acted legally against vicious and atrocious terror”.

Mofaz of course makes the mistaken assumption that Britain would pursue the same policy choices he and his government made in prosecuting Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. My cherished hope is that Mofaz himself will be one of the those current and former IDF officers who cannot make overseas trips without fear of the same thing happening to him.

It is only fair to note that there could be no “Shaul Mofaz” unless he served a useful purpose for the political echelon which appointed and supported him. Sharon must’ve wanted a brutal beast of a chief of staff. And that’s what Mofaz gave him. Certainly, Mofaz improvised new riffs on brutishness which his sponsors may not have expected. But largely he did their bidding.

With Amir Peretz as defense minister things must get better. But how much better? And will they improve enough to breathe some semblance of life into Israeli-Palestinian relations which have withered with the ‘scorched earth’ policies of his predecessor.

It appears that the U.S. is not the only country with a failed defense secretary/minister. Sol Salbe turned me on to Akiva Eldar’s latest Haaretz column: Hammer Blows. In it, Eldar appraises Shaul Mofaz’s abysmal tenure as defense minister (Olmert has just bestowed the ministry on Amir Peretz and Mofaz will be leaving soon). Along the way, the Israeli journalist makes some telling observations about the lack of intelligence of Israeli military intelligence:

Shaul Mofaz: man of iron and blood (photo: Worldjewishnewsagency.com)

Mofaz sowed evil and is bequeathing ruins to the next government, and not only to the new defense minister. He is leaving behind him the serious damage caused by two mistaken strategic theories – theories that were wrong for Israel and for the entire Middle East. Both attributed to Arab leaders with very limited military strength the actual intention of destroying the State of Israel.

Th[e first] theory was that Saddam Hussein would turn his weapons of mass destruction against Israel when he had “his back against the wall.” Gilad and Mofaz assessed that the American invasion of Iraq would improve Israel’s strategic situation – but instead it led to an increasingly close relationship between the Shi’ite regime in Iraq and its Iranian neighbor.

The second theory was that Yasser Arafat entered the Oslo process and began the intifada in order to bring about the establishment of “Greater Palestine,” which would include Israel and Jordan. This conspiracy theory regarding the Palestinians led the security services to adopt a one-dimensional, shortsighted, aggressive approach.

In this [their mistakes], there is no consolation for the tens of thousands of innocent victims of the military conflict, including the 1,200 Israeli dead. The children of the upcoming third intifada will not come into a better world.

Poor Mofaz, after such a scathing attack it’s a wonder he’ll be asked to be dogcatcher by Olmert in the next government.

In the following section, Eldar takes Mofaz and the defense establishment to task for violating two fundamental tenets of Clausewitz’s rules of war:

Carl Maria von Clausewitz…claimed that war is “nothing but the continuation of policy by other means.” The success of a war is measured by the maneuverability that it grants the political echelon no less than by the degree of security it brings to its citizens. This maneuverability allows the military victory to be translated into a political arrangement. The chaos in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the terror attacks in Iraq and Israel, prove that military superiority is neither a guarantee of political achievement nor a recipe for security. The unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the unilateral “convergence plan” in the West Bank, the separation fence, Hamas’ victory and the ensuing severance of relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority – individually and cumulatively – are testimony to the fact that five and a half years of military conflict have reduced the political echelon’s room for maneuver to a nadir not seen since the Yom Kippur War.

The Prussian military man also stated that no sensible person goes to war before clarifying his goals. The great success of chief of staff Mofaz…conducting an all-out war against the Palestinian rival [during the first Intifada]. And what was the goal? To make the “price of losing” clear to the Palestinians. To etch in their awareness that the price of violence is far greater than the benefits. And what would happen after the “victory”? Who would fill the vacuum left by Arafat and his senior Palestinian Authority colleagues after they were eliminated? What political arrangement would replace the disorder in the territories resulting from the destruction of infrastructure? Who would replace a relatively moderate Hamas political leader [Rantisi] who was sent to the heavens in a whirlwind by the air force?

There you have the fatal flaw of Israeli military strategy in a nutshell. They use their military might not to advance a political agenda. Rather, force itself IS the agenda. There is hardly a political agenda behind the use of force.

Eldar notes that Israeli intelligence handed Mofaz an issue of the Hamas magazine, Falastin al-Muslama, which detailed the organization’s strategy of attrition against Israeli forces in the Territories during the Intifada:

Magazine contributors define the next political goal based on the model of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. They point out that as in the case of Lebanon, their goal is to convince the Israeli public, by means of the intifada, that “Zionist security” comes with such a unilateral withdrawal…Escalation on Israel’s side could be expected to lead to escalation on the Palestinian side, and thus making it clear to everyone that only Hamas “can deliver a blow to the enemy, establish a balance of terror, exhaust its strength and sow confusion in its political considerations and influence its internal situation.”

Chief of staff and defense minister Mofaz regularly supplied Meshal with proof that Hamas can in fact achieve by military means what the PA did not succeed in getting from Israel by political means. “The high point was the decision to harm [Fatah security chief] Jibril Rajoub,” says Dr. Mati Steinberg, who was at the time a special adviser to the Shin Bet head of Palestinian affairs. “His security establishment did not fire at us [and] did not operate against us…,” says Steinberg…

Steinberg blames Mofaz for the grave outcome of the policy that did not differentiate between the Palestinian forces [Hamas and Fatah] and punished the population indiscriminately. “The policy of ‘the price of losing’ was what gave legitimacy to the suicide attacks…This is the unavoidable price of the only choice the aggressive [Israeli] policy left them [Palestinians] – the choice between unconditional surrender and an uprising until death.”

The Haaretz columnist notes that former foreign minister (under Barak), Shlomo ben-Ami describes in his new book how the military echelon did all in its power to undermine the stated policy of the civilian government:

Shlomo Ben-Ami was…a member of the security cabinet at the start of the intifada. In his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, Ben-Ami wrote that minister Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who coordinated the efforts to achieve calm, expressed to him his anger and frustration at the behavior of Mofaz and at the spirit with which he inspired the forces in the field. “Goods that were supposed to reach the population were stuck at checkpoints – bulldozers uprooted hothouses, nurseries and other crops, ostensibly for security reasons, in a manner that raised the level of Palestinian fury to unprecedented heights. The policy of collective punishment and inflicting economic hardship, which clearly did not serve the intentions of the political leadership to try to achieve calm, was an agenda led by the military leadership, which turned its back on the instructions and intentions of the political leadership and ignored them.”

The vision of Mofaz…never exceeded that expected of a mediocre brigade commander (Mofaz failed the officers’ tests three times). In the IDF, they customarily call that the “shoemaker’s syndrome” – every problem can be solved with a hammer. If a half-ton hammer does not solve it, use a one-ton hammer. At the end of 2000, when the Barak government wanted to adopt Clinton’s proposals in the hope of returning to a channel of rapprochement, chief of staff Mofaz claimed that the political leadership was endangering the country’s security.

Ben-Ami writes that Mofaz ignored the fact that the alternative to an agreement, even an agreement that did not fulfill all of Israel’s security wishes, was a rebellious Palestinian nation, raging terror, a return to occupation, international ostracism and a conflagration in the Arab and Muslim world. He did not know how right he was. Hamas control of the territories has acted as a bridge between the Iranian Shi’ites and the Sunnis of the Muslim Brotherhood, bringing the conflict to a more fundamentalist and global level.

The suit and tie [of the defense minister] did not change Mofaz’s way of thinking…This time as well, the only alternative he has proposed is more assassinations, closures and checkpoints. Since the withdrawal, he has done everything in his power to prevent the PA under the leadership of chairman Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) from presenting the disengagement as part of a bilateral political step.

Incoming defense minister Amir Peretz is being warned by dissident intelligence analysts that the IDF and Shin Bet make the same mistake as the CIA during the Cold War: they deliberately overestimate the power and strength of the enemy. The effect of such a mistake is to raise the level of fear among the general populace and thereby causing it to resort to ever greater escalations of the conflict in order to vanquish the allegedly powerful enemy:

A former senior member of MI suggests to Peretz that he beware of the habit that has become common at MI in recent years – overestimating the rival’s strength. He says that in light of the general staff’s damaging dominance in national-level decision making, this tendency has become one of the great obstacles to that process. It is also liable to lead to another escalation in the Palestinian arena, and perhaps even to wars in other sectors, he says. Among the intelligence community there are those who warn of a conceptual freeze and are recommending that the new defense minister conduct a thorough investigation of the mistaken theory that dictated policy toward the Palestinians under Mofaz…

“Since we enjoy absolute military superiority,” says Steinberg, illustrating the general’s words, “the new minister must be careful not to be tempted into thinking that we also have the power to conquer the minds of the Palestinians in expecting them to accept our interpretation of the road map or the Clinton proposals.

Steinberg says the Iranian threat, the increased power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the global jihad movement provide convenient circumstances for consolidating a pragmatic axis in the region. “Our conflict has become a black hole in the core of the Islamic world. Only a political agreement, even a partial one, and a proper balance between security considerations and broader needs, can rescue the Palestinians from Hamas and us from a war of religions.”

Shaul Mofaz has taken Israeli policy into a dead end of escalating violence and bloodshed. Amir Peretz has an opportunity (to the extent that Olmert allows him to do so) to break out of this cycle and breathe some fresh air into Israeli relations with the Palestinians. Let us see if he can succeed.

Relative mourns death of Palestinian killed in Israeli targeted assassination (photo: AP)

Haaretz reported yesterday that Israel assassinated two Islamic Jihad militants with an airstrike which also killed three young Palestinian civilians:

The military operation took place in Gaza City at about 5:30 P.M., when IAF jets fired two missiles at an ice-cream van in which Munir Sukar, 27, and Ashraf Shaluf were traveling. According to the security services, Sukar is responsible for numerous Qassam launches at Israel, as well as an attempt to send a suicide bomber to Jerusalem last month, while Shaluf is also a Jihad operative.

However, the strike also killed Raad Al-Batash, 8, Mahmoud Al-Batash, 15, and Ahmed A-Susi, 24, who were nearby when the missiles hit. Eight other passers-by were wounded, and Sukar’s aunt, who lives nearby, died of a heart attack apparently brought on by the strike.

Apparently, for Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, such collateral damage is a small price to pay for ridding the world of such terrorist scum. Ariga.com notes he even has the temerity to use the old Reaganesque term “cost benefit analysis” which was used to obviate any moral qualms arising from a questionable government policy:

One of the ‘untargeted innocents’ (photo: Alquds Alarabi)

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told Army Radio that ‘of course we regret any innocent loss of life … but the cost benefit of eliminating the terrorists, whether those who launch the Qassams or those who send them to do so, is quite clear. And it is clear to all that we do not target innocents.’

And this statement from the IDF reassures me no end that the raid was carried out with the purest of intentions:

According to the probe, an IAF observation unit identified the target vehicle as it was traveling. However, the spotters only saw that the vehicle was approaching a crowd of civilians when it was too late.

Military sources said that by the time the crowd was identified, it was already too late to divert the two missiles from their courses.

IAF Commander Major General Eliezer Shakedi said on Tuesday morning that the air force makes “super-human efforts in order to reduce the number of innocent casualties in aerial strikes.”

Shakedi presented data indicating a change in the number of “non-combatants” killed in IAF aerial strikes in the territories. Non-combatant deaths made up about half of all Palestinian casualties resulting from IAF strikes until 2003 but only 3.5 percent of such casualties last year. Shakedi said Monday’s casualties were the first civilians harmed in aerial assassinations since the beginning of 2006.

Go tell it to the parents of the Palestinian dead. I’m sure your statistics will comfort them. I have 16 month-old twins and a five year old son. For me to lose them in such a way would break my heart irreparably and mark me for tragedy for life. Essentially, I would no longer have a life. There is no “cost benefit analysis” that can justify such killing of innocents. Mofaz can argue till he’s blue in the face that Israel does not “target innocents.” But the fact is that it kills them. And it kills them in the hundreds during these nameless, faceless raids from the sky. This is a calculus of death that I can never accept.

Mofaz, keep making statements like this. There are lawyers around the world collecting them and preparing to try you before an international criminal tribunal. I am sorry to speak so harshly. I do believe that Israel has a right to protect itself from terror. But not by killing innocents whether it targets them or not. This is treif and morally impermissible.