Everyone knows that Yaser Arafat, angry about leaving Camp David empty-handed in 2000 went home and orchestrated the second Intifada, right? It’s pretty much accepted wisdom. It fits quite well with a narrative that blames the Palestinians both for the failure of Camp David and for the second Intifada which followed. But one thing you learn by observing this region as long as some of us have is that almost nothing is quite as it seems. If someone tells you something is black, believe it at your peril.
So says the Israeli general who commanded the Gaza region during and after Camp David. Gen. Zvika Fogel tells Haaretz in an eye-opening interview that the IDF, in preparing for an anticipated Palestinian uprising actually fueled the violence that led to the uprising:
…In the past few years he has reflected a great deal on the actions he and his fellow officers carried out in the months that preceded the eruption of the second intifada, at the end of September 2000. His conclusion: the IDF created an irreversible situation that led to a confrontation with the Palestinians.
“The constellation of preparations we made actually led to the confrontation”…
The massive preparations undertaken by Southern Command were in fact based on an intelligence assessment that the Palestinians were bent on a confrontation, but that assessment was the subject of controversy even within the IDF, and in any event did not maintain that a confrontation was the only possible outcome or was inevitable…
“The conceptual sequence is that we are creating the conditions for a confrontation by the very fact of our preparations,” Fogel says. “It is clear to everyone that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We want to decide which event would foment the explosion. All we have to do is say what will launch it and then behave as we have planned.”
Even if that was not the Palestinians’ intention?
“Exactly.”
Was the course the IDF embarked on a one-way street?
“I am afraid that I have to say yes…”
Did anyone warn about this? Did anyone say “We are doing things that are irreversible”?
“No one said that. When you are busy making a network of preparations that are supposed to provide a response to the outbreak of the confrontation, and have thereby taken the initiative, you don’t spend time checking whether it’s a dead end. You try to find elements that can strengthen this approach.”
And did you find what you were looking for?
“We did. You see Palestinian police exceeding their behavior, [sic] you see more and more organizing and processions on the outskirts of the settlements, you see more and more attempts to prevent people who work in Gush Katif [the settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip] from getting there, you see internal power struggles.”
Do you also look for things that might refute the accepted assessment?
“No way, that is never done.”
What we have here is the perfect psychological description of a military force deluding itself into the mistaken belief that it must prepare for war–and thereby causing war. If you look at the history of most failed military campaigns you are bound to find such terrible miscalculations leading to disastrous results. Here we have yet one more model for students of military strategy and tactics to study in the lessons of failed campaigns.
Fogel makes the additional allegation that the IDF established free fire zones (“death zones”) in which any living thing was assumed to be a Palestinian militant and was killed indiscriminately:
One of the means Southern Command adopted in order to avert attacks on Israelis was to declare death zones in the Gaza Strip – areas in which IDF soldiers were authorized to open fire at anyone who entered them. “Their use of women, children, infants and innocent farmers increased,” Fogel explains. “We understood that in order to reduce the margin of error, we had to create areas in which anyone who entered was considered a terrorist.”
And was marked for death?
“Absolutely.”
The Military Advocate General’s Office denies the existence of any such order.
“I have my truth.”
Was there machine gun fire into populated areas?
“…Use of that was permitted gradually, including at suspicious places, and that definitely loosened the trigger finger.”
Fogel relates that soldiers also fired flechette antipersonnel shells into populated areas. These shells, usually fired from tanks, contain thousands of metal darts which disperse over a wide area; they are intended to kill and maim. “It came and went,” Fogel says about the use of flechettes. “We banned it when we understood that it had a huge deterrent effect and that it also caused casualties among noncombatants. At first we used it a great deal, particularly in areas that we did not want to evacuate with D9 bulldozers.”
Were they fired even into clearly populated areas?
“If not clearly, then yes, into populated places. There are houses in an orchard and we fired into it.”
How was it done from the legal standpoint? Is firing flechettes a matter of black-and-white?
“When you want to use something, you have no problem finding the justification…”
Fogel also comments persuasively on the lost opportunity represented by the unilateral nature of the Gaza withdrawal:
“I think the disengagement was a peak point at which the intifada could have been stopped and we could have moved to true parameters of neighborly relations,” Fogel says. “It was the point in time to create a different mode. Hamas then had the best possibility of winning in the elections – if they had shot at us, they would have said that the disengagement was done because of that. Hamas understood that it could achieve this even without shooting. Instead of seizing this lever and providing the economic tools and the necessary aid to lead to the right path, we opened a dialogue of weapons, not a dialogue of economic aid.
“The whole disengagement operation was implemented without thinking. One thing led to it – the desire to set a process in motion, to create a new reality. I remember that in the first discussions I said unequivocally that we are disengaging, but are not guaranteeing three things: full Egyptian control of the Philadelphi route; an air, sea and land opening for the Palestinians – the possibility to complete the building of the port, and also land passages to Sinai; and employment instead of what they had in Israel.”
Fogel warns that the situation that has been created – the imprisonment of the Gaza Strip’s inhabitants without the possibility of transit – creates “a focal point of explosion that is aimed completely at Israel … There is no other place it can erupt into. The Egyptians are a lot less gentle than we are. If tomorrow morning 2,000 people will try to enter Egyptian territory via the Rafah crossing, it’s clear that there will be 2,000 bodies, because they will prevent it.”
Did Israel not recognize its responsibility in the Gaza Strip?
“That is exactly the point: Israel did not understand that the moment it disengages and does not allow the Palestinians these things, we continue to be responsible for their fate. I am not talking about fuel and electricity; I am talking about everything, bringing in merchandise – we are still the custodian.”
How does that sit with the kind of operation in Gaza that the IDF now wants to carry out?
“I say that the operation in Gaza…has to be carried out in conjunction with other actions. Everyone is asking how we will leave, and the answer is that we will leave when the Palestinians have a future. At the moment they do not have a future. A future means a port. What are they going to bring in there, tanks? After all, after an equation is created, when it will be clear that you are not afraid of entering the Gaza Strip and striking at them, the majority – who are rational – will understand that it is worthwhile to live.”
So why isn’t it happening?
“The primary characteristic of all our behavior is that we are unable to see the interests of both sides and find the common denominator.”
Fogel proves that while there are commanders of good conscience and strategic sense serving in the IDF, there is something about the assumptions made in an institutional framework that guarantees the utter bankruptcy of strategy and thought that the IDF faces wherever there is conflict, whether it be Gaza or Lebanon. Where is the politician brave enough to appoint a commander who can break free of such ruinous pre-conceptions and think his way out of the morass into which the IDF has sunk? Where is the commander capable to doing this?
Hat tip to Sol Salbe for first noting this article and The Magnes Zionist for featuring it in a post where I noticed it.
