Ehud Barak blames Binyamin Netanyahu for “the greatest failure in Israel’s history”

FEW ISRAELIS have anything close to Ehud Barak’s experience of operating in Gaza. In 2000 he was prime minister and defence minister when the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, erupted in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Before that he was the commander of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) when Israel carried out its first major pullback from the cities in the Gaza Strip as part of the first Oslo Accords signed in 1993.

And then in his second stint as defence minister, in 2009, he oversaw Israel’s largest ground operation against Hamas in Gaza to date. Now the Israeli army is gearing up for what is expected to be a much larger ground operation in Gaza. Its target is Hamas, which attacked Israeli communities and bases along the border on October 7th, killing more than 1,300 Israelis, three-quarters of them civilians.

The atrocities represent “the greatest failure in Israeli history”, Mr Barak says. Now comes the military response. The army he once commanded faces huge difficulties going after a determined and well-armed enemy, entrenched in a tiny coastal enclave crowded with more than 2m inhabitants, he says. He is mindful of the implications of the inevitably heavy toll this operation will inflict on its civilian population. In the first nine days following the Hamas attack, nearly 2,400 Gazans were killed in Israeli air strikes, which Israel claims were against “Hamas targets”.

Mr Barak advises the government not to rush a ground operation. “We’re not facing an existential threat from Hamas,” he says. “Israel will win this.” Once all the reservists who have been called up have undergone refresher training, Israel can take control of most of the Gaza Strip and destroy Hamas’s centres of power and military capabilities “in two to six weeks.” Unlike the major ground operations in 2009 and 2014, when Israel simultaneously entered different areas of the Gaza Strip, thinks Mr Barak, this time the offensive could be carried out in stages.

Although he is confident about the army’s ability to pulverise Hamas in Gaza, the IDF will face some constraints. Israel has acknowledged that Hamas took more than 120 civilians and soldiers hostage. Mr Barak thinks that a ground operation should be delayed if an agreement can be reached to release some of them.

He also wants Israel to ensure that its actions are seen as legitimate by the wider world. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack most Western governments offered Israel their full support. But “the support also comes with an expectation we abide by international law in our operations,” Mr Barak warns. “Support will erode when there is footage of ruined homes [in Gaza] with bodies of children and weeping old women.” America’s naval presence—on October 14th it deployed a second aircraft carrier group to the eastern Mediterranean—is partly designed to deter outside actors from entering or escalating the conflict. But it “also emphasises Israel’s need to operate according to international law”.

Israel will need to keep a watchful eye on Hizbullah, the Iran-backed Shia militia in Lebanon. It has perhaps 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel. Israel has sent troops and tanks to the border in the hope of deterring an attack. The Hamas attack from Gaza was, says Mr Barak, based on similar Hizbullah plans to take over settlements in the north. But Hizbullah has now lost the element of surprise and Israel is prepared. “Israel doesn’t have an interest in conflict with Hizbullah right now and I don’t think they will attack now that we’ve deployed a lot of forces up north,” he says. One of America’s aircraft carriers is now looming off the coast of Lebanon, sending a signal to Hizbullah, and to its sponsor, Iran.

Although Mr Barak strongly supports a ground campaign in Gaza, he is critical of talk of “destroying Hamas” by Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as well as ministers in his government and some generals.  “What does it even mean?” he says. “That no one can still breathe and believe in Hamas’s ideology? That’s not a believable war aim. Israel’s objective now has to be clearer. It has to be that Hamas will be denied its Daesh-like military capabilities,” he says, referring to the Arabic term for Islamic State.

Mr Barak believes that the optimal outcome, once Hamas’s military capabilities have been sufficiently degraded, is the re-establishment of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. The authority, which was established under the Oslo Accords and runs the autonomous parts of the West Bank, was ousted from Gaza by Hamas in a bloody coup in 2007. However he warns that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, “cannot be seen to be returning on Israeli bayonets”. There will, therefore, need to be an interim period during which “Israel will capitulate to international pressure and hand Gaza over to an Arab peacekeeping force, which could include members such as Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. They would secure the area until the Palestinian Authority could take control.” Yet for now, other countries in the region seem to have no desire to contribute troops to such a force.

And then there is the great reckoning that will take place in Israel once the war ends. Questions will be asked as to who was responsible for the failures in intelligence and planning that allowed Hamas to take Israel so completely by surprise and to then reach civilian communities where they committed such horrific crimes.

“The immediate operational problems are being fixed now,” he says. “But a much deeper assessment will have to take place later.” When that happens, he is convinced that the blame will fall on Mr Netanyahu. “It will be clear that, above all, Netanyahu had a flawed strategy of keeping Hamas alive and kicking… so he could use them [Hamas] to weaken the Palestinian Authority so that no-one in the world could demand that we hold negotiations [with the Palestinians].”

Few people know the Israeli prime minister better than Mr Barak. The two men go back 55 years, to the days when Mr Netanyahu, then a commando in the secretive General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, served under Mr Barak, who commanded the unit. His older brother, Yoni Netanyahu, another of the unit’s commanders who was killed while rescuing hostages held at Entebbe Airport in 1976, was one of Mr Barak’s closest friends. In their political lives, they have been both close allies and bitter rivals.

In 1999 Mr Barak led the Labour Party to electoral victory, ending Mr Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. But when Mr Netanyahu returned to office in 2009 Mr Barak served as his defence minister for four years. Since he left parliamentary politics in 2013, however, he has become increasingly estranged from Mr Netanyahu. Now aged 81, he has been active in the protest movement that has taken to the streets over the past nine months in an attempt to stop Mr Netanyahu’s government from making constitutional changes to curb the powers of the Supreme Court. Mr Netanyahu, he says, ignored repeated warnings from military commanders that the divisions this was causing were also tearing the army apart. During the protests thousands of reserve soldiers and officers said they would stop volunteering for the IDF if the constitutional changes passed.

Mr Netanyahu is squarely to blame for the crisis, believes Mr Barak. Israel’s strategy towards the Palestinians has backfired. “Because the deaths were mainly of civilians and the state has forsaken its most basic commitment to its citizens—to keep them alive—this was the worst type of negligence.” ■

Correction (October 16th 2023): An earlier version of this piece stated that the hostage rescue operation at Entebbe Airport, during which Yoni Netanyahu was killed, occurred in 1967. It was actually in 1976. Apologies for the error.