The Prospect of American Retreat from the Middle East Is Encouraging Israel to Extend Its Sovereignty into the West Bank

Why does Benjamin Netanyahu, whose career has largely been defined by caution, seem intent on taking the dramatic step of applying Israeli law to the southern and eastern suburbs of Jerusalem, and to the Jordan Valley? Haviv Rettig Gur argues that the move is a strategic response to Washington’s efforts to disentangle itself from the Middle East, which began under President Obama and will likely continue whatever the results of the 2020 elections:

A Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated regime in Turkey is on the march in Syria and asserting new maritime rights in the eastern Mediterranean. Iran is briefly contained—primarily by America and by the weaknesses of its own regime. But remove America, lift the sanctions re-imposed by the Trump White House, and the Shiite axis Tehran has constructed from Lebanon to Yemen is, at least in the short term, contained no more. Russia has moved into the region, as has China with its forward base in Djibouti.

This point is argued by Israeli defense planners on both sides of the annexation debate. The anti-annexationists say a dangerous region and a retreating America require bolstering alliances with conservative Sunni states like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and [other] Gulf states. Annexation only makes that more difficult.

But the same vulnerability lends a new importance to the West Bank. A withdrawal from the Jordan Valley, say most Israeli defense planners, now becomes impossible to justify. A vacuum of Israeli security control in the West Bank would be used by rising enemies from Ankara to Tehran—and their proxies and ideological compatriots in Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic Jihad—to threaten directly the Israeli heartland of the coastal plain.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Security, Jordan Valley, U.S. Foreign policy, West Bank

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF